The news publishing industry contributed £5.3bn to the UK economy in 2015, according to a Deloitte report commissioned by the News Media Association (NMA), the industry’s trade body.
In a challenging era of falling newspaper profitability, due mainly to declining advertising revenues, the report finds many reasons to be cheerful.
Among its positive findings is the revelation that the news media industry generated £4.8bn revenue through circulation and advertising over the course of 2015.
The sector also supported an estimated 87,500 UK jobs; invested £97m in digital services; and added value across the supply chain because the average publisher dealt with nearly 2,600 suppliers.
Furthermore, 90% of the total spend with suppliers by news media organisations remained within the UK, compared to the average of 77% across the economy.
The report, “UK news media: engine of original news content and democracy”, says publishers are by far the biggest investors in original news content, accounting for 58% of the total investment in news production.
But it warns that their future contribution rests on their ability to monetise newsbrand content, particularly on digital platforms, in order to fund newsgathering.
Ed Shedd, a Deloitte partner and head of technology, media and telecommunications, said: “It is clear that the news media industry makes an extremely valuable economic contribution to the UK. This is a vibrant sector that distributes value across the supply chain.”
The report finds that, in addition to the sector’s economic contribution to the UK, the journalism produced by its editorial staffs has wide-ranging benefits, such as boosting small and medium enterprises (SMEs), improving literacy and enhancing community cohesion.
The report also points to the crucial role played by local, regional and national newsbrands in civic life.
In an introduction by the NMA’s chairman, Ashley Highfield, and vice-chairman, David Dinsmore, they write:
“Newsbrands act as the public’s watchdog. By scrutinising and holding the powerful to account on behalf of their readers, newspapers underpin the democratic process.”
As examples of agenda-setting newspaper journalism, they refer to the Guardian’s Panama Papers revelations and the Sunday Times’s investigation into Fifa.
These, they write, were cases of “painstakingly researched stories which dominated the global news agenda when they broke”.
At local level, they praise the Jersey Evening Post’s investigation into online underage grooming and the Camden New Journal’s campaign for “school dinner ladies to receive the London living wage.”
Highfield, chief executive of Johnston Press, said of the report that it “provides compelling evidence of the significant economic, cultural and social value that news media contributes to the UK.”
But he noted that it “also presents the challenges the industry is facing”. In a clear reference to social media sites and search engines, such as Facebook and Google, he said there is an “urgent need for a fair and equitable regime in which news media publishers’ investment in news is appropriately acknowledged and rewarded, without the commercial benefits being siphoned off by digital platforms and aggregators.”
Dinsmore, chief operating officer at News UK, agreed: “Urgent action must be taken to ensure that news media publishers’ ability to fund the original agenda-setting news and information our readers want us to produce is not fatally undermined by third parties who gain so much from our investment while contributing very little.”
