3 Things - 20 January

Welcome to this week's 3 Things - a look at a handful of stories from the worlds of media and tech I noticed in the past seven days.

1. Will UK consumers ever pay for their news?

Last week I flagged the latest trends report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. This week I was interested in Press Gazette’s report examining the price of the online news subscriptions for UK media brands. The summary is that titles are reluctant to raise the price of online subs, presumably because the market is competitive and they see consumers as fickle and price-sensitive.

Savvy UK news consumers who know when to buy can indeed save a packet. Many brands offered deals on subs for last year’s Black Friday (29th November) and have been back with new-year offers only weeks later. The Financial Times is currently offering a digital subscription for ￡279 for the year. Pricey, but also 40% off the ‘standard’ price. Meanwhile, you can get a year’s digital access to The i Paper for ￡20 (just over 5p a day), a quarter of its normal ￡79.99 price.

I simplify by saying that the UK news media landscape now broadly falls into three buckets of the BBC, subscription-based premium news brands like the FT and a squeezed middle of commercial titles without mature subscription models but at the mercy of a digital ad market controlled by Google and Meta.

For an indication of the scale of the challenge, look at other research, from last year, by the Reuters Institute. Even in a market where commercial news brands are offering cut-price deals, only 8% of UK consumers are paying for their news. Compare that to figures from other mature developed democracies: 40% for Norway, 31% for Sweden and 22% in the US.

Of course, most UK citizens pay a news subscription of sorts via the BBC licence fee. But that’s required by law. The question is whether a large chunk of ordinary Brits will ever be persuaded to shell out for news from other places beyond the Beeb. At the moment it looks unlikely and that’s not good for a functioning democracy.

2. Changes at Times Radio

Times Radio, which is five years old later in 2025, has made a few presenter changes, enforced by Aasmah Mir’s decision to leave the breakfast show. Replacing her is Kate McCann, the station’s political editor and formerly of Talk TV, Sky News and the Telegraph.

McCann’s a top broadcaster - warm, engaging and highly knowledgeable - so I’m sure she’ll be great, but it’s nevertheless challenging times for Times Radio. The last listening figures, compiled by industry body RAJAR, showed the station’s weekly reach at 557,000, up 12% year on year. But since then it’s lost Matt Chorley, in my view by far its best presenter, to Radio 5 Live, and now Mir.

As with online news, I think it’s important that the BBC has commercial rivals in radio. It increases the plurality of news and competition breeds better standards and content. So hopefully people continue to tune into Times Radio (and other stations) to keep the radio news segment healthy. These stations all pump out news podcasts too, of course - another booming part of the market.

3. The real harm of TikTok

TikTok has probably had more scrutiny in the past week than ever before as the clock ticked down on it ‘going dark’ in the US, ostensibly over national security concerns. Yet there’s another side to the app which I think is at least as concerning: TikTok is social media crack.

The company itself has tacitly acknowledged it is addictive while its internal data reportedly suggests 95% of smartphone users under 17 use it. TikTok switched off in the US over the weekend so I was interested to see if anyone had looked at how hooked users responded during the enforced cold turkey period. It was too soon but I did find this Reuters article that interviewed some heavy TikTok users in the hours before it went offline in America.

“Honestly, I am happy about the ban. I feel like I don’t remember what life was like before,” says one, aged 23. Another, 30, adds: “I can almost feel it decreasing my attention span." A third, 23, says she deleted TikTok “a few times to detox” and compares the platform going dark to taking away a smoker’s pack of cigarettes.

Imagine the quotes above were from people using a new unregulated drug. Given it’s young people most at risk, it’s time we got serious in the UK about TikTok’s harm, before it’s too late.