News providers in the UK

Who are the major players in terms of news providers in the UK and what exactly do they own?

The National Readership Survey uses its national survey to estimate average monthly print readers for the whole of 2014 and uses data from Comscore to estimate PC and mobile readership for November 2014. It only provides combined print, PC and mobile readership for daily national newspapers and their websites

The Daily Mail newspaper is owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust who managed into 2014 to obtain revenue worth £1.86BN in 2014 alone. Rupert Murdoch who owns The Times, The Sun, The Sunday Times and News Corp UK, is the owner of at least a third of hte UK's market share for newspapers.

Impact of Google

Why has Google led to the decline of the newspaper industry?
Google has led to the decline of the newspaper industry by removing billions of dollars in classified advertising from the newspaper business, which is one of the key revenue sources for newspapers.

Find a statistic from the article that illustrates the decline of traditional news media.

About $40 billion dollars of advertising money has disappeared from the traditional news media platform which is about 60% of the ad revenue that the print media industry generated in 2000.

Looking at the graph featured in the article, what period has seen the steepest decline in newspaper advertising revenue? 

The period that has seen the steepest decline in newspaper advertising revenue is from 2000 to 2010, going from $60 billion dollars of advertising revenue to almost $20 billion dollars.

Do you personally think Google is to blame for newspapers closing and journalists losing their jobs? Why?

I personally think that Google is not to blame for newspapers closing and journalists losing their jobs. This is because they were sole responsible for the process of making information more widely available and accessible to anyone and everyone. Technology has advanced so much in the last decade that physical print media was doomed to fail as it was a platform of the past that could not keep up with the rapid expansion of technology.

Read the comments below the article. Pick one comment you agree with and one you disagree with and justify your opinions in detail.

You can’t single out Google just because it’s the largest digital company. Patch, for example, invested hundreds of millions into journalism in the US and continues to search for the model that will work going forward. There are many who are investing in the future of journalism. - Jane, January 5th 2014

I agree with this comment because it is absolutely unfair to single out Google purely because it is one of the largest company on the digital platform. As the person who submitted the comment states, there are most definitely companies which are going out of their way to invest in journalism and help to evolve it alongside the expansion of technology. Journalism doesn't mean it has to be in physical print media, it could be done online quite easily and this negative, pessimistic and narrow minded perspective will not help the industry expand.

Obviously, Google is not to blame. I don’t think it’s about blame. I think the Internet is incredibly poorly designed. Rather than being free, everything on it should cost something in order to compensate creators. We have a proven system for doing this through organizations like ASCAP and BMI. The principal of royalties for profiting from the content of others is well established. Google came along, and, at least in the case of Youtube, knowingly robbed content creators for years in order to build up the business. The ideal system would be one in which every click resulted in a nano-charge on your phone bill, maybe 1/1000 of a cent for a news story, for example. Sites like Google that link to other sites could also pay in very tiny increments. - Phil Hood, January 7th 2014

I completely disagree with this comment because it implies that the internet should be a resource that has to be paid for by every user. I think this goes against the whole idea of the internet in the first place as it was made by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to be free and allow for resource to be shared freely amongst everyone and anyone. By involving corporations that can choose to charge people for their services will be absurd and put society at a setback.