John Ryley has stepped down as the head of Sky News after 17 years. In this second article for his series on the future of broadcast news, John will look forward to how news will change over the next 40 years.
Tuning in
Today, there are those who argue that non-stop news channels like Sky and BBC are in decline, slowly and surely on their way out.
They point to the exponential growth in the mobile internet: “Why would you want to get your news from a linear news channel, from some know-it-all editor who has smugly decided for you exactly what you will watch and in the order in which you will watch it, when you can pick-and-mix from a veritable smorgasbord on a million internet-connected platforms?”
It is undoubtedly true that the incredible growth of the internet, especially on smartphones, has opened new markets for news suppliers; Instagram; YouTube; TikTok; the platform formerly known as Twitter. All now serve as a vector, not just for light-hearted clips to pass the time, but as a medium for serious news outlets.
One of the United States’ most prominent “futurologists,” Marc Andreessen – the founder of Netscape – thinks we have drastically underestimated the scale of the smartphone revolution and its impact on the news industry. Andreessen says more people have access to a phone than have access to running water; a chastening thought. By 2063, you have to assume that almost everyone on the planet will have access to the internet. According to the UN’s mid-range prediction, that’s around 9 billion people. As Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute for Journalism says, there are some other things which we must take as given when we envisage life in 2063…
Looking ahead
Wi-Fi will be ubiquitous and universally fast! You will be able to get all content in a nanosecond, wherever you are. Video will stream in ultra-high quality not just 5K, but 50K, with no infuriating buffering.
Battery life will no longer be an issue; either batteries will be constantly recharged wirelessly while you are on the move, or new technology will keep them going almost indefinitely.
Printed newspapers are going to be sold in increasingly smaller numbers. Since 2010 the circulation of national newspapers has dropped from 22 million to less than half that. As many regional papers have already done when they became economically unviable as a daily product, they may convert to weeklies, becoming even more like magazines. But that doesn’t mean that the big news brands will disappear! On the contrary, the smart ones will prosper.
Raising questions
Today, news is delivered in a multifaceted way; TVs, mobiles, PCs, tablets, outdoor screens and a range of syndication partners. The type of news and its format is dictated partly by the size of the screen and partly by users. TV is better for live event coverage and long form video reports. Smartphones, short-form, bite-sized news works best. People tend to look at news on their tablets, mostly in the evening and at weekends. They use their PCs mainly at work, viewing news in their downtime.
Most big news organisations understand they must allow their audiences to consume the news when they want it, how they want it, where they want it. Today, that often means having multiple journalists servicing multiple platforms. Many newsrooms still have separate teams for old media and new media, both in print and broadcast. In forty years’ time, these differentiations of platforms will have long since disappeared. PC sales are falling fast, while handheld device sales boom.
By 2063, it’s probable they will just be “smart screens.” Big screens, small screens, and medium-sized screens; all very smart and all designed to suit your individual need at a particular time and in a particular place.
So where will that leave the non-stop news channel? With all this content available on demand on multiple devices, will it even be necessary? Sceptics say: “No, not even in the medium term.” But I say: “Absolutely, yes!”
Making headlines
Live video news is just that; live. It delivers genuinely arresting TV moments. Moments where you realise you are witnessing something remarkable, or bizarre. When President Putin’s tanks crossed the border into Ukraine in February 2022, people turned to TV news. When the news of Queen Elizabeth’s death came in September last year people turned to TV news. Then in May this year when King Charles and Queen Camilla were crowned in Westminster Abbey, the event was watched by 20 million UK viewers.
For a non-stop news service, a non-stop channel is extremely important. It is the production hub of a newsroom; its spinal cord and main source of strength. To put it another way: a news channel is certainly not sufficient on its own. Yet it is a totally necessary component of the whole, immediately accessible news proposition. Many new rivals in digital journalism, from Huffington Post to the Wall Street Journal have understood this and created live streams of video content. That content looks and feels very much like what you would see on a non-stop news channel.
Think, for a moment, about your own homes. Think about the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom. I am pretty sure the furniture is pointing in a certain direction: towards the TV, the centrepiece of many rooms. It’s hard to imagine that changing, even over the next 40 years.
However, there’s one last reason for my prediction that live, rolling TV news will still be with us in 40 years’ time…
Douglas McCabe of the media consultancy Enders Analysis says it’s a simple matter of demographics. In the future, there will be more people than ever at home with the time to watch TV. Thanks to technology many will have more leisure time. If there’s one major legacy of the COVID pandemic, it’s the huge growth in the number of people working from home.
By 2063, a quarter of the population will be retired. Yet since they will still be very fit, have their own domestic robots, and will likely live well into their 100s, they will barely be counted as middle-aged. In forty years’, time, the smart screen you watch live news on will do a great deal more than just receive a TV signal. In forty years’ time, the smart screen will deliver not just the TV channel, but a limitless amount of on-demand content related to your specific interests. It will be so utterly interactive and so intuitive to navigate, that it will make what we have today look like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
