18.02.2016

The strange death of liberal media

The Independent is Britain’s first major print casualty of the digital age, and probably not the last, writes William Kane

So we bid goodbye to The Independent and its Sunday sister, in print form at least.

Things had been looking ropey for the Indy and Sindy for a while: the current owners - father-and-son oligarchs Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev - bought the papers for the princely sum of £1, such was the dire state of things six years ago. They have since ploughed £100 million of hard-earned (by someone, anyway) cash into the titles, yet in the week the closure was announced, paper circulation was a dismal 40,000.

The Indy had long been kept afloat by its more nimble cousin, entitled i - a genuinely smart notion on the part of the Russians. The i is a lighter-weight affair - if not quite a classic tabloid, then at least a middlebrow offering after the fashion of the Daily Mail. In reality, it is something like a national equivalent to the Evening Standard, which became a free sheet under the Lebedevs: while the i has a cover price, it is a token sum, and the circulation of 270,000 provides enough eyeballs to enough advertisers for it to turn a handsome profit. Alongside lightweight copy, it benefits from republishing the output of some of the Indy’s more serious contributors - or at least has until now.

The sale of the i to Johnstone Press, which owns The Scotsman, was widely expected to mean the death of the main titles, now that their support system is gone. So it has proven. From late March, the Indy will cease to trouble the world’s forests, becoming an online-only outfit.

There are doubts as to whether the website will succeed in its own right - which we will address below. In any case, the death of the dead-tree Indy has widely been written up as the end of a ‘great experiment’. The paper is the youngest of the national dailies, founded in 1986 by three disaffected Telegraph staffers: Andreas Whittam-Smith, Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds. Despite the Tory background of its founders (Stephen Glover, in particular, still writes hair-raising op-eds for the Mail), it quickly found its home in the soggy centre of British politics, occasionally drifting a standard deviation or two to the left or right.

In the context of the mid-1980s, this is not a huge surprise. Politics was polarised: the Thatcher government was the most across-the-board rightwing administration the country had seen since before the war, unleashing a vast offensive against the organised working class and exploiting mob hatred against gays, immigrants and blacks. The miners’ Great Strike was a painfully recent memory. The Wapping dispute actually provided the infant Indy with its first print staff: those employees of Rupert Murdoch who looked at the move to the infamous Fortress and decided, on balance, to look elsewhere. The Labour Party was beginning its gallop to the right, but only beginning; the anti-Militant purge was in full flow, but those who had gotten Tony Benn to within a whisker of the shadow leadership had not exactly given up and died.

The first political result of this ‘age of extremes’ was the Social Democratic Party split, which saw a clique of treacherous rightists decamp from the Labour Party in the name of ‘moderation’, to the tumultuous applause of the bourgeois media. At the same time, the Liberal Party was finally looking like a significant force again, after its post-war nadir under Jo Grimond. By the time The Independent made it to the news stands, the SDP and Liberals were standing together as the Alliance, and before long they were united as the Liberal Democrats.

Alternative

The Independent, in this world, was supposed to offer - within the media - an alternative to the ‘tribalism’ everywhere else (Murdoch’s capture of The Times being a bad augur for those worried about the advancing influence of the ‘tribes’). “The Independent:it is - are you?” ran the marketing material. It was supposed to be free of party-political bias and proprietorial influence, although in reality it was neither, but took up its positions on both axes in ways that its claims could be, to vulgar consciousness, plausible. Its proprietors were, in the early days at least, journalists rather than businessmen, so its ‘proprietorial influences’ were at least more complicated than the competition. As for the ‘party political’ angle, being in essence the voice of gentle liberalism and thus of the Liberal Democrats, it could at least claim to have some independence from the two parties likely to have a meaningful contest for government.

The Independent achieved a respectable circulation of 400,000 in its early days, but was badly wounded when Murdoch launched a price war in the early 1990s. It has since struggled to regain its initial momentum, instead seeing its circulation figures degenerate to the sorry state they are in now. In the intervening years, proprietors of the old-fashioned type have come into play, not least the Lebedevs - the younger of whom has a bizarre fixation on seeing himself in print in his papers, an indignity more often inflicted upon the Evening Standard, but from which the Independent titles have hardly been spared. Evgeny is evidently more comfortable with the Tory-supporting ES than The Independent, and last year the paper’s electoral advice amounted to a forlorn hope for the continuation of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition. Appropriately, the Liberal Democrats’ return to electoral near-oblivion has been followed rapidly by the closure of The Independent.

The paper is, of course, merely at the sharp end of a long-term transition in the press, as the traditional media outlets struggle to make their own way in a world where more and more people consume news primarily in digital rather than physical form. However, we do not buy the gabble of the techno-utopians that the age of the ‘traditional’ media is over: indeed, we would doubt that many of the techno-utopians would be able to sell that particular prospectus in 2016. Yet the rise of the web, and latterly the various mobile ‘walled gardens’, has - as the tech industry jargon goes - disrupted those media violently.

At the root of the problem lies money, which is a coarse but necessary angle from which to examine both the dead-tree-to-digital transition and the complicated history of the Indy. The latter, after all, was put on notice by the aforementioned aggressive pricing of The Times, made possible in the last instance by the much larger revenues well-positioned print outlets could expect from advertising than from circulation sales. The paper itself was a loss-leader - the real money came from ads.

As it is in the world of dead trees, so it is online. From the perspective of the humble journalist, to be sure, the online advertising world has certain practical advantages. Here is how print advertising works: the paper sets aside a certain amount of space for ads. The sales team haggles with giant corporations, selling a half-page, a full page and what not - or would sir like to pay extra for a wrap-around cover? - to particular advertisers. It is good, dishonest money, but it comes at an editorial price. Say your newspaper is the Financial Times. Say it runs a piece critical of Hewlett Packard, and that HP is a major advertiser; and that HP’s ‘director of marketing and communications’ complains. What do you do?

Well, it turns out that if you’re the FT in this situation, you run an article by the original journalist excoriating the said PR wallah in public.¹ Very good - except that not everyone does (and we rather doubt the FT behaves with such integrity all the time). The Telegraph has recently gained infamy for its pliability, when it comes to major advertisers, particularly HSBC. The proximate cause for the closure of the News of the World in 2011, meanwhile, was a collective boycott of advertisers. This is a more important phenomenon than is commonly acknowledged, for it allows the press to act as a collective mouthpiece for capital, rather than merely a vehicle for the influence of one particular ‘proprietor’.

Yet it can only do this because of the sales people.

Techno-utopian

On the web and other online platforms, advertising works like this: your web page sends a bunch of possibly useful data, along with details of the slots on the page, to an ad server. The ad server offers the slots up for bidding to a series of other automated systems, which use their own heuristics to decide whether to buy. These systems in turn then look at the available data, and decide which ad to send to the page. At no point in this process is any human involved.

In this situation, if an HP advert turns up next to an article critical of HP, there is precisely zero point in the PR guy emailing the website; because the website has no more control over the ad servers than the brand. A boycott is simply ruled out, for practical purposes. Thus one of the great disciplinary influences on the bourgeois press is neutralised - for the time being.

That is the upside for a journalist. The downside is that the digital advertising rates are abysmal. The ad servers I mentioned above are not great in number. Google controls a vast amount of the market on its own. When such monopolies arise, everyone orbiting them gets squeezed dramatically. One must guarantee a certain amount of eyeballs looking at the page for the deal to be worth it; and thus even the ‘quality’ press is driven towards shallow sensationalism to make the numbers add up. A disaffected Indy staffer is currently being widely quoted as describing the paper’s website as a clickbait operation (that is, a news outlet that uses cheap tricks to get page views); but we could also cite the Mail Online, which is half composed of the lunatic conservative ramblings we so love in the print edition, and half of smutty pictures of frequently underage celebrities. (It is also, terrifyingly, the most popular news website in the world.)

So we find it difficult to credit the dutifully bullish noises emanating from the Lebedevs and their lieutenants. They have spent a lot of money and effort keeping hold of the paper’s star columnists - notably Middle East specialists Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn. They promise to cut down on the clickbait and turn the website into something a serious newsreader would actually want to visit. Yet it is surely far too late. The emergence of new media inevitably takes a toll on their immediate predecessors - the Indy is the first casualty of what will no doubt be many.

Indeed, the greatest surprise in The Independent’s downfall is perhaps merely that it beat The Guardian to the cemetery. The latter paper has been bleeding money at worrying rates for years. It refused, throughout the Alan Rusbridger years, to even consider anything so boorish as asking people to pay for the website, even while investing a great deal of money in its digital profile; it seems that a new software engineer is hired for every two hacks and subs it lets go. If I were a vulture, I would be winging my way to Kings Place in short order.

The grain of truth in the techno-utopian idea is that a significant shift in media power is happening; yet the only certainty, as long as capitalism persists, is that the power currently wielded by the Lebedevs and Murdochs will only be transferred to a newer, shinier oligarchy.

Notes

1 . www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b57fee24-cb3c-11e5-be0b-b7ece4e953a0.html.