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Journalism, Economic Uncertainty
and Political Irregularity in the
Digital and Data Era
This page intentionally left blank
Journalism, Economic
Uncertainty and Political
Irregularity in the Digital
and Data Era
By
Jingrong Tong
The University of Sheffield, UK
United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited
Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK
First edition 2023
Copyright © 2023 Jingrong Tong.

Published under exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited.
Reprints and permissions service

Contact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in

any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise
without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting
restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA
by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those
of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of
its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’
suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-80043-559-9 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-558-2 (Online)
ISBN: 978-1-80043-560-5 (Epub)
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The News Business in Trouble 5

The Collapse of Traditional Funding Models 6
The Reasons That Explain the Trouble 8
The Importance But the Peril of (Measurable) Attention 13
Competing with Multiple Players for Attention 17
Striving to Win Over Digital Audiences 20
New Funding Strategies 23
Chapter 2 Algorithms, Cloud Computing and Journalism 29

A Continuity of Digital Transformation of Newsrooms 29
Different Scenarios of Using Algorithms for Journalism 30
Moving onto the Cloud 33
What Is Cloud Computing? 33
The Adoption of Cloud Computing by News Media 35
Potential Issues of Using Cloud Computing for Journalism 39
Implications for Journalism 42
Chapter 3 Revisiting the Importance of Data Journalism 47

The Rise of Data Journalism 47
The Importance of Data Journalism 50
The Limitations of Data Journalism 53
The Promise and Problems of Data Reporting:
A Case Study of Data Journalism During the
COVID-19 Pandemic 57
vi Contents
Chapter 4 The Tabloidisation of Journalism as Digital Logic 61

The Concept of Tabloidisation and Existing Views 61
Tabloidisation as Digital Logic 63
Tabloidisation of Online Content 63
The Importance of Human Interest 64
Tabloidisation But Clear Boundaries 67
Tabloidisation in the Tweets of Seven British News
Media’s Twitter Handles 69
Conclusion 73
Chapter 5 Tensions Between Journalism and Politicians 75

Journalists and Politicians: Friends or Foes? 75
The Boom of Leaks 81
Leaks and Exposés Seen as a Threat to National Security
and Privacy 82
Governments and Politicians: Endeavouring to Control
News Media 85
The Responses of News Media 89
Conclusion 91
Chapter 6 The Rise of Partisan Journalism and the Crisis

of Objective Journalism 93
Introduction 93
The Crisis of Objective Journalism 94
The Concept of Objective Journalism 94
Criticism About Objectivity in Journalism 95
Intense Disputes Over Objective Journalism Today 95
The Proliferation of Partisan News Media 103
The Values and Problems of Partisan Journalism 106
Conclusion 107
Conclusion: The Transformation of Quality Journalism 109
Bibliography 111
Index 135
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
Fig. 1. UK Daily Newspaper Average Circulation Per Issue
by Month, 2000 – 2020 (1st January 2021) (m) (Data
Extracted from Tobitt & Majid, 2021). 7
Fig. 2. Overtime Spread of the Number of Tweets Sent by
the Seven British News Media Between 10th and
15th January 2022. 70
Fig. 3. Mapping Prominent Topics in the Tweets Published
by the Seven British News Media’s Twitter Handles. 71
Tables
Table 1. Statistics of Tweets Sent by the Seven British News
Media Between 10th and 15th January 2022. 71
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to all of the interviewees who generously shared their experiences,

views and insights about data and/or journalism with me. I would like to thank
Brunel University London and the University of Sheffield for their funding, which
has allowed me to carry out the research. Thanks also to Jen McCall and Kimber-
ley Chadwick of Emerald Publishing for their support with this book project and
patience with me. Finally, I thank my family for their love and encouragement.
Introduction
This book explores the transformation of journalism in the face of economic

uncertainty and political irregularity in the digital and data era. It looks into how
journalism has changed under the influence of news media’s financial difficul-
ties and recent developments in society and technology, such as the COVID-19
pandemic, the application of cloud computing in news media, declining media
freedom and profound social divisions.
In the 2020s, while many countries’ economies have not truly recovered from
the financial crisis of 2007–2008, economic uncertainty has been worsened first
by the COVID-19 pandemic and later by the Russia–Ukraine war. With audi-
ences and advertising significantly migrating to online platforms, news media
have experienced steep declines in revenue. Adversity in the economy may mean
less demand for advertising space and time and less affordability of subscriptions,
potentially further exacerbating the unfavourable situation for news media.
Recent political irregularities in countries such as the United States (US), the
United Kingdom (UK), Northern Ireland and China have baffled observers. The
world has seen the (re-)surge of populist politics as exemplified by the influence of
Donald Trump in the US and the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. The UK’s Brexit
vote in 2016 suggests that British society is deeply divided. In the UK, in the 2021 by-
elections, Conservatives’ victory in Labour’s red-wall heartlands and Liberal Demo-
crat’s success in Tories’ blue-wall heartlands reflected changes in British politics and
voters’ will and sentiments. However, shortly after in 2022, the wind changed direc-
tion. The Conservatives suffered a massive blow in local elections and lost hundreds
of seats to the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats due in no small part to the
‘Partygate’ scandal. In the US, in 2021, Trump lost the 2020 presidential election but
allegedly rallied his supporters to attack the Capitol in Washington D.C.. Despite
all he had done and said, his US support base remained high at the time of writing
(between 2020 and 2022). Voters’ tolerance of politicians’ mistakes and abhorrent
behaviour or remarks has been shown in countries such as the US, Romania (Mares
& Visconti, 2020) and Brazil. In 2020, violence and riots in Northern Ireland were
rampant for several days. In 2022, the Sinn Fein party, which stands for the unifica-
tion of Ireland, won the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first
time. In 2022, China even presented signs of closing up to the world with its zero
COVID policy and relevant measures such as strict and long quarantine requirements
for people travelling to China from abroad while the rest of the world has reopened.
Journalism, Economic Uncertainty and Political Irregularity in the Digital and Data Era, 1–4
Copyright © 2023 by Jingrong Tong
Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited
doi:10.1108/978-1-80043-558-220221001
2 Journalism, Economic Uncertainty and Political Irregularity
The world has also seen the rise of authoritarianism in authoritarian countries
like China and democratic countries such as the United Kingdom and the United
States. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has not only resulted in a humani-
tarian catastrophe but also caused international worries over the possibility of a
third world war and a disaster for media freedom in Russia.
These political irregularities are accompanied by the decline of the dominant
globalisation discourse and the rise of nationalism. Domestically, as shown in the
UK and the US, social divisions have become a significant feature of societies at
the time of writing – not only polarised societies but also ones split into different
segmentations associated with race, ethnicity and class. All these suggest that the
world is politically turbulent and volatile, full of tensions and conflicts between
social groups with different political ideologies, religious beliefs and cultural val-
ues. The question for journalism thus is how quality journalism has changed in
response to this politically tumultuous and economically uncertain world to meet
audiences’ needs while maintaining its role in democracy.
All of these happen in a world that has been dramatically – though not entirely –
digitalised and datafied by the broad application of digital technology, such as
the Internet, portable digital devices and related infrastructures, making digital
communication possible. The wide application of digital technology has signifi-
cantly changed the communication environment into interactive, de-territorial,
immersive and virtual, with information transmitted instantaneously. Although
this new environment started to emerge in the late twentieth century, news media
and journalism are still adjusting to it today. The need for continuous adapta-
tion is partly because the changes are relentless and ongoing. It is partly because,
as established organisations and institutions, news media and journalism have
their inertia, resulting from their previous success and conventional routines and
potentially preventing them from fully embracing the new opportunities created by
digital technology.
Despite these adversities, we have heard good news from the media. In 2020,
The New York Times celebrated its milestone in its subscription rates: the number
of paid digital subscribers had increased to seven million, with its net income
doubling to US$33.6 million (Lee, 2020). The newspaper generated more revenue
from digital subscribers than from its print readers for the first time. The news-
paper commented: ‘There is little doubt that Donald J. Trump’s presidency has
helped lift The Times’ subscription business, and the readership numbers have
risen steadily during his years in office.’ The New York Times’ achievement is a
joyous surprise. Its success conveys some positive signs that news media may still
be able to turn the corner by making the best of political irregularities and the
opportunities digital technology offers. However, how has news media’s endeav-
our to survive and thrive shaped journalism? What can journalism offer our
democracies after all the changes in journalism? And to what extent are journal-
istic principles such as objectivity still valid?
The current literature has extensively explored the transformation of journal-
ism in an age of economic uncertainty and digital technologies. The discussions
in the literature ( such as Franklin, 2012; Fenton, 2010; Carson, 2020; Saridou,
Spyridou, & Veglis, 2017; Picard, 2014; Matthews & Onyemaobi, 2020; Tong,
Introduction 3
2017; articles in Journalism Studies Special issue ‘Future of Journalism: In an

Age of Digital Media and Economic Uncertainty’, 2014) focus on the severity
of the financial crisis news media have suffered, how it has impacted journalism’s
ability to serve democracies, and how digital media can help soothe the problem.
The existing literature (such as Singer, 2011; Spyridou, Matsiola, Veglis, Kalliris, &
Charalambos, 2013; Tong, 2022c) has also explored the changes in journalism
practices, the emergence of new forms of journalism such as data journalism
and the development of digital journalism. Scholars have also started to reflect
on the implications of political irregularities, such as the Trump presidency, for
journalism (see, e.g. Jacobs, 2017; Gutsche, 2018; Zelizer, 2018; McDevitt &
Ferrucci, 2018; Parks, 2020; Carlson, Robinson, & Lewis, 2021). These discus-
sions rightly outline the challenges journalism faces and how journalism as an
occupation adapts to the changes in its ecosystem. Contextual changes, such as
economic challenges, technological advances, or political dynamics, can reshape
and remodel journalism in terms of its practices and norms. However, the exist-
ing literature seldom considers the joint influence of all the three forces: com-
mercial, political and technological forces on the transformation of journalism,
which is however worth exploring. In addition, the latest developments in the
media environment and journalism require more up-to-date discussions about
the topic.
This book takes these discussions further to answer the questions specified
above. It discusses the transformation of journalism under a confluence of tech-
nological, political and economic factors. It focuses on the most recent devel-
opments after the middle of the 2010s, including the onset of the COVID-19
pandemic. Although examples from different countries are discussed, the discus-
sion in this book is more focussed on journalism practised in the UK and the
US than in other countries. It explores how the pressure to reinvent journalism
and engage audiences pushes news media to make the most of digital technolo-
gies, including algorithms and cloud computing, and the role such pressure plays
in the relationship between journalism and politics. It discusses whether, and if
so, to what extent, the combination of commercial, political and technological
influences strengthens the prominence of tabloidisation in news media, amplifies
the tensions between journalism and politicians, and results in partisan journal-
ism outperforming objective journalism. Apart from the introduction and the
conclusion, the book’s main text is organised into six chapters, each addressing
one aspect of journalism’s transformation. The research presented in this book
is drawn from several research projects the author has been conducting, and the
related explanations of research methods and data will be given in relevant chap-
ters, respectively.
Chapter 1 discusses the news industry’s troubles in the media market. These
troubles result from the changes in the communication environment and the prev-
alence of the attention economy, which is closely associated with the popularity
of social media platforms and the rise of tech giants. It looks into the decades-
long financial crisis of news media and journalism and how the attention econ-
omy has worsened the situation with a profound impact on journalistic practice,
threatening the survival of journalism.
The digital and data age has witnessed the profound penetration of digital
technologies ranging from algorithms to cloud computing into journalistic work.
Chapter 2 examines the continuity of newsrooms’ digital transformation and
explores recent developments in news media moving onto the cloud. It analyses
how the adoption of digital technologies in journalism has influenced journalism,
the role of news media and its relationship with audiences.
Chapter 3 discusses the increasing importance of data journalism during
social and political turmoil, particularly since the onset of COVID-19 pandemic.
It examines the power and problems of data for journalism in times of crisis and
corruption. The proliferation and availability of digital data enhance journal-
ists’ capability to hold power accountable and to inform citizens about what is
happening in the world. Data journalism has the potential to engage the audi-
ence. Nevertheless, problems with the available data and its quality and the abil-
ity of journalists to clean, analyse and present it have created new problems for
data reporting. The case of the COVID-19 pandemic is discussed to illustrate the
opportunities and problems associated with data reporting.
Chapter 4 discusses tabloidisation in news media in the digital and data age. It
unpacks the concept of tabloidisation and discusses how it works as a dominant
logic of the digital world. The last part of this chapter offers a case study analys-
ing the content published by selected British news media accounts on Twitter.
The case study displays signs of convergence between quality and tabloid press
in relation to tabloidisation, although the boundaries between the two are still
distinctive.
Chapter 5 discusses an increasingly contentious relationship between jour-
nalism and politicians in the Western contexts in general and, in particular, in
the United Kingdom and the United States. It discusses the recently flourishing
publication of media exposés, leaks and relevant news stories before examining
tightening media control in these countries – where media freedom is supposed to
be protected by law – and journalists’ responses to such control. It also evaluates
the role played by commercial pressure and digital technology in intensifying the
antagonism between journalism and politicians.
Deepening social divisions have led to an increase in audience fragmentation.
Chapter 6 discusses whether and to what extent the concept of objectivity is still
relevant to journalism in the context of audience fragmentation. It examines the
rise of partisan, advocacy journalism and its promise, problems and implications
for quality journalism.
Chapter 1
The News Business in Trouble
In 2021, the book author interviewed 18 UK audience members about their read-
ing of data visualisations in COVID-related news. They were a group of people
who were well educated with at least a university degree. Four were university
students, and one was a retiree who used to research for and about news media.
The remaining interviewees had a job in their professional fields, such as medi-
cine, data analytics, education, media and the information industry.1 I started the
interviews by asking them to talk about their daily news consumption with the
question: ‘How do you read news every day?’ I asked. To my surprise – or maybe I
should not have been surprised, the majority (more than 70 per cent) of them only
randomly read the news online but did not buy newspapers or subscribe to any
particular news outlets. Only five of them subscribed to or purchased one or more
newspapers at the time of the interviews. The rest either read free news fed in by
news aggregators such as Apple news on their mobiles or read free news online. It is
not new that today’s audiences may not pay for news. What surprised me was that
this group of interviewees were well educated and well off with good jobs, as most
of them, being professionals, were presumably able to afford subscriptions if they
were interested in reading quality news. Therefore, the question is, if this group of
audience members were unwilling to pay for and read the news, who would? How
can news media survive without attracting sufficient paying audiences?
What is described above well captures the trouble news media have been expe-
riencing in the media market for quite a while, at least since the turn of the new
century. This trouble is the decline in the subscriptions and sales of print copies
of newspapers, which means they are losing readers, viewers or listeners. With the
loss of audiences, news media have also been enduring the pain of losing advertis-
ing revenue. This chapter will look at the decades-long financial difficulties faced
by news media and unpack the main reasons for the problematic situation. It will
1
According to the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS)’s classification. Accessed on
6th August 2021, at https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/classificationsandstandards/
otherclassifications/thenationalstatisticssocioeconomicclassificationnssecrebasedon-
soc2010.
doi:10.1108/978-1-80043-558-220221002
discuss the troubles caused by the paramount importance of attention in the digi-
tal and data era and the fierce competition between news media and other diverse
players in the media markets. The last part of the chapter will evaluate news
media’s responses to the challenges and their new funding models. The material
base of journalism discussed in this chapter is the foundation and context for the
changes in journalism.
The Collapse of Traditional Funding Models

News media have been suffering chronic, severe financial difficulties following
huge advertising and subscription revenue losses, starting from the turn of the
twenty-first century and getting worse since the 2010s. Traditionally, news media
sell two types of products – news content (and journalism) and audiences of news
content, with the former sold to audiences and the latter to advertisers. Both
products profit newspapers, although news content and journalism are not as
profitable as advertising (Bainbridge, Goc, & Tynan, 2015). In the history of the
press, for example, by 1930, almost 75 per cent of British newspapers’ revenue
came from advertising (Esser, 1999). Traditionally, news media’s funding comes
from two types of sources, corresponding to the two types of products. The first
is subscriptions. For the press, subscription is the number of copies they sell. For
commercial broadcasting media, subscription refers to the number of subscrib-
ers to their channels. The second is advertising revenue generated from selling
advertising space and media audiences/readers to advertisers. However, neither of
these funding models works in the digital and data era, as news media have lost
subscribers and advertisers.
News media’s losses of audiences and advertising have led to a plunge in rev-
enue. In many countries, news media live a troubled life as their income has been
in decline for decades. In 2018, US newspaper circulation dropped to its lowest
level since 1940, the first year such data was available (Barthel, 2019). In 2020, US
newspaper revenue continued to dramatically decline, with advertising income
falling to US$14.3 billion from US$37.8 billion in 2008 (Grieco, 2020a). In the
same year, all UK newspapers’ circulation dropped drastically (see Fig. 1), and
their revenue generated from selling newspaper copies had shrunk by two-thirds
since 2000 (Mayhew, 2020). In 2021, Spanish media groups reportedly lost mil-
lions of advertising and newspaper sales revenue due to the COVID-19 pandemic
(Negredo, Vara, & Amoedo, 2021). In Brazil, newspapers had a relatively com-
fortable life in relation to advertising revenue in the 2000s but saw a fall in rev-
enue from the 2010s. Their share in the national advertising market shrank from
21.5 per cent in 2000 to 11.4 per cent in 2014 (Carro, 2016). In countries like
China, news media’s revenue deficit emerged almost one decade later than their
counterparts in the West. Despite enjoying blossoming media markets for nearly
20 years from the 1990s, entering the 2010s, the Chinese news media started to suf-
fer revenue losses, which reached crisis proportions in 2016 (Tong, 2017; Wang &
Sparks, 2018). India is an exception as its news media were still profitable in the
2010s. However, evidence of decline has also been shown in recent years. As of
The News Business in Trouble 7
UK daily newspaper average circula�on per issue by month, 2000 - 2020 (m)
4.00
Financial Times
Guardian
3.50
Telegraph
Times
3.00 i
The Sun
Express
2.50
Daily Mail
Daily Mail The Sun
Mirror
2.00 Star
Metro
Mirror ES
1.50
Metro
1.00 ES
Telegraph Star
Times
0.50 Financial Times Express
Guardian
0.00
i
Jan Jan Jan Jan 1
2000 2010 2020 2021
Fig. 1. UK Daily Newspaper Average Circulation Per Issue by Month, 2000 –

2020 (1st January 2021) (m) (Data Extracted from Tobitt & Majid, 2021).
2020, the Indian print media saw a 41 per cent decline in advertising revenues and
a 24 per cent plunge in circulation profits, with the TV sector’s advertising income
falling 22 per cent (Lidhoo, 2021). At the time of writing (in 2022), the influence
of the most recent Russia–Ukraine war on the income of news media in related
areas had not unfolded yet.
In addition to huge revenue losses, job cuts and news outlets’ closure spread
like wildfires. Scholars describe the severity of job losses and newsroom closure
in Anglo-American societies as ‘haemorrhaging’ (Curran, 2010; Franklin, 2012,
2014). Pew Research Centre’s analysis of Bureau of Labour Statistics revealed
that the number of US newspaper newsroom employees in 2019 was only around
half of those in 2008, with overall newsroom employment in the United States
down by 23 per cent between 2008 and 2019. The data for this analysis was col-
lected before the COVID-19 pandemic, which worsened the situation (Grieco,
2020b). The author’s own analysis of Occupational Employment and Wage Sta-
tistics (OEWS) data (US Bureau of Labour Statistics, n.d.) shows that for the
sectors of ‘Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers’ and ‘News-
paper Publishers’, jobs in the ‘News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists’ cat-
egory was 63,140 in 2020, falling from 110,580 in the corresponding categories
of ‘Broadcast News Analysts’ and ‘Reporters and Correspondents’ in 2012. All
sectors had 556,160 jobs in this category in 2020, slightly down from 696,570 in
2012. The analysis also shows a gradual reduction in newspaper employment,
with the newspaper sector’s employment in this category being 71,520 in 2019,
down from 74,931 in 2018, 80,430 in 2017, 86,630 in 2016, 92,550 in 2015, 98,760
in 2014, and 104,680 in 2013. The closure of news outlets has accompanied job
cuts. The situation in other countries such as the UK, China, Australia and Brazil
is similarly bleak.
All in all, news media urgently need to find a viable way to boost their market
income and shares as the traditional funding models of news media have col-
lapsed and are not quite feasible in the digital and data age.
The Reasons That Explain the Trouble

Several reasons explain the news media’s trouble in the media markets. They are
associated with the changes in audiences’ news consumption behaviour, time scar-
city, and the fact that tech giants have lured audiences and advertising way. Before
discussing these reasons in detail, the views and experiences of audience partici-
pants in the research discussed above will be introduced, as they well epitomise
these reasons.
The opening of this chapter discussed the author’s research with audience
members, most of whom primarily read free news. The question is, why they did
not buy newspapers? They did give their reasons in the interviews. Lacking time
is the first reason. Most of them did not have the luxury to sit down, hold a copy
of the newspaper and read from the front to the back page. The main reason for
their news consumption was the convenience of reading (free) online news on
computer screens or using smaller screens such as mobile or tablets.
The second reason is that most of the interviewees read the news merely for
information. They still wanted to receive information to understand what was
happening in the world. Most of them were not necessarily loyal to one particular
news outlet but were happy to come across the news published by various news
outlets, which may have opposite political leanings and provide different points
of view. News articles from diverse (free) sources fed by online news aggregators
already satisfy this basic need. As an 18-year-old participant said, social media
and Apple news were their primary sources, and they did not feel it necessary to
read news from other sources or pay for it.
The interviews point to the prevalence of the pyramid-like hierarchy of needs
in news consumption. At the bottom of the pyramid lies humans’ fundamental
need for information to be aware of what is happening in the world, which is
most audiences’ basic need. More complex needs, such as interests in gaining a
deeper understanding of events or situations and looking for truth, sit at the top
of the pyramid. With the popularity of the Internet, mobiles and news aggre-
gators, audiences’ basic need for information has already been satisfied by free
information. Thus, there is no need for them to pay for the news and make efforts
to look for more news – they would do so only if they have interests to know
more about particular events. Only if they do want more, audiences will turn to
paid news content – particularly those news analyses, features, investigative, in-
depth reports, and literary articles, to fulfil their interests and gain a profound
understanding of events.
The third reason is social change. Human societies have changed and continue
to change. The changes in participants’ news consumption reflect those changes
in the broader social context. The occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic, for
example, has become a triggering, influential factor that has shaped their news
consumption habits. One of the participants who used to deliver newspapers as a
paper boy when he was a teenager said the time paper boys or girls delivered news-
papers to neighbours’ doorsteps in the morning has long gone. Instead, most of
his news consumption happens online, complemented by watching TV – primarily
also online – and an occasional purchase of newspapers of his choice. During the
COVID-19 pandemic, he even found that the supermarket where he often did
weekly shopping had stopped supplying newspapers (interview, 24th June 2021).
During the COVID-19 pandemic, for working people with dependent children,
the pandemic and lockdowns meant juggling homeschooling with work, which fur-
ther squeezed their already limited time. Among the 18 audience members the book
author interviewed, those with childcare responsibilities reported that working from
home took away their opportunity to read the news on free newspapers or their
mobiles while commuting to the workplace. It left no time for them to read the
news, apart from a quick glimpse at the TV news or some news feed on Facebook
or Apple news on their mobile. For example, one participant commented that she
stopped reading free newspapers on the train as she had stopped commuting to
work since the pandemic. Instead, she merely relied on news apps on her mobile for
information (interview, 30th April 2021).
We can see the shifts in the locations of news consumption. In the past, the
primary location for consuming traditional news media was home (Boczkowski,
2010). However, with the rise of metros – free newspapers on the train or other
public transport, for those who only have time to read the news on the train and
would not buy newspapers, the primary location of news consumption has shifted
to public transport. The proliferation of portable digital devices like mobiles and
tablets leads to placeless news consumption, meaning audiences can consume
news on these small screens at any place that suits them. During the COVID pan-
demic, people no longer used public transport as much as before, and during lock-
downs, they stayed at home most of the time; therefore, news consumption venues
switched back to home. Despite this, once the pandemic finishes, as long as audi-
ences still use small screens to consume news, the location of news consumption
may move back to public transport and remain flexible and placeless.
What the participants said precisely describes the current main features of audi-
ences’ news consumption. Their discussion points to some ostensibly straightfor-
ward reasons why audiences tend not to pay for news. Not only can they already
have enough (free) content to consume and know the news when it breaks without
the need to pay for it, but they may also not have enough time – or interest – to read
serious news produced by traditional news media that they need to pay for. These
trends can be exacerbated by societal changes such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
These reasons, appearing to be simple on the surface, are deeply rooted in
society, reflecting the dramatic changes in audiences’ ways of living and accessing
information. First, audiences have already gotten used to living digitally and con-
suming the news online. In the digital and data era, most (but not all) people live
digital lives. Holding copies of newspapers to read may be considered outdated
and time-consuming, while scrolling up and down and tapping on mobile screens
provides a more convenient way of getting information. During the COVID pan-
demic, there have been even hygiene concerns over physical copies of newspapers.
In India, in 2020, newspaper readers refused to have newspapers delivered to their
homes over the fear of possible virus transmission through newspapers (Dutta,
2020). These make it not strange that the number of physical copies of newspa-
pers being sold and distributed has been declining, and there are few positive
signs for its recovery.
Secondly and importantly, most modern people are suffering time scarcity
though overwhelmed by information overload. Time scarcity does not help
modern-day’s busy life, which is featured with information-rich and overload.
Time costs for accessing news play a decisive role in influencing audiences’ news
consumption behaviour and, therefore, news outlets’ performance in the news
market. Time is a crucial resource that determines audience members’ availabil-
ity for news media (McQuail, 2005). Time deficiency has emerged as a big issue
in well-off societies associated with capitalism and modernism from as early as
the 1960s, as shown in works (such as Linder, 1970; Grazia, 1962). Due to time
scarcity, leisure has become fragmented but intensive and hurry (Linder, 1970).
Time pressure has become quite outstanding in the fast-paced, speeded-up twenty-
first century, with us experiencing more busyness and less leisure time (Colvile,
2016; Rosa, 2013; Southerton & Tomlinson, 2005; Sullivan, 2008). Information
communication technologies such as mobiles may have heightened time pressure
and allowed work to take over life by blurring the boundary between work and
leisure (Mullan & Wajcman, 2019; Wajcman, 2015) but helped to save time by
offering online services (Colvile, 2016). The factors of gender and occupational
status play an important role in creating a heightened feeling of time pressure (Sul-
livan & Gershuny, 2018). Employed women, for example, were found feeling tre-
mendous time pressure (Rose, 2017). With busy work and family life, modern-day
audiences have commonly experienced time deprivation. Those having less time to
deploy were found more likely to turn to digital news than those having more time
(Zhang & Ha, 2015). They would reduce the time spent on searching for news.
Although digital living is no longer new after decades of the Internet’s pene-
tration, from around the 1970s, news organisations and audiences are still adjust-
ing to the prevalent, relentless changes occurring in the digital transformation of
human society and activities. The digital and data era is an era of information-
rich but time poor. Audiences have increasingly spent more time online, which
would not help their consumption of physical copies of newspapers. For example,
the average daily time spent online among UK adults increased from 3 hours
11 minutes in 2018 to 4 hours 2 minutes in 2020.2 Ofcom’s 2021 report about news
consumption in the UK shows that 90 per cent of young people between 16 and
24 years old got news stories online (Ofcom, 2021).
Audiences’ fundamental need for essential information can be easily fulfilled
with abundant, free information available on the Internet, particularly on social
2
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/media/media-releases/2020/uk-Internet-
use-surges (accessed on 2nd August 2021).
media. Without making efforts, audiences can easily receive overloaded, free
information. After the basic information need has been met, reading long-reads
increasingly becomes a leisure activity. It is something nice but may not have to
achieve. Whether or not to pursue it depends on their ability to afford the cost and
the amount of time and interest they have. Most of the time, news breaks on social
media rather than by news media – it has become impossible for news media to
break the news first. However, the news is more than just information audiences
can easily get from social media networks. News media can provide verified infor-
mation and in-depth or analytical writing rather than rudimentary information
about events such as earthquakes, crimes and tsunamis. These kinds of in-depth,
more sophisticated writing would need audiences to spend more time reading and
pay for them, which, however, may not be feasible for most of the audience.
Apart from information abundance, the third problem that has long haunted
modern news media is the homogeneity in news content, as shown in Boczkowski’s
content analysis of top stories published by print and online newspapers. His
analysis reveals the high homogenisation of news content (Boczkowski, 2010).
Despite the extensive closure of news outlets due to financial deficits, the twenty-
first century has also witnessed news abundance and diminishing news diversity,
partly due to news media’s expansion to the digital world and the concentration
of media ownership. Doyle (2015) found that adopting multimedia platforms
accelerated news abundance. In the Belgian context, going digital has also eroded
news diversity (Hendrickx, 2020). A longitudinal content analysis of nine Flem-
ish newspapers in Belgium revealed that, although news stories published by
newspapers did not become more similar over time, newspapers’ profile – being
elite or popular – and concentrated media ownership influenced the homogeneity
level of content. More homogeneous news stories can be found in newspapers
with a similar profile than those with a different one, and in newspapers owned
by the same media group than those independent (Beckers et al., 2019). In the
Belgian context, media ownership concentration was also confirmed to be the
main influencing force for the erosion of diversity in news content (Hendrickx &
Ranaivoson, 2019). For most audiences willing to pay for and who have some
time for news, homogeneity in news content would mean that it might be enough
for them to choose to pay for just one news outlet. To win over audiences, news
outlets would need to provide their own top, high-quality and distinctive stories
and make them stand out in the competitive news market. They have to fight for
audiences’ time and attention. However, it is not easy to make audiences want to
read news in their spare time as a leisure activity rather than merely just getting
informed with what is happening in the world.
When it comes to the second traditional funding model – advertising, along
with the migration of audiences to the Internet, advertising has also significantly
shifted to online platforms, especially those offered by Google, Amazon, Face-
book, Twitter and YouTube. Advertisers invest in news media for their audiences,
who are the consumers of their products. Where audiences go, advertising goes.
Another factor that makes digital audiences appealing to advertisers is that digi-
tal audiences leave digital trails on the platforms. Using algorithms to trace these
trails by tech giants such as Google and Facebook endows them with sufficient
data to understand audiences. It enables them to offer advertisers so-called tar-

geted audiences. Targeted audiences usually have demographic backgrounds, such
as gender, age and income, which appeal to advertisers and thus make them ideal
consumers for the products advertised. As a result of all these advantages, search
engines and social media platforms have dominated digital advertising markets,
with Google and Facebook having more than half of all US digital advertising
spending in 2019 (Wakabayashi & Hsu, 2021).
All of these are happening (or have happened) against a backdrop of eco-
nomic crisis and austerity in the world. Since the recent financial crisis in 2007
and 2008, economic adversity and even austerity have been seen in many coun-
tries. The world economy has not recovered from the crisis since then. Following
a recession, companies would cut their advertising budgets, although economists
advocate advertising as a must during a recession. Newspapers were among the
hardest hit in terms of reduced advertising spending. Forbes reported cross-media
declines in the US advertising spending markets, for example, a 27 per cent drop in
newspaper advertising spending, in the aftermath of the 2008 recession (Adgate,
2019). When the economy bounced back after the 2008 crisis, investments flew into
digital media companies such as BuzzFeed and Vice (Nicolaou, 2020).
During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, the global economy has been hit
hard. It shrank by an IMF-estimated 4.4 per cent in 2020, and many countries
have experienced recession. Unemployment, for example, has risen across coun-
tries. In 2020, the unemployment rate increased to 13.4 per cent from 11.9 per
cent in 2019 in Brazil. It grew to 8.9 per cent from 3.7 per cent in 2019 in the
United States (Jones, Palumbo, & Brown, 2021). This time, digital media compa-
nies were not immune to economic adversity, with BuzzFeed cutting pay and jobs,
and Vox asking readers for financial support (Nicolaou, 2020). Amid local news-
papers’ struggles, McClatchy, the Miami Herald owner, filed for bankruptcy in
2020 (Aliaj & Nicolaou, 2020). Overall global advertising spending was estimated
to have fallen nearly 12 per cent, with traditional news media such as television
and newspapers seeing a fall of 20.7 per cent (Barker, 2020b). In the UK, in 2020,
advertising spending fell by over £1 billion (a 48 per cent decline) year on year
during the coronavirus lockdown (Sweney, 2020).
In 2021, there were some good signs. Advertising spending bounced back to
a record high. In December 2021, global advertising spending was forecasted to
reach $710 billion, increasing 22 per cent from 2020, with digital media as the driv-
ing force (Adgate, 2021). News media also saw a rebound in advertising spending.
In the UK, digital magazine publishers saw a year-on-year increase of 78 per cent
in advertising spending from 2020 (Majid, 2021a). This increase suggests that
the pandemic may have brought up opportunities for news media. Despite these
promising signs emerging in 2021, the prospect of advertising income for most
news media is uncertain as it is not known how long the 2021 advertising boom
will last.
When it comes to 2022, the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s sud-
den invasion of Ukraine have thrown the world into further economic uncertainty.
Following Russia invading Ukraine, many countries such as the UK, the United
States, Canada, France, Japan and other G7 countries have imposed financial and
economic sanctions. These sanctions may devastate Russia’s economy and hurt
the global economy dearly. In the UK, for example, due to shunning oil imports
from Russia, the massive surge in the cost of living, such as fuel and energy
prices, may have a derailing impact on its economy. The influence of economic
uncertainty and adversity on news media’s income is waiting to unfold.
The last influencing factor is that audiences have ceased to exist as collectives
as they did during the mass communication era. Audiences in the digital and data
era are fragmented due to the flexibility, interactivity and sharability they enjoy in
choosing media content to consume. They have the autonomy to decide what to
read, when, in which order and using what devices. Their news consumption time
might be limited and trivial. They tend to use smaller rather than larger screens to
consume news. In 2014, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s digital
news report revealed that 37 per cent of its global sample accessed news from
a smaller screen such as a smartphone each week and 20 per cent used a tablet
to access news (Newman & Levy, 2014). In the UK, the smartphone overtook
the computer to be the primary device to access news in 2017 and was used by
62 per cent of the UK sample in 2020, while Spain saw the highest proportion –
73 per cent of the sample depended on smartphones for news (Newman, Fletcher,
Schulz, Andı, & Nielsen, 2020).
Audiences are exposed to an overload of information online created by the ever-
lasting proliferation of user-generated-content on social media platforms. With the
rise of social media platforms, audiences increasingly receive news from friends
and family who they trust rather than from news media. For example, Facebook’s
news feed algorithms are based on the social recommendation of contacts, and
rank news that receives more sharing and likes higher than the stories that receive
less. In addition, apart from news, plenty of entertainment content, cheap or even
free, offered by Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube, is made available to them.
Therefore, all these different types of content, among which news content is
merely one type, may compete for audiences’ attention, which is especially impor-
tant when their time is scarce. They are fragmented and may be trapped in their
own echo chambers, where predominantly those with similar value systems and
similar viewpoints would communicate with one another, receiving information
that can reinforce their existing worldviews. With the ending of mass communica-
tion and shrinking readership, news media fail to offer advertisers large groups
of audiences existing as a collective block with the potential to buy their products
or services. This dysfunction reduces the opportunity for news media to bring in
advertising revenue. The remainder of this chapter will discuss the importance of
audiences’ attention and the implications for news media.
The Importance But the Peril of (Measurable) Attention

‘If the headline does not grab my attention, I would skip it.’ In 2021, a senior IT
manager made this comment in an interview with the book author for the study
mentioned above. This quote reflects the importance but the peril of attention:
too many things or people – e.g. our seven-year-old, partner, work – demand
our attention. And to live a happy life also requires us to pay sufficient attention
to our leisure needs to balance work and life. Being fragmented by the need to
attend to different tasks, our attention is thus scarce. Therefore, how much time
and attention can we give to journalism? The answer is that it might be very little.
Today, journalism operates in a world in which attention is king. If com-
panies want to be profitable, they need people to stick around. New products
and brands seek customers’ attention. Election candidates wish to keep voters’
attention to political campaigns. Websites need visitors’ attention to function
and make money. Likewise, researchers would like audiences to pay attention to
their research outcomes. News media desire audiences’ attention to survive and
thrive. So they have to join other social entities, such as politicians, commercial
companies, governments, celebrities and academics, competing for Internet users’
attention.
However, attention is subjective and selective. Scarce and limited, it may not
be retained for long and given too many things at once. By giving attention to a
small fraction of information, one may ignore other types of information concur-
rently appearing in their environment. Our attention can also be influenced by
our cognition of the world, our existing worldviews, or the viewpoints of those in
our social networks. Therefore, one may find they give attention to only certain
types of things and content they like to see.
In the digital and data era, attention has become more critical than ever, along
with the increasingly severe time-poverty problem. Its growing importance is for
three reasons. Firstly, people’s attention has become quantifiable and measur-
able, enabled by the digitisation and datafication of society as well as the avail-
able technological affordances of algorithms for measuring attention. In the past,
attention was hidden, undetected and unperceivable. We knew people might give
different amounts of attention to different things. But we did not know how much
precisely they gave. Attention was thus an abstract concept. We might be able to
use methods such as questionnaire surveys or interviews to try to understand
how much attention people give to a specific subject or matter and how long
that attention might last. Yet, such an understanding is merely a brief snapshot
of the whole picture of their attention. It depends on participants’ retrospective
accounts and memory in surveys or interviews responding to questions about
their attention.
Today, our society is digitised and datafied (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier,
2013). Most – if not all – of our activities and lives are recorded digitally as
digital data or can be converted into data in digital form. For example, when
we purchase things on Amazon, our transactions create data about our online
shopping behaviour. Doctors’ diagnoses and prescriptions also generate patients’
data, which is stored in governments’ or hospitals’ medical databases. High-speed
cameras record traffic in figures saved in related traffic databases. Wearing devices
such as Fitbit or Garmin all day long – including going to sleep, we produce data
about our health, exercises and lifestyles. The data about how much water we
drink, how much sleep we get, how often we exercise and what kinds of activities
we do is recorded. This data is usually large in size and grows constantly. Analys-
ing large-scale data, especially data from different sources, generates new knowl-
edge and offers, insights into our lives and societies. For example, the data about
our buying activities and the things we buy on Amazon, along with the data we
have provided about our demographic backgrounds, can enable Amazon and
vendors to understand users’ and customers’ buying behaviour and preferences.
With the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, data scientists can
produce knowledge about diseases and even enable automatic diagnosis by ana-
lysing medical data and other related data such as demographical backgrounds.
Analysis of the traffic data can not only produce insights into the behaviour of
road users but also assist the police with criminal investigations or investigations
into traffic accidents. Governments even use data and algorithms to predict who
has crime motivations and is more likely to become perpetrators.
Meanwhile, our society is profoundly platformised, upon the economic, cul-
tural and political rise of social platforms such as Facebook, Google, Amazon,
Twitter and YouTube. These social platforms dominate almost all aspects of
our lives, from social and cultural activities to economic ones. Communities are
formed on Facebook, and users exchange information on Twitter. Numerous pic-
tures are uploaded to Instagram, and videos are sent to YouTube and TikTok on
a daily basis. The emergence and rise of sharing economy (gig) platform service
providers such as Uber, Airbnb, Eats, Deliveroo, Didi and Handy is transform-
ing employment and work. Department stores and retailers have collapsed one
after another in the face of the dominance of online shopping platforms such as
Amazon and eBay, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. These are only
prominent examples, among many others. In a word, the platformisation of our
society is evident and penetrating.
China, for example, is one of the most platformised societies in the world.
For Chinese people, Tencent’s WeChat is a platform for communication, mon-
etary transactions and financial activities. Users use the app to transfer money
to friends and relatives and make payments, for example, paying the services of
Didi Chuxing, a ride-hailing platform in China. During the pandemic, Chinese
nationals even get their vaccine passports via WeChat. The far-reaching penetra-
tion of social media platforms in Chinese society is an example of how plat-
forms rule our society. This deep platformisation of society means our related
activities are likely to happen on these social platforms and thus be constantly
datafied. Their occurrence creates data collected and analysed by algorithms.
(Nearly) everything is now becoming information and data. Our attention is not
an exception.
While our attention is datafied, it can be measured by algorithms. Our society
is algorithmised due to the prevalence and broad penetration of algorithms that
collect and analyse data and make decisions for humans and by humans. Banks
use algorithms to run credit checks to determine mortgage applicants’ credit lev-
els. Governments use algorithms to predict who could be potential perpetrators of
crime or unrest. Google’s algorithms decide the ranking of search results returned
to users and the types of news they like to see. Algorithms advise advertisers who
are their target customers and what they like to see. Likewise, algorithms such as
Chartbeat also tell newsrooms and journalists what their audiences prefer to read,
where traffic comes in, when and where they read news and which devices they
use to read the news. Page views, website traffic, time spent on each web page and
news article, and what is being forwarded and favoured on social media are all
metrics for measuring audiences’ attention.
The datafication, platformisation and algorithmisation of society mean that
being online and digital has become a standard, even dominant means, through
which people access information and do most things from shopping and seeking
medical help to teaching, learning and work. People are generating vast amounts
of data by doing things online and digitally. This data makes their attention
measurable by algorithms tracing the digital trails left by every click they make,
every page they visit and every post they send, edit and delete. In some cases,
how much time we spend reading a web page and the position and focus of our
eyeballs can be collected and quantified by digital technologies, which portray a
detailed picture of our attention. Therefore, audiences’ attention is no longer hid-
den, undetected, transient, subjective and immeasurable. It is instead perceivable,
traceable, quantifiable and measurable. However, this measurable feature deepens
news media and journalism’s ordeal in the media markets.
The second reason why attention has become extremely important is the mate-
rialisation of attention, i.e., it has its material values and is a resource. Human
attention is considered a scarce but quantifiable commodity (Marazzi, 2008).
Attention has long been regarded as the real lifeblood of businesses, even in indus-
trial society (Davenport & Beck, 1971). Unlike material resources, such as steel,
clothes and estate properties, attention as a commodity and resource is intangible
and can be transient. The notion of the attention economy started to be men-
tioned in the late 1990s when it became clear that people were increasingly living
online. Michael Goldhaber, for example, argued that ‘the economy of attention
– not information – is the natural economy of cyberspace’ (Goldhaber, 1997). He
regarded attention as property and ‘enduring wealth’ that can increase value for
the owner (Goldhaber, 1997). Competing for audiences’ eyeballs and pursuing
maximum clicks feature the digital world where organisations and individuals
strive for attention. Entering the third decade of the twenty-first century, we have
seen the continuing rise of the attention economy, as shown in the economy sur-
rounding digital platforms. The primary business model of these social platform
companies, such as Google and Facebook, shows the dominant importance of
attention in the economy. They use algorithms to understand users’ interests to
feed them with content that can retain their attention and attract advertising with
the attention and data generated by users.
The third reason to explain the growing importance of attention is its scarcity,
associated with the issue of time shortage discussed above. In this digital world of
information overload, people are overwhelmed with information from different
sources, all of which require their attention, which hence becomes scarce. This
dilemma is well encompassed in Simon’s quote: ‘Hence a wealth of information
creates a poverty of attention’ (Simon, 1971, p. 40). People are too busy to give
a particular activity attention for long periods of time, and are easily to get dis-
tracted. Disorientation is a big issue associated with audiences’ online reading,
comprehension and exploration. Due to the lack of time, with short attention
spans, audiences may be headline-readers – those who only have a glance at a
headline before moving on to the next one. Besides, the prevalence of hyperlinks
and hypertext in online content would easily distract audiences’ attention from
what they are reading to what is linked to in the content (Tong, 2022).
The danger measurable attention poses to news media and journalism origi-
nates from attention being scarce. It is hard for news media to keep audiences’
attention. Many other types of fun content would easily entice audiences from
consuming serious news articles on social and political issues. While audiences’
exodus is apparent, news media cannot evidence and demonstrate their influence
and audience base, which are dear to advertisers.
For news media, news content or advertising needs audience attention to
demonstrate the audience reach. Without audience attention, news content
and advertising would be meaningless, let alone showing their influence. News
media’s financial difficulties thus have been worsened by the departure of audi-
ences and advertising to the Internet, in particular, online platforms by tech
giants, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, along with the shift of
audience attention from traditional news media content to an online informa-
tion glut. Fierce competition for audience attention has arisen among players,
ranging from traditional news media and new media producers to tech giants
and even ordinary Internet users.
Competing with Multiple Players for Attention

News media now compete with multiple players ranging from ordinary users to
big tech companies for audiences’ attention. Users have greatly enhanced capa-
bilities on the Internet to access, produce and disseminate (primarily free) infor-
mation, communicate with other users and break down traditional news media’s
monopoly in news production and dissemination.
Along with the proliferation of free online content emerges a mentality that
takes for granted Internet content should be free. With the explosion of user-
generated-content (UGC) – which does not necessarily count as journalism or
citizen journalism – social platforms have become a place where news often
breaks before any legacy news media. In this virtual space, users can receive a
constantly ongoing stream of free but fragmented information. Some traditional
news media such as the Sun and the Daily Mail (both in the UK) and the Southern
Metropolitan Daily (in China) have also switched off their paywalls and made
their news content accessible for free.
News aggregators such as Google News and Apple News significantly impact
news media’s revenue. They pay nothing or little for the journalism content they
compile and deliver to audiences. The news industry has been complaining about
news aggregators ‘snatching’ news away for little or no cost for a long time.
Very recently, there have been some developments in the situation. For example,
Google has agreed to pay some selected publishers, such as News Corporation,
for their high-quality news (Cellan-Jones, 2020; Hern, 2021). In 2021, Facebook
also agreed to pay News Corp Australia for the content appearing on its plat-
form (The BBC, 2021b). Despite these developments, the problem posed by news
aggregators taking away journalism content with no or low cost still exists. After
Australia passed a law requiring news aggregators to pay, it is uncertain if other
countries will follow suit and paying for journalism content can become standard
practice worldwide.
These big tech companies pose an enormous threat to news media regarding
advertising. The priority given to clicking rates means clicking on the websites
of news aggregators cannot generate advertising revenue for news organisations.
Digital advertising revenues are so considerable that related technological giants
responded aggressively when laws and regulations were introduced to limit them
from using news content for free. A famous, recent case is that Facebook blocked
users in Australia in 2021 from seeing or sharing news content on its platform
over a law proposed by Australian authorities to ask social media to pay for news
content showing or connected to on their platforms (The BBC, 2021a).
Competitors also include new news media such as journalism start-ups. The
digital and data era has witnessed the rise of entrepreneurial journalism, a form
of journalism practised by journalist start-ups making good use of the Internet
to raise funds for their journalism and deliver their content. Entrepreneurial jour-
nalism started to emerge in the early twenty-first century. Some of them, such as
BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, successfully secured venture capital investments
and have grown into large media organisations. BuzzFeed was founded in 2006,
and by 2021, it had 1,100 employees worldwide.3 But most journalism start-ups
such as HU2 News remain small, targeting niche markets. While it is excellent
that journalism start-ups can create employment for journalists, one downside is
their existence may make the competition for audience attention even fiercer in
the already busy news markets. How sustainable these journalism start-ups can
be is thus a big question.
News media also compete with entertainment companies such as Amazon and
Netflix that offer cheap entertainment content for audiences’ attention. In the
UK, in 2020, paying as little as £5.99 (minimum fee in the UK), one can access
the collection of films and TV series on the Netflix platform. For Amazon Prime,
once becoming a Prime member, one can automatically access most of its movie
and TV resources. Since spare leisure time is limited, watching a relaxing film
would mean less time spent consuming serious news content.
The relationships of news media with ordinary Internet users and big tech
companies have become more complex and intricate than ever. Ordinary Internet
users are far more than merely audience members of news media. Their relentless
writing and publishing of online content fuel the overload of online information
and distracts the audience’s attention from news content. Through crowd-funding
and crowd-sourcing, they may also be news media’s funders and journalists’ col-
laborators. Some news media encourage their audiences to contribute ‘micropay-
ments’ to fund them.
Meanwhile, the journalistic practice of inviting audiences to provide or ver-
ify information has become common. The Guardian, for example, invites read-
ers to donate small amounts of the fund to support its journalism. In 2009,
3
https://www.buzzfeed.com/about (accessed on 5th August 2021).
crowd-sourcing helped the newspaper cover the MPs’ expenses scandal. It pub-
lished its inquiries and encouraged its readers to go through vast piles of MPs’
receipts, which included ‘700,000 individual documents contained within 5,500
PDF files covering all 646 Members of Parliament’ (Rogers, 2009), and tell the
newspaper which ones they thought worth exploring.
Big tech companies are news media’s primary rivals in the media markets, tak-
ing away audiences and advertisers. Competing with tech giants over audiences
and advertisers looks like an unwinnable war for news media. Enormous numbers
of users and their associated data that can be used to ‘accurately’ target users are
advantageous to tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon. In 2020,
Google, Facebook, Alibaba and TikTok’s owner: Bytedance and Amazon, had
US$296 billion in advertising sales, taking up 46 per cent of the global digital
advertising market – up from 17 per cent of global ad revenues in 2010 (Turvill,
2021). There have been some changes in the situation. In 2021, it was reported
for the first time that Facebook saw a drop in the number of its daily active users
(DAUs), with its revenue growth slowing down (The BBC, 2021c). The BBC’s
article pointed out that one main reason is that Facebook is not as attractive
to young people as its rivals, such as TikTok. However, such generational shifts
between tech giants would not necessarily benefit news media as tech giants – no
matter which one – still dominate the advertising market.
Yet, these tech giants are far more than just news media’s rivals. On some lev-
els, news media and tech giants are symbiotic, with news media increasingly rely-
ing on big tech companies. For news media, big tech companies have become
platforms and part of the global communication infrastructure that makes global
news production and dissemination possible. Since news media increasingly rely
on social media platforms to reach out to audiences and nurture and manage their
audience communities, these platforms have become powerful and influential – if
not controlling – in news media’s access to audiences. The case mentioned above,
in which Facebook cut off Australian users’ access to news content on its plat-
form, shows its power over news media’s audience reach on its platform. Social
media companies are also powerful enough to influence news media’s income.
Take Sky News. In 2021, YouTube decided to ban Sky News Australia from its
platform for seven days over its messages, denying the existence of the COVID-19
virus and encouraging viewers to use unapproved medication. Sky News Aus-
tralia had 1.85 million subscribers on YouTube at the time. The ban is thought to
have had an impact on Sky News’ revenues (Meade, 2021).
As for tech giants, news media are their users and clients. News media’s exten-
sive use of social platforms can drive traffic and revenue. The more journalists
and news media use their platforms and other services, the more benefits they
can receive. Journalism content is one primary type of content circulated on their
platforms, helping boost platforms’ popularity.
What is more, some tech giants provide cloud services for news media. Cloud
computing is an efficient way of providing remote computing software, platforms
and infrastructure (you will find the related discussion in the next chapter). News
media have begun to use cloud computing to handle the challenges posed by the
fast growth in audience traffic and data and the need to reach global audiences.
However, cloud service providers would know everything about news media –
their clients – from data to channels. If anything were to go wrong, the impact
would be immense and unpredictable. For example, if cloud service providers can
access news media’s audience data, they would have the knowledge about news
media’s audiences and the advantage of engaging them.
The relationship between news media and tech giants is further complicated
by tech giants’ acquirement of news media. The Washington Post was acquired by
Jeff Bezos, the founder and former CEO of Amazon, in 2013, and Bezos would
like to focus more on The Post after stepping down as CEO of Amazon in 2021.
After its acquisition, Amazon allegedly poured in resources to support its jour-
nalism (Chotiner, 2021).
Big tech companies such as Google and Facebook have begun to support jour-
nalism. The Google News Initiative,4 for example, was launched to help journalism
deal with the challenges in the digital age. Likewise, Facebook has also started its
Facebook Journalism Project to strengthen the journalists-community connection.
In 2021, a Reuters story reported that Google and Facebook contributed $600 mil-
lion to support news media globally, most of which were local and regional news
outlets that had suffered the worst in the digital and data age (Coster, 2021).
The Washington Post, the Google News Initiative and Facebook appear to
have set some good examples for big tech companies acquiring news media and
supporting journalism. However, it is uncertain if this phenomenon will become
trendy in the future and what implications for journalism’s quality.
Striving to Win Over Digital Audiences

News media must handle the challenges posed by diminishing readership and
waning advertising revenues. They urgently need to adapt to the information-
rich but time-poor environment and tech giants’ domination, which has taken
away news media’s revenues. Still, news media may have to collaborate with these
tech giants.
There are, of course, opportunities for news media and journalism too. For
example, the technological affordances of algorithms enable news media to meas-
ure attention. With the assistance of algorithms, the online activities of audiences
or the data typed in by themselves can be recorded. Take cookies, for example.
Cookies are algorithms run by a website or third parties that are used to track
Internet users and monitor their online activities. They work discreetly with-
out raising users’ awareness, tracking users’ every move online. They are very
powerful in collecting information about users, including the information of the
accounts they log into and other information related to the content they visit,
such as the products or news articles they have viewed. Most of us should have
the experience of clicking on a product the second and seeing advertisements
about similar products the next. Even if one is navigating on Facebook, one may
4
https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/intl/en_gb/ (accessed on 19th August 2021).
find advertisements showing products similar to those they saw the night before
on other websites. Since 2011, websites have been required by law to notify users
about the use of cookies, and users are invited to read their cookie policy and
choose whether to be tracked (although they may not be able to afford the time
reading this through).
Audience data captured by algorithms has enabled tech giants to offer targeted
content to audiences, and newsrooms can also use such data to understand audi-
ences’ activities. Audience measurements include measuring audiences’ website
or content visiting frequencies, time duration and types of websites and content
visited. Common aspects of audiences’ online activities that newsrooms meas-
ure include the following: the number of unique visitors, page views (per visit),
the amounts of time spent on the site, online traffic, traffic source and access
locations, visits to the site, referral sites, destination sites, audience interests and
search terms (Webster, Phalen, & Lichty, 2014).
Measuring audiences’ attention with web analytical tools and metrics and its
increasing importance have brought about significant changes in news production
within newsrooms. A video published by the BBC Academy explains how the
BBC newsroom uses web analytics to inform their decision-making and aid their
journalism (The BBC Academy, 2017). They look at metrics, such as the number
of unique browsers, page views of news stories (story pages), spike alerts for sto-
ries trending, and referral sites. With this knowledge, they want to understand
what drives traffic, how things are performing (the performance and visibility of
their content) and what is and is not successful.
In the media ecosystem, measuring and quantifying audiences and their atten-
tion has led to the rise of social platforms and news aggregators ranking and
delivering tailored news to their users. For example, Google’s news ranking algo-
rithms return news items in a specific order in the search results, enabling users to
browse and read the news that is most important and relevant (as deemed by the
algorithms) to them. With users allowed to personalise their news selection, tech
giants such as Google and Facebook distribute to users what they want to receive
and read. In the case of Facebook’s news feed algorithm, friendship becomes
a crucial factor influencing the algorithm’s selection. Friendship decides which
stories appear first by the relevance of stories and by how many likes, comments,
and forwards these stories receive. On Twitter, users’ attention produces social
recommendations through making specific topics or posts trending on the plat-
form, and trending topics will attract more attention in a spiralling effect. What
news items are delivered to audiences and in which order are beyond the control
of news media and journalists. Delivering news content to audiences according
to their interests risks creating echo chambers, where people would like to con-
nect and communicate with like-minded users, reinforcing their pre-existing view-
points (Boutyline & Willer, 2017). The echo chamber effect may exacerbate the
already dire situation of polarisation and homophily in audiences.
News media measure audiences’ attention to retain it. Today’s audiences may
merely use smartphones or tablets to access and consume news when they can
find short, trivial times. They may be headline-readers who lack long-term atten-
tion spans and may only read headlines without actually reading the full text
or watching the whole video of news content. Meanwhile, legacy news media
also try to adapt to the changing communication environment. For example, the
launch of their websites and the emergence of app-based news delivery are two
of their continual attempts to become accustomed to and make the best of the
online environment. It is safe to say that most legacy news media now deliver
news through their own websites and applications that can be used on portable
devices such as smartphones and tablets. The New York Times even uses ‘Ins-
tagram slides’ and ‘Twitter cards’ to produce more digestible stories (Tameez,
2021). These changes on the part of legacy news media further nurture audiences’
digital news consumption habits.
Social media platforms help news media retain audiences’ attention. News
media have adopted social media optimisation (SMO) and social engine optimi-
sation (SEO) strategies to increase their visibility and capture audiences’ atten-
tion. Headlines with links are one key element to encourage audiences to click on
them. Although clicking on headlines does not necessarily mean audiences will
read the content, clicking can boost online traffic and thus potentially generate
advertising revenue.
To grab audiences’ attention within a second or two, news media and
journalists need to make sure the headlines of their news items are attractive
enough so that audiences will click on them. However, this need may generate
the danger of the rise of clickbait. Sensational and clickbait headlines have
emerged on the Internet and worried observers. Clickbait headlines refer to
sensational but often deceptive headlines, blurring distinctions between fact
and fiction and even misleading to trick people into clicking on the link asso-
ciated with the headlines to a specific webpage. High clicking rates drive high
online traffic and thus digital advertising revenue. Clickbait is one feature of
the rising tabloidisation of online journalism. It can deceive readers and func-
tions as ‘false news’ (Chen, Conroy, & Rubin, 2015). Disguising rumours as
truth and manipulating facts in a deceptive, compelling, emotion-triggering
way that tricks audiences into clicking and sharing, clickbaiting is one of the
driving forces behind the rise of misinformation and fake news (McQueen,
2018). Headlines that trigger audiences’ emotions such as outrage and curi-
osity, expose social problems such as corruption, bias, prejudice and social
inequalities and are shocking, funny or unusual would work well to grab audi-
ences’ attention as clickbait (Clark, 2014). The use of clickbait in journal-
ism can impair the quality of journalism and journalistic integrity, credibility
and legitimacy, as shown in a study of football journalism (Cable & Motters-
head, 2018) and that of audience perceptions in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cable &
Mottershead, 2018).
However, clickbaits would not truly help news media keep their audiences. The
arguments of Alison Gow from Reach plc are representative. In a guest lecture
for the author’s module at the University of Sheffield in 2022, Gow, audience and
content director of North West at Reach, explained Reach’s audience engagement
strategies. They try to turn ‘flyby’ audiences – which means random audiences –
into ‘super loyal’ audiences – which means regular audiences who are supposed
to become subscribers. She argued that content should still be king, because if
audiences realise that the attractive headlines are actually clickbait, they do not
return for future content. If audiences do not come back, there is no chance for
them to become ‘super loyal’ audiences.
New Funding Strategies

Today, news media have diverse, mixed traditional and ‘new’, largely digital-based
funding models. In terms of revenues, news media primarily seek funding from
digital subscriptions. Most tabloids make their content free to access but gain
profits from advertising. Some news media – primarily quality news media – set
up paywalls, so their content is barred from non-subscribers. Some news media,
such as The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph and the New Statesman, allow
non-subscribers to read several free articles monthly. But for others, such as The
Times, audiences can only access news content after paying. The Guardian runs
an alternative system combining digital subscription and crowd-funding: provid-
ing free content on its website but encouraging readers to subscribe, become paid
members, donate small amounts of money or pay for digital editions.
The use of paywalls may lead to polarisation and inequalities in news consump-
tion as only those who can afford the subscriptions will read quality news hiding
behind a paywall. However, those who cannot afford the subscriptions are excluded
and may only be fed free tabloid content. In this sense, The Guardian’s funding
models are more democracy friendly than purely setting up paywalls, and they
also boost their popularity among audiences (see more discussions in Tong, 2022).
In 2021, research by Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, showed readers
continued to rank The Guardian as ‘the UK’s most widely used newspaper website
and app for news’ (Gayle, 2021). By the end of November 2021, The Guardian
had more than one million digital subscriptions, including paid digital subscrip-
tions, digital recurring contributions, memberships, and patrons from around
the world (The Guardian, 2021). However, how financially feasible this model is
remains uncertain.
Of course, the rise of digital news consumption does not mean the elimination
of physical copies of newspapers. The press delivers digital and print content in
a parallel fashion. While newspapers may unlikely be able to recover from declin-
ing sales of physical copies of newspapers, digital subscriptions have shown some
promising signs that perhaps rightly justify these news outlets’ focus on boosting
their paid audience base. The New York Times, for example, increased 2.3 mil-
lion digital-only subscriptions, and its overall subscriptions, including digital and
print newspapers, reached over 7.5 million in 2020. The highly contested presi-
dential election boosted the number of its digital subscriptions, which is not its
most significant revenue stream (Tracy, 2021).
Regarding digital advertising, one noticeable change for digital advertising
in news media is the shift from selling space on pages or broadcasting time to
charging fees for adverts published on their web pages or apps. News media
can also offer something they have the advantage of, which is native adver-
tising. Native advertising, different names of which are ‘branded content’ or
‘sponsored content’, means those adverts look very much like the news stories
on news media’s websites. Native advertising is not new, with its origin traced
back a hundred years ago. The very first native advertising appeared in 1915,
when The Saturday Evening Post published an ad about Cadillac, an automo-
bile company based in the United States, with the headline ‘The Penalty of
Leadership’ without mentioning Cadillac or showing the automobile (Laursen
& Stone, 2016; Post Editors, 2021).
With news media going online and being digital, the digital nature of online
news content makes their news websites suit the publication of native advertis-
ing well. In 2016, a report outlined the findings from a survey with 156 news
media executives from 46 countries among International News Media Associa-
tion (INMA) members. It shows around half of the publishers surveyed said
they had already used native advertising as an advertising option. Only 13 per
cent of the publishers regarded them as less or least likely to do so (Laursen &
Stone, 2016). Ethical concerns exist about native advertising potentially blur-
ring the boundaries between advertising and editorial content and deteriorat-
ing audiences’ confidence and trust in news. However, native advertising can
become popular among news media by making news media advertising more
appealing.
The author did a small experiment by observing digital advertising on six
UK newspapers’ websites, revealing that they all ran native advertising during
the sampling period. The six UK newspapers that were selected for observation
include three tabloids - The Daily Mail, The Sun, and The Mirror - and three
quality newspapers - The Guardian, the Telegraph and The Times. The obser-
vation occurred twice a day on their news websites between the 6th and
12th August 2021, focussing on the types, content, style, amounts and frequency
of the advertisements appearing on their websites.
In terms of digital advertising, the observation showed the existence of dis-
tinctions in conjunction with similarities between the six UK quality and tabloid
newspapers. The tabloids and quality newspapers had different advertising styles,
types of advertisers, targeted audiences and types of advertisements. Most of
the ads on the three quality newspapers’ websites looked more elegant, neat and
aesthetically pleasant. These tabloids’ and broadsheets’ digital advertising also
share three similarities. One is their advertising style matched their newspaper
style. The second is that they did not run a massive amount of advertisements
during the sampling period. And the third is that they all ran native advertising.
The Guardian stands out with the least number of advertisements. During
the period, The Guardian did not have any ads on its website four out of twelve
times. Overall, the ads about its own apps and subscriptions counted for most
of its ads. The Guardian made good use of its advertising to project its brand,
defining the role of its journalism. For example, ‘The world is confusing’ – the
words from The Guardian’s ad for its weekly magazine – repeatedly appeared in
its ads. However, the second-biggest category of its ads was paid-for content,
i.e. native advertising, which The Guardian had almost every day (except one
day) during the sampling period. Although clearly marked as ‘Paid content’ and
‘Paid for by’, the content and style of these native ads looked very much like the
news articles on its website.
Telegraph’s advertising was low in number but elegant in style, easily distin-
guishable from tabloids and other broadsheets. During the sample week, it only
had ads for one or two brands every day, apart from four sponsored ads, which
appeared 10 out of 12 times when the sample was collected.
Among the three quality newspapers, The Times had the biggest number of ads
in quantity. Suppose a larger amount of ads means more profits. In that case, The
Times appeared to have been doing the best in attracting digital advertising dur-
ing the sampled week among the three quality newspapers. Brands it advertised
were for everyday life, such as H&M, the UK government’s travel advice and Pureis
ultra-pure CBD, a food supplement brand. For several days, The Telegraph and The
Guardian had no external advertising. But The Times did not have such ad-free days.
In addition, it had four pieces of sponsored content daily during the sampling week.
The three tabloids did not necessarily perform better than the three qual-
ity newspapers regarding the quantity of digital advertising on their websites.
Among the three tabloids, The Sun did the best if judged by the number of ads.
Most of the brands advertised during the sampling week were for everyday
products and services, such as clothes, holidays, travel, pension, mattress, and
lottery tickets. All tabloids had something that the three quality papers did not
have. They had loads of small, short ‘coupon/voucher’ ads for deals or discount
codes for retail brands, such as fashion, beauty, home and garden, groceries, and
holidays. These small ads looked like the classified ads one would find in print.
During the sampling period, all quality and tabloid newspapers had native ads
with quality newspapers clearly marking them as sponsored or paid-for content.
Still, tabloids labelled the native ads less noticeably, and the ads looked more like
news. Although not spotted during the sample week, MailOnline’s logo morph5,
a format that integrates a native ad into the logo of MailOnline looks quite con-
cerning as it remarkably hides the fact it’s an ad by morphing itself into the logo
of MailOnline.
This experiment shows that native advertising has become a common practice
among these selected UK newspapers, although their advertising strategies and
styles differ, with profound implications for their ethical practices. The Advertis-
ing Standards Authority Ltd. (ASA) and The Committee of Advertising Practice
Ltd. (CAP) in the UK require publishers to ‘ensure advertorials are distinguish-
able from editorial content’ when they publish native advertising.6 Therefore, not
making native advertising easily recognisable breaks this code. However, even if a
native ad is made obviously noticeable as an advertisement, the fact that it looks
very much like a news article that audiences would find on the hosting website
may let audiences’ guard off and influence them without noticing.
Newspapers are increasingly doing better at attracting digital subscrip-
tions than getting sufficient digital advertising. For tabloids, digital ad markets
5
https://www.mailmetromedia.co.uk/advertise-with-us/ad-formats/digital-bespoke-
logo-morph/ (accessed on 17th September 2021).
6
https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/recognising-ads-native-advertising.html (accessed
on 3rd April 2022).
are what they aim for, so they usually offer free content in exchange for large
audience bases. Most of them, such as The Sun, erected a paywall in 2013 but
scrapped it in 2015, aiming to grow its audience – which can be sold to advertis-
ers – and adopt a ‘blended revenue model of advertising, premium content and
revenues streams such as Dream Team’ (Ponsford, 2015b). In the year to the end
of June 2020, The Sun and The Sun on Sunday had 133 million monthly global
unique users, with the online audience expanding noticeably (News Corp, 2020).
During this period, however, the two tabloids saw a 23 per cent shrink in adver-
tising and sales revenues (Sweney, 2021). Likewise, with a rise in MailOnline
audiences, Daily Mail still saw a significant fall in advertising revenue between
April and June 2020 (Barker, 2020a). In Reach plc, digital advertising revenues
started to overtake print advertising revenues from the end of 2020 during the
COVID-19 pandemic. However, the increase in digital advertising revenues can-
not cover the loss in Reach’s overall revenue (Tobitt, 2021a). In 2021, it was
reported that Reach’s digital advertising revenues increased 42.7 per cent in the
six months to the 27th of June (Hosking, 2021).
When it comes to quality newspapers, they often charge for their content
despite some exceptions, such as The Guardian. As discussed above, The Guard-
ian offers free content on its website but does have a paywall for members if
they would be willing to support its journalism and want to read its digital edi-
tions. The Times and The Sunday Times had more digital subscribers (335,000
and 336,000 respectively) than print subscribers (151,000 and 220,000 respec-
tively) in the year to the end of June 2020, with digital subscribers for both
together increasing to 367,000 by 30th June 2021 (Illinois News Today, 2021;
News Corp, 2020). However, by July 2021, they had not reported increased digi-
tal advertising revenue. A similar pattern can also be observed in The Financial
Times, showing a surge in digital advertising revenue, which is more than print
advertising revenue, along with an overall loss in 2020 (Tobitt, 2021b). As of
September 2021, The Washington Post had 1.6 million print readers per week,
104 million nationwide unique visitors per month and 39 million international
unique visitors per month.7 Despite the surges in digital subscriptions in 2020,
The New York Times still suffered a loss in ad sales due to the closures of busi-
nesses during the pandemic (Tracy, 2021) and actually made more profits from
readers than advertisers (Benton, 2020). However, a 66 per cent increase in its
ad revenue in August 2021 offers some hope for the newspaper’s financial future
(Berr, 2021).
There are three main reasons digital advertising revenue cannot make up for
the losses in print advertising revenues. The first reason is that most news media
have not adopted how tech giants charge for advertising. This ignorance means
running an ad in news media may not appeal to advertisers who want to see their
ads’ effectiveness and pay for the effect. Tech giants charge for advertising based
on the number of click rates. For example, Google Ads charges cost-per-click
7
https://www.washingtonpost.com/mediakit/ (accessed on 2nd September 2021).
(CPC), which means advertisers pay for each ad click.8 Facebook states on its
website how its customers are charged for their ads:
The pricing of Facebook ads is based on an auction system where

ads compete for impressions based on bid and performance. When
you run your ad, you’ll only be charged for the number of clicks or
the number of impressions your ad received.9
Google and Facebook have an attention-based ad-charge model – the more

popular an ad becomes, the more the advertiser will be charged. Several reasons
explain why this model is attractive to advertisers. The primary one is that it looks
like advertisers only pay for the amount of attention their ad gets. If the number
of clicks or impressions an ad receives can be seen as the effect of that ad, then
this model looks quite fair: the costs for running an ad are justified by the effect
it has achieved. However, despite their endeavour to make the best of the online,
digital world, news media have not adopted tech giants’ methods of charging for
audience attention.
The second reason is that digital advertisements are much cheaper compared
to print. In 2015, the advertisers of The Times in the UK agreed to pay the same
rate for advertising in its tablet edition as they would in print. This change was
hailed as a breakthrough (Ponsford, 2015a). However, this practice does not look
universal. For example, in 2021, publishing a video on the centre of The Guard-
ian’s website and apps costed as low as £50, with an audio podcast only £70. How-
ever, the cheapest print advertisement was £45 single column centimetre (SCC),
with a double-page spread (DPS) in The Guardian costing £32,400.10 The New
York Times’ 2019 rate card shows that a Sunday full-page advertisement costs US
$245,451.11
The third main reason is that producing news content, which is likely to be
clicked somewhere other than news media’s own digital channel, does not help
news media increase revenue. Advertisers’ decision to display their adverts on
a news media website largely depends on website traffic. A study of advertis-
ing markets in France, Germany, Spain and the UK revealed that higher web
traffic was estimated to correlate with higher overall revenues (Deloitte Finan-
cial Advisory, 2019). When news media’s articles may be consumed somewhere
other than their own website, clicking on their articles does not increase their
web traffic. Tech giants, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, offer leading
platforms where news articles are clicked on and consumed, although they are
8
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/116495?hl=en (accessed on 11th August
2021).
9
https://www.Facebook.com/business/help/716180208457684?id=1792465934137726
(accessed on 2nd September 2021).
10
https://advertising.theguardian.com/advertising/rates (accessed on 4th August 2021).
11
https://nytmediakit.com/uploads/rates/Business2019.pdf (accessed on 6th September
2021).
also a primary source of news websites’ traffic, which may arguably drive the
latter’s revenue. A UK government’s research in 2020 revealed that Google and
Facebook provided nearly 40 per cent of the traffic to UK news media’s websites
(Competition & Markets Authority, 2020). Being leading platforms of news con-
sumption is one of the reasons why ad revenues have gone to these tech compa-
nies that charge advertisers per click. Consequentially, Google and Facebook are
the key players in the digital advertising market – for example, they had around
80 per cent of UK digital advertising revenues in 2019 (Competition & Markets
Authority, 2020).
National and international news media are currently much more successful
than their local counterparts in winning their audiences back to pay for their
journalism. However, their digital advertising revenues cannot be on a par with
their digital subscriptions. As journalism – i.e. news content – is not as profitable
as advertising (Bainbridge et al., 2015), whether and when their digital revenues
can make up for their losses in print are precarious, although determining their
sustainability.
Independent journalism start-ups have started to embrace the opportunities
brought about by Internet-based crowd-funding – a funding model of seeking
small amounts of funding donations from the crowds. We have seen successful
cases of crowd-funding, such as Hong Kong’s FactWire (an independent, inves-
tigative news agency) crowdfunding HK$4.75 million for its launch in 2015 and,
more recently, the UK’s Tortoise crowdfunding US$710,000 in 2018 and South
Korea’s Newstapa raising US$230,000 from donors in 2019 (Majid, 2021b).
Despite the crowdfunding succeses, the sustainability of journalism start-ups is
precarious. For example, the Correspondent closed in 2020 during the COVID-19
pandemic. Its news model focussed on stories about longer-term global develop-
ments was proved unsustainable, as, during the pandemic, audiences were more
inclined to receive up-to-date breaking news about COVID-19 (Tobitt, 2020). The
sustainability of Newstapa is influenced by the level of media freedom and is asso-
ciated with donors’ political orientation. The non-profit investigative newsroom
was launched in 2012 when South Korea suffered poor press freedom. However,
the number of donors dropped along with the country’s improved press freedom
situation. Its donor base also shrank when the newsroom investigated the liberal
politicians, who were donors’ favourable politicians (Taehoon, 2019).
To conclude this chapter, news media’s business has been in trouble due to the
changes in the media environment and audiences’ lifestyles and news consumption
behaviour. They are facing a significant challenge in keeping audience attention,
which is scarce and measurable and attracting advertisers’ investment. Although
they have experimented with different funding models to embrace opportunities
brought up in the digital environment, news media’s financial future is precarious.
Chapter 2
Algorithms, Cloud Computing

and Journalism
Against the backdrop of financial difficulties, news media have attempted to use
the technological affordances of (digital) information and communication tech-
nologies in their news business to produce and deliver journalism and engage the
audience. From earlier years of digital transformation and convergence of news-
rooms to more recently using algorithms and cloud computing for journalism,
news media’s embrace of digital technologies has dramatically changed journal-
ism. This chapter discusses using algorithms and cloud computing for journal-
ism, which show challenges and opportunities brought up by the invention and
application of (digital) information and communication technologies for news
media and journalism.
A Continuity of Digital Transformation of Newsrooms

Following the rise and popularity of information and communication technolo-
gies like the Internet and other technologies such as satellites, computers, digital
cameras and microchips, newsrooms worldwide have experienced profound digi-
tal transformation. Digital transformation and convergence of newsrooms started
when news media launched their websites and began to offer digital, multimedia
news content. In a move to cope with the need to produce multimedia, cross-plat-
form news content, many newsrooms have transformed their organisational struc-
ture, moved into offices that facilitated collaboration between staffers working in
different areas, such as print and multimedia departments, and reformed their
production and content management systems. The Daily Telegraph, for example,
merged staff from The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and their website
into one division to achieve its editorial integration after the newspaper moved
to its news hub in 2006. A similar transformation can be found in other Brit-
ish news media, such as The Guardian and the BBC, and in news media in other
parts of the world, such as the Tampa group in the US and Norway’s NRK (Lar-
rondo, Domingo, Erdal, Masip, & Hilde, 2016). As part of the digital transforma-
tion of newsrooms, news media have updated their content management system.
doi:10.1108/978-1-80043-558-220221003
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
although by constantly seeing him he was placing himself in the
black books of Charles and the Duke of York. We find him calling, on
March 4th, upon Coventry in his prison in the Brick Tower when he
was in charge of a son of “Major Bayly’s, one of the officers of the
Ordnance,” again on the following day he visits him and finds
Coventry, “with abundance of company with him.” The visits were
continued on the following days until the 16th of the same month,
after which Coventry was liberated. The stir his imprisonment had
made, and the number of visitors who called upon him—in one day
some sixty coaches stood waiting outside the Tower Gates for those
who called on Sir William—had much annoyed the King, the Duke of
York, and Buckingham. Sir William Coventry, of whom Bishop Burnet
writes that he was “a man of great notions and eminent virtue; the
best speaker in the House of Commons, and capable of bearing the
chief ministry, as it was once thought he was very near it, and
deserved it more than all the rest did,” after this quarrel with
Buckingham and his imprisonment in the Tower retired from public
affairs, going to Minster Lovel in Oxfordshire, and dying at the age of
sixty, in 1686. He had been Secretary of the Admiralty, and twice
member for Yarmouth, and in 1667 had been one of the Commission
of the Treasury.
Colonel Blood.
(From a Contemporary Engraving.)
There is a blank in the list of commitments to the Tower between

the years 1668 and 1678. They are supposed to have been lost, but
we know that the year after Pepys’ friend Sir John Robinson had
ceased to command in the Tower, the gossiping diarist himself was a
prisoner within the walls, having been in some way concerned in the
so-called Popish Plot of 1679. It is greatly to be deplored that no
account of Samuel’s experiences in the Tower have come down to
us, for his diary ends ten years before this date: Pepys was in the
Tower from the month of May 1679 until the following February. His
expenses, however, have been recorded:—“For safe keeping of Sir
Anthony Deane and Mr Pepys, from and for the 22nd day of May
1679 unto and for the 24th of June 1679, being four weeks and six
dayes, at £3 per week, ancient allowance, and 13s. 4d. per weeke,
present demands, according to the retrenchments, £6, 9s. 6d.”
(Bayley’s “Tower of London.”)
Among other prisoners in the Tower in this reign was Nathaniel
Desborow, or Disbrew, as his name is sometimes written. Desborow
was Cromwell’s brother-in-law, “clumsy and ungainly in his person,”
and, a born plotter, he hated all who were placed above him. He had
been made Chancellor of Ireland by his nephew Richard Cromwell,
but nevertheless he helped to pull down the Protector’s son and
successor from his short-lived position. There were many others
besides, imprisoned for political and non-political offences, and of
the latter was Stephen Thomson, who was imprisoned for “stealing
and conveying beyond the seas the sole daughter and heiress of Sir
Edmund Alleyn, deceased, she being an infant.”
The most sensational event that occurred in the Tower during the
reign of Charles II. was the attempt made by a ruffian who called
himself “Colonel” Blood to steal the Crown and Regalia. Blood, half
sailor, half highwayman, and a complete scoundrel, was about fifty
years old when, in the month of May 1671, he made what was
literally a dash for the Crown. Blood appears to have served under
Cromwell, and consequently styled himself “Colonel”; after the war
he became a spy of the Government, and a short time before his
performance at the Tower he had almost succeeded in having the
old Duke of Ormond hanged on the gallows at Tyburn.
At this time Sir Gilbert Talbot held the appointment of “Master of
the Jewel House.” The allowance for this charge had been reduced,
and, as a kind of compensation, the Master had permission to allow
the public to inspect the Regalia, then kept in the Martin Tower, or
Jewel Tower, as it was then called, a fee being charged which
became the Master’s perquisite. Three weeks before Blood made his
attempt, he had called at the Martin Tower disguised as a clergyman,
“with a long cloak, cassock, and canonical girdle.” He was
accompanied by a woman whom he represented as his wife. The
lady requested permission to see the Regalia, but soon after being
admitted to the Tower complained of “a qualm upon her stomach,”
and old Talbot Edwards, who had been an old servant of Sir
Gilbert’s, and had been placed by him in charge of the Regalia,
called to his wife to look after the soi-disant Mrs Blood. That lady
having been given something to remove her “qualms” was, together
with her husband, most profuse in the expression of her gratitude to
the old keeper and his wife, and promised to return upon an early
occasion.
The next time Blood came to the Tower he was alone, bringing
some gloves for Edwards’s wife as a token of gratitude for the
kindness shown to “Mrs Blood.” On this occasion he informed
Edwards that he had a young nephew who was well off, and in
search of a wife, and suggested that a match might be arranged
between him and their daughter. Blood was invited to bring his
nephew to make the acquaintance of the young lady, and it was
arranged that the old couple should give a dinner at which the
meeting should take place. At the dinner Blood took it upon himself,
being still in his clerical disguise, to say grace, which he did with
great unction, concluding with a long-winded oration, and a prayer
for the Royal family. After the meal he visited the rooms in the Tower,
and seeing a fine pair of pistols hanging on the wall, asked if he
might buy them to give to a friend. He then said that he would return
with a couple of friends who were about to leave London, and who
were anxious to see the Regalia before leaving, it being decided that
he should bring them the next morning. That day was the 9th of May,
and at seven in the morning old Talbot Edwards was ready to receive
his reverend friend and his companions, who soon put in an
appearance. Blood and his confederates had arms concealed about
them, each carrying daggers, pocket pistols, and rapier blades in
their canes.
They were taken up the stairs into the room where the Regalia
was kept, but immediately they had entered, the ruffians threw a
cloak over Edwards’s head and gagged him with a wooden plug,
which had a small hole in it so that the person gagged could breathe;
this they fastened with a piece of waxed leather which encircled his
neck, and placed an iron hook on his nose so as to prevent him from
crying out. They swore they would murder him if he attempted to
give an alarm—which the poor old fellow could scarcely have done
under the circumstances. But the plucky old keeper struggled hard,
whereupon they beat him upon the head with a wooden mallet, and
stabbed him until he fainted. The villains, thinking they had killed
him, then turned their attention to rifling the treasures in the room.
One of them, Parrot, put the orb in his breeches pocket, Blood
placed the Crown under his cloak, and the third began to file the
sceptre in two pieces, it being too long to carry away without being
seen. At this moment steps were heard; Edwards’s young son
having just returned from Flanders in the very nick of time. The
thieves dashed down the stairs past the young man who was coming
up, carrying with them the orb and crown, the sceptre being left
behind in the hurry of their flight. The pursuit was immediate; young
Edwards had brought with him his brother-in-law, a Captain
Beckman, and the latter hearing cries of “Treason! Murder!” from the
terrified women in the Tower, and the cry “The Crown is stolen!”
rushed after Blood and the two other men. These had meanwhile
crossed the drawbridge between the Main Guard at the White Tower
and the Wharf; at the bridge a warder had tried to stop them, but
Blood fired his pistol, and the man, although not wounded, fell to the
ground, and they dashed past him. At St Katharine’s Gate, near
which horses were in waiting for the thieves, Beckman overtook
them; Blood again discharged his pistol but missed his pursuer, who
ducking his head, promptly seized the sham clergyman, from under
whose cloak the Crown fell to the ground, rolling in the gutter. Then
followed what the London Gazette of the day called a “robustious
struggle,” Blood ultimately being secured, remarking that “It was a
gallant attempt, for it was for a Crown!”
When the Crown fell to the ground, some of the gems came loose
from their settings, and a large ruby, which had belonged to the
sceptre, was found in Parrot’s pocket. Little harm, however, was
done, except to the poor old keeper, who was nearly eighty years of
age and had been terribly injured; he was soon past all suffering,
and was buried in the Chapel of St Peter’s, where his gravestone
can still be seen.
After his capture Blood occupied a prison in the White Tower for a
short time, but the King soon sent for him. And although it is not, and
cannot be known, whether Charles was an accessory or not in the
attempted theft, or whether Blood knew too much of the King’s
affairs, yet, whatever the reason, Blood was not only pardoned but
rewarded, the King giving him a pension of £500 a year, and
bestowing upon him landed estates in Ireland, the “Colonel”
becoming one of the most assiduous of the Whitehall courtiers.
Whether Charles also rewarded Blood’s accomplices is not
recorded, but none of them were ever punished for the attempted
robbery. John Evelyn recounts meeting Blood at court on the 10th of
May 1671. “How he came to be pardoned,” he writes, “and ever
received into favour, not only after this but several other exploits
almost as daring, both in Ireland and here, I never could come to
understand. This man had not only a daring, but a villainous
unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well-spoken, and
dangerously insinuating.”
Charles the Second, always in want of money, might very possibly
have commissioned Blood, after he had stolen the Crown, to pawn
or sell its gems in Holland or elsewhere, and the thieves could then
have divided the spoil. There can be little doubt that had not young
Edwards and his brother-in-law arrived at the Tower when they did,
Blood and the two, or others, would have got safely away with the
jewels. The plot had been admirably planned, and only the accident
of the return of the keeper’s son, which Blood could not possibly
have foreseen, prevented its successful accomplishment.
In later years Blood is said to have become a Quaker—not a
desirable recruit for that most respectable body, one would imagine.
He died in 1680, and has had the honour of having had his bold, bad
face placed in the National Portrait Gallery; it fully bears out Evelyn’s
description of the “villainous unmerciful” look of the man.
A very different individual from Blood, who was also in the Tower
about the same time, was William Penn, the founder of
Pennsylvania. He had been imprisoned for no offence, unless that of
writing a pamphlet on Unitarianism could be considered a punishable
crime. William Penn’s father, the celebrated Admiral, Sir William, had
accused the Duke of York of showing cowardice in a sea fight with
the Dutch, and the son’s pamphlet was made the stick with which to
beat the father. Young Penn passed some months in the Tower,
where he wrote his famous work, “No Cross, no Crown.” Edward
Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, was sent to the Tower to see, and
to convert, the young Quaker from his errors in belief, but Penn only
said to the prelate: “The Tower is to me the worst argument in the
world,” and Stillingfleet found that he could make no impression.
In 1678, William Howard, Viscount Stafford, a Roman Catholic
peer, was accused of being concerned in the Popish Plot, that
monstrous tangle of lies, invented, for the greater part, by the
infamous Titus Oates. Stafford was accused by Oates, with four
other Roman Catholic peers, of being mixed up in the plot to
overthrow the King, and to place the Duke of York upon the throne.
From his place in the House of Lords Stafford had declared his
innocence of the charge, but he was committed to close
imprisonment in the Tower in the month of October (1678), remaining
a prisoner until the month of November 1680, when he was tried at
Westminster Hall, Titus Oates being the principal witness against
him. In Reresby’s “Memoirs” it is said that Charles wished to save
Stafford, whom he knew to be innocent; but his mistress, the
Duchess of Portsmouth, whom Reresby believed to have been
bribed, prevented the King from acting in the matter as he would
otherwise have done, and Charles allowed an innocent man to be
judicially murdered in order not to thwart his mistress’s wishes.
Stafford was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 29th of December 1680,
the crowd hooting him on his way to the scaffold, for Titus Oates’s
infamous accusations had made any Roman Catholic an object of
hatred to the populace. On Stafford asking one of the Sheriffs, of the
name of Cornish, to interfere, the latter brutally replied: “I am ordered
to stop no man’s mouth but your own.” So fervently, however, did
Stafford proclaim his innocence on the scaffold, that many of the
spectators, “with heads uncovered, exclaimed: ‘We believe you, God
bless you, my Lord!’” “He perished,” writes Sir J. Reresby, “in the
firmest denial of what had been laid to his charge, and that in so
cogent and persuasive a manner, that all the beholders believed his
words, and grieved his destiny.” The same tribunal which had
condemned Stafford, three years after his death reversed the
attainder they had pronounced against him, it having, in the
meanwhile, been proved that Stafford had perished an innocent
man, done to death by the false witness of the villain Oates. Lord
Stafford was buried in the Chapel of St Peter’s.
William, Lord Russell.
(From the Portrait in the National Portrait Gallery)
The Rye House Plot brought two of the best and noblest heads in
England to the block—William, Lord Russell, and Algernon Sidney.
Both suffered death for the good cause of the liberty of England.
Russell was the proto-martyr in that faith, Sidney the second.
England under Charles the Second was fast drifting back into the
worst of the tyrannies that had darkened her former history. The
King, as he proved on his death-bed, was a Roman Catholic in
religion, and although professing to belong to the Church of England,
moved in the steps of his brother James, who was an avowed
Papist; and the country was rapidly becoming, politically, a
dependency of the French King, and, in religion, a fief of the Pope.
The four most conspicuous Englishmen who clearly saw the danger
that threatened the freedom, both civil and religious, of England, and
who had done their utmost to save their country—patriots in the best
sense of that much-abused term, were at the time of the discovery of
the Rye House Plot in 1683, either out of the country or in prison.
Shaftesbury, after an imprisonment of five weeks in the Tower, had
crossed to Holland after his liberation in November 1681. The news
of his acquittal had been received with great rejoicings in the city,
Reresby writing that “the rabble lighted bonfires.” The Duke of York,
according to Lenthall, expressed his indignation publicly at “such
insolent defiance of authority such as he had never before known.”
But Shaftesbury’s friends and admirers had a medal struck in honour
of his liberation, on one side being the Earl’s portrait in profile, and
on the other a view of London taken from the Southwark side of the
Thames, with the sun casting its rays over the Tower from out the
clouds; above is inscribed the word, “Laetamur,” with the date 24 of
November 1681 beneath. This medal gave rise to Dryden’s satirical
poem called “The Medal,” in which he compares Shaftesbury to
Achitophel.
Russell, Sidney, and Essex were arrested and placed in the
prisons of the Tower. They suffered death in the cause of
constitutional liberty, as against the arbitrary power of the King, and
also for wishing to exclude the Duke of York from the succession to
the throne after his brother’s death. This plan was quite distinct from
the Rye House Plot—a plot that arranged for the assassination of the
King and the Duke of York on their road to Newmarket races.
Russell and Sidney were betrayed by Lord Howard of Escrick, and
although warned of his danger, Russell, unlike Shaftesbury, refused
to flee, saying he had done nothing to make him fear meeting the
justice of his country. However, on entering the Tower, he seems to
have had a foreboding of his fate, for turning round to his attendant,
Taunton, he said he knew that there was “a determination against
him to take his life, for the devil is unchained.” “From the moment of
his arrest,” writes Bishop Burnet, “he looked upon himself as a dying
man, and turned his thoughts wholly to another world. He read much
in the Scriptures, particularly in the Psalms. But, whilst he behaved
with the serenity of a man prepared for death, his friends exhibited
an honourable anxiety to save his life. Lord Essex would not leave
his house, lest his absconding might incline a jury to give more credit
to the evidence against Lord Russell. The Duke of Monmouth offered
to come in and share fortunes with him, if it would do him any
service. But he answered, ‘It would be of no advantage to him to
have his friends die with him.’”
During the fortnight which elapsed between his arrest and his
sentence, Russell’s devoted wife did all that was humanly possible to
save her husband’s life, and the night before the trial she wrote to
him: “Your friends believe I can do you some service at your trial. I
am certainly willing to try; my resolution will hold out, pray let yours.
But it may be the Court will not let me. However, do let me try.” Lady
Russell not only tried, but succeeded in being of assistance to her
husband during his trial, which took place in Westminster Hall on
July 13th, 1683. Lord Russell asked his judges if he might have
“some one to help his memory,” as he put it, and the request being
granted, “My wife,” he said, “is here to do it.” And all through that
long summer day, whilst he was being tried for his life, Lady Russell
sat by her husband’s side writing down notes of the evidence, and
giving him her advice. When the news came, during the course of
the trial, that Essex had been found in the Tower with his throat cut,
Russell burst into tears. He wept for the fate of his friend, whilst his
own misfortunes only made him appear the more serene and
indifferent to the malice of his enemies. Jeffries, who presided, took
care in his charge to the jury to turn Essex’s untimely end into an
additional proof of Russell’s guilt.
Essex had been arrested soon after Russell, and on the same
charge, that of being concerned in the Rye House Plot, and was
accused of high treason. Taken from his seat at Cassiobury to the
Tower, he was placed in the same room which was occupied by his
father. It is described in the depositions placed before the
Commissioners in William the Third’s time, as being “on the left hand
as you go up the mound, after passing the Bloody Tower Gate.” In
Dalrymple’s history it is stated that Essex was confined in the same
room which his father, Lord Capel, had occupied, and in which Lady
Essex’s grandfather, the Earl of Northumberland, had killed himself
in Elizabeth’s reign. To this prison Essex was brought in the month of
July in the year 1683—a year so fatal to some of England’s truest
patriots—and there, as has already been stated, he was found with
his throat cut. Whether Essex died by his own hand, or by the hands
of others, will never be known. On the whole, the evidence points to
suicide; and this is the opinion of the most trustworthy authorities,
such as Green and Gardiner.
Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, had been one of the most popular of
the liberal leaders in the country. He had held high offices in the
State, he had been Ambassador from the court of Charles II. to that
of Copenhagen, he had been Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and, for a
short time, Prime Minister. The only son of the gallant Lord Capel of
Hadham, who had been executed by Cromwell, Essex had every
reason to expect some gratitude from the son of the man for whose
sake his father had given his life. But with the Stuarts the sense of
gratitude was an unknown quantity, and Essex was doomed to share
the fates of his friends, Russell and Sidney, accused by the same
traitor who had betrayed both them and himself. On the day of
Essex’s death, the King and his brother James had been visiting the
Tower, a place in which neither of them had set foot for a dozen
years. After James’s flight at the Revolution, it was eagerly believed
that this visit was in some way connected with Essex’s death. In a
curious contemporary print, Essex is seen being murdered by three
well-dressed individuals, the position in which his body was found
after death being also shown at the same time. In the depositions
alluded to above, the sentry at the prison door stated that two men
had entered the room on the morning of the Earl’s death, that an
alarm was given by Essex’s valet when he found his master’s body
on the floor of the closet next his bedroom with his throat cut. Two
children deposed that they had seen a hand throwing a razor out of
the Earl’s window, that a woman then left the house and picked it up.
A sentry, named Robert Meek, who had made some remarks tending
to prove that Essex had met with foul play, was found dead soon
afterwards in the Tower moat.
Arthur Comte d’Essex

Gate and Portcullis in the Bloody Tower
Bad and heartless as were both the King and his brother James,
none can believe that they would commit a cold-blooded murder
themselves; and had they hired others to do so, the fact of the
brothers having gone that same morning to the fortress gives the
idea of murder high improbability, and Essex’s death will remain one
of the many unsolved tragic mysteries of the Tower. That the
authorities believed the theory of suicide is proved by the register of
St Peter’s in the Tower, in which is the following entry: “Arthur, Earl of
Essex, cutt his own throat within the Tower, July 13, 1683. Buried in
this Chapel.”
But to return to Lord Russell. After his condemnation, and during
the few days that were left to him on earth, Russell was visited by
Tillotson, Dean of Canterbury, as well as by Bishop Burnet, both of
whom urged him to sign a paper declaring his adherence to the
principle of non-resistance, which they declared to be an article of
Christian faith. Russell said, in answer, that he had always believed
in the right of a nation to defend its religion and liberties when they
were threatened, expressing his willingness to give up his life in their
defence; and if he erred in this, “God,” he said, “would forgive him,
as it would be the sin of ignorance.” He also told the prelates that
both he and Lady Russell were agreed on this subject, and that
nothing could alter their views. Lady Russell was fighting in these
days to save the life she valued far above her own; but all was
useless; it was a hopeless struggle. “I wish,” said Lord Russell, “that
my wife would give over beating every bush for my preservation”; but
he added, “if it will be any consolation for her after my death to have
done her utmost to save me I cannot blame her.”
On the 19th of July, two days before the day fixed for his
execution, Russell wrote a letter to the King that was not to be
delivered to Charles until after the writer’s death. In that letter he
assured the monarch that “he had always acted for the best interests
of the Crown, and that if he had been mistaken he hoped the King’s
displeasure would be satisfied with his death, and would not extend
to his widow and children.” The following day he received the
Blessed Sacrament from Tillotson. “Do you believe all the Articles of
the Christian Faith as taught by the Church of England?” asked the
Dean; and Russell assenting, “Do you,” continued the Dean, “forgive
all your enemies?” “With all my heart,” answered Russell. Then after
reading and signing the paper which he intended to give to the
Sheriff on the scaffold—his farewell to his country—Russell sent for
his wife, who came at once, bringing with her their three children.
“Stay and sup with me,” he said to her, “let us eat our last earthly
food together.” At ten o’clock that night the parting between these
two took place. “Both,” writes Burnet, “were silent and trembling,
their eyes full of tears which did not overflow. When she had left,
‘Now,’ said he, ‘the bitterness of death is past.’ Then he broke down:
‘What a blessing she has been to me, and what a misery it would
have been if she had been crying to me to turn informer and to be a
Lord Howard.’ And then he praised his devoted wife to the good
Bishop as she deserved to be praised, for a nobler, more loyal or
devoted wife than Rachel, Lady Russell, is not to be found in all
history.”
Some of the things Russell said to Burnet on that last evening of
his life are well worth recording. Speaking of death he said, “What a
great change death made, and how wonderfully those new scenes
would strike on a soul.” He had heard, he told Burnet, “how some
persons who had been born blind were struck when, by the couching
of their cataracts, they obtained their sight; but what,” said he, “if the
first thing they saw were the rising sun?”
Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the place chosen for his execution, the
scaffold being erected not far from his own house. This was on the
29th of July, and when the Sheriffs arrived to take him they found
Russell quietly winding up his watch. “Now,” he said, “I have done
with time, and must think henceforward of Eternity.” He then gave
the watch as a souvenir to Burnet, that good old Bishop of Salisbury
who had clung so closely to his friend in his trials as to a beloved
brother, and to whom we owe the touching account of that friend’s
last days upon earth.
On the 7th of December of this same year, Algernon Sidney was
executed on Tower Hill, having been condemned to death by a
picked jury and the infamous Chief-Justice Jeffreys, on the trumped-
up charge of conspiring against the life of Charles; only one witness
appeared against him, but he was condemned by his writings, which
were certainly strongly republican; yet, considering what the rule of
the second Charles had become, a man of Algernon Sidney’s lofty
spirit, with his love of freedom, could not have written or thought
otherwise. It has been well said of him that not only did he write from
his judgment but also from his heart, and he informed his readers of
that which he felt as well as that which he knew. He was condemned
principally for the treatise in which he advocated the rights of
subjects, under certain contingencies, to depose their king, and
although this paper had never been published, or, in fact, printed, it
was sufficient material for Jeffreys, who bullied the jury into a
committal against Sidney. Algernon Sidney’s life had been as noble
as was his name, but his unbending republican principles had made
him the bête noire of both Charles and James, and any evidence by
which he could be entrapped into a charge of treason was welcome
to them. When he came forth from the Tower to die in the cause of
liberty, “Englishmen,” as Dalrymple has finely written, “wept not for
him as they had done for Lord Russell, their pulses beat high, their
hearts swelled, they felt an unusual grandeur and elevation of mind
whilst they looked upon him.” One of the Sheriffs asked Sidney if it
was his intention to make a speech upon the scaffold, to which he
answered, “I have made my peace with God, and have nothing to
say to man,” adding, “I am ready to die, and will give you no further
trouble.” His last prayers were for “the good old cause.” When his
head lay on the block, the executioner asked him if he would raise it
again. “Not till the general resurrection; strike on!” And these were
Algernon Sidney’s last words.
James, Duke of Monmouth.
(From a Contemporary Engraving.)
CHAPTER XV
JAMES II.
During the four years in which James the Second misgoverned

England, the most interesting events connected with the Tower were
the tragedy of the Duke of Monmouth’s death, and the imprisonment
of the Seven Bishops.
James was the first of our sovereigns to omit passing the night
previous to his coronation in the Tower, and the fortress now ceased
entirely to be a royal residence, being given over to the uses which it
still fulfils.
After the Duke of Monmouth’s capture near the New Forest, on the
13th of July 1685, after his luckless attempt to wrest the Crown from
James at Sedgemoor, he, with Lord Grey of Wark, was brought to
London and imprisoned in the Tower, the warrant for his committal
being thus worded: “James, Duke of Monmouth, 13 July, for High
Treason in levying war against the King and assuming a title to the
Crown.” Monmouth had married Lady Anne Scott, daughter of the
Earl of Buccleuch, when he was only fourteen years of age, but the
union does not appear to have been a happy one. When the
Duchess came to take her last leave of him after his condemnation,
the interview is said “to have passed with decency, but without
tokens of affection”; the prisoner’s heart was elsewhere. Monmouth
had no lack of clergymen to see him pass out of the world at the
close of his short and wasted life, for during the day and night before
he died, four ecclesiastics were in attendance upon him, and they
never left him till the end. These were Tenison, then Vicar of St
Martin’s-in-the-Fields, but afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, and Primate;
Turner, Bishop of Rochester; Hooper, afterwards Bishop of Bath and
Wells; and the saint-like Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells.
When Tenison reproached the Duke for the want of feeling he had
shown towards his wife, Monmouth replied that “his heart was turned
against her, because in his affliction she had gone to the play and
into public companies, by which I knew she did not love me.” The
woman he loved best, and with whom he had been living, was Lady
Harriet Wentworth, the daughter of Lord Cleveland.
Accompanied by the four clergymen, Monmouth left the Tower on
the morning of the 15th of July, at ten o’clock; the writ for the delivery
of the Duke’s body to the Sheriffs is still to be seen in the Record
Office, being addressed to Sir William Gostling and Sir Peter
Vanderpatt, and endorsed by them on receiving the Duke from the
charge of the Lieutenant of the Tower.
Monmouth passed on foot through a lane of soldiers, preceded by
three officers, who carried pistols and accompanied him on to the
scaffold. The Duke’s appearance caused a commotion in the crowd
which had come to see him die; he had always been a favourite with
the people, his personal beauty probably being the principal reason
for his popularity; and he was also regarded as a kind of hero on the
Protestant side, as opposed to James the Second and the Romish
priests. The populace had recently given him the title of “King
Monmouth.”
The scaffold was all draped in black. Monmouth made no speech
to the people, but only conversed with the clergymen near him; but
he had prepared the following statement, written on a sheet of paper,
which he gave to one of the Bishops:—“I declare that the title of King
was forced upon me, and that it was very much contrary to my
opinion when I was proclaimed. For the satisfaction of the world I do
declare that the late King told me he was never married to my
mother. Having declared this, I hope that the King who is now, will
not let my children suffer on this account. And to this I put my hand
this 15 July 1685. Monmouth.” This extraordinary statement was also
signed by the four clerics and the two Sheriffs.

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This book explores the transformation of journalism in the face of economic

2017; articles in Journalism Studies Special issue ‘Future of Journalism: In an

The News Business in Trouble

The Collapse of Traditional Funding Models

0.50 Financial Times Express

Fig. 1. UK Daily Newspaper Average Circulation Per Issue by Month, 2000 –

The Reasons That Explain the Trouble

data to understand audiences. It enables them to offer advertisers so-called tar-

The Importance But the Peril of (Measurable) Attention

Competing with Multiple Players for Attention

Striving to Win Over Digital Audiences

New Funding Strategies

The pricing of Facebook ads is based on an auction system where

Google and Facebook have an attention-based ad-charge model – the more

Algorithms, Cloud Computing

A Continuity of Digital Transformation of Newsrooms

There is a blank in the list of commitments to the Tower between

Arthur Comte d’Essex

During the four years in which James the Second misgoverned

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List of Figures and Tables vii

Chapter 1 The News Business in Trouble 5

Chapter 2 Algorithms, Cloud Computing and Journalism 29

Chapter 3 Revisiting the Importance of Data Journalism 47

Chapter 4 The Tabloidisation of Journalism as Digital Logic 61

Chapter 5 Tensions Between Journalism and Politicians 75

Conclusion: The Transformation of Quality Journalism 109