A hurricane of optimism descended on City University this afternoon as Emily Bell, director of digital content at Guardian News & Media (GNM), painted a picture of a “world of better” for British journalism during a lecture to journalism faculty students.
Bell: "There is no time like now to enter journalism."
Bell spoke of increasing standards across the industry, partly fuelled by the development of communications technology in recent years, and insisted that there was “no time like now to enter journalism.” She spoke in excited tones about live reporting, citing Andrew Sparrow’s liveblogging of the Chilcot Inquiry and telling star struck wannabe hacks how Alan Rusbridger described it as a “dazzling piece of journalism.”
Also on the agenda were the launch of the guardianlocal project in Leeds, the rapid development of social media in feeding traffic to Guardian.co.uk, and the incredible pace of change experienced across the media industry in recent years.
“The industry has changed more in the last five years than it did in the entire previous ten, and more in the last 18 months than it did in the previous five years. That’s the pace of change that you guys are getting to grips with,” she said.
The optimistic tenor of her talk was well received given the doom-mongering of recent months, but for all its inspiring rhetoric it failed to address perhaps the most crucial question facing journalism today: “Where is the money?”
Aside from a brief reference to video adverts and a plug for the Guardian’s paid-for iphone app, Bell seemed more keen to emphasise how the Guardian’s money could be spent (and at £100,000 losses per day, being spent it is) than how it might be earned. There was plenty of information about how successful the website’s G20 coverage had been, and how well it had integrated tools like those offered by mysociety.org with its local coverage, but singularly no mention of the voluntary redundancies at GNM or the aforementioned “unsustainable” financial losses.
The Guardian strategy is about size, reach and a politically non-partisan output of high quality content. Competitors like The Telegraph (branded content) and The Times (impending paywalls) have taken a different tack, as mentioned in a previous Media Bastard piece. The problem for the Guardian is that it has gone into direct competition with an organisation that also likes to provide politically balanced, commercially untainted and, crucially, free-of-charge content that doesn’t have to worry about a revenue model at all: The BBC.
The license fee, Conservative government or not, will continue to swell the BBC coffers. The Guardian must be hoping that a stratospheric leap in digital advertising will shore up theirs. If not, Media Bastard wonders how they intend to pay for the world of better.
