Reach CEO: Sun and Mail are our allies in ‘battle for survival’
Reach’s CEO has cast The Mirror‘s rival newsbrands The Sun and the Mail as allies in an “existential battle for survival” against Big Tech.
In a speech this week at the Stationers Company Autumn Livery Dinner, Jim Mullen warned that journalism is “in danger of being taken for granted” and that digital platforms have upset the online publishing market.
“My competitors are still The Sun, the Mail, and The Guardian, but increasingly they are our allies as we are fighting an existential battle for survival becuase of the competition from the likes of Google and Meta,” Mullen said.
He continued: “Advertisers understandably like the fact that the platforms can target adverts directly to people who are naturally interested in their products because of their search history. We can also do that as we grow our digital audience, but the slope is steeper as a large part of our audience are continually at risk of being diverted away from us by the platforms.”
Mullen suggested there is “simply too much power” in the hands of Big Tech and social media companies and their algorithms, and warned their platforms are used to promote “unreliable, untrustworthy and unscrupulous news”.
Tech platforms have received renewed attention from regulators this year. Google, for example has faced two separate antitrust cases brought by the US Department of Justice, which alleged Google has operated a monopoly over both online search and in adtech. A federal judge last month found that Google has abused a monopoly over search; Google’s adtech trial is ongoing.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority also preliminarily found this month that Google has abused dominant positions in adtech.
Meanwhile the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC), passed during the washup period this summer, allows the CMA’s Digital Markets Unit to compel Big Tech to pay for news content that appears on their platforms.
“Platforms have so far resisted efforts to be lumped in with publishers and the responsibilities we carry,” Mullen said. “They don’t determine reliable news, they don’t place a value on trusted sources, they just provide avenues of news for the reader to browse. It’s why politics of deliberate division and misinformation have sprung up. It’s why teams of people work to influence attitudes and feelings in other countries. It’s why recent elections and referendums have been influenced by such operators.”
Regulation needed on Big Tech, BBC
Referencing the real world effects of mis- and disinformation, Mullen said societies have seen “deadly consequences” of the irresponsibility of falsehoods spread online, including around Covid vaccinations, US elections and Brexit.
“More recently, our own journalists at the Liverpool Echo covering the terrible tragedy in Southport, had to contend with violent abuse at the hands of rioters who were not from the community but stirred up by outside actors on social media — including the likes of Tommy Robinson,” continued Mullen.
Admitting he did not want to merely bring up problems, Mullen urged the government to move on regulations for Big Tech, as well as the BBC, which he suggested has taken advantage of an enlarged remit to unfairly compete against national and local commercial news titles in the UK.
“If platforms are regulated to pay the providers for the content they so freely offer, if they are regulated so that the advertising market is not so heavily distorted in their favour and that reliable trustworthy news is prioritised in their feeds — then there is hope,” he said.
Regarding the BBC, Mullen suggested that the Corporation’s digital news via its website “does raise questions” over the fairness of a tax-funded free news website “if it is at the expense of a varied commercial news ecosystem”. However, he said that debate should be had “another day”, implying it is less urgent than regulating Big Tech.
An argument against paywalls
Apart from lodging complaints against tech and the BBC, Mullen also decried the movement of publishers toward subscription-based business models, which has occurred as digital ad revenues are much less lucrative than print ad revenues.
Mullen himself admitted in his speech that “print is in irreversible decline”.
But paywalls, according to Mullen, put the health of democracy at risk.
“Now, some in the sector may say that the answer is in pay walls and building a subscription-based audience. It is not for me to comment on others’ business models but you’ll forgive me if I pause and ask you to think about what this means for us as a society and as a democracy,” said Mullen.
He added that “news cannot be seen as a luxury”, because viewing it as such “strips the basic rights of people to be able to judge their government, to form an opinion and to have a voice that answers back to that government”.
Mullen asked: “If we think it acceptable that communities should have to pay to have that voice, can we complain if they believe that they are being excluded and then stop engaging?”
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