Google and Meta spent a record amount on advertising in the UK last year as the tech giants came under greater regulatory pressure in Westminster.

According to Nielsen, estimates shared with Press Gazette show Google’s ad spend in the UK in 2022 was £195m, up 16% from 2021.

Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, spent £90m on marketing campaigns in the UK, up 58% from the previous year.

Only a fraction of Google and Meta’s ad spend went towards traditional media outlets.

Google spent £1.6m on press advertising last year, down from £3.1m in 2021, while Meta spent less than £900,000, down from £1.7m.

TV advertising accounted for £26.3m (14%) of Google’s ad spend and £12.7m (14%) of Meta’s UK marketing outlay.

Google spent 61% of its money on digital video advertising, an area dominated by its sister brand Youtube. Meta’s biggest areas for ad spend were on outdoor media (£29.3m) – a category that includes advertising boards – and social media (£23m).

Both firms' spending has grown significantly in recent years, according to the Nielsen figures (below), which go back to 2017.

Over the same period, the proportion of money spent on press advertising has declined. Google's £1.6m of press advertising last year was its lowest outlay in the period, while Meta's £0.9m was its lowest since 2017.

So far in 2023, Nielsen has tracked £14m of Google ad spend in the UK, including £0.9m in the press, and £10m by Meta, with £0.4m going to the press.

In recent months, as the tech duo face increased regulatory pressure in the UK, including through the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill, Google has taken out several high-profile ads in newspapers and in Politico’s Playbook newsletter to highlight its benefits to the news industry and wider economy. It is not clear whether these ads are counted in the 2023 totals so far.

[Google and Meta have made 6,773 grants to news publishers: What are they up to?]

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The BBC has won a Freedom of Information court case against Press Gazette to keep secret the amount of money it paid a consultancy to produce a report that highlighted the corporation’s value for money.

The “deprivation study”, titled “What is life like without the BBC” and written by consultancy firm MTM, was published on 27 April 2022, shortly after the government announced a licence fee freeze.

For the study, MTM deprived 80 households, most of them containing licence fee sceptics, of access to the BBC for nine days. One of its key findings, highlighted by director-general Tim Davie, was that “the majority of the households underestimated the value that they get from the BBC”. The full study ran over 70 pages.

Shortly after the report was published, on 3 May 2022 Press Gazette sent an FOI request asking the BBC to reveal the total cost of producing this report. The BBC declined to release the information, citing section 43(2) of the FOI Act that protects “commercial interests” and upheld this decision after Press Gazette asked for an internal review.

The Information Commissioner’s Office later sided with Press Gazette and ordered the BBC to release the figure. The commissioner said the BBC had failed to demonstrate how the release of the information would damage its commercial interests.

Rather than release the information, the BBC made an appeal to the First-tier Tribunal (General Regulatory Chamber), claiming that its commercial interests would be harmed – in part because it could affect future negotiations with other market research agencies – and arguing that disclosure would also “be likely to harm the commercial interests of MTM”.

The BBC said it was concerned that disclosure would “set a damaging precedent for future research work” and that consultancies could be “discouraged from working with us in the future”.

MTM was concerned that the release of the information would enable competitors to calculate its rates and “deliberately undercut MTM in future competitive tenders for comparable work”.

Press Gazette argued that there was a public interest in disclosure.

The tribunal found that the section 43(2) exemption was engaged “as both the commercial interests of the BBC and of MTM are affected” and that “there is a real and significant risk of prejudice to the commercial interests” of both.

The tribunal’s panel, which had access to confidential information about the contract between the BBC and MTM, further ruled that the public interest “lies in favour of non-disclosure”.

It found that the information about a contract awarded via a competitive tender process would “not add any greater understanding of the value for money of the contract”. It said MTM had awarded the contract “at a competitive discounted rate”. It noted that the BBC already publishes some information about its research costs.

It also said: “There is limited public interest in the cost of one study – particularly in a context where other financial information and process information is already published to meet the public interest in the way the BBC spends public funds and given the fact that this is one cost within a significant marketing budget.”

Read the full judgment here.

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An academic who tracked 6,773 philanthropic grants Google and Meta made to the global news industry has concluded that the tech giants’ “primary goal has been to reap reputational and political gains”.

Charis Papaevangelou, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, sought in his study to investigate the extent to which the firms have been able to “capture” the news industry by making publishers reliant on their services and funds.

Papaevangelou told Press Gazette his research, titled “Funding Intermediaries: Google and Facebook’s Strategy to Capture Journalism”, had been hindered by “obfuscation” from the tech companies, which refused to release payment data and information.

He suggested this lack of transparency, reinforced by non-disclosure agreements that have been signed by partner news companies, was part of a wider strategy to “divide and conquer” the journalism industry.

The strategy, he alleged, was to make publishers reliant on platform tools and funding while prohibiting them from speaking to peers about their relationships with big tech. This, he said, made it difficult for news companies to stand together, push for regulatory change and to negotiate with platforms.

Papaevangelou, whose research was conducted in collaboration with McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, said his study suggested there “could be a correlation” between the “intensity” of payments by country and “political will” in those countries to regulate big tech.

The study focused on payments, grants and other forms of support offered to publishers through the Google News Initiative, including the Journalism Emergency Relief Fund that was launched in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Facebook Journalism Project. The report said that the payments from Google and Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, “should be seen as a subtle diversification and expansion of their lobbying activities”.

Papaevangelou told Press Gazette he believes the philanthropic funding, often distributed through “funding intermediaries” such as academic institutions and trade bodies, is designed to “create or reinforce the sense of dependency that the industry has on them” and to make it more difficult for publishers to “collectively stand against them”.

The paper explained: “Both platforms’ endeavours to fund journalism, news organisations and other relevant stakeholders are part and parcel of their strategy to become the de-facto infrastructural backbone of the news industry.”

It later added: “News media organisations, by receiving grants from platforms are opening themselves to an increased dependence on the latter and, as such, run the risk of getting captured by the platforms’ interests, whims, and governance.”

How the 6,773 payments were spread internationally

The researchers identified 6,773 beneficiaries of the Google News Initiative, including the Journalism Emergency Relief Fund launched in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and Facebook Journalism Project between 2017 and early 2022.

The study found 5,510 recipients of Google News Initiative funding, 942 Facebook Journalism Project beneficiaries and 321 publishers that received money from both.

The study was focused solely on philanthropic programmes rather than cash-for-content schemes such as Google News Showcase and Facebook News.

The United States had more beneficiaries (2,203) than any other country, with Brazil (424) and Canada (339) in second and third positions.

Papaevangelou suggested that the high number of payments made in Brazil may have been linked to the threat of the so-called Fake News Bill, which threatened to force Google and Meta to pay for news.

He said: “That was another hint in our hypothesis that platforms prioritise regions and jurisdictions that have a strong news industry, with many organisations. Because this is where, on the one hand, public pressure can build up on public authorities and governments to regulate platforms…

“And in countries where there is public regulation being proposed or developed or enforced, this can be seen as a way of actually trying to salvage their reputation, fight it and turn the tide, basically. Now, the extent to which they have been successful, it’s a matter of how you see it. But, I mean, [their motivations are] pretty obvious, I think.”

The data was also broken down by continent. North America (2,842) and Europe (1,805) accounted for 69% of all payments. Africa, which has a larger population than Europe and North America added together, received 121 of the grants. Asia, the largest continent by population, received 893 payments, according to the research.

Asked to explain the continental discrepancies, Papaevangelou said: "An important thing to consider is the fact that most of these grants require co-funding and an already existent professional organisational backbone (to a certain degree, of course), which might be more difficult to find in developing regions.

"Another potential explanation could be the fact that most ‘bad press’ and regulation (or the one that ‘affects’ platforms the most) comes from predominantly Western countries or important markets for platforms, which are prioritised.

"Finally, I thought that this pattern was particularly concerning given that the explicit goal of much of this funding during the examined period was to address the effects of Covid-19 pandemic, which has been an important global issue."

How big tech 'obfuscation' hindered the study

Papaevangelou told Press Gazette he had spent around a year working on this project. He said a major challenge of the research was accessing the data because the tech firms have not published the data in an accessible format.

Much of his work, therefore, included scouring through press releases and qualitative reports that mentioned recipients. And there were “very few cases” in which Google or Meta revealed the size of payments.

Papaevangelou said he was able to speak with representatives of Meta, after contacting representatives through Linkedin and Twitter, but that Google “totally ignored us”.

“I have to be cynical,” he said. “I wasn’t surprised. And frankly, this is a common experience that other researchers have had… This is, I think, a common practice of obfuscation and making access to data hard.”

Asked why he believed the companies were reluctant to make this information available, he said: “I think that part of their business model is to divide and conquer. So if we had access to that data, the industry could identify who’s getting what, and that could create further tensions in the relationship between platforms and the mainly larger incumbent players of the news industry.”

The study concluded that the "informational opaqueness of many of these financial arrangements" make relationships between the media and big tech "deeply asymmetrical", which "reduces publishers' negotiating power and increases their dependency".

At the time of writing, the Google News Initiative is still active and claims to have distributed $300m in funding to more than 7,000 news organisations. The Facebook Journalism Project, now known as the Meta Journalism Project, has become less active.

Google and Meta did not respond to requests for comment.

Papaevangelou's full dataset can be viewed here.

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Update 30 June: A week after Canada passed the Online News Act and Meta said it will block news on Facebook and Instagram, Google has now followed suit.

Google said it would remove all Canadian news links from its Search, News and Discover platforms when the Online News Act takes effect.

Kent Walker, Google and owner Alphabet’s president of global affairs, also said it would be “untenable” to continue with its Google News Showcase product in Canada.

Walker said in a blog: “The unprecedented decision to put a price on links (a so-called ‘link tax’) creates uncertainty for our products and exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating Canadians’ access to news from Canadian publishers.

“We have been saying for over a year that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism in Canada and may result in significant changes to our products.”

Walker said Google will “participate in the regulatory process and will continue to be transparent with Canadians and publishers as we move forward”, adding: “We hope that the Government will be able to outline a viable path forward.

“Otherwise, we remain concerned that Bill C-18 will make it harder for Canadians to find news online, make it harder for journalists to reach their audiences, and reduce valuable free web traffic to Canadian publishers.”

Canada’s heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez said in a statement, reported by Fortune, that Google’s decision was “deeply irresponsible and out of touch… especially when they make billions of dollars off of Canadian users. Canada needs to have a strong, free and independent press, it’s fundamental to our democracy.”

Original story 23 June: Canada’s parliament on Thursday passed the Online News Act, which will seek to force Google and Facebook to pay publishers for news.

The legislation, which could lead to deals worth CA$329m a year for publishers according to a parliamentary estimate, is now awaiting royal assent before it becomes active.

In response Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said that it would follow through with threats to block “news availability” on its platforms in Canada before the bill takes effect.

At the time of writing Google, owned by Alphabet, had not issued a statement in response to the legislation, which will come into force six months after it receives royal assent. The search giant has already expressed reservations about the Online News Act and has experimented with news-blocking some of its Canadian users.

Canada’s Online News Act is roughly based on Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, which was passed into law in early 2021.

In Australia, the tech giants made several threats about withdrawing services from users and Facebook did briefly block news on its platform. (A Wall Street Journal investigation alleged that Facebook’s news ban had “deliberately caused havoc” by also blocking access to the pages of emergency services and charities as well as publishers.)

But, ultimately, the News Media Bargaining Code persuaded Google and Facebook to strike cash-for-content deals with publishers that were thought to be worth more than AU$200m a year cumulatively.

In an interview with Press Gazette’s Future of Media Explained podcast last month, the head of Canada’s news industry body, which has long lobbied for the legislation, said he believed Google and Meta would come to recognise that it was in their “self-interest” to retain news on their platforms.

Paul Deegan, the president and chief executive of News Media Canada, advised publishers in others countries to not be “intimidated” by their threats.

The UK, US and several other countries are considered introducing similar laws.

Like the News Media Bargaining Code in Australia, Canada’s Online News Act enables publishers to band together to negotiate deals with Google and Facebook. Both laws contain the threat of final-offer arbitration if deals cannot be struck.

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UK publishers have raised the prospect that Apple could, like Google and Facebook, be forced to pay for news under the upcoming Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill.

DMG Media, which owns the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Mail Online, Metro, the i and the New Scientist, and the News Media Association, which represents news publishers across the UK, both mentioned the possibility of Apple paying for news in written submissions made to the House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee.

Press Gazette asked three senior news industry sources whether their organisations would be pushing for Apple to be impelled to strike cash-for-content deals. Two said they would be, though one wasn’t sure it was “realistic”. The third did not indicate their publisher would target Apple, but said they thought it was a “possibility” that the tech giant could in the future be forced to pay for news.

Apple News is the UK’s most popular news app, just ahead of BBC News and well ahead of any other rival. Publishing partners on Apple News, which include most of the UK’s largest news brands, are offered a share of advertising revenue, depending on their reach, and some can sell subscriptions through the app. Apple News+, the premium version of the app, directly pays partners – including The Times and Sunday Times in the UK, as well as dozens of magazines – for their content.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

What is the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill?

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill is a wide-ranging piece of legislation that seeks to ensure competition in the UK’s technology sector for the benefit of both consumers and companies.

Under the rules of the law, the Digital Markets Unit – a newly created division of the Competition and Markets Authority – would have the power to “designate” companies for regulation in areas of the digital sector in which they are judged to have market dominance, or “strategic market status” (SMS). They will then be subject to bespoke codes of conduct that seek to introduce greater competition.

The most obvious targets for this legislation are Alphabet (which owns Google and Youtube), Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp), Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

Most notably for the news industry, the Digital Markets Unit is expected to designate Google and Meta and draw up codes of conduct that would seek to address their dominant role in news.

The result would be that UK regulators effectively force Google and Meta to pay publishers for news content. This is the UK’s answer to Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code – which led to Google and Meta agreeing licencing deals with publishers worth more than AU$200m a year – and Canada’s Online News Act, which was passed in Ottawa’s parliament last week.

The UK legislation has been in the pipeline for years. The government kicked off the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill at the end of April.

Telegraph calls for ‘pioneering’ UK law to be ‘more explicit’

In submissions to the House of Lords review, published last week, DMG Media, Telegraph Media Group and the NMA were all broadly supportive of the legislation.

The Telegraph said that the bill, with “some limited amendment”, “has the potential to be one of the pioneering efforts (alongside the EU, Australia and, shortly, Canada) to recognise the contribution that news production makes to society and the quality of the democratic discourse and take measures to address the power imbalance with dominant digital platforms”.

It said: “The maintenance of the UK’s news media sector relies on the ability of news publishers to secure adequate revenue from the content they generate. The Bill represents an important opportunity to ensure that this issue is addressed and a pro-competitive market sustains a vibrant media sector.”

The Telegraph suggested that the bill would be improved if it made “its role more explicit in supporting news publishers vis-à-vis the major online platforms.

“The digital world has brought huge changes to the way in which content is accessed and consumed, but also to the way in which the production of news media content is financed by advertising and reader revenues,” it said.

“For news publishing organisations, traditional newspaper sales (and directly associated advertising revenues) are in steady structural decline. Over the past 30 years, news publishers have seen advertising revenue reduce from more than half total revenue to less than a third. This decline is not offset by growth in online revenues, and this is acutely the case for online advertising revenue.”

DMG Media: ‘News publishers’ digital revenues have fallen by another 20%’ since 2018

DMG Media praised the bill for its “flexibility to deal with rapidly changing markets” and for being “rigorous”. DMG predicted it would be a “model for many other jurisdictions around the world”.

The publisher suggested the legislation could be “speeded up” to help publishers sooner. It wants the bill to be passed by Christmas or early in 2024.

It said: “The Bill is the culmination of five years of work, beginning with the Cairncross Review in 2018, and continuing with the Furman Review, CMA Digital Advertising Market Study, and numerous subsequent consultations.

“During this time news publishers’ digital revenues have fallen by another 20%, while the market dominant online platforms have continued to make vast profits. It is therefore vital, if the UK is to maintain a sustainable and pluralistic news publishing industry, that the Bill becomes law without delay.

“We understand the hope is that the Commons Committee stage can be completed by the Parliamentary summer recess. We appreciate the Bill must then be carried over into the next session of Parliament after the King’s Speech in the autumn.

“Of course, as the Bill is drafted, a number of significant actions can only be initiated once it becomes law. We therefore hope the Bill can complete its Parliamentary stages as soon as possible, ideally by Christmas or early next year.”

Could Apple be forced to pay for news?

In their submissions to the bill, both DMG Media and the NMA took issue with section 20, which seeks to restrict a regulated firm’s ability to “leverage” its size to build up an unfair advantage in an area where they are not currently judged to hold “strategic market status” (SMS). The news organisations would like section 20 to be bolstered.

Section 20 of the bill currently states that codes of conduct will prevent the target firm from “carrying on activities other than the [SMS activity] in a way that is likely to increase the [its] market power materially, or bolster the strategic significance of its position, in relation to the [SMS activity]”.

DMG and the NMA suggested the wording should be amended to prevent a targeted tech firm from “carrying on activities other than the relevant digital activity in a way that is likely to harm competition in the relevant digital activity or the other activity, increase the undertaking’s market power materially, or bolster the strategic significance of its position, in relation to the relevant digital activity, provided that the conduct is related to the relevant digital activity”.

In other words, DMG and the NMA want to ensure that tech firms – like Apple – are not able to evade regulators while using their clout to unfairly build up market dominance in areas – such as news – that they are not currently judged to have “strategic market status”. Both DMG and the NMA specifically referenced Apple’s position in news, and also used their submissions to raise the possibility that Apple News fall under the scope of regulators.

“Since a SMS firm’s market power undoubtedly spills over into non-SMS activities and it can harm competition there, the leveraging principle is necessary and important – and without it the definition of the SMS activity would come under too much strain,” said DMG Media.

“Say for example that the Apple App Store is designated but Apple News isn’t. Apple could then still impose an unfair term in its Apple News contracts (e.g. about the use of news publishers’ data or their copyright) and claim that the term isn’t caught by the DMU because Apple News isn’t designated (even though the commercial reality is that Apple can impose that term due to its App Store and Operating System market power), by arguing that’s not where the unfair term happened and so legally it can’t be caught.”

Owen Meredith, chief executive of the News Media Association, told Press Gazette: “Government must not permit potential loopholes to frustrate the whole point of this well-designed regime. The DMU must be able to prevent big tech from undermining news publisher sustainability by simply shifting anti-competitive conduct to their non-designated business.

“For example, without a robust anti-leveraging requirement, Apple could impose unfair terms on publishers via its Apple News contracts, notwithstanding the overwhelming market power of the App Store and iOS Operating System gives it the clout to impose such terms.”

The NMA also said regulators should resist any attempts by technology firms to lobby for changes to the appeal process around the bill. It said that a “full merits or ‘judicial review-plus’ standard” would give them “great scope” to “obstruct or delay CMA decision making”. Meredith raised this point in a committee hearing last week.

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Update 2, 23 June: Vice UK journalists have called off their planned two-day strike after winning an improved redundancy package.

The National Union of Journalists said the terms had improved from £2,000 and statutory redundancy pay to £50,000 and statutory redundancy pay.

A spokesperson for the Vice UK NUJ chapel said: “Despite its inadequacies, the new package provides some support to those at the most junior levels and lowest salaries, and the NUJ chapel has decided to consider its most vulnerable members at a time of great uncertainty as they begin to look for new work opportunities.

“We are pleased that our actions have persuaded management to offer a more substantial package and hope that our colleagues can now gain further compensation for their hard work and dedication to the company over the years, as they begin to enter their individual consultations.”

Mostafa Rajaai, NUJ organiser, said they hoped to have a “more constructive relationship” with the new owners of the business, a group of lenders who bid for the company with secured debt they hold over it.

Update 1, 21 June: Journalists at Vice UK will strike for two days this month over “unfair” redundancy terms.

The National Union of Journalists confirmed staff being made redundant as a result of the company’s financial difficulties have been offered £2,000 and statutory redundancy pay. The NUJ said it is seeking fewer redundancies and an increased pay offer.

The Vice NUJ chapel said: “We believe it is Vice’s moral obligation to give those at risk the redundancy pay that they deserve, at a time of great uncertainty,” noting that those losing their jobs will be entering an “already saturated job market at a time of even greater scarcity”.

The strike will last from 10am on Thursday 29 June until 6.30pm on Friday 30 June.

Original story 9 June: Vice UK’s union chapel is balloting members on whether they would consider strike action in response to the online publisher’s redundancy offers.

Press Gazette understands that 23 jobs at Vice, mostly in video production and post-production, are at risk of redundancy.

On 31 May, the National Union of Journalists revealed that those facing redundancy had been offered “the bare minimum of statutory redundancy pay”. This could have left some outgoing staff with nothing.

Since then Vice’s management, represented by European chief operating officer Katherine Chandler, has held meetings with union reps to negotiate.

[Read more: Digital natives on the ropes: What next for online news publishers?]

Press Gazette understands management offered staff a flat redundancy payout of £2,000 on top to statutory redundancy. This was rejected by the chapel and negotiations are ongoing.

Under UK statutory redundancy rules, employees who have worked at their companies for two years or more receive half a week’s pay for each full year when they were under 22, a full week’s pay for each full year worked between the ages of 22 and 41, and 1.5 week’s pay for each full year completed at the age of 41 or over. Length of service is capped at 20 years and weekly pay is capped at £643.

Vice UK’s latest round of redundancies was announced in late April. In May its US parent company, Vice Media, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and said it was in talks to be acquired by its lenders for $225m. In Vice Media’s heyday, private investments valued the company at $5.7bn.

On 31 May, highlighting the statutory redundancy offer, the Vice UK chapel said in a statement that it was “devastated and shocked to learn that not only are dozens of colleagues been placed at risk of redundancy, but that the company is currently only prepared to offer the bare minimum of statutory redundancy pay to those affected.

“Throughout this process, the company has shown little regard for the personal circumstances of many of our colleagues affected, such as staff who are on maternity leave or pregnant, and many who are on lower salaries with less career experience.

“Vice seems determined to send the message that it is a profitable company and will emerge financially healthy from the Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This process should reflect that, and staff should be paid what they deserve. We implore the company to treat those facing potential redundancy with dignity and respect by offering pay packages that our colleagues deserve.”

Vice’s recent troubles have coincided with challenges at Buzzfeed, which announced the closure of its news division in April. Buzzfeed, at peak, had a private market valuation of $1.7bn. Today the market capitalisation of Buzzfeed, which now incorporates Huffpost and Complex Networks, stands at less than $100m.

Vice did not respond to a request for comment.

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The Popbitch office was everything I could have hoped for and more: a poky room, cluttered with odd collectibles and mundane office supplies, on the ground floor of a creaky Soho townhouse that had been converted into a shared office space.

On one shelf, a pack of Chairman Mao playing cards was propped up by a box of ink cartridges. On another, a Russian doll depicting Dmitry Medvedev was nestled between a bag of Fairtrade coffee and a stapler. A third was occupied by a mysterious silver suitcase and a white Bosch kettle, half filled.

After greeting me at the front door with a firm handshake, Popbitch boss Camilla Wright – dressed half smart with a silky black shirt up top and bright green trainers below – showed me to a seat at the far end of a rectangular metal table that took up much of the room. When she disappeared into a communal kitchen to make us some herbal teas, I took the opportunity to absorb my surroundings.

On her return, Wright handed me a souvenir mug that commemorated the coalition government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Wright, who I found to be softly spoken, polite and maybe even a little shy to begin with, spluttered a short laugh when I complimented her on Popbitch’s various office oddities.

“Well,” she offered by way of an explanation, “we’ve had an office somewhere in Soho for about 15 years, I guess, and therefore you build up random shit people send or that you use.”

From Devonport dockyard to Soho

Wright, 52, was born in Barbados and raised in central Plymouth, “near Devonport dockyard”. Her dad, “a Tottenham boy”, was a civil servant and her mum worked in a factory. (Wright believes she has retained a slight Devonshire twang – it is subtle – and said she had sometimes been mistaken for an Australian when abroad.)

She studied PPE at Oxford but eschewed the idea of going into political journalism. “The world of politics is so insular, so Westminster-focused. It struck me quite early that there were better ways to talk to people, there were better ways of doing journalism.”

By her late 20s, she had established herself as a freelance journalist with a specialism for music and celebrity interviews. In December 1999, Wright and her then-boyfriend Neil Stevenson, an editor at Heat, thought up the idea of sending out a weekly newsletter to friends sharing showbiz scuttlebutt that wasn’t making it into the mainstream media. And so, Popbitch was born.

Fairly swiftly, the newsletter and accompanying message board morphed from a bit of fun into an occupation for Wright. (Stevenson departed to edit style magazine The Face in 2002.) Legend has it that the Popbitch of the early noughties revealed the name of Madonna’s son, Rocco, before he was born, and was reporting on various celebrity scandals and infidelities long before the tabloids. (Popbitch was also apparently ahead of the game when it came to reporting on the scourge of tabloid phone hacking.)

Today, as its office space attests, Popbitch remains a small operation with a digestible level of output. “You have to have huge amounts of money to do the 24/7, always-on website,” Wright noted. “Whereas if you’re saying, ‘Ah, this is the only bit you need to know,’ it’s a bit of a cheat isn’t it?”

But Popbitch is notable by its cultural influence and by the fact its weekly email – still packed with (often lewd) celebrity stories, media gossip and geeky jokes – lands in more than 300,000 inboxes each Thursday evening.

Wright has so far resisted the temptation to expand Popbitch (although, spoiler alert: this could soon be on the cards). And when I asked her if she saw herself as an entrepreneur, she looked slightly embarrassed. “It’s been brilliant having a vehicle through which to practice journalism, practice talking to people,” she said shyly. “I think if I was a media entrepreneur I’d have probably sold it in 2004 to some oligarch and made several millions.”

‘We’ve had a legal letter from his brother, but not from Harry’

Wright has lived abroad since 2019 when her partner transferred to Hong Kong for work. Political protests and Covid-19 rules later persuaded the couple to move to Dubai. On leaving the UK, Wright handed over more Popbitch responsibilities to Chris Lochery, 38, who started out as an intern and shift worker in the late noughties and is now editor. Since 2020, Wright has balanced her Popbitch work with Red Knot Communications, a sports PR firm where she is now a partner.

Despite being three hours ahead of UK time in Dubai, Wright is a frequent virtual presence in the Soho office. “I’m quite happy to make a decision and edit things out, and also legally it’s my responsibility,” she said. “So I want everybody to feel at the end of the week, whatever stories have gone in, it’s my decision and I’m happy to go to court if I have to and nobody else would be on the hook for it.” Lochery told me Wright was “fantastic to work with. She’s very funny. We share a very similar love of music of all types. She’s a very mischievous force, which I really love. She’s one of my best friends and we speak every day.”

I met Wright on one of her visits to the UK. It was shortly before Prince Harry was due to appear in the High Court to give evidence against Mirror Group Newspapers. I asked Wright if she’d had any run-ins with the litigious prince. “No,” she said. “We’ve had a legal letter from his brother, but not from Harry.”

Wright has, inevitably, fallen foul of the UK’s legal system on occasion over the past 24 years. In 2008, for instance, Popbitch was forced to pay out “substantial” damages to the actor Max Beesley for making false claims about his sex life.

Changes to the UK’s Defamation Act have helped her cause a little, said Wright. But she added that tightened privacy laws mean there is now “so much you can’t write about”.

She said that Popbitch’s tone and coverage has also changed over the years in line with reader tastes. Wright suggested that the public’s appetite for stories about celebrities’ personal lives had changed in the aftermath of the phone-hacking scandal. “There’s much more in the way of self-censorship now,” she said. “The world’s changed, how readers respond to it as well, massively.”

As well, Wright said she tries to consider the “harm that stories can do to people”. “I hesitate to use the term ‘cancel culture’ because it has so much political connotation – but when we started, if you wrote a story about a pop star misbehaving, the worst that could happen was they could be slightly embarrassed for a couple of days. Now you could write the same story and someone’s career could end.”

‘It’s a lot of actual serious work. Sensible work’

In some ways, the average Popbitch week begins on Thursday evening, as the main newsletter lands in email inboxes. “That’s when the next week’s stories start coming in,” said Wright. “People see something and respond to it.”

On Mondays, Popbitch sends out a second email, providing developments from Thursday’s newsletter, plus stories from the weekend to its paying subscribers. It has two premium membership tiers: Club Popbitch, offering the Monday newsletter and daily music quizzes for £4 a month, and VIPbitch, which for £10 a month includes a quarterly “zine” and two tables at the annual Popbitch Popquiz.

Wright said that Popbitch typically receives between 40 and 50 story tips per week, around 10 of which become viable leads. “Some are those media and urban legends that go around and around and around that you’re not certain, but you’re pretty sure, are probably not actually true. Some sound like crazy. And some you won’t be able to stand up. So probably about one in four or five come to anything.” Much of Wright and Lochery’s time, therefore, is spent “filtering” and “trying to second source things”.

The Popbitch lifestyle involves less partying than you might imagine. Lochery, who I phoned after my interview with Wright, told me that he’d occasionally go to evening dos if they were deemed worthwhile but that more of his time was spent meeting trusted contacts for lunches, coffees and drinks.

I asked Wright if, living in Dubai, she missed London’s party scene. “No,” she said. “I think it was a good part of life… and I’m very pleased to come back and still be part of that world.

“But even back then, in order to do Popbitch it’s a lot of actual serious work. Sensible work. And, therefore, you can’t be the person out at 3am every night. I used to, and would still prefer to, send other people to those parties than go myself.”

Popbitch has the ‘potential to be a slightly bigger alternative news source’

Wright said that Popbitch’s main email newsletter had between 300,000 and 320,000 subscribers, a level it has hovered around for a while. She said Popbitch’s average email open rate is around 60%, well above the industry average of 15–25%, and that, because it is often forwarded on, “readership can be at least double subscriber number in some weeks”

Supplemented by some events, reader contributions, subscriptions and Axate-generated micropayments on certain paywalled articles, Wright said the business had always made enough money. She estimated that around 25–30,000 readers have either donated, paid for a subscription or contributed to Popbitch through micropayments in recent years.

“We’ve never really set up for revenue,” she said. “The audience is there, and the potential is there, but two people running it – I mean, we’ve essentially just [aimed] to hit every week how much we need to get by.” She added that Popbitch, “over the lifespan”, had probably generated on average “a couple of hundred” thousand pounds a year in revenue to cover its costs (which include Wright, Lochery and legal fees).

Over her 24 years running Popbitch, Wright said that she had been encouraged several times to expand beyond her current business model, being told variously: “You should be a blog with programmatic ads! You should be a TV show! You should pivot to video! You should be on Facebook!” Now, with email newsletters very much in vogue, she sounded pleased to have swerved much of this advice. “I think all those stages in media are obsolete now,” she said, “so we’d have died years ago.”

Now, though, she feels the time could be right for Popbitch to expand in some way. Intriguingly, she suggested this could be done in collaboration with another company.

“I’m starting to wonder, for the first time, whether it would be a good time to be part of a bigger organisation,” she said. “The technology available now in newsletter delivery and subscription, acquisition, advertising that a lot of the better-funded media groups have, we don’t have access to.”

Wright said that she had “been approached a few times lately by people looking to buy” Popbitch. “I’m not going to say who because – although some of them would be a good story – but I’ve never felt yet that we’ve found the right partner or home. So we may yet stay exactly as it is.”

It sounded a lot like Wright was using a Press Gazette interview to slap a “for sale” sign on Popbitch. “Not looking to sell,” she responded quickly, “but looking to see what options there are out there. Just because there are some people out there who are interested in buying it, there might be other people who are interesting to us.”

Asked what kind of organisation Popbitch could work with, Wright said again: “I don’t know. I suppose as well, over the last two or three years, we’ve done a lot of collaborations behind the scenes with other media companies, journalism media groups, on slightly bigger stories – tips that come into us that would require more resources and things like that. And I suppose formalising that in some ways might be of interest. Then again, there’s the downside, which is: why change this?”

‘A lot of people want to be an insider’

Part of the reason for Wright’s newfound interest in expansion comes from her belief that the “heritage media” is not designed for “normal Britain” and “doesn’t really show the world as most people see it”. She noted that some digital upstarts, such as Buzzfeed and Vice, showed promise but have since declined because of financial troubles and cuts.

“I think there’s been a general re-energisation of readers for something slightly different. And I don’t think that the media landscape, as it is now, really covers it.” She added: “I think there is a general distrust or disinterest in most media that’s out there.”

Wright said she felt there were “massive gaps to be filled”, and that Popbitch is “filling a niche of it”. When I asked her what other outlets were doing a good job at filling these voids, Wright named America’s Daily Beast, The Fence in London and Politico’s Playbook newsletter (although, she added, “it would be twice as good if it was half as long”).

The common theme between Popbitch and these three other outlets appears to be that they are broadly marketed as being written by insiders for insiders. “Everybody wants – no, not everybody – a lot of people want to be an insider,” said Wright.

“Popbitch’s readership, it’s always had a very good media, music industry, London creative base – but that’s not really where its growth came from. It’s anybody, and any group, that wants to feel that they have a good sense of what’s happening inside a story, whether they’re interested in music, sport, TV, politics, they just feel like they want to know a bit more than they’re being told.”

The irony of Popbitch, I reflected after my visit to its higgledy-piggledy one-room HQ, was that Wright, the ultimate insiders’ insider, is actually a bit of an outsider: a woman who grew up near Devonport dockyard and now documents London’s entertainment industry from Dubai.

“It might be insider news, but it’s very much aimed at people who are not necessarily part of the establishment,” was Wright’s take. “Maybe not being a lifelong insider, maybe bringing that outsider’s perspective into an insider’s world, has helped inform Popbitch a bit.”

Quickfire questions with Camilla Wright

Favourite Popbitch story? “I think one of the most fun ones, unexpected ones and ones that had an impact was when we thought we’d found Boris Johnson’s phone number on the internet and made a reference to it in Popbitch, assuming that people would go, ‘oh, that’s funny,’ and not realising that within seconds, tens of thousands of people, from what I can gather, actually found out the number and started ringing it.”

Newspaper? “Haven’t got one at the moment. I’m still a Times subscriber, but I used to really enjoy it and I find I’m enjoying it less.”

Magazine? “Haven’t really bought a magazine in years… I quite enjoy Vogue. Wired? Maybe Wired.”

Newsletter? Politico’s Playbook or the Daily Beast’s Confider.

Podcast? “I’m not a massive podcast listener. I really like Cautionary Tales, the Tim Harford one.”

Musician or band? “Miley Cyrus.”

Career low? “Getting sued by Max Beesley.”

Career high? “Maybe haven’t got there yet? Putting something together that people, in their hundreds of thousands, still bother to read every week.”

The post Inside Popbitch: ‘It’s a lot of actual serious work’ appeared first on Press Gazette.

Google will launch the US edition of its News Showcase aggregation platform this summer – about two years behind schedule, according to publishing sources spoken to by Press Gazette.

The technology giant announced the launch as part of a package of support focused on local news in the United States. It said that the Google News Initiative is launching new partnerships with five news associations to “provide financial grants and training to nearly 1,000 local publications”.

The Google News Showcase project is said to be worth $1bn to publishers around the world over three years and sees the search giant pay to aggregate headlines in a new section of its platform.

The timing of Thursday’s announcement is notable because it coincides with momentum in the US around laws that could force Google and Facebook to pay for news. The California Journalism Preservation Act, which is based on the national Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), is advancing through Sacramento.

Google said it will launch News Showcase with more than 150 news publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg and El Diario.

The New York Times, notably, was not referenced in Thursday’s press release, despite the publisher having recently signed a multi-million-dollar deal with the company. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the NYT’s deal was worth $100m over three years and did include Showcase.

Press Gazette first reported in 2021 that the US launch of Showcase had been delayed because Google was struggling to sign up news partners.

Google said that 90% of its News Showcase publications are local or regional titles based across 39 states. Partners named in the press release included the Duluth News Tribune, Nola.com/The Times-Picayune, Oaklandside, La Opinion, La Raza and Orlando Weekly.

It appears that Google has so far fallen short of signing up several of America’s largest publishers, including local publishing giant Gannett. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Gannett had rejected an offer of $6m a year to sign up to Showcase, making a counter-offer of $300m a year.

Google first launched the News Showcase aggregation platform in several countries in 2020. One year after launch, a Press Gazette investigation raised questions about Google’s interest in the platform. Evidence from publishers, shared with Press Gazette, suggested that Google was using Showcase payments to placate publishers in countries where legislation was threatening to force them to pay for news. As a result, for example, it appeared that Google had offered more generous deals to publishers in Australia – which passed its News Media Bargaining Code in 2021 – than news companies elsewhere.

In addition to the News Initiative and News Showcase funding, Google also announced the launch of Reader Revenue Manager, a suite of tools that are designed to help publishers monetise their content. It will be available in the US, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Peru.

The five partnering US associations referenced in Thursday’s press release were the Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION), the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP), Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN) & Institute for Nonprofit News (INN).

The post Google to finally launch News Showcase in the US as part of local news support package appeared first on Press Gazette.

Nick Robinson does not shy away from confrontation.

When he was political editor of the BBC, he had high-profile run-ins with Alex Salmond (who accused him of “heckling” him at an SNP press conference) and George W Bush (who, after being asked a question he didn’t like, told Robinson to “cover up your bald head”).

Nowadays, as a presenter on Radio 4‘s Today programme, Robinson’s job description includes leading “rough-tough interviews” with politicians and public figures, often for the showcase 8:10am slot.

In February this year, I experienced Robinson’s directness first-hand after I tweeted a Press Gazette chart that compared the growth of some commercial radio stations with decline across the BBC network.

Out of the blue, Robinson slid into my DMs with a note that began with the stomach-dropping words: “Re your tweet.” He went on to explain why he felt the graph, in isolation, was “slightly misleading”.

We patched things up. Robinson agreed to do this interview, and I found him to be friendly and generous with his time: the BBC had scheduled a 30-minute meeting, but Robinson stuck around for an hour. (And, despite some reservations about being caught off-guard by “dangerous questions” in the Broadcasting House elevators, he continued to field my queries as he escorted me off the premises.)

Still when, during our interview, Robinson casually said that many journalists were “arsey gits”, I couldn’t resist the temptation – with our Twitter exchange in mind – to ask if this was how he would define himself. “Oh, yeees,” he responded with a Cheshire cat grin. “Well,” he reconsidered, “I hope I’m not a git, actually. I’ll probably regret saying that. ‘Arsey git,’ says Robinson – I can see the headline now.”

I told Robinson I’d had the same vision. He cackled before giving me a stern look. “It’s not the first time I’ve said something like this, I should just warn you.” Alas, it was true: in 2006, an Independent headline described Robinson as “northern”, “arsey” and “confrontational”. Robinson didn’t seem to mind. “I mean: Am I arsey? Of course, I’m arsey.”

I met Robinson, 59, in a generic meeting room in Broadcasting House at 9:30am, half an hour after the end of his Friday shift on Today. His co-host that morning had been Justin Webb, who Robinson (under some coercion) loosely defined as his office bestie. (With apologies to Amol Rajan, Mishal Husain and Martha Kearney: when I asked Robinson if he had an office bestie, he answered that he and Webb had recently “danced the night away” at Abba Voyage with their partners, “if that’s a qualification for being a bestie?”)

Robinson, in a blazer and chinos, was perched at the end of a long table by the window. Spread out on the table in front of him was his flatcap, glasses, a blue watch and copies of that day’s FT and Times newspapers.

As is his routine, Robinson had gone to bed at 8 the night before. His alarm was set for 3:30 and he was in a taxi by 3:45. At around 5am, Robinson (a Manchester United fan) talks football with Barry (an Arsenal fan) in the basement canteen while drinking coffee alongside his helping of porridge. When he’s not on shift, Robinson tries to keep normal hours, which can be difficult. “There is a slight feeling of permanent jetlag.”

Impartiality rules have been changed ‘without anyone being told’

Shortly before I met Robinson, he had been lambasted by Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader turned GB News presenter, for suggesting, on the radio, that not many Today programme listeners were likely to tune into the upstart television station. Farage had called him “arrogant” and demanded rhetorically: “Who the hell do you think you are!?”

Naturally, I’d assumed the combative Robinson might have a view and want to extend this war of words. Not quite.

“Competition is good,” he said evenly when I started to ask him about new broadcast rivals like GB News and TalkTV. He quickly pivoted the conversation towards the United States, where Fox News recently paid out $787.5m to settle a libel case after it was accused of knowingly spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.

“The question I think we’ve got to ask ourselves is: are we sure it couldn’t happen here?” said Robinson. “Not today, not tomorrow, but one day?” He added that he felt the UK had “moved very quickly, without much public conversation, it seems to me, from a model of broadcasting impartiality,” covering the BBC, Sky, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and others, “to a completely different, much broader definition of what impartiality really is”.

He said it felt as though “news and highly partisan views are now routinely broadcast alongside each other on radio and TV news channels. Presenters tell viewers and listeners what they think. Serving politicians host their own shows and interview their own party colleagues, even during election campaigns. None of this, we’re told, is a breach of the rules. If so, the rules I’ve operated under, both at the BBC and ITV for more than 30 years, have been changed without anyone being told, let alone asked if they agree.”

Robinson suggested that broadcast regulator Ofcom (statement below) should instigate a form of public debate on this topic. “It’s not for broadcasters like me to set the rules,” he added, “but it is surely time that those who do – the regulator and our elected politicians – invite the public to discuss and debate how we can have news we can trust and if they want change to say so.”

Clearly, this was an issue at the top of Robinson’s mind. Later, when I asked about the future of the BBC’s licence fee funding model, he told me this was the “wrong debate” and that “no one out there gives a flying you-know-what about the funding model of the BBC. What they care about is whether in this country we preserve something that makes us unique.

“You go round the world, and [people] say: ‘You have got something we wish we had. You have got media we can trust.’ Let me stress: not just the BBC, but top-quality broadcast news made by Sky, made by ITN, as well as the BBC. You’ve got top-quality journalism, top-quality broadcast news, you’ve got fearless interviewers who can ask tough questions of any world leader and of their own leaders, you’ve got this based on [the concept] of impartiality.

“The basis of it is, as you watch it, you think: These guys aren’t asking this question because their proprietor – the guy who pays the bills – rang them up that morning, or rang their boss up, and said: ‘This is what I think.’ They’re not asking that because they’re simultaneously a member of parliament, an activist for a political party, or a columnist for a partisan newspaper.

“They’re asking these questions because they think they’re the questions that need answering, and they think that they’re questions sometimes that the public would want to hear and see answered. That is incredibly powerful prize: you build it up over decades and you throw it away like that. And that’s why I’m fearful.”

Today listening figures and ‘moments’

The timing of this interview was fortuitous for me, less so for Robinson who had recently returned from a holiday in Japan. The day before, RAJAR had released its latest radio listening figures. They showed that, in the first three months of 2023, Today’s average weekly audience had fallen by 792,000, or 12%, from the previous year.

Robinson said his reaction to the figures was to “stay calm” and think: “Look guys, we’re the market leader here. We’re the guys people want to have a pop at. We’re still the most influential morning news programme.” Which is all true. Today, in the first quarter of this year, drew an average weekly audience of 5.76 million people, according to RAJAR.

But he acknowledged that the show has had to change its game of late. “To state the bleedin’ obvious,” said Robinson, whose voice in person is identical to his on-air delivery, “it’s not enough to do the news. When I grew up you turned on the radio to find out what had happened, to literally learn events. Whereas most of us now grab our phones.”

To compete with phones, televisions, podcasts and music apps like Spotify, Robinson said Today had to deliver “moments” – “something you tell your friends about. You turn to your wife or husband, you turn to your partner, you stand over the water cooler, you say over a cup of coffee: ‘Did you hear that?’”

These “moments”, he added, could be “rough-tough interviews”, “powerful emotional moments” or “first-hand reporting”. He listed recent examples as his 8:10 interview the previous day with Ruth Kelly, the chair of Water UK – in which he challenged her on the scale of dividends that had been paid out to investors – as well as a first-hand dispatch from a reporter on the stabbing of a school teenager.

Today podcast mooted

Before my interview with Robinson, I’d heard a rumour that he and Amol Rajan were planning to launch a podcast spin-off of the Today programme.

“Podcast-tastic we are at the moment,” was Robinson’s evasive reply when I asked if this was true. “Yeah, there’s talk that – I’m sure one day we’ll do some – I mean, there is already a Today podcast called the Best of Today, but frankly it’s not well-known and it’s not well noticed. And we want to make sure that we come up with a podcast that we think really enhances what you get from Today daily if you tune in. It’s a bit ‘watch this space’ at the moment.”

When I asked if the BBC was running scared of The News Agents – a daily Global show fronted by four former BBC journalists that regularly tops the charts and recently said it had attracted 30 million downloads in its first nine months – Robinson said: “Oh, good God, we’re not running scared at all.” Had he listened to The News Agents much? “Much? No. I’ve listened occasionally. Look, they’re old mates, they’re old colleagues. I like Jon, I like Emily, I like Lewis as well. I think they do really good stuff. I’m not a regular listener.”

Robinson went on to note that podcasts in general – “this isn’t about News Agents per se, actually” – attract audiences that are “tiny compared with what Today gets”.

That may be the case for now. But podcasts are in the ascendancy, while Today, also facing increased competition from commercial radio stations like LBC, Talkradio, Times Radio and GB News Radio, may be heading in the opposite direction, at least according to the latest RAJAR numbers.

When I asked about this trend, Robinson shrugged it off, noting that there “have been endless developments” – including breakfast television and 24-hour news – that have seemingly imperilled the future of Today. The creation of podcasts, increased competition in radio and television, in speech networks, means people are asking that question again. And I say, not with complacency – because it is a challenge – but with some confidence: They’re all going to be proved wrong again.”

From ‘bouffant boy’ to BBC stalwart

Robinson grew up in Macclesfield. To my ears, he has no discernible north of England accent, something he puts down to having grown up in “posh Cheshire”. But he said he tended to sound more “Manc” when working in the BBC’s Salford offices or when sitting in Manchester United’s Stretford End.

At school, Robinson was known among friends as “the bouffant boy” because of his “big and ridiculous” hair. (He couldn’t recall when he’d gone bald when I asked. “I know that seems ridiculous,” he said, “but early. Early 30s? I literally can’t remember.”)

When Robinson was 18, he was involved in a fatal car crash. He survived while his two companions, including his best friend Will Redhead, were killed. Robinson, who named his son Will, said: “As your kids go through the age you were, and they drive for the first time, you relive it all again. You have the anxiety. I think about it a lot.”

Will Redhead’s father, Brian, was the legendary BBC journalist and Today programme presenter. He encouraged Robinson to pursue a career in broadcast journalism after he had graduated from Oxford, where he was president of the Oxford University Conservative Association.

Robinson joined the BBC as a trainee producer in 1986 and went on to work for Newsround, Crimewatch, Panorama, 5 Live and BBC News 24 before he was poached to become political editor of ITV News. He was coaxed back to Broadcasting House in 2005 when the BBC offered to make him its political editor. Robinson, who self-identifies as a “workaholic – it’s a disease, I need therapy” – did the job for a decade.

In 2015, a year when he was forced to take some time off work to recover from a lung cancer diagnosis, Robinson joined the Today programme. He also now hosts the Political Thinking podcast, which features in-depth, conversational interviews with public figures.

The first six months of 2023 have been a tumultuous time at the top of the BBC. This month chairman Richard Sharp will stand down from his post after coming under pressure over his relationship with Boris Johnson, the former prime minister who appointed him to his role.

“I thought it was another reminder that he who sups with Boris Johnson sometimes comes to regret it,” was Robinson’s take. He said he knew Sharp “a bit” and described him as a “decent and sincere man who tried his best”. Was he a good chairman? “What I saw was a guy who brought with him real interest in what the BBC does.”

Both Sharp and Sir Robbie Gibb, another BBC board member, have faced accusations that they are too close to the Tory government. Robinson said that governments have always tried to “control the BBC” but they are doomed to fail because the licence fee funding model enables the corporation to be “independent”. “So anything, or anybody, that compromises that, that’s a bad thing. But I’ve got confidence that this institution is not under the thumb of anybody.”

Quickfire questions with Nick Robinson

Favourite newspaper? “I think The Times does a bloody good job.”

Magazine? No favourite.

Podcast? Talk of the Devils (The Athletic’s Manchester United podcast).

Musician? “One name? I can’t do that.”

So, Abba then? “Oh, God, don’t put Abba! Abba is definitely not my favourite. Okay, here’s my embarrassing answer: I did in my youth go to seven Genesis concerts.”

Newsletter? No favourite.

The last thing that made you laugh hysterically? “This is just a weird answer, right, but we have a dog. And our dog finds the next-door dog annoying. And my son did [an impression of] our dog barking back, but basically instead of him barking, it was just a sort of stream of foul-mouthed abuse. So, our dog appeared to be saying [in dog bark tone]: ‘F*** off!’”

Which politician would you like to go to the pub with? Ken Clarke.

Do you ever regret working too hard? “Yes. Often. I’m a workaholic. It’s a disease. I need therapy.”

Career low? “I was angriest with myself – I don’t know if it’s a low, really – but I was angriest with myself when, during the Scottish referendum, I ended up having a row [at a press conference with then-SNP leader Alex Salmond]. It’s not a low in the sense that I feel guilty about it, I was just frustrated with myself.”

Career high? “Career high, just because it was an amazing moment rather than an amazing piece of journalism, was being told by George W Bush that I should cover my bald head when I asked him a question he didn’t like.”

Ofcom statement

In response to Robinson’s comments about impartiality rules, an Ofcom spokesperson said: “Our rules – which make clear that news and current affairs must be presented with due impartiality – came into force in 2005 following public consultation, and reflect the duties set for Ofcom by Parliament in this area. Our code makes clear that the approach to due impartiality may vary according to the nature of the subject, the type of programme and channel, and the likely expectation of the audience. We take into account all these important contextual factors in deciding whether or not a programme is duly impartial.

“Our rules are also clear that serving politicians cannot, in general, be a newsreader, interviewer or reporter in any news programme. And during an election period, candidates cannot present any type of programme.

“We are currently investigating an episode of Saturday Morning with Esther and Phil on GB News against our due impartiality rules. We are working to conclude this investigation as quickly as possible and will publish our decision on our website.”

The post Nick Robinson interview: Whatever happened to broadcast news impartiality? appeared first on Press Gazette.

A new academic study has found that news consumers prefer short-form videos that are produced or edited by journalists to those generated exclusively by artificial intelligence.

For the research, 4,200 people were shown clips from 14 news events involving the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Donald Trump and Justin Bieber. For each news story, one video was highly automated, one was partially automated with input from human editors, and the third was fully human-made. Each of the 42 individual videos was watched and rated by 100 people.

Comparing viewer opinions on each clip, the study concluded that “human-made videos have the edge over those created with automation”.

However, the difference between partially-automated videos and human-created clips was not significant in terms of how much they were liked overall, suggesting that “a modest use of automation, with some post-automation human editing, can be well received”.

The researchers found that human videos tended to rate more favourably in terms of “telling respondents things they didn’t know”, “professionalism”, “factfilledness,” being “engaging”, “comprehensiveness”, “story flow” and “understatedness”.

They were “on average rated as more emotive and lighter in tone” and were judged to include less “sensationalism”. Respondents also suggested that human-created videos made better use of audio, music and images.

[Read more: Survey finds half of newsrooms already ‘actively working’ with generative AI]

Dr Neil Thurman of Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich – who conducted the research along with Dr Sally Stares at City, University of London, and Dr Michael Koliska of Georgetown University – said of highly-automated videos: “They tended to be a little bit repetitive with the images that they used. They didn’t do quite as well matching images to captions and that sort of thing.” He suggested that perceptions of “sensationalism” in the AI videos may have related to the music that accompanied clips.

One of the automated videos, documenting the career of Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo in 60 seconds, was set to rock music. In an apparent error, it included one still image of Fernando Torres, a different footballer, and another showing England fans in a pub.

The researchers found that human-made videos did not stand out in terms of “story structure”, the “number of relevant facts presented”, “bias/fairness”, “subjectivity/objectivity”, “relatability”, “informativeness”, “clarity” and “accuracy”.

‘You’ve got to keep humans in the loop’

The study used human-made videos from PA Media and compared them with automated and semi-automated offerings made by Wibbitz, which counts Reuters, Conde Nast, USA Today, TMZ and NBC among its clients.

The highly-automated videos for the study were created using a script of text prepared for each news event. The automation tools sourced media including video clips and still images, added background music, and used a variety of pre-built “themes” that set the tempo and appearance of the videos. The semi-automated videos included edits from journalists, who could alter images, text and style.

[Read more: AI and journalism – Six things news publishers need to know]

“Our research shows that, on average, news consumers liked short-form, automated news videos as much as manually made ones, as long as the automation process involved human supervision,” said Thurman.

Koliska said that “one key takeaway of the study is that video automation output may be best when it comes in a hybrid form, meaning a human-machine collaboration. Such hybridity involves more human supervision, ensuring that automated video production maintains quality standards while taking advantage of computers’ strengths, such as speed and scale.”

Thurman told Press Gazette that he believed news publishers now recognise that “you’ve got to keep humans in the loop” when deploying automation.

“I think maybe a few years ago they were thinking more along the lines that AI would do more,” he said. “Now I think they’ve come to realise you need that human supervision and it’s just as fruitful for them to work on technologies that empower perhaps journalists who don’t have the training in some of the traditional video editing tools but still enable them to produce something that’s of professional quality.”

Read the full study here.

The post Study: AI news videos benefit from a human touch appeared first on Press Gazette.