Media bosses count more passengers than parachutes in economy

No sooner had a leaked memo from Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger put the boot into recently-acquired rival The Independent (I say acquired...) than the newspaper revealed new adverts aimed to do the very same. 

The paper announced: Guardian ads poke fun at new Independent ownership ...though it's probably our job as receivers of these adverts to decide whether they're actually fun or not.

I'm still thinking.

And while I do, there was more media in-fighting to mull over today with the BBC's Kevin Marsh, former editor of the Today programme, hitting out at claims by newspapers keen to erect paywalls that there is actually anything worth paying for:

Of all the arguments in favour of newspaper paywalls, one is utter tosh. It is that we - the readers - must pay online to preserve what one tabloid editor once called "the best newspapers in the world"... One thing we absolutely, certainly, assuredly don't have here in the UK is the best newspapers in the world. Full stop.

If we did, a quarter of those who used to buy them wouldn't have stopped doing so over the past 20 years - a desertion that long predates the web, incidentally. If we did, our press wouldn't be one of the least trusted institutions in the land and our newspaper journalists the least trusted in the world. We wouldn't have journalists sent to prison for hacking into mobile-phone mailboxes. Nor editors fired for printing fake photographs or "setting the agenda" while, by their own admission, still drunk from the night before, or admitting that they pay policemen to breach their public trust and give information to journalists...

Websites such as Tabloid Watch would have nothing to watch: they'd not be able to point to astonishing examples of poor journalism, like this or this or this or this. We might have less of a warped obsession with celebrity.

Come on Kevin, don't hold back, say what you really think.

Of course verbal blows have always been traded in the media world but is the temperature being turned up a notch?

Students of the advertising industry may think they noticed during the recession a discernible increase in competitive messaging as companies fought more urgently over scraps. No longer was it enough to talk up your own company, you also needed to talk down your rivals more than ever. Now it seems in the media world, as its own challenges bite and fears threaten to become reality, the major protagonists are starting to look around and realise there are more passengers than parachutes on this particular flight and any sense of bonhommie and civility - or even grudging toleration - is rapidly disintergrating.

And I, for one, can't help thinking the media industry will be a far more interesting place for it.

Comments

[twitter.com/markpack]

The trust point puzzles me as it seems to me that Kevin Marsh is absolutely right to point out how little the public trust journalists. (Only politicians rate worse in the MORI trust barometer.)

It seems to me that this is a key point in the question of whether the public is willing to pay for the output of journalists - if you don't trust it, why pay for it?

But in nearly all the debates about paywalls, future of journalism etc. the public's lack of trust in journalism barely gets a mention.

By contrast, the public's lack of trust in politicians (the ones vying with journalism for bottom spot in the trust league) gets mentioned in nearly every debate about the future of politics. That makes the silence in the journalism debates all the odder by contrast.