Is it time to pull the plug on TV news channels?

At long last, writes Raymond Snoddy, newspapers are making the right changes to cope with a digital world. Yet by comparison, TV news channels seem stuck in the 1990s with their mantras of “breaking news” when absolutely nothing is happening. Are their days numbered?

The news is, there may not be enough news to go around – certainly not enough to fill 24-hour television news channels.

The argument is that just as continuous television news channels largely supplanted the impact of the big evening new bulletins, now social media, instant blogging and the immediate online world is fatally undermining that child of the satellite age – the TV news channel.

And television has failed to keep up with the speed of technological advance which means that the work of large teams of people who could be doing other, better journalism are tied up in increasingly irrelevant channels that typically cost between £40 million and £60 million a year to run.

The proposition comes from people who really should know what they are talking about – Richard Sambrook, former director of BBC News and Sean McGuire, former head of BBC strategy.

Ironically, the idea that television news was failing to keep up came at around the same time that Mike Darcey, chief executive of News UK, was celebrating the future of newsbrands while attacking the “relentless” concentration on declining paper sales as “myopic and misleading.”

While arguing that future reform was necessary, particularly in measuring all readership on whatever device it occurs, Darcey was convinced that we are entering a new age for news with “greater choice, functionality and convenience.”

The strangest news of all is that newsbrands may, finally, be adapting to the new online world rather better than television. At long last newspapers have started to make the necessary changes and have been experimenting on a wide front. By comparison, television news channels seem stuck in the 1990s with their mantras of “breaking news” when absolutely nothing is happening and “live” when most of the time it is nothing of the sort.

As Sambrook and McGuire point out at least Simon McCoy of BBC News had the honesty to admit: “Plenty to come. None of it news but that won’t stop us.”

Sambrook, now professor of journalism at Cardiff University argues that the satellite age “is all but over” in the face of online.

The terrible truth about the TV news channels is that their audiences are vanishingly small on average days and big news days which unite the world don’t happen every day of the month. Even then with events such as the Boston bombings channels like CNN, which wrongly reported an arrest when there had been none, struggle to keep up not just with the speed but also the accuracy of instant blogs from the scene.

Too often the news sausage machine is slow and costly.

The former BBC authors believe that news channels are perfect for “quite big but not really big stories for people who want information quite fast but not immediately.”

They think this is a bizarre category of audience to lavish so much money and effort on.

Jeff Zucker, who came from NBC last year to run CNN has acknowledged that there isn’t enough news to go around much of the time and has started beefing up CNN’s coverage with documentaries.

Sambrook and McGuire overstate their case of course. The 10pm bulletins may have lost a lot of their audience but have not gone away and neither will news channels. They have to be reinvented with a great sense of honesty and of an addiction to live – for live’s sake – when little is happening.

Just like newspapers adapted to radio and television, so television news has to adapt with a broader brush of comment, current affairs and documentaries while little of importance is happening.

Above all else television, again like newspapers, will have to provide its information on whatever devices audiences use and that will probably mean more customised material online. Again, as newspapers found out, the economics of such an enterprise are challenging.

But someone will have to reinvent, or at least redefine, the role of the television news channel for the online world.

Darcey, who came to newspapers from satellite television, has very firm views on the economics of the newspaper or newsbrands business. It can be stated very starkly; you charge for the expensively assembled information. If you don’t you are an idiot – or at the very least an executive from either the Guardian Media Group or the Daily Mail and General Trust.

His numbers are small, if not always imprecise. The Sun has said goodbye to its millions of free online readers in exchange for around 100,000 paid for subscribers, while The Times and The Sunday Times has 153,000 digital subscribers plus a further 207,000 other subscribers.

Darcey goes on to note that “dwell times” on the tablet editions are as high as 40 minutes.

That’s all well and good, but Darcey too probably overstates his case and certainly Guardian executives believe that a way can be found to steer the Guardian news business – which doesn’t have to make a profit – at least in the direction of break even

Losses in the year to March 2013 totalled £30.9 million, but should be further reduced this year, and online revenue at £55.9 million represented a rise of 29 per cent.

We will see if this trick can be pulled off. It is too soon to insist that it cannot.

So we now have four working models out there which at least have something to be said for them – a full Times paywall, a Telegraph metered paywall, the Guardian and Daily Mail “free” online, and free newspapers and magazines.

Perhaps they will all be sucked into the pay vortex in the end but for the moment there is still life in all four models and the funding methods chosen seem relevant to each individual publication.

Perhaps when Mike Darcey has finished his mission at News UK his next Murdoch task could be the reinvention of the television news channel.

@RaymondSnoddy