Think what you may about the Daily Mail, but it has long been committed to funding journalism. And yet now the axe has fallen even at DMGT, which runs the Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail Online.
A redundancy process, which will lead to up to 99 job losses, is well under way. Reporters found out last week if they were casualties of this latest step to bring digital and the two papers under one operation, rather than remaining separate entities. The departure of many experienced journalists is being watched by Fleet Street with horror. If such cost-saving measures are being taken at the historically well-resourced Mail, they can happen anywhere.
As they are. The journalist’s trade mag Press Gazette (which shares a publisher with New Statesman) has taken to keeping a monthly tally of news job losses across the UK and US. More than 900 jobs were cut in January. The February tally sits at 210. Last year Press Gazette recorded a total of 4,000 jobs lost on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, those impacted included journalists at the Observer – where staff were offered redundancy after the buy-out by Tortoise Media – and the BBC World Service.
Journalism across the UK is struggling to make money from digital advertising (of which an astonishing 80 per cent is sucked up by Google and Facebook). Digital subscriptions offer some hope, but many readers are hooked on introductory offers and reluctant to stick at full price. Print revenues still bolster profits for many British news brands, but that cannot last.
We need to start thinking seriously about the state of our news ecosystem. More than ever it is imperative that a workable alternative to the BBC licence fee is sold to the British people to protect public service broadcasting. The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, appears to favour mutualisation, with licence-fee payers having some kind of stake in owning the business and a role in managing it. But in an interview with the Sunday Times, the BBC chair, Samir Shah, indicated he leans towards an annual fee for all households – regardless of whether they use the BBC or not.
It is going to be a tough argument to make, particularly among young people who rarely watch BBC content, and with those who have lost faith in it. But the argument must be made nevertheless.
More than £1.3m of taxpayers’ money has been spent by the BBC investigating the Huw Edwards scandal and “reviewing procedures”, according to a Financial Times freedom of information request. It is unclear whether that includes legal costs of trying to recover the £200k Edwards earned between his arrest and the point he pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children.
Still, the whole mess works out cheaper than the £3.3m spent on investigating and dealing with the Radio 2 DJ Tim Westwood – most of it on legal fees.
The worlds of US media and politics are increasingly becoming one. Dan Bongino is preparing for his first day as the new FBI deputy director on 17 March – but first has to wind up his current job as host of his podcast. The Dan Bongino Show is worth a listen while you can – if you enjoy conspiracy theories, high emotion and ads for items such as “metabolism testers”, which seem to involve blowing into a plastic tube. Recent topics covered on the podcast include Bongino’s claim that the FBI was complicit in planting pipe bombs around Washington ahead of the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021. He has also called the FBI the “most corrupt law enforcement agency” in the US. Agents must feel some trepidation about his arrival.
Mark Zuckerberg’s recently renewed commitment to free speech is going through a bit of a wobble. Meta is poised to take legal action against the publisher Macmillan, which recently released a book by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Facebook (as it was called then). The threat comes after days of furious activity by Meta staff addressing the allegations made in her book, Careless People. In one chapter, Wynn-Williams details Facebook’s attempts to begin operating in China.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post has reported that Wynn-Williams is bringing a whistleblower complaint against Facebook. She alleges Facebook worked “hand in glove” with the Chinese government in 2015, creating a “censorship tool” to help the regime to oversee social media content.
Presumably Zuckerberg – whose firm rejects the claims, and said it “ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored” – was not referring to this period when in Janaury he said it was “time to go back to our roots about free expression on Facebook and Instagram”.
If you were horrified by the grotesque image of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sunbathing on a beach in the president’s new Gazan “Riviera”, spare a thought for the creators of the AI-generated video.
Solo Avital has told of how the video was intended as satire and that when his creative partner put it up online, he asked him to take it down – but too late. Trump somehow saw it and posted it from his Truth Social account. Avital hopes the film can at least illustrate how easy it is to create fake content. Perhaps – although whether fake or fact is of little concern to Trump.
[See also: Labour’s collision course]
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This article appears in the 12 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why Britain isn’t working