Towards the end of last week, the Bank of England predicted that the UK economy is about to go into a recession. Coming on the back of the endless grim news about the climate catastrophe, the cost of living crisis and Putin’s latest high stakes gamble in Ukraine, for many of us, newspapers aren’t exactly fun to read at the moment.
Those already worried about their own circumstances (and let’s face it, that’s most of us) are going to read about the prospects of a recession with an increasing sense of unease.
Anecdotally, a number of sensible, intelligent people I speak to have abandoned reading a daily paper and watching the news because, frankly, it is all too depressing.
Speaking personally, my own appetite for newspapers has definitely diminished. As a communications professional, I read them because it’s an essential part of the job – but I wonder if I would still be an avid reader if my livelihood didn’t depend on it. Long gone are the days when I sat with a double espresso and spent an enjoyable couple of hours reading the Sundays with genuine pleasure.
The commercial effects of hard news avoidance won’t be lost on media proprietors. If people aren’t buying newspapers or reading news on-line this has seriously damaging consequences for their business models.
With falling readerships both in hard copy terms and online, companies will bargain harder to pay less for advertising space, which is calculated largely on audience reach.
Currently, for advertisers and media owners alike it’s a shrinking market, which is why Martin Sorrel – ex chief of global advertising giant WPP, warned last week that costs had run ahead of expected growth and this meant bigger than expected losses for his new outfit S4 Capital and a challenging second half to 2022.
Never ones to stand still, outlets like the Mail Online (one of the five most-visited English-language news websites anywhere in the world) have responded by serving up instead endless celebrity gossip because they’ve realised that more people prefer to read about the Kardashians than the cost of living crisis.
I’m old enough to have worked through three serious recessions and there are lessons to be learnt here.
It’s important to note that the papers still play an active role in ‘talking’ the nation into a recession because journalists simply can’t resist reporting stories of imminent catastrophe. One of the reasons is that journalism is the first version of events for the history books, and news reporters and commentators like to make their mark for posterity.
However, writing about recessions has a powerful dampening effect on consumers’ appetite to spend money, who prefer the safety of putting money into savings when under threat. Pubs, shops, restaurants, holiday companies, hotels – you name it - all suffer the consequences as the recession bites.
But newspaper proprietors know that positioning their outlets as harbingers of doom is turning off their readership.
So as soon as we are firmly in recession, they will increase pressure on their journalists to look for ‘good news’ that brings some hope into the gloom they themselves helped to create.
I look back to 2008 and the biggest financial crash in my working lifetime (much bigger than the 1991/2 and 1999/2001 recessions) and clearly recall journalists calling up because they had been mandated by their editors to write positive stories.
I predict that this will happen again. It will present a golden opportunity for those of us in the business of pitching stories on behalf of clients. Stories about job creation, going “above and beyond” to support employees or the community, innovation and British successes on the world stage will be snapped up by the press when the time is right. You heard it here first.
By Tom Buchanan, MD and Founder of Paternoster Communications