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Has the relative importance of factual content in news publishing changed?
This isn’t a question about the importance of facts. Facts matter. Facts matter more than ever in a world riven by misinformation and disinformation. When, in very recent memory, the so-called leader of the free world could lie to the point of undermining a free and fair election result, the truth is everything.
So let’s accept that the pursuit of facts is immutable in serious news publishing.
But what about from a business perspective? Can ‘just the facts’ deliver the audiences and the engagement needed to sustain a healthy publishing operation? Probably not, according to Alan Hunter, the former head of digital at The Times and The Sunday Times.
Writing on his company’s blog, Hunter raised the prospect of a new reality for news publishers stating that the news business needs more than facts to survive. Contemplating longtime Guardian editor CP Scott’s 100-year old dictum for journalism,“Comment is free, but facts are sacred”, he wrote:
While Scott said that a newspaper’s ‘primary office is the gathering of news’, I think that 101 years later, the main task of its successors is going to be explaining the news if they want to be sustainable for the next century.
Hunter’s argument is simple – in the 21st Century, facts in the form of news have become commoditised.
In Scott’s day, and probably for another 70-plus years, facts were sacred because they were relatively hard to come by. Even 40 years ago With two newspapers at most a day, magazines on a weekly or monthly schedule, and a limited number of TV and radio channels, publishers and broadcasters controlled the flow of factual information.
Scott highlighted the responsibility that brought, but it also brought opportunity. Consumers keen to know what was going on had little choice but to pay for papers and magazines as the best way of keeping abreast of what was going on in the world.
Fact overload
Consumers still want to know what’s going on – except for the 38% actively avoiding the news – but now, rolling news feeds, amplified by social media, deliver reporting minute by minute, much of it for free. Updates are everywhere; news is ubiquitous with very little to differentiate its originators.
To demonstrate this idea, Hunter asks: “Could you tell me from which provider you heard that Queen Elizabeth II had died?”. The answer is more likely to be a device or platform – On my phone. On Twitter – than a recognisable publishing brand.
Differentiation
Ironically, the more accurate and unbiased the reporting is, the less differentiated it is; much of the time the same facts are being supplied by the same sources. So how can publishers differentiate their output? For Hunter, the answer lies in commentary and analysis. He writes:
All the user data I’ve ever seen has shown this type of journalism to get more page views, more subscriptions and more engagement than vanilla news, barring exceptional events like terrorism attacks, elections and similar.
He explains that, while most news publishers still focus on update-style output, this type of content sees less engagement than pieces that move beyond the facts to deliver insight. For Hunter this is an argument to replace ‘breaking news with breaking views’.
It’s difficult to argue with this; publishers and broadcasters with clearly defined positions get attention. The worrying thing is that without CP Scott’s sacred facts, we end up with so-called news providers pumping out clickbait or, worse, feeding the outrage engine to create hyper-partisan audiences.
Facts and commentary
Of course, it is completely possible to deliver facts and commentary effectively.
At the height of the pandemic, the Financial Times ramped up its data analysis to deliver much needed perspectives on the unfolding public health crisis. The content created by the FT’s data visualisation team wasn’t without its critics. Senior Data-Visualisation Journalist John Burn-Murdoch told The Media Voices Podcast at the time:
We’ve had to be acutely aware of the fact that this has become a very political topic, and any number that we put out isn’t going to be reported just as a straight number, it’s going to be reported as the number that proves x is bad and y is good.
And Burn-Murdoch acknowledged that editorial decisions were involved in the data visualisation process, but making decisions for statistical reasons rather than political ones lay at the heart of keeping their coverage factual.
New launch Semafor has built a mix of fact and comment into its publishing DNA. Its ‘Semaform’ article format creates a framework to deliver a mix of fact and commentary in all its stories, an effort to revive trust in journalism. The format clearly labels factual content with reporter analysis and counter-narratives. Aggregation of global sources is also used to help readers ‘triangulate the truth’.
When he argues for ‘breaking views’ over ‘breaking news’ Hunter is in no way promoting a wholesale shift to commentary; he simply sees it as adding the value needed for differentiation. But less ethical publishers are already taking this approach, and why wouldn’t they? Comment gets more attention for a generally lower creation cost – it costs way less to publish a highly partisan polemic than to report a story accurately.
So yes, commentary and analysis is key to the future of news provision. News from nowhere, as Jay Rosen describes it, has no future. But the wisdom of CP Scott must prevail – without facts, we’re at the mercy of the publishers fanning the flames of the culture wars or promoting dangerous disinformation/misinformation agendas just to boost their numbers. And that is a scary prospect.
