Picture of

Would you want your children to do what you do? It’s a question which, ten years ago, I would have met with an unequivocal ‘yes’.

Digitisation and the internet have made for a golden age in human creativity and expression

You get a level of access denied most citizens, you meet people with extraordinary stories and your colleagues, as with many vocational professions, are often likeminded, stimulating and invigorating company. Going to work is a joy not a chore. And although it would never make you rich, there was a level of security and a salary which would at least sustain you.

However, nowadays, despite the privileges that being a modern journalist still brings, advising your children to tread the same career path means accepting a far higher level of career risk and a much lower level of remuneration. The issue, as we all know by now, is the uncertain business model for the future of news journalism.

Digitisation and the internet have made for a golden age in human creativity and expression, but the inevitable smashing of the distribution bottleneck which previously guaranteed our income has left a significant question mark over how or even whether any of us can make a sustainable living from journalism, writing, film making, music or any content creation where the audience not only expects content to be free but can generate its own material and share it with the world for fame rather than fortune.

Print journalism: the sunset years

I started in print journalism just as the industry entered its sunset years – at the end of the 1980s. I remember my first job, on a fabulous but relatively obscure agricultural publication called Big Farm Weekly, for which I was trained in all the necessary skills of shorthand, legal etc, at the expense of my employer. Trade publications, broadcasters and national newspaper groups all ran extensive trainee schemes, many of which have now closed or been dramatically reduced. In my second job for a much more glamorous trade mag – Campaign, the advertising industry’s bible – I remember the group profits for the company running into tens of millions of pounds and every edition was as thick as a brick, stuffed with recruitment and display advertising.

Already 24-hour radio and the nascent CNN TV news network were pointing the way to a different future.

Traversing from that to a junior reporter’s job on the Observer’s business desk in 1990 felt like arriving in the midst of the last days of the Roman Empire. Salaries were banker-high, three quality Sunday newspapers sold over 800,000 copies each and no one had even heard of the internet. With hindsight, the markets were already in decline, but it didn’t feel like it from the inside. Even through the unpleasant recession of 1990 and 1991, there was still a feeling that this was market adjustment and after a shakeout good businesses and livings could be made. But this was illusory. Already 24-hour radio and the nascent CNN TV news network were pointing the way to a different future.

A cultural revolution unfolds

A decade later, I was working in the cannibalistic outpost of the Guardian’s web division. The spectacular and thrilling growth of our audience and almost giddying engagement with the previously arm’s-length audience made up entirely for the lofty derision of former print colleagues and precarious business models. It was a rare thing to see such a cultural revolution unfold at first hand, but the new economics of the web from day one meant that it was clear that for a long time to come there would be a gap between the costs and revenues of the print business and the revenues of the online business. It is still the case that for £10 spent in print you can only expect £1 online.

One thing is for sure, the world of content creation will never be the same again

Online businesses have started to find ways to make money – display advertising has grown exponentially over the past six years (if only to come to a shuddering halt with the current economic constriction). Other businesses which have looked at how to aggregate rather than create content have fared far better.

Google, for instance, has thrived in terms of its own revenues and stock market quote – it represents around three-quarters of all internet advertising expenditure in the UK on a relatively small headcount, because its business model is very different. Facebook, MySpace, Flickr – all the signature businesses from the Web 2.0 revolution, which gives audiences useful tools to work with, produce much more attractive economic models than a newsroom full of journalists, or a television studio producing original dramas or documentaries. No wonder many of us worry about what the future holds for content creators. One thing is for sure, the world of content creation will never be the same again, and many writers, journalists, musicians, photographers and filmmakers of my generation will be the last people in their industries to know what it was like to be “looked after” by a record label, publisher or broadcaster.

The value of our content is effectively zero

But even if the future outlook is uncertain is it necessarily bleak for all time?

But even if the future outlook is uncertain is it necessarily bleak for all time? Once we have absorbed this cruel adjustment there will still be a world in which creators are able to earn money for what they do – albeit perhaps not so many of them, and maybe not at the same level. I think in some ways newspapers were lucky to discover, very early on in the digitisation process, that the value of our content (monetary value that is) is effectively zero. Unless of course you produce something so specialist, well resourced and unique you can protect it with a subscription. But essentially realising our business is free, is liberating and troubling at the same time.

So where are the new opportunities? Well, some of them are in the same place as they always were; advertising targeted against web content is still valuable, you just have to reach bigger audiences. There is an interesting trend in America, where journalists from regional and local newspaper groups who have lost their jobs as newspapers have closed have started online-only businesses. They cannot employ the same number of people as the papers did, but their overheads are lower. In the UK entrepreneurial bloggers like Rick Waghorn, famous for his Norwich City local blog, have moved out of traditional local reporting and into online.

Another emerging model is the idea that larger media companies, such as the Guardian, or maybe Google, can use their advertising sales expertise to sell advertising across dozens of smaller affiliated websites. It is a very nascent business idea, which is only really getting traction now, but again points towards a glimmer of hope for the entrepreneurial.

The rise and rise of live events

Then there is exploitation of the limited bandwidth of the live event. The rise and rise of live events has been an extraordinary phenomenon during the past two decades. Now music is so freely and often illegally available to download, a sense of thrill and exclusivity revolves around live performance. In 1980 there were barely 20 rock and pop festivals in the UK. Now there are 300. There has been a similar explosion in book festivals as the digital world of home entertainment becomes ever more available and mundane and people cry out for a real experience. For writers this is not an entirely satisfactory model; giving talks and signings is not the same as selling copies and receiving royalties, but there is nevertheless a willingness in the public’s mind to pay for an authentic experience or a physical object.

It will separate into a bifurcated future of a thin layer of content “rock stars”

But many of these are marginal and emerging options for payment, which provide scant comfort in the here and now. Unless a way can be found to subsidise content creators more widely than through the BBC, the creative community will go through an extremely barren patch. It will separate into a bifurcated future of a thin layer of content “rock stars” who can make money from their output and many thousands more who can’t. It might be said, perhaps only at a whisper, that in some areas the impending shakeout is somewhat overdue; in my own area of national newspapers the sheer volume of newsprint produced daily in the UK is staggering – and far more in reality than the market can bear. The uneconomic carving of the pie into so many pieces has meant that in straitened times, the less well resourced are reduced to putting out a weakened offering which undermines the healthier players in the market.

Creative intervention required

There is no way of ducking the fact that we might in the coming few years lose some of what is good and precious as well as experience a great increase in other types of creativity. This will, I believe, require creative intervention with support and money from the public as well as private sources. Unlike many, I don't believe the answer lies in yet more copyright protection – we already have a vast array of ever tougher copyright laws which seem to be so easily circumnavigated that an acceptance that this particular model is broken would be more helpful than the heaping on of further regulation. Those like Google or the internet service providers which rely on our content for their businesses will, I believe, in time, reach a better accommodation with the creative industries, through mutual benefit rather than coercion. In the meantime entering a career as a content maker is a path for the energetic: those who embrace risk but eschew material wealth.

© Copyright Emily Bell

Emily Bell has worked for the Observer and then the Guardian for the past 18 years, setting up MediaGuardian.co.uk in 2000 and becoming editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited in 2001. In 2006, Emily was promoted to the new position of director of digital content for Guardian News and Media. She writes a regular column for the Guardian about media policy issues and also for Broadcast magazine. She lives in north London with her husband and three children.

Back to the top