The Rise, Rise & Fall of News

(Any views expressed in this slide deck are not necessarily those of A&N Media)

The Rise, Rise The Rise, Rise & Fall of News& Fall of News

A Brief History

• 16th and 17th century evolution: from town crier to print• Wars fed appetite for news• Industrial revolution provided means to mass produce

Lords and Ladies

• News didn't make huge sums money to start with

• Owned by middle class businessmen to help political direction of ‘friends’

• In exchange the owner was bestowed a title, i.e. Beaverbrook, Northcliffe, Thomson, Astor

• Sensationalist journalism made newspapers hugely popular among a nation with improved reading skills

• 70-80% of profits came from advertising

Good Times

The Big Threats

• Co-existed even with similar ad spend of 2.5-3% of GDP (as it is now)

• Cable and satellite TV and eventually Internet viewed as a similar threats, but a degree of co-existence was expected as before

The Perfect Storm

• 4 major shifts happened:

– Organisations made news freely available on internet as a punt on the future

– General public started to self-author news/reviews/features

– Ad spend shifted in ever larger proportions to internet

– Generation Y grew up (and they’re influential and have money)

• They've known fast internet all their lives, are completely on-demand and don't expect to pay for news as a result of content that’s been published free.

The Cross-Roads

is evil (and so is Facebook, eBay, Bing, Groupon, Amazon, Yahoo!, Expedia…)

• 97% of Google's $8.5b profit is advertising (UK is about $1b)

• Statistics show that 55% of us trust online reviews and 90% of us trust reviews from people we know - Facebook 'Sponsored Stories‘

• served 297,000,000,000 adverts in Q3 of last year

• Circulations dwindling along with aging readers, and advertising is migrating to other more populous channels

So what is the future for

news?

So what is the future for

news?

There will be no cash to support journalism as we know it…

• iPad (The Daily)?

• Well visited news sites (Mail Online and New York Times)?

• Paywalls (The Times and FT)?

• Free and easy (The Metro)?

• Content supported by AdWords revenue?

• Something else???

Is the Future for News…

@samdb