As most people are aware, News print readership has been on the decline since the 1950s. Readership of newspapers has dropped on average from 4.2 million readers per day (1950) to just 2.2 million in 2015.
With traditional print titles now having to compete with the beast that is social media, some have suggested that they will all but perish in the coming years. But in the current turbulence we are facing worldwide there is some good news for these established UK titles, and this is good news for corporate communications professionals.
We don’t need to tell you about the appeal social media offers. As you are socialising, skim reading headlines or browsing pictures of cute cats, platforms are curating the information you want to hear and quickly filtering out that which doesn’t resonate. The result - we rely on social media news services that paint a very biased (but comforting) picture of the current state of affairs (the echo chamber effect).
There is a developing sense of ill ease around the intrusiveness of social media, the pervasiveness of others’ opinions and the insidious effect of curated content based on your previous browsing history. People are starting to realise what they are seeing or being fed may not be the full story. According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, the public are encountering roadblocks in a quest for facts with 73% of the public being afraid of “fake news being used as a weapon”.
The results speak for themselves: “A survey published by Origin last week found that half of young people ages 18 to 24 have had enough of social media, with 34 percent saying they’ve deleted all their accounts” (Business Wire).
With the looming threat of a messy Brexit becoming a reality, people are returning to the only place that they feel can guarantee an informed and educated position - the established newspaper titles that have been around for centuries. With news engagement up by 22 points (Edelman’s Trust Barometer) in 2019 it seems clear that when it comes to times of crisis, the public are no longer willing to wade through the bogs of social media. Instead they are seeking informed opinions that will give them a clear and distinctive voice of reason in amongst the white noise.
Whether this short-term upswing will revive the fortunes of the nationals in the long run remains a guessing game. But it’s good to see these much loved and highly regarded titles bucking a decline that has seemed unstoppable for over half a century.