We are already a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and — co-incidentally — a little over 25 years into the mass market internet. How is it going for journalism? An asymmetry between audience popularity and the scale of revenue might be, to date, the obvious theme. Huge numbers of readers, listeners, viewers, yet all of them adding up to a vanishingly trivial proportion of people’s enormously extended digital day.
Another theme might be an alarming decline in reliance and — in some parts of the media at least — decline in trust. Online, in aggregate, people seem increasingly to rely on individual talents at the expense of media brands. That matters. An American election has been won by someone who largely avoided traditional media. On the other hand, between two thirds and three quarters of people believe tech platforms should be responsible for the content published there (Reuters Institute).
Meanwhile, some industry leaders lament subscription fatigue, while others despair at the slow erosion of advertising share. Online display adspend is flat at best, especially when affiliate and retail revenues are taken into account. Investors are clear on their preference. Paying audiences are valued at roughly 11x or 12x EBITDA, while advertising-led businesses are languishing nearer 4x.
At the same time, generative-AI is present in every boardroom, in two forms. The opportunity that needs to be designed and the existential threat that’s already plain to see.
Offline: tight rules exist
How will 2030 come to be a more successful marketplace for online journalism? Well, let’s start right there, conceptually. If you are a competition authority or industry regulator, the marketplaces for broadcast news and newspapers are very precisely defined. There are policies for journalism prominence, frameworks and guardrails to ensure best practices; there are editorial codes that ensure laws are not broken and other harms avoided. Robust convention ensures suicides are not explained by journalists even when they know exactly what’s happened. There are precisely defined advertising marketplaces for popular newspapers, quality newspapers and local newspapers. Journalism created its own audience measurement apparatus to systemise advertising trading. When a newspaper tries to acquire another newspaper, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) sweeps in to appraise the potential effects on advertisers and advertising. This is on top of journalism impacts, such as the plurality of opinions and perspectives or, more recently, foreign state ownership, and other precisely calibrated state interventions.
Publishers carved out a wholesale distribution structure to secure the newspaper and magazines marketplace, and the CMA protects effective monopolies of distribution to ensure market efficiencies. Such protections require an industry to convince the state that its outputs are a special case. Magazine journalism, not just newspaper journalism, is part of that regime. Journalism has been seen for decades — centuries — as a crucial institution for the public. Journalism products do not pay VAT. Reputational own goals (phone hacking) elide the larger premise that disciplined journalism requires editorial codes, provides legal backstop and commits to publicly correct errors. When journalism is dramatically irresponsible, it is headline news everywhere.
Public Service Broadcasting — the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and beyond — comes with many requirements, including the prominence of news bulletins and news editorial codes. PSB news is assessed for its impartiality. News bulletins are provided with great frequency on a huge range of commercial radio outlets — one of the unsung wonders of news supply. Such offerings imperceptibly and reliably inform people who have not tuned in to find out what’s going on in the world.
We could go on, but you get the picture. Offline journalism is a series of precisely codified marketplaces, a framework that has long protected and boosted journalism’s audience and revenues, and that also both protects the public and maximises opportunities to inform us all.
Carving out an online marketplace for journalism
Now, let’s return to our question about making the online journalism marketplace more successful. Put simply: can you picture the online journalism marketplace? What do you see, exactly? Maybe you see one of these: Google News or Apple News+? Or maybe you think of a thin, erratic scattering of journalism as you scroll through your favoured social media. Either way, online journalism is different from offline journalism: it is competing in other people’s marketplaces but has forgotten to contrive its own.
When this century commenced, as online was establishing itself as a mass market phenomenon, the advertising market for print-based media was about half of all advertising spend, protecting and boosting journalism. Online today, journalism is generating about 5% to 7% of advertising, depending on what you include in the measure. The direction of travel is relentlessly downwards. Our forecasts suggest sub-5% of spend by 2030, even assuming some growth in the advertising revenues coming into media.
This is not an argument for switching spend to support journalism (though those commercial and moral cases could happily fill the pages of this entire magazine). Rather, this is an argument for journalism to think about how it invented, designed and fine-tuned marketplaces in the offline world, and so consider what an equivalent collaborative infrastructure — perhaps including relevant state intervention — would ideally look like in the online world.
The format of offline journalism was highly distinctive and separate from other offline discourse — such as chatting in the pub, the Yellow Pages directory, a trip to the movies — but nevertheless the distinction was labelled and reinforced at every opportunity. Newspapers and magazines are not scattered around WH Smith like Cadbury’s. They are merchandised together. Broadcast journalism is reliably provided at 6pm, 7pm, 10pm and on every radio hour.
No such distinction and certainty exists online. Infinite content volumes flow together almost imperceptibly, and the journalism industry does nothing to signal the methods and attributes that elevate publisher output. As best they can, publishers highlight their finest talents (people), and their media brands, but no one is promoting the category of journalism itself. How far we have come from the days when the industry carved out a wholesale system, convinced the state to treat their collective outputs as a special case and embraced a set of unique guardrails.
Working together
By operating in silos, publishers are each minnows competing against everyone. This has myriad effects. One is a relentless temptation for online journalism to be excessively obsessed with directly winning traffic. That is a good discipline when publishing to a medium with an immediate and precisely quantified feedback loop. But it is a terrible discipline when an information category wishes to sustain its distinctive and premium position in the information hierarchy. Media brands rightly value their expensive human methodology, and the information standards such methodology is designed to maintain. But what if implementation and strategic ideals are literally in opposition, not just tangential?
The more that journalism is obsessed with directly winning traffic, the less able it is to generate quality revenues, by which we mean three streams: audience payments; high-yield, pleasant, useful, proportionate, unobtrusive advertising experiences; and additional service revenues, such as events and curated premium experiences, which often include elements of the first two. Those revenue streams do not compete with each other: they are not zero-sum. Quite the reverse: they reinforce each other. For decades, offline rewarded general media, with huge bucks for big audiences. Online rewards specialist services that do one thing (or a very tightly defined and woven cluster) extremely well. In the absence of an ambitiously implemented marketplace for journalism, hundreds of millions — and possibly billions — of pounds are being eschewed, and individual companies are undermining their opportunities to competitively develop their share of a growing market.
What might journalism’s own marketplace look like? Has Apple or Google already cracked it? To some degree, perhaps they have. Certainly, the journalism sector needs to remember that service quality is defined for consumers by tech platforms, not publishers. The merchandising and functioning of offline and online subscriptions need to meet the standards of Apple, Amazon, Spotify, not those of a small enterprise with limited infrastructure. Customisation and personalisation are not just expectations in principle. People assume exemplary implementation and retailing nous. But no journalism marketplace should be tied to one technology platform or device or operating system. It should be accessible to all, everywhere, and it should provide publishers with merchandising and partnership freedoms. The Scotsman is bundling with the New York Times — an excellent initiative — but why not with a news service of my choice?
If such an outline sounds like a call for industry collaboration, that is barely the half of it. Success will not be determined by seamless industry collaboration, even with the world’s finest product developers in charge. Four enormous stakeholder groups also need to be convinced.
Key stakeholder groups
The public find it harder to define online journalism than anyone inside the industry. How do people in the real world think journalism is different from everything else in their social media stream? Do they care, or why should they care? Their expectations are not where they were at the end of the 20th century. What is the right marketing, the right visual language?
Advertisers have a continued respect for journalism as do agency strategists, but no one we speak to believes that journalism provides systematic trading evidence of the benefits that stem from the context of journalism (individual publisher case studies do so). These benefits would surely include brand leverage, consideration (propensity to buy) and pricing power: the profitability effects of marketing rather than immediate performance.
Policymakers always thought about the outputs of journalism as a special case, requiring particular protections, efficiencies and prominence. Have those 20th century considerations really become irrelevant in 2025?
And journalists themselves. Their role is evolving in the context of much more ubiquitous information. Formats are changing. The need for audience utility — usefulness — is made easier by AI, but also harder. The risk of describing collective action challenges is that it sets an exhausting tone of negativity and fear. Our sense is quite the opposite. We are optimistic about the effects of the industry discussing an online journalism marketplace. It will galvanise belief in the future.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
