Like death and taxes, the digital world has its certainties. One of them – alongside the inevitability of Apple launching yet another higher specification (and more expensive) iPhone – is the prospect that audience trends in other countries will wash up on our shores.
That is why the latest report from Britain’s telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, has excited the interest of more than a few media people in New Zealand.
It shows that, for the first time, online has overtaken television as the biggest source of news in the United Kingdom. Broadcast TV had been the leading source of news there since the 1960s, when it overtook newspapers and radio.
The Ofcom survey shows that online – social media, podcasts, messaging and other digital apps – is now narrowly ahead with 71 per cent of adults getting their news from those sources. Television, which a year ago sat at 75 per cent, is now down to 70 per cent. A little over half the adult population get their news from social media alone. Meta (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) now outperforms ITV, while Google is barking at the broadcaster’s heels.
The BBC remains the most dominant source, although its reach is declining while digital platforms increase their audience year-on-year. Since 2018 the adult audience for BBC One has dropped from 56 per cent to 42 per cent.
But the American-owned transnational platforms do not have it all their own way. The younger end of the market is transferring its allegiances from the likes of Meta and Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube) to the Chinese-owned TikTok. The Ofcom study found that, in the 12-15 age group, TikTok is only six percentage points behind the BBC. Since 2020 Britain’s state-owned broadcaster has dropped 15 points to now sit at 36 per cent of the youth audience. In the same period, TikTok more than doubled its youth audience. Thirty per cent of that market now access news from the platform, and one in ten rate TikTok as their most important source.
More than half in this age group get their news from social media sources. Interestingly, the US-based services have either lost ground or remained static in the youth market.
TikTok’s reach extends well beyond school-age teens. During the British general election, a survey conducted for The Economist found about 65 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 38 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds had seen something about the election on TikTok in recent weeks.
Two significant take-outs have not been lost on New Zealand media executives. The first is that traditional broadcasting is on a downward audience trajectory against social media, irrespective of whether it is a public service broadcaster or private sector television. The second its that the transnational platforms with which they have established relationships are losing ground to a Chinese competitor with whom they have had limited or no engagement.
NZ on Air’s annual Where Are The Audiences survey released last month showed that, although it has an overall New Zealand daily reach of only 18 per cent, more than half of the 15-24 age group and a third of the 15-39 demographic were more likely to engage with TikTok. There has been a slight easing at the older end of the demographic, but it would be unwise to see this pointing to TikTok’s New Zealand market leveling out.
So, if our news media want to capture and hold younger audiences, they can see clearly where it is sitting.
However, powers-that-be have an ambivalent attitude toward TikTok. Concerns about potential security risks have been swirling around the platform since 2020.
Last year it was banned on all devices that had access to the New Zealand parliamentary network. A survey by Stuff found a number of other agencies did not authorise the use of TikTok, including the Defence Force, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Corrections, Police, Treasury, Ministry of Justice, and Ministry of Primary Industries.
Earlier this year the US Congress passed a Bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell or face a ban. Far from bowing to American pressure, the response by TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, has been to challenge the legality of the move.
All of this raises an interesting question for our media organisations: How closely should they engage with an organisation that could be a risk to national security and one that is willing to push back? At the very least there is a signal to approach it with caution.
And there is another impediment to our media cosying up to the platform. How much benefit would they derive for a closer relationship?
TikTok is a short form video social media platform. Much of the content is created by users and may have no link back to the source of the information. When we look at the Ofcom study on news engagement among that 12-15 audience, we find that half find out about the news by talking to family members and more than a third by talking to friends. If they then take to TikTok to discuss what they heard second-hand, where is the benefit for the media organisations that created the news in the first place? Most of those TikTok users wouldn’t know the meaning of ‘attribution’, let alone see the need to provide a pathway back to the news media’s own platform.
If the TikTok ‘news’ is derivative and reinterpreted by users, ByteDance could well believe it owes no financial obligations to news media outlets that may or may not have been the original source of material that has passed through several ‘filters’ before even finding its way onto the platform. In that scenario, TikTok may argue that it cannot reasonably be captured by the digital news bargaining mechanism now being considered by the coalition government.
As I said at the outset, New Zealand will inevitably follow the trends now playing out in Britain. Our news media will do well to address the matter before that happens. However, for the reasons outlined above, TikTok may be the problem but not the solution.
The UK trends point to the clear need to find new ways of engaging with the audiences of the future. It must be done through mechanisms that ensure the ongoing sustainability of the journalism that is its crucial feedstock. And media outlets must do so without losing current audiences, or they will find themselves with the same dilemma as that faced by Radio New Zealand and discussed here a fortnight ago (see An audience in the hand versus one in Neverland).
The right to know
In 2016 I wrote a short book entitled Complacent Nation (BWB Texts). In it I stated that the spirit of the Official Information Act had been broken by “a process in which the flow of information from the state to its citizens has become highly politicised and restricted”.
I went on to set out numerous examples of how the act’s limitations and obfuscation on the part of politicians and their (public) servants had made a mockery of the public’s right to know.
It seems nothing has changed in the eight years since that book was published.
An excellent editorial by Tracy Watkins in the Sunday Star-Times put some perspective around a joint statement last week by the Public Service Commission and Ombudsman praising the timeliness of responses to the tens of thousands of OIA requests. As Watkins pointed out, the data reflected responses to large numbers of often routine requests from members of the public. It does not reflect the way journalists’ requests are treated.
Her editorial echoed what I had said in the (unfulfilled) hope that things might change. This is part of what she said:
The reality of the OIA, and the corresponding Local Government Official Information Act, is that the act is mostly only useful if you already know exactly what you’re looking for.
Even then you might still fall at the first hurdle because of the size of the industry built around gaming the OIA. That industry ostensibly exists to serve the people, but in reality it’s there to serve the needs of its masters – the Government, or local government, and their agencies.
It protects their interests, shields them from embarrassment or awkward questions, and seems largely focused on finding ways around the original intent of the act, which was for official information to be accessible to all unless there is good reason otherwise.
I couldn’t agree more. That principle of availability is blown out of the water by no fewer than 56 grounds in the legislation for withholding information, and the OIA is written in such a way that it has become a plaything for those tasked with protecting a government, an agency of state, or the backside of someone within them.
As Watkins says: “It’s more than 40 years since the Official Information Act (OIA) came into force. It has not aged well.”
I’d go further. Its laudable intent was subverted by self-serving lawmakers, and the past 42 years have been spent taking advantage of its shortcomings and ensuring they remain in place.
You can read the editorial here.
From Jim Tucker: I’m with you and Tracy about the OIA. I’ve never bothered to use it once in all my decades as a journalist. Waste of time from the outset. And not helped by the blanket approach taken by some reporters hoping a big mass of requests would overwhelm their target. Bureaucrats quickly learned to counter the OIA and although it sometimes does flush out little known data, mostly it is used to control what we and the public are allowed to know about things that are plainly of public interest. Good luck with any campaign for change. It’ll never happen.