A roundtable: Media prospects

As part of LabourList‘s link-up with Soundings today, here we publish extracts from a roundtable with Georgina Henry, Simon Bucks and Julian Petley with questions from Joy Johnson, about what the future holds for the media.

Georgina Henry launched the Guardian’s Comment is Free, and is executive comment editor across print and the web.

Sky News, currently responsible for user content online.

Julian Petley is professor of Screen Media and Journalism in the School of Arts at Brunel University.

Joy Johnson was a former political journalist with the BBC and ITN. She currently lectures in journalism and communications.

What kind of political changes do you think are on the horizon?

Julian: One major problem is the threat that a future Conservative government will abolish Ofcom, which will extend direct political power over the broadcasters.

Simon: We at BSkyB believe two fundamental things. First, that BBC digital expansionism has dislocated the media market in this country to a point where it is very difficult for commercial players to compete. And second, that Ofcom as a regulator has the potential to inhibit the way in which all broadcasters – commercial broadcasters – behave. In an environment where the media is spreading its opportunities, and its platforms, Ofcom is looking increasingly anachronistic.

Georgina: Be honest – what is Sky’s problem with Ofcom at the moment? Ofcom is looking into your business and you would rather they weren’t. We all have our self interests.

Simon: That is part of it, but I am looking at in a much broader way. And it does seem that in the future it will be unsustainable for Ofcom to satisfactorily regulate the media as a whole.

Julian: I am no fan of Ofcom for a number of reasons, but that is not because I am against regulation. Ofcom has let down public service broadcasting badly, particularly when it comes to the future of news on ITV; and it has allowed ITV to completely slough off its education programmes.

Georgina: It seems to me that ITV has been a lost cause for some time now.

Light-touch regulation has failed in the global financial system. And regulation is necessary in broadcasting to protect content and impartiality. Would you like to see Sky become like Fox News?

Simon: No, but I don’t think it would even if there wasn’t the Ofcom regulatory imperative to have impartiality. We have discovered that the model we have actually works. I don’t think that there is an appetite in Britain for Fox News.

Julian: I have no quarrel with Sky News. It is good public service broadcasting news, but I would be worried about Rupert Murdoch having other stations – for example Fox News UK. If we look at the States, where as you know there is a strong liberal tradition of news broadcasting, it’s very hard to deny that Fox News has pushed them rightwards.

Georgina: What is Ofcom regulation preventing you from doing?

Simon: We should not be shackled by a lot of Ofcom code, which seems to me an anachronism in a digital world.

Julian: But surely the important thing about the Ofcom code is the impartiality regulations. Newspapers aren’t impartial, so it is important that the mainstream broadcasting news balance out the partiality of the press.

Simon: The imperative is what the audience want. There are good commercial reasons for doing it. But let us look at it from the other point of view, which is that in the newspaper industry, where these rules don’t apply, you do get a much more diverse range of newspaper reporting.

Julian: I would like to argue against the idea that newspapers are diverse. If you look at readership figures, there is a massive imbalance. Most of the population read newspapers – and I don’t just mean tabloids – that are not only illiberal, but extremely illiberal.

Georgina: In a way the argument has moved on in this area. None of us is profitable. Well, the Sun is still profitable, but most of the newspapers at our end of the market need lots of money. The old model is broken. Most newspapers are being read online. What worries me about that is the constant knocking of the BBC. If you have less regulation through Ofcom and an attack on the BBC’s funding, it affects its ability to provide an alternative to what the press or the blogs are doing.

Aren’t you concerned about the BBC’s website?

Georgina: No. Of course it is a formidable publicly funded website, but you have to look at it in two ways. One is that the BBC is a business competitor if you work for BskyB or The Guardian or whoever. The other is as a viewer and listener. As a viewer and a listener I think the BBC is brilliant. I don’t share the view that if only the BBC could be curbed on its websites we would be doing a great deal better.

Simon: If you go back to a time when advertising was plentiful and there was a lot of money flying around, it was a different landscape then. The new model that Rupert Murdoch is proposing is one where people actually pay for quality journalism. It is going to be very difficult for any commercial news website in this country to do that, when the market leader in the business is the BBC and it is giving its content away for nothing.

Can I ask for a prediction then – in five years time will content on the web be free or will we be paying for it?

Georgina: Newspapers have already tried to put stuff behind paywalls. Everyone is waiting for Murdoch, because he has led the industry in many other ways. If he has got some idea that will be extremely special that will work for News International, who knows? In terms of conventional models, which the FT and the New York Times have tried, I don’t think it’s going to work.

In broadcasting – apart from Sky – will it still be free to view on ITV and so on?

Simon: In five years? Oh yes.

Georgina: Ten? Maybe not. Do you think the BBC will end up as a subscription channel?

Simon: There is certainly going to have to be a remodelling of the BBC’s financial structure. It’s entirely possible that some bits of it may end up being paid for by subscription.

How about local news, an area in which financial survival has been very difficult in the last few years?

Julian: One idea – and I know it’s an idea that is not popular with this government and probably won’t be with the next one – would be to have a levy on companies like BT or Virgin – media providers who produce and make nothing except large profits. In France there is a levy on French Telecom, and because it carries a lot of profit-making material it virtually finances the French film industry. But over here levies seem to be an absolute no-no, whatever the party, because the people who would have the levies levied upon them have lobbied very heavily to say they don’t want this.

Would you have a levy on Google?

Julian: Yes, I would have a levy on bodies that make vast amounts of profits on carrying media content without actually producing media content. That, to me, is the problem.

Simon: Don’t you think Google is providing a fantastic service to the media, and without it a lot of our content wouldn’t be seen?

Georgina: I don’t know if a levy is realistic. It is absolutely intrinsic to our business since we wouldn’t be anything like as popular without it. On the other hand, you look at the Google profits and you think the time might be coming for a little quid pro quo.

Simon: The share of the market is so overwhelmingly colossal that in no other industry would it be allowed, on competition grounds. And the interesting thing is that the biggest rise in online advertising is through Google. That’s where the money is. And it is not about search, it is about ads on the back of content. I think this is going to be a very big issue for the future.

It seems to me that we are where we were years ago with Hollywood, when the distributors and the studios were the ones that called the shots, but then content became king?

Simon: It’s a good analogy. It is a colossal issue, because we need them so badly but at the same time we resent their overwhelming power. Those sorts of relationships are always tough – when you both need and resent simultaneously. In the future it’s going to have to be addressed because of the growing friction.

The unabridged version of this discussion is published in Soundings issue 44, Spring 2010.

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