James Staunton: Fake news is good news for publishers
3 min read
Fake news has been a huge news story since the use of the term exploded in the last quarter of 2016, courtesy of US Pumpkin-In-Chief Donald Trump. But fake news is not necessarily bad news for publishers.
Publishers have suffered at the hands of internet platforms with low overheads – and especially social media giants like Facebook, which have been eating their advertising budgets for breakfast – for years. Until now they have had very limited success in meeting the challenge posed by Facebook and Google, focusing their efforts mainly on cost cutting. While their business models have been undermined and their high production values increasingly challenged over the last 20 years, fake news suggests it’s not too late to get back on the front foot.
Because fake news has highlighted the value of professional news brands and their ability to create quality, fact-checked, well-regulated journalism – rather than automated clickbait. To paraphrase Don Draper, fake news has created an itch and publishers of quality, mainstream journalism are providing the calamine lotion.
In research carried out by Instinctif Partners (more here) two in every five (39%) of respondents to a poll of 2,000 people we commissioned said the increasing prominence of fake news has highlighted the need to get news from media outlets with large news teams – “boots on the ground” dedicated to finding out the truth. While 60% of those polled agreed it had, only 7% disagreed.
The public said the rise in fake news had made them more likely to consume news from a media outlet that sets out both sides of a story – even if they disagreed with one side of the argument. While 57% said they were more likely to turn to outlets that gave both sides of the story, only 6% said they disagreed.
The issue has also underlined the dangers of relying on media outlets that choose what people read via secret algorithms. While there may be good reasons why Facebook puts a particular news story in a reader’s feed, they have no way of knowing what those reasons are. When Instinctif asked if fake news had emphasised the need to get news from sources that choose what is printed via publicly available editorial policies, 59% of people agreed, while only 7% disagreed. The results also showed that 44% of news consumers would trust a media outlet more if they knew what their editorial policies were – while only 18% think they would not (38% said they didn’t know). Half of those polled (50%) agreed “we are moving into a ‘black box society’” – a world in which human freedoms and options are increasingly influenced by mysterious algorithms.
By seizing this opportunity, the traditional, mainstream media can win back the initiative. We have seen this in the numbers. The CEO of the New York Times says there is such a thirst for objective information that the paper is putting on subscribers – it added 265,000 digital subscriptions in the last three months of 2018. The Spectator is now selling more print copies than at any time in its 189-year history. In the wake of fake news, Radio 4’s Today programme increased its weekly listeners to a record high. While newyorker.com has been growing for over a decade, fake news has seen it start to fire on all cylinders – it had 22.5 million unique visitors in September 2018, a 27 percent increase compared to September 2017.
In the era of fake news, where you get your analysis from has never been more important.
By James Staunton
James Staunton is a partner at communications consultancy Instinctif Partners specialising in thought leadership PR and the author of an influential report on fake news
