All over the news
Engagement with news online continues to dwindle - what does it mean for how we reach our audiences?
One of my favourite TV series is The Thick of It's third instalment (aka the one where Nicola Murray becomes Secretary of State for the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship). It’s peerless TV, particularly the final two episodes, where Malcolm Tucker gets sacked before re-emerging in a blaze of glory.
It’s been on my mind this week given Rishi’s snap Genny E call - it’s remarkably like the plot of The Thick Of It. Malcolm hopes to seize the initiative and save his party via the element of surprise. Spoiler alert - it doesn’t work. Sorry, Rishi.
In that same finale, press officer Terri Coverley (a civil servant with no party affiliation) bemoans the election call, saying, “That's a complete disaster; there’ll be nothing on else on TV for weeks”. This is in 2009, so pre-VOD days, but there’s another reflection of our reality here.
News coverage over the next six weeks will be dominated by the General Election. Elections are good business for the media, particularly in a world where long-running military conflicts and an ongoing cost-of-living crisis make the news feel generally bleak. Plenty of publishers will be looking for a traffic bump during this period, and many more will aim to convert a percentage of election visitors into long-term subscribers.
Trouble is, a six-week bump is unlikely to arrest some of the long-term downward trends in news consumption across the Western world.
The downward spiral you’re most likely to have heard about if you read the tech press is referral traffic from Google and other social platforms falling off a cliff. Google updated its search algorithms in a bid to clamp down on AI-generated spam (and lay the groundwork for generative AI results in Search Engine Results Pages. You might have heard that process hasn’t started so well).
Meta’s long-term pivot away from news in favour of Shrimp Jesus continues to bite, and while LinkedIn’s popularity continues to grow, it’s not a major traffic driver. Apple News is the one bright spark among the gloom - the news aggregator that often barely warrants a mention. Whenever I’ve tried it, I find it full of clickbait rubbish, but as per this piece in Semafor, several US-based publications generate five-figure revenue from it.
One way of looking at this trend is that we’ve seen it all before. The past 15 years or so for media titles have been characterised by these peaks and troughs of tech platform-enabled periods of plenty (”pivot to video”) followed by the inevitable downturns and pivots into some new format. Zooming out, we see the long-term trend of a slowly consolidating media landscape comprised of a small bunch of the biggest, most self-sufficient titles.
As with so much of popular culture, the squeeze is most noticeable in the middle —the biggest players keep getting bigger, backed up by a long tail of smaller, more niche publications. Making the jump from small to big is tough and will only get tougher unless we see another shift in the platform landscape.
The fact is that the current crop of big tech publishing platforms doesn’t need news - and neither do their users. A study recently published in new media & society found that participation with news declined by 12% in the seven years between 2015 and 2022. This is despite those seven years containing some of the biggest news cycles of recent times.
That decline was borne out in reduced liking, sharing and commenting on news shared on social media. The only platform to see an increase in news participation was WhatsApp - a jump of 20%. The study fits neatly into the other patterns of online behaviour we see, with people retreating away from the algorithmic newsfeed into private spaces where they have more control.
This need for control was highlighted in Ofcom’s most recent Online News report, with people in the UK reporting a “lack of control over the news that appears in their social feeds”. Algorithms are basic and are no substitute for an editorial team curating a range of different topics to make you feel, in quick succession, informed, angry, entertained and happy. Too many social feeds were consistently angry, turning people away - it’s much easier to de-rank news than to make an algorithm think like a newspaper editor.
We know WhatsApp is one major platform likely to benefit from news slowly dwindling from our feeds. TikTok, being a completely different format with more sophisticated algorithms, will also likely benefit - but the barrier to entry for publishers used to working mainly with words is high.
Broadcast news, specifically the BBC and ITV, remain the number one and two channels for people to get their news in the UK. Perhaps those who want to stay informed will go back to TV. The BBC News app and its smartphone notifications also have significant reach - it’s where the election campaigns want to be this year.
The bigger worry than where people get their news is that more and more people may simply decide that reading the news regularly isn’t for them. Last year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Reports identified more and more people actively avoiding the news, put off by the relentless grimness of the headlines and the poverty of algorithmic recommendations.
While many people actively block news from their feeds, a small portion continue to pay to subscribe to their favourite outlets and journalists actively. The Reuters Institute looked into the nature of paid subscriptions in September last year and found that “long-term news subscribers tend to be male, older, richer, and better educated, with a strong interest in news and politics.”
In the UK, that represents 9% of the population. If you work in corporate comms, that 9% likely comprises the audiences you most want to reach. Those elusive “stakeholders” - politicians, civil servants, investors, analysts and other “business decision makers”. Given their direct connection to their favourite titles, any news deprioritisation on social media will unlikely affect them.
But there are bigger, broader questions when it comes to planning campaigns that aim to reach a mass of consumers. Relying on earned media coverage is no longer an option (you could argue it hasn’t been an option for ten years, but we’ll leave that aside).
Any large-scale campaign aimed at changing hearts and minds on a specific issue needs to be sophisticated and multichannel by default now, not by reluctant agreement. Brands and businesses need to meet people where they are - whether that’s on Facebook Groups, the TikTok FYP or before their favourite YouTube channel’s latest video.
Later on in the series finale of The Thick of It, Terri’s tune changes. An election means time off - she’s free to focus on her amateur production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. While the election and the overall news cycle feel like big deals to us in advertising and comms, those big stories don’t always translate to the broader population. If we want to get more people to care about your campaigns and stories, those campaigns need to work harder than before.
We’re unlikely to see those trends of reduced interaction with news reverse any time soon - there’s no Malcolm Tucker-style return on the cards. Perhaps, as you prepare for whichever party ends up in power after July 4th, it’s worth also preparing for a world where the news continues to matter less and less to the general population than it ever did. How we respond to that change is as crucial as anything happening in Westminster.