Jerry Seinfeld had a line about how amazing it was that the amount of news happening in the world each day “always just exactly fits the newspaper”. The joke worked because everyone half-knew the secret. The news did not fit the paper. The paper was the fit.
Pagination was set by advertising volumes and press capacity, and the day’s journalism was cut, stretched or spiked until it filled the space available. Broadcasting worked the same way. The Nine O’Clock News was never seven minutes long on a slow Tuesday.
What few appreciated at the time was that this artifice had editorial value. The fixed container forced a daily act of judgment about what mattered enough to make the paper, and readers absorbed that judgment as part of the product. Then the internet dissolved the container.
In a post-print, post-linear world there is no physical or temporal limit on how much can be published in any 24 hours, and for two decades the industry has struggled with a question it never previously had to ask. If output no longer has to fit anything, how much of it should there be?
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The first answer was simple. As much as possible. When every article is a unit of advertising inventory and the marginal cost of one more is trivial, the rational strategy is to publish until the clicks stop coming.
This was the logic of the page-view era, and its casualties are instructive. BuzzFeed News and many others built an apparently successful business model entirely on free viral distribution through Facebook. But when the platform turned off the traffic, most of the companies went bust.
The stack-’em-high volume model didn’t die, though. Reach, publisher of the Mirror tabloid and a stable of Irish titles, asks reporters on some desks to file as many as eight stories a shift, and still regards page views as the metric that pays the bills.
Newsweek publishes hundreds of pieces a day, including a daily service explaining the answers to New York Times puzzles, and has quadrupled its revenue doing so. How all this will fare in the era of artificial intelligence (AI) slop remains to be seen.
The second answer emerged from digital subscriptions, and it inverts the first. If readers are paying for a relationship rather than clicking on inventory, every marginal story changes their sense of what the brand is worth. A weak piece on a free site adds a few page impressions. A weak piece in a subscription product subtracts from the thing people are buying.
The New York Times worked this out a decade ago, when an internal review conceded that enormous resources were going into incremental stories hardly anyone read. The Times of London has supplied a more recent proof of the theory. As Press Gazette reported in April, it has cut daily output by roughly a quarter, from more than 200 stories to about 150, with no reduction in staff, and has enjoyed record months of audience growth. The stories it stopped publishing were, it turns out, worth nothing to readers, while their absence freed time and promotional space for the ones that they did want.
Many publishers still sit awkwardly between these two opposing stools, carrying the costs of quality while chasing the metrics of scale. In Ireland, the volume play is doubly difficult, because it depends on scale that a market of five million people cannot supply.
It is no accident that the purest traffic operations here are branch offices of British ones, or that publishers competing directly in the Irish market have largely chosen the loyalty route, from the paywalls at this newspaper and at Mediahuis to the reader contributions funding The Journal.
Which brings us to RTÉ, the one Irish media organisation exempt from the whole calculus. Appearing before the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee last week, director general Kevin Bakhurst outlined a strategy of expansion, with costs rising by €50 million this year, investment flowing into the RTÉ Player, an increase in high-end drama from one or two productions a year to four, and a rollout of new podcasts. RTÉ, in other words, is largely exempt from the volume versus loyalty choice that confronts all its private sector competitors.
To be fair, some of its expansion is exactly what public funding is supposed to be for. Ambitious Irish drama is a textbook example of market failure, content the commercial sector here will never be able to finance at scale, and producing it offers audiences a local alternative to the overwhelming power of the global streamers while sustaining the independent production sector.
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But the same cannot be said of podcasts and other commercially-viable formats, where Irish publishers and independent producers have built actual businesses. A publicly-subsidised flood of free audio competes directly and arguably unfairly with these people.
We saw this last week with the announcement that Ger Gilroy was joining RTÉ from Bauer Media’s Off the Ball vertical to front a new sports podcast offering. It is hard to argue that audiences are not already well served in this area by a host of independent operators.
RTÉ is not the villain of Irish media economics. That distinction belongs to Google and Meta, which have extracted the advertising revenue on which journalism here once depended. But clearer boundaries are required on its activities. The BBC, for example, must submit significant new services to a public interest test, weighing their market impact. Germany’s publishers won restrictions on how much press-like text ARD and ZDF can publish online. Ireland has no equivalent mechanism, and the coming negotiation over RTÉ’s next funding settlement is the moment to create one. Somebody, at last, should be asked to decide how much is enough.
