Former Times editor  ‘reasonably confident’ journalism will  survive, but says it has tough times ahead


LONDON ― Print media is increasingly recognized as a thing of the past, being elbowed out by online alternatives, and the U.K. industry is no exception to this trend.

In late 2007 British newspaper the Guardian’s daily Web audience surpassed its daily circulation, while Google’s advertising revenue in the U.K. market overtook that of major television network ITV in 2008.

George Brock, a former managing editor of The Times and head of City University London’s acclaimed Department of Journalism, however, emphasizes that the key skills and values needed for good journalism are not necessarily affected by this disruption. 

“Technology is changing journalism and it always has, but Twitter, Facebook and the Internet don’t fundamentally change questions such as ‘Can you spot a story?’ ‘Can you test a story?’ and ‘Can you tell a story?’” the professor told The Korea Herald at his school office in London earlier this month.

“Those are examples of old-fashioned skills and ideas which we still have to teach,” he added.

Majoring in modern history at Oxford University’s Corpus Christi College, Brock started his national newspaper career in 1976 as a feature writer on The Observer, a Sunday newspaper now owned by the same group as the Guardian.

Moving to The Times in 1981 ― the same year global media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News International purchased the newspaper from Thomson ― he worked in positions including foreign editor, Brussels bureau chief, European editor and managing editor, before he became the head of journalism at City University three years ago.

As has been exemplified in the coverage of Osama Bin Laden’s death, Twitter often plays the role of independent breaking news service, but he is skeptical.

“If what you want to do is release short sentence news, Twitter is fine, but the moment you need to explain something, Twitter is no good at all. Twitter is either a headline or link exchanger.”

In the longer run, however, he expressed belief in social media’s power to drive social change.

“In some societies, you get two public spheres: official, established media and new media, and if the established official media are not circulating all the information which people have or which they are interested (in), then you get some separation between these two spheres,” he said, taking the “Arab Spring” countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, as examples.

“If a government is hoping to exclude minority viewpoints, that won’t work in the long run, given the existence of new media.”

Now leading one of Britain’s top university-level journalism colleges ― City University London and Cardiff University are considered the top two U.K. journalism schools ― he is not wildly optimistic about the near-term economic prospects for the print media. The business model for print daily news is disappearing, and there is still no obvious replacement.

At the same time, online news aggregators such as Google, as well as the online editions of newspapers in the U.K. and the U.S., have seen dramatic increases in users in recent years, but the revenues generated have not made up for the losses in their traditional businesses.

According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, a Washington, D.C.-based non-partisan think tank, losses from the U.S. daily print sector were 10 times greater than gains in their digital businesses in 2011, worse than seven times greater a year earlier.

“I’m reasonably confident that journalism will find a sustainable way of financing itself. History tends to show that journalistic vacuums do get filled eventually, not immediately,” Brock added.

Despite his somewhat optimistic outlook on the future of journalism, he pointed out that print alone can hardly be a sustainable business model for media organizations anymore.

“There are almost no publishers who are only operating print,” he said. “Even book publishers don’t do that anymore, let alone magazine and newspaper publishers.”

In an effort to increase the profitability of their online businesses, an increasing number of global newspapers are charging online readers for premium content. Two Murdoch papers, The Times and the Wall Street Journal, use “hard” paywalls, which require paid subscription before any of their online content can be accessed.

The former managing editor of The Times denounced such model as “an odd way of doing it,” claiming softer or hybrid pay walls ― in which free access to select content is allowed, while keeping premium content behind a paywall ― to be ideal.

“They (The Times) claim 130,000 (online) subscribers, so you can make an assumption. It’s not a very large amount (of money).”

In the month after The Times put its online content behind a paywall on June 2010, the newspaper saw its online readership decline by 4 million, while it gained about 105,000 paying subscribers.

Asked about the phone-hacking scandal, in which journalists of Murdoch’s now-shuttered News of the World tabloid illegally hacked into the voice mail accounts of celebrities, politicians and murder victims in search of scoops, the professor made it clear that it was “straightforwardly illegal,” but rejected the suspicion that journalists of other Murdoch papers might also have cooperated with the NOTW reporters on such practices.

“One thing that I think people haven’t grasped in the reporting of the phone-hacking scandal is how separate the newspapers are in day-to-day editorial operations. They do remarkably little collaborations even when there is a big foreign story,” he said.

His evaluation of his former boss was overall positive.

“I actually think Rupert Murdoch has been, for The Times, a good proprietor,” he said. “He spends lots of money on the paper and hasn’t changed it drastically. All the papers have to develop and evolve anyway and always do.”

By Lee Yong-sung, Contributing writer
(ohmydan2@yahoo.co.kr)