Time to get serious about the future of news

It’s been a silly season that’s been anything but. July and August are the months that newsrooms dread, where the usual drought of serious stories means frivolous tales take up undue amounts of space in our newspapers and TV bulletins.

Not this year.

Apart from an early summer spate of “killer” seagulls, the news agenda has remained resolutely serious: the Labour leadership battle and the rise of Corbyn, the heart-rending migrant crisis and the recent appalling events in Shoreham and Virginia.

Now, as the nation prepares to head back to work, there’s serious debate once more about how the nation will be watching stories in the future and how the leaders of our traditional TV news organisations need to change the way they operate to meet demand.  

James Harding, the BBC’s Director of News and Current Affairs has got the biggest job on his hands. Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival yesterday, he wasn’t willing to bet on whether the corporation’s news channel would exist in its current form in ten years’ time. Amid the digital revolution he spoke of how one alternative could be streaming content direct to mobiles – leave out the TV bit altogether.

He knows the stats and has to react. The young aren’t tuning in to the telly anymore. Last year, TV News was watched by 92% of the over-55s each week. Among 16-34 year olds, it was 52% - and that figure continues to fall.

When it comes to online, the figures are even starker: while only 18 per cent of over 55 year olds say their main source of news comes from online, for those aged 18 to 24 it’s more than three quarters at 76 per cent. 

These quickly changing viewing habits have prompted big changes in our national TV newsrooms that have all seen a surge of young, talented online journalists being employed. Digital first is the new mind-set – break your big stories online, don’t save them up for their traditional flagship TV bulletins. Connect with your young audience or die.  

But while the media landscape shifts at a dizzying pace, there is plenty to suggest that our more traditional platforms for consuming news remain strong and stable.

After the soaps, the evening news bulletins are one of the most watched programmes on both the BBC and ITV, pulling in around 8 million viewers combined every weekday.

And let’s not forget the apocalyptic predictions made at the advent of the digital era that our national Press would be swept away, unable to compete with online alternatives and social media. They’ve all adapted to do more than just survive. The most successful among them, The Daily Mail, now gets 23 million readers a month for its online and print editions in the UK – globally it’s more than 200 million.

So, while Harding ponders the ways in which BBC News will have to change in the future, he can be certain that people’s appetite for news, in all its forms, will never wane and the audience for it will remain vast.