CONCENTRATION OF OWNERSHIP due to Google Facebook ad dominance

The newspaper industry has been based on ad revenue since the scrapping of stamp duty (tax) in 1851 led to a sharp increase in professionalism, with production (and distribution) costs exceeding revenue from cover price. As Curran and Seaton argue in great detail in Power Without Responsibility, this led to a mass closure of ‘radical press’ titles and consolidation and concentration of ownership by wealthy individuals who pursued right-wing agendas such as low business taxes and attacking trade unions/workers rights.

The modern-day online migration of ad revenue (one major consequence of disruption from digitisation, the other being the youth market almost disappearing as a paid-for print media market: steep circulation decline) is an important factor in any possible change to press regulation.

The industry is struggling for survival, so tougher regulation, especially that proposed by Impress, linked to the Royal Charter idea that Leveson proposed, which would see newspapers routinely charged for the legal fees of accusers even if their complaints were ultimately rejected, could result in mass closure and a further loss of pluralism.

Guardian: Newsquest targets Archant as newspaper consolidation gathers pace.

“Consolidation is inevitable,” Ashley Highfield, chief executive of Johnston Press, owner of the Scotsman and Yorkshire Post, said last week. “It’s the obvious and necessary road ahead and smaller publishers increasingly cannot survive without being part of bigger groups to bring economies of scale and shared content.”
Last year, Johnston Press, the UK’s second-biggest regional newspaper group, paid Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Evening Standard and Independent websites, £24m for national newspaper the i to bulk up the publisher’s scale. It also was one of a number of suitors, including Lebedev, to look at buying national freesheet Metro when DMGT, which owns the Daily Mail, tested market appetite for a sale.

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The shift of readers away from printed newspapers, which have traditionally provided the bulk of revenues and profits through sales and advertising, has been profound over the last decade.
Total weekly regional newspaper circulation fell by half from 42m to 22m between 2009 and 2016 , with paid-for copies falling from 26m to 13.8m, according to Enders Analysis. Similarly, the national newspaper market has shrunk from selling 9.3m copies per day in 2009 to 5.2m last year.
On Tuesday, investors in Trinity Mirror, the publisher of the Mirror titles, will vote to approve a £200m takeover of Richard Desmond’s Express and Star titles as the national newspaper industry faces the same issue of the need to build scale to survive in the battle for advertising against the tech giants.
The impact on publishers’ bottom line has been further affected by lower rates for digital advertising, exacerbated by giants such as Facebook and Google hoovering up to 90% of all new ad money being spent online.
Since 2008, almost £800m in ad spend has been stripped from national newspapers, from £1.54bn in 2008 to £757m last year. The impact is even more stark in regional newspapers, which have seen ad revenue fall from £2bn in 2008 to £723m last year, according to figures from Group M.
“In order to survive, consolidation is key to compete with the online players and retain some share of digital advertising,” says Alice Pickthall, media analyst at Enders.
“As the digital market grows, publishers aren’t seeing a proportionate amount of share gain. Facebook has had an especially big impact on the local market. If a local business is offered a lovely shiny [presence] on Facebook who wouldn’t use it? The largest [traditional] players in the market will win, they will continue to pick up smaller publishers to maintain scale in a shrinking market.”

PRESS FLAK Czechmate for right-wing attack on leftie leader

Guardian included 1 of Corbyn's popular (with younger aud) online vids

Jeremy Corbyn was accused by right-wing papers of being a Soviet spy - an absurd story that was quickly proved false, but led to massive TV and radio coverage. Remember this if exploring the proposition that circulation decline means the loss of press power over politics and public opinion; listeners and viewers who never pick up a newspaper are exposed to their agenda as the broadcast media routinely take their news agenda from the papers.

The story very clearly showed up the current binary approach between Labour (left) and Tory (right) parties:

[Corbyn accused] rightwing papers of being controlled by billionaire tax exiles, with the party repeating that it planned to hold a media ownership review if it got into power, and sending a lawyer’s letter to a Tory MP over an ill-judged tweet.The Conservatives, meanwhile, have sought to stoke the row in an attempt to get it picked up by broadcasters – while at the same time trying to pretend they are above the fray by arguing, none too subtly, that it is the party that supports the press and the existing structure of independent regulation. [Guardian 'spying row' article]

Clause 1 of the Editors Code (Accuracy) appears to have taken a typical battering, free of consequence or censure from the regulator, with the right-wing press' combined attempted assault on Opposition leader Corbyn. Branded a traitor and a spy, his response has been to go on the attack, promise Leveson part 2 (the PM has taken the opposite stance), and action to tackle the lack of diversity of ownership, characterised as 'billionaire tax exiles'.

Labour and Corbyn are calculating that by using social media they will win this battle and thwart the attempted character assassination, with only older voters significantly influenced by the press. A bold volte face for a party which slavishly sought press favour under Blair's, who notoriously flew to Australia before becoming PM for a meeting with Murdoch.

Corbyn's 2018 Labour are calculating that the declining press industry is losing its grip on public opinion and are using social media to distribute short videos, quotes etc to engage with a primarily youth audience to counter the mainstream media discourse and flak that he faces.

They did, though, also turn to the law - a legal letter forced a Tory MP to delete a libellous anti-Corbyn tweet, apologise and make a charitable donation.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown wooed the press, long maintaining personal relationships with Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre respectively, while in No 10. But personal attacks on Corbyn motivate the party’s supporters, particularly younger voters, who don’t read the Sun, Mail or Telegraph, and who don’t necessarily remember the cold war.Ed Miliband broke with the Murdoch press in 2011 following the phone-hacking scandal, promising to break up the Sun and Times empire if he was elected. A controversial attack on his Marxist father Ralph, described by the Daily Mail as “the man who hates Britain” led to a furious row with Dacre’s newspaper in 2013. But if both moves were popular at the time, he nevertheless was badly beaten in the 2015 election.

The PM (May) used the story in PMQs, and later pontificated on the free press

“A free press is one of the foundations on which our democracy is built,” in an attempt to claim a moral high ground.Labour ... repeat[ed] that the party wanted to carry out the second part of the Leveson inquiry into press regulation and insisting that its media review would aim to boost diversity in British media, without specifying any details as to how.In doing so, it risked entrenching an already adversarial relationship with the rightwing press – but the Labour calculus is that, except possibly with older voters, in the social media era that does not matter.

Guardian: Spying row: how Corbyn seized chance to take on the Sun.

LEVESON buried as government goes for Google

UPDATE: Former Labour Leader Ed Miliband (or 'Red Ed' as the right-wing red-tops would have it of this very 'centrist', at least politician who opposes Jeremy Corbyn's left-wing policies) has called for Leveson2 to happen.

Great quote on IPSO - he wasn't impressed when the Mail branded his father a traitor. He tweeted and gave media interviews to counter that rather than trying IPSO.

The Leveson inquiry must be completed. The victims of phone-hacking deserve nothing less

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/08/victims-phone-hacking-leveson-inquiry?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

UPDATE2 A vote could back Impress as the compulsory regulator, and another make papers pay legal costs whether they win or lose any case.  

Government faces possible defeat on press regulation votes

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/may/08/government-facing-possible-defeat-in-press-regulation-votes?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

Nor can we take comfort from the response to Leveson part one. The press declined to set up the kind of independent regulator that both Leveson and parliament wanted to see. Instead we have Ipso, a toothless organisation that, despite bold promises, has yet to impose a single fine or deliver a single equal prominence front-page correction in a national paper. There are also significant issues around the lack of rules or redress around much of the news on social media.

Greenslade's view that the press inquiry announced by UK PM May marks the death, or at least the long-term parking (surely a Labour victory would see Leveson resurrected?) of Leveson2 seems about right.

His Guardian column is occasional rather than daily these days but always worth looking out for. As a former national newspaper editor himself he reliably skewers the realities of this cantankerous industry and it's billionaire figureheads, gladhanded as they are by regimes of a non-socialist bent.

Interesting that the press' extreme aversion to political scrutiny means it mostly failed to imbue May with lavish praise for meeting a long-term demand, an inquiry into the leeching of the new media titans of press content and finance.

This is, nonetheless, a strong sign of the press' continuing current grip over their ideologically matched right-wing Tory government. Obvious echoes here of the timid burial of Calcutt2 nearly 30 years ago when a declining Tory government took years to respond to Calcutt's demand for a new review, as agreed in his original report, when he noted that press behaviour had not substantially altered, then quietly announced there would be no such review.

Here's a snippet:

For years, they have been calling for something to be done about Google and Facebook, arguing that both steal their content while luring away their advertisers. The result has been falling profits for “old media” and consequent closures of regional and local titles accompanied by a sizeable reduction in the number of journalists, rightly described by May as “a hollowing-out of newsrooms”.

This is hardly a new story, and there has been plenty of political lobbying from publishing organisations in order to persuade the government that their industry’s decline requires attention.

These pleas for action have been couched in terms of a warning that the nation is in danger of losing its “free press”, which, to quote the Daily Mail, therefore represents an “insidious threat to British democracy”. A free press, eh? Would that be the press owned and controlled by rich men – yes, men – or profiteering conglomerates that have been propagandists for a “free market” and opposed all regulatory intervention?

Would that be the free press that has traditionally championed business competition and praised the virtue of technological innovation in other industries where jobs have been wiped out?

It was noticeable that May also ignored such ironies when contending that the decline of newspapers is “dangerous for our democracy” and that the loss of “trusted and credible news sources” makes us “vulnerable to news which is untrustworthy”.

Given that untrustworthy news has been the stock in trade of national titles like the Mail for generations it was hard not to laugh at her disingenuousness.

Guardian: Is May’s press inquiry just a way of putting Leveson 2 on the back burner?