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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Online subs booming for the 59 news titles with more than 100,000 paying online readers
And why did the UK media have to fight to name a suspected war criminal charged with murder and torture?
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Thursday, 12 March.
🚀 When Press Gazette first started ranking the top paywalled websites in the world in 2020 we wondered whether the appetite for paid online news was reaching its peak.
Back then we counted 24 English-language news websites with more than 100,000 paying readers, adding up to 20 million readers in total.
Since then, business has boomed in the world of news paywalls with some 59 titles now in our updated 100k Club who collectively have some 55 million subscribers. The overall total is up 21% year on year.
It’s important to note that comparisons over time are tricky because every year we find new sites to include and auditing methods change.
But overall the direction of travel is clear and it’s a positive one for quality journalism.
The strength of paywalls is at least partly down to weakness in other revenue areas (such as display advertising) which has forced publishers to find different ways to keep the lights on.
And congratulations to podcast producer Goalhanger who joins the 100k Club with 250,000 subscribers to their network of shows.
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🗞️ We report on a new bid to encourage young people to pursue a career in journalism. Is that wise, readers of this newsletter may ask themselves, given all the recent layoffs in the industry?
Well, according to the NCTJ, the jobs are still there at entry level in the UK news business.
Some 88% of those achieving a pass in all areas of its flagship diploma find a job in journalism.
Would I encourage my own kids to go into the news business? I’d certainly advise them that there are more financially secure paths to take, but I’d also back them wholeheartedly if they were committed to following the path of adventure.
And as our 100k Club data shows, paid-for online news is growing fast and needs to find the next generation of people who are clever and hard-working enough to uncover information so good that people will pay for it.
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The question being raised is why this challenge had to be made at all.
Reporters are increasingly being forced into doubling as lawyers charged with upholding the public’s right to know in the face of spurious secrecy bids made on behalf of suspected criminals.
As Rebecca Camber of the Crime Reporters’ Association said: “It doesn’t matter how famous you are or how infamous the alleged crime, trust and confidence in our rule of law rests on the public knowing what happens in our courts.”
🤏News In Brief
Ladbible Group is cutting around 12 staff on its social video team based in Manchester, according to Digiday, with video editors, channel managers and social editors said to be impacted. (