British Newspapers

Contested Futures

In the new millennium, British newspapers confront a pivotal moment in their history. All national papers now have extensive online editions: Guardian Unlimited, for example, attracts 16 million readers (unique users) and 147 million page downloads each month. Newspapers understood literally as “news” printed on “paper”—rather than as news content on multiple media platforms that is delivered by the Internet, podcasts, and mobile telephony, more often than by newspaper boys and girls—constitutes an increasingly modest element in the editorial mix in an age of digital convergence. Newspapers in Britain, like many countries around the globe, are once again in a state of flux reflecting the influence of a number of technological, economic, political, and cultural changes.

The scholarly literature offers two distinctive predictions for the British press. The first, pessimistic account argues that newspapers will suffer reduced numbers of published titles, dramatic reductions in circulations, the loss of readers and advertisers to increasingly attractive Internet and television advertising channels, and a decline of public trust in media credibility reflecting—among other factors—newspapers' growing reliance on public relations firms as sources of news. Newspapers' editorial preference for celebrities, human interest, and trivia above the reporting of hard news stories will exacerbate these trends, making newspapers “an endangered species.” Some pundits offer unrealistic extrapolations based on declining circulations, to predict the precise date on which the last newspaper reader will vanish.

A second, more optimistic, account acknowledges newspapers' need to strike an urgent editorial and financial accommodation with the web, but suggests that they are well along in adapting both their editorial contents and formats to developments in media technology, pressures of market forces, and readers' changing requirements for news. They believe this “editorial Darwinism” explains how newspapers have survived previous challenges—from telegraph to television—to their business and editorial environments, enabling them to adapt to changing circumstances; this editorial Darwinism is central to understanding the history of newspapers. Moreover, the availability and popularity of new media technologies—in living rooms no less than newsrooms—empowers a growing army of citizen journalists, bloggers, and readers wishing to post comments online, to construct a more pluralist debate about matters of public interest. The “tablets of stone” model of journalism, in which journalists and leader writers [Page 209]hand down authoritative opinions, is giving way to a new participatory journalism that encourages readers to join journalists in a more interactive discussion.

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