
Mirror editor-in-chief Caroline Waterston defended having page-view targets for her journalists at the Society of Editors Conference in London on Tuesday.
Waterston, who has been in the role for about a year, said that after the Mirror newsroom previously raised concerns about having the targets, they are now “really coming along on the journey”.
Asked by panel chair and BBC News media editor Katie Razzall about fears of clickbait, Waterston said: “I don’t think we should shy away from the fact that we want our journalism to be read or to be seen by as many people [as possible]. And if that means that we have a goal for our reporters, I believe that’s the right decision.
“I do not believe we should be writing content for the sake of clickbait in the old use of the word, the bad use.
“Page views are essentially people with eyes on your content and as long as you are looking at that with other metrics whether it be engagement, whether it be most talked about, most commented, it’s something that actually I would say the newsroom are really coming along on the journey with.”
Mirror owner Reach set out the value of page views in its annual report published this month: “As a largely ad-funded model, page views are our digital currency. And while customers do not pay directly for their content, they give us their time and attention, which we measure most simply via these page views.”
Headlines should be ‘alluring but not clickbaity’
Richard Duggan, regional editor in the North West for Newsquest, told the panel clickbait is often mischaracterised but there is a “fine line”.
“People misuse the word clickbait all the time and use it for a certain agenda. Ultimately if a headline gives away the entirety of a story, why would you click and read it?
“There are some times when you do play a headline straight and I think that’s absolutely the right thing to do. But I think there’s nothing wrong with an alluring headline but there is a fine line that’s often trampled on by journalists and it’s not doing our industry any good so we really, really have to work hard to make headlines alluring but not clickbaity.”
Duggan also spoke about how he sees the biggest challenge right now as “where we’re getting our traffic from. Facebook I don’t think is our friend, which might sound like not a very nice thing to say but it isn’t.” Duggan cited Meta ending its funding for the Community News Project (since saved by the NCTJ) which he said was “effectively pulling its support for community journalism.
“We have for too long as an industry relied on Facebook and other social media platforms for our traffic and we’ve really got to get people coming back directly to our websites.” Duggan added that social media will always have a part to play but we “can’t rely on them”.
Duggan also said that Newsquest “still make a hell of a lot of money” from its newspapers, which still have an audience and must not be treated as “an afterthought”. “If you can show your readers that you still love that print product,” they will hold up better, he said.
The i Paper: Digital subscriptions having ‘halo effect’ on print
Also on the panel, Oly Duff, editor of The i Paper, revealed how the brand’s digital subscriptions strategy is making the print side of the business more “resilient” in the long term.
The i Paper consistently has one of the smallest year-on-year print circulation drops among the UK’s national newspapers, down 5% to 119,333 in February (a decline of 3% month on month).
Duff said this “puts us in a position where five years down the line we can be fairly confident we’ll make more money from the print edition than we currently do”.
This echoes what Duff told Press Gazette in November 2023 when he “confidently” predicted that “thriving” print revenue would continue to see growth for years to come.
He echoed Duggan when telling the panel it is important to “keep loving” the print product, adding that there is a “nice crossover” from the content created to fit into the digital subscriptions strategy.
He said that “feeds quite nicely back into the print edition… it’s benefitting from the halo effect… you have to show readers the evidence every day.”
Duff added that The i Paper’s readers are clearly “tolerant of price increases” and that this is helping to result in higher average revenue per user/reader. Despite an increase in price from 65p to £1 in the past five years, The i Paper is now the cheapest UK national newspaper with The Sun and the Daily Star overtaking it to £1.10.
Duff also spoke about the value of hiring and promoting the right people – who he described as optimists – for the newsroom.
He said he looks for “newsroom resilience and optimism and the mix of skills within them. It’s around building leaders, creating teams who are resilient and optimistic in the face of this perpetual transformation which has just been a fact of life. The newsroom at The i Paper – I’m sure it’s true for everyone else – six months ago is different to the one today and very different in another 12 months’ time. So it’s being able to hire and develop optimists, people who can imagine the impossible, people who have a really high tolerance for ambiguity and change.”
Duff added that The i Paper now has engineers, product designers, researchers and analysts “actually sat in the middle of our newsroom because that’s the only way you can actually drive change at the pace we need. Obviously one of the challenges there comes from the salaries that those people can earn outside of the news industry.”
AI: ‘The key thing is to know what’s being stolen’
On AI, Sky News UK managing director and executive editor Jonathan Levy said it is both an opportunity and a threat. “We have agency about how we use it so we shouldn’t get too carried away,” he said.
“It’s not originating tech, it’s kind of replicating technology so I think it goes back to this idea that if you’re originating, if you’re doing original journalism, that’s something that for the time being at least, and in my mind for a long time to come, AI is not going to do that. AI is not going to do what Yousra Elbagir does and report on the fall of Khartoum [in Sudan]…
“So in that way I feel confident. And at the same time I think like all technology, AI may be helpful in creating the space to do more of the journalism that’s original, that’s creative and is going to engage audiences.”
Meanwhile Duff said: “We tell a few lies about AI – there’s three of them. One is that regulation’s a barrier to AI firms in the UK…
“The idea that copyright law in the UK is unclear – it’s not. Scraping for commercial purposes without a licence is unlawful. The law’s not being enforced. The Government’s got itself into a big mess and we’re facing a critical few weeks now,” he said referring to the wait for the Government’s response to its recent public consultation about a proposed system which would allow AI platforms to use content unless the creator opts out, something opposed by many publishers and other creative industries.
“But the third lie we’ve been told is a really big one – it’s the claim that gen AI firms don’t need our content in the future, they’ve already trained these models. LLMs are incredible powerful but the limitations on the training data that have – they are not capable of knowing the news before it’s happened whether that’s advancements in science and medicine or it’s political shifts or it’s the future of tech or it’s what Taylor Swift’s up to or finances – none of this stuff.
“So they have to keep on scraping. They have to keep augmenting the training data they have with real-time data, and that fast-moving data, non-static stuff is the thing that we as news media are creating and is actually really valuable. And so the really key thing to know is what’s being stolen.”
Duff referred to the investment made by The i Paper’s parent company DMGT into Prorata.ai, which is designed to share revenue with publishers when their content is used to answer a user query.
He said: “What they’ve managed to do is show you can reverse engineer an answer from an AI engine and you can go ‘oh right, that’s 38% Sky… or The i Paper or the FT or whatever. And part of the Prorata model is to start talking about revenue share with the publisher and you’re into a really interesting space there. You can start to talk around the value of your future journalism.”
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