Thank goodness we have the media. It is a lifeline – for everyone. For people like me it tells us what is going on in the world outside our cocooned locked-down world. Each day so many of us learn what is happening in the fight against Coronavirus by television, radio or on-line news outlets.
Those that do the reporting, journalists, are trying to do their job as best they can. However, they too are constrained in what they can do and what information they can obtain. In truth they have limited access to politicians and government officials. After all, with Parliament not sitting, it is really only journalists who are holding the Government to count.
I admire and respect most journalists. Many of them are friends – stretching back at least 25 years – even if they sometimes call me to account as a politician! But that is their job.
In the main, except for a few television or radio correspondents, it is print journalists who do the dogs work. They gather what information they can, analyse it and then comment in writing on what they have ascertained or observed. For me writing about what is happening is where journalists really earn their spurs,
Thereafter television and radio programmers leap on their product and use it for their own ends with items like ‘What the Papers Say’. That’s good because the news and comment are spread much more but I always think it is rather lazy journalism – on the backs of those that do the real work.
Mind you more and more people are now subscribing to on-line versions of newspapers and journals. I have just done that for a journal myself, this morning – which prompts this post.
In truth though print journalism, which produces paper copy seems to be in serious decline, even before Coronavirus. The traditional print-centric media was already in huge decay, mainly because of the digital revolution.
According to the Press Gazette, which uses figures from an organisation called ABC, in January 2000, there were sixteen daily and Sunday paid-for newspapers with a combined circulation of 21.2 million. By 2010 this had fallen to 16.4 million amongst seventeen newspapers (the Daily Star Sunday was launched in 2002). This was a drop in circulation of 23 per cent.
Yet by January 2020 the same group of seventeen newspapers produced 7.4 million copies rolling off the presses. That is a drop in circulation of over a half (55 per cent) in just ten years.
Overall newspaper sales have fallen by two thirds in 20 years by the start of 2020. Then along came the Coronavirus; with people reluctant to go out and get a newspaper or indeed pick one up on the way to work. On top of crashing print production which is already well set in its ways, I wonder whether our newspapers can survive Coronavirus too?
Maybe on-line newspaper and journal sales could be a lifeline? I truly hope so because our society would be so much the poorer if we did not have professional journalists, used to writing down considered thoughts and who can comment freely upon what is happening.