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Date: 22nd October 2024
A few weeks ago, in a blog on the continuing debate about whether Scotland should re-organise the league structure of the professional game, I looked at the decline of newspapers, which have seen their reach fall off a cliff in the last few decades. Not only has the number of papers sold plummeted, but the average age of their readership has risen substantially.
To give you an idea, the paper I look at most (online) is the Dundee Courier. In 2004, the Courier’s print circulation was 82,000 copies. By 2015, this had fallen to 44,000 copies. In 2020, this has fallen to just over 31,500. In the first six months of 2024, it’s 16,757. At the same time, the age profile of its readership has skewed massively towards the over 45s, with very few young people reading it, or indeed any other, printed newspaper.
This is not the only problem. There will be at least two major issues in the future for those journalists who make their living from football.
First, there is the rapid rise of AI. Reach plc, the owners of the Daily Mirror, Daily Record, Sunday Mail and a host of regional weeklies in Scotland and elsewehre, is increasingly turning to artificial intelligence. As reported in the Daily Telegraph, “Reporters say editors have started writing more stories to increase volume, while the media group is also ramping up use of its Guten AI software to help speed up the process of rewriting stories “ripped” from news agencies.” In addition, journalists at Reach were told that, “they were expected to write eight stories a shift … with one senior Daily Mirror executive saying the newspaper was aiming for a “baseline” of 12,500 page views on an article within 48 hours of publishing.” Although the management have rowed back on this requirement and now only want five stories a shift, the pressure to produce click-bait is increasing almost everywhere.
Secondly, there is the rapidly changing pattern of media consumption amongst football fans. To illustrate this, let’s turn again to the Dundee Courier. Online, it has a very impressive reach of over a million website users every month. But a unique user online only has to be on a website for 10 seconds to count, so how much (and what) are they actually reading. For football fans like me, almost all my online consumption of the Courier is Eric Nicolson’s excellent reporting and analysis of St Johnstone. Now I no longer live near Perth, I have less interest in the rest of the local news. Moreover, despite being definitely in the baby boomer category, I do spend quite a lot of my time on social media, albeit largely for work purposes. To help reach out to people like me, newspaper publishers have embraced social media. On Facebook, the Courier has 78,000 Likes and 97,000 Followers, while on X/Twitter it has 59,000 Followers and on Instagram 7,620. However, on TikTok, it has only 3,518 Followers.
Therein lies another issue. Although the Courier, being owned by the Thomson family, is solvent and more likely than most to be able to adapt to the changing media landscape, it is the youngest readers/fans who seek information elsewhere, notably social media. These are the seed corn upon which the media companies will depend for their eyeballs (and hence advertising/paywall revenue) in the years ahead. And the social medium that many of them frequent most commonly is, more often than not, the likes of TikTok rather than Facebook.
Now because Facebook is so big, it’s often the largest driver of traffic to a website (this is true for the SFSA), to the detriment of the other social channels. But Facebook’s attitude towards news from news publishers appearing on its pages is also a problem for the media, many of whom have had an unhealthy reliance on social media in general.
More specifically, Facebook’s recent overhaul of its algorithm deprioritised news articles with a devastating effect on those news groups, including Reach, which have relied on Facebook for referrals. At one time, some online newspapers were getting 50% of their traffic from Facebook; now it can be as low as 5%.
To make matters worse, Google has also made changes to its algorithm over the last year, with the intention of tackling spam and similar, unwanted content. This, in turn, has pushed news outlets down the search rankings – particularly those with a heavy reliance on ads. Some media analysts think Google could follow Facebook in abandoning news.
Essentially, what we’ve seen over the last three decades is the newspaper industry sitting by and watching the internet destroy it, removing the four classified advertising pillars (motors, sits vac, property and ‘others’) which underpinned print media revenue for most of its previous existence. For most papers, recruitment ads (sits vac) were their single biggest source of revenue, up to 25% in a few cases. That’s all gone online now. In addition, Covid, working from home and the decline of the morning commute have all added to the trend of declining sales and now we’re getting our news from a much more diverse array of sources. You only have to look at the way the major broadcast media have jumped on the podcast bandwagon to see how they are trying to adapt. But is it all too little too late?
The SFSA, in conjunction with final year students at UWS Ayr, will soon be launching a major survey to examine football fans media consumption. We are not going to second-guess the results, but we think they will be very interesting…
Alastair Blair, Director of Operations, SFSA
Posted in: Latest News
Tags: Scottish football