What do TV audiences really want from news?
As Sky News announces a seismic overhaul of its newsroom it’s clear that what audiences demand of ‘news’ is changing. Meeting these demands, to a high quality and at a profit, is a huge challenge for journalists, says Eliot Wilson
Last week, David Rhodes, the executive chairman of Sky News Group, outlined a new strategy dubbed “Sky News 2030”. The plan, described in this paper as “a seismic overhaul of its newsroom”, is an attempt to rethink the business model of the loss-making channel and find new revenue streams: expect innovations like subscriptions, podcasts, newsletters and ticketed events.
The problems facing Sky News are familiar to anyone in the media: a format which relies on advertising and sponsorship is inevitably vulnerable to falling and increasingly fissiparous audiences. When the channel began broadcasting 36 years ago this Wednesday, it was competing with four terrestrial television channels and barely a dozen daily national newspapers. Last year, an Ofcom report showed that more than half of us use social media as a news source and nearly a third do not watch TV news at all.
When the US media giant Comcast bought Sky Group Ltd in 2018, it guaranteed the news channel’s budget as a condition of the purchase, but that commitment expires in 2028. Clearly Sky News cannot operate at a loss indefinitely; Rhodes denied that his 2030 plan is a cost-cutting exercise, but he was open about the financial pressures, and sceptics will feel that money remains the driving force.
“Premium experiences, where engaged audiences are willing to pay, are where we need to be… some of [the new revenues] are ad based. Some of them won’t be. Some of them could be conducive to subscription. We need to add to our revenue mix.”
Journalism has to be paid for
Of course good journalism has to be paid for. The BBC – currently – relies on the licence fee, but every national newspaper except The Guardian, which is cushioned from brutal financial liability by the Scott Trust, now operates a paywall. “Sky News 2030” would not see free-to-air content disappear, with the 24-hour linear television channel being maintained. Instead it represents a shift in emphasis, with less money spent on breaking news and, in Rhodes’s words, “putting engagement over reach”.
There is a contradiction in Sky News’s plans, however, that we should not gloss over. Rhodes cites falling audiences for linear television but also the growth of rival broadcasters, with GB News overtaking Sky in terms of average audience for the first time last November. These are not quite opposite forces, but they represent different challenges: if audiences for linear TV are falling, why has GB News surged ahead of its more established rivals?
Invoking the demise of linear television and the growth of online content and social media will not quite do. Rather, we need to ask a deeper question: what do people want from providers of news and current affairs journalism?
Without passing judgement on the channel, GB News is not directly comparable to Sky News, or to ITN or the BBC. It is a news provider but it is also a comment and opinion platform in a way which is very unusual in the British media landscape. Andrew Neil, GB News’s initial chairman, denied that it would be a “British Fox News”, but resigned within months of its launch when he realised that was exactly the direction of travel.
There is nothing inherently wrong in combining journalism, analysis, comment and opinion. Every newspaper does exactly that
There is nothing inherently wrong in combining journalism, analysis, comment and opinion. Every newspaper does exactly that, and CityAM’s own editor-in-chief, Christian May, has successfully introduced a video segment entitled “The Week in Business”. But the UK’s regulatory landscape is not designed to accommodate that kind of broadcasting, which is why GB News and Ofcom have clashed repeatedly and are currently butting heads in the courts.
The current roster of GB News presenters includes the leader of Reform UK and two of his fellow MPs, two former Conservative MPs and the former leader of the DUP. It is disingenuous to pretend that the channel has no ideological slant, but equally it is performatively naïve to argue that viewers are unaware of the fact.
Perhaps “Sky News 2030” is not radical enough – it is an attempt to adapt an existing product to an evolving market. Let’s reframe the question: what do audiences want from “news” channels and what is the most profitable way of supplying that to a high degree of quality? If that is the challenge posed, I am not at all sure that the answer would be what broadcasters are currently offering. That should make us stop and think.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and strategic adviser