After a good night’s sleep and a filling breakfast, we headed to Regents via the Tube and our first lecture. Jason MacKenzie, managing partner at the Nudge Factory, led a lively session on the Current Landscape of the UK Media, comparing it to our situation and challenging the students to keep the 90-minute session interactive. They did!
Much like the U.S., he sees journalists in the UK pushed and stretched to cover what U.K. citizens need to know, especially in the local and regional areas. Those publications and broadcasts are suffering from dwindling numbers of journalists as well as drops in circulation and viewers or listeners. A bright spot is in one year the number of U.K. citizens engaged has risen 22 percent, according to PR giant Edelman’s trust barometer. The bad news? More distrust the media, although he correlated it to a distrust of public institutions, no surprise with the current Brexit situation and the inability of Prime Minister Theresa May’s government to solidify a solutions and true exit.
Jason said he still loves to listen to radio, specifically radio 2, and he is a reader. His office has news on all the time and subscribes to The Economist. One thing the U.K. does not have is a prominent leader who cries “fake news” constantly like our president. Thanks goodness.
A difference in the U.K. is that in any city any citizens can read the nation’s 11 national newspapers. Jason believes the secret to success is knowing your audience, covering the news seriously, ensuring political coverage and telling the British story.
He divides the media into two major components – analog and digital – and said way too many people lump in the entertainment media with mainstream media. He believes augmented end virtual reality and artificial intelligence will forge the future for the media. Jason said the trend toward faster and faster and more and more screens will continue and further stretch journalists.
Jason further divides the media into print, radio, TV and digital, and explained how FANG – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google – the tech giants will further shape the media landscape in the U.K. Politico, though, has landed in the U.K., which I did not know. A problem for television is the fragmented of its delivery system, as it doesn’t have Hulu yet, but he is sure it is coming.
Newspaper audiences in print have dropped substantially as newspapers change to tabloid format except for the Financial Times and the Observer. The Guardian has found success in its donation model of finding revenue and being a serious newspaper, Jason explained to the students.
Before a fun session with students looking at newspapers to answer his questions, Jason posed two important concluding points to us:
In regards to the traditional media and digital, they can co-exist, but will they feed each other or eat each other?
- As a storied BBC spokesman told him and others, there are no citizen journalists but rather citizen witnesses.
- One good result of all of this, Jason said, has resulted from the distrust of the media and public institutions – more transparency. So he is very hopeful for the future.
We had just time enough for a quick lunch at Regents – which has changed a great deal since our stay in 2008 – before we all dispersed for our own private explorations. Jan and I found Abbey Road and the recording studios, which was a Tube stop away from Regents. Then we headed to the Victoria and Albert Museum and had just time enough to see the Mary Quant special exhibition. We stayed long enough to be shooed out of the place, politely of course, and then headed back to the hotel. We ended the day with a great dinner at Jack Horner’s Pub with Cheryl and Robin. Of course some of us had pie, and mine was a delicious lamb. Great cider and delicious dessert, too! A perfect end to a great first day.