As UK Elections Approach, The Sun is Wielding its Power in New Ways
As UK Elections Approach, The Sun is Wielding its Power in New Ways
Can the News Corp newspaper revitalise itself in the digital age?
Attending Prime Ministerial press conferences is an almost pointless task if you’re a minor member of the Lobby, the group of political reporters tasked with following, recording and reporting on the workings of Number 10, Whitehall and Westminster at-large.
The order of events typically goes like this: PM delivers speech, offers media Q&A, only takes questions from three major broadcasters (traditionally, The BBC, ITV and Sky News, before GB News entered the fray) and then gives a couple of questions to the press, sometimes The Daily Mail and nearly always The Sun.
This habit shows how much ‘soft power’ The Sun wields in Westminster, even though News Corp long wrote down the value of the outlet to zero and The Daily Mail has gone on to overtake The Sun as the most read paper in the UK.
Because of its working-class and lower middle-class readership, sometimes dubbed ‘white van man’ or ‘Mondeo man’, The Sun has been seen by successive administrations in Number 10 as a gateway to a key voting block, a tribe politicians vaguely describe as ‘hard working people’.
A Circulation Mystery
The last known readership figures for The Sun came in 2020, with the paper having a circulation of 1.2 million. Audience data has since become hard to come by because The Sun, alongside The Telegraph, The Times, Guardian and The Observer, decided to stop publishing the data via industry body ABC.
They typically want lower taxes, have high aspirations for themselves and their children and want to own their own house, preferably in the suburbs with a nice garden and a sizable conservatory. They also don’t like the state meddling in their affairs, but they do want the government to crackdown on crime and immigration.
The problem is that many of these people are no longer reading The Sun and instead get most of their content from social media platforms. Successive surveys from British media watchdog OfCom and The Reuters Institute show as much.
It’s a problem faced by all newspapers, but it’s a phenomenon that is especially dangerous to tabloid outlets, whose mix of entertainment and news is now replicated by Instagram, YouTube and TikTok channels.
By way of comparison, The Sun’s sister title, The Times, continues to see increased subscriptions (now at 575,000) as its readers are happy to buy into its information-as-a-service model.
To add to these socio-economic headwinds, the big technology platforms are increasingly deprioritising news content. News UK Chief Operating Officer David Dinsmore recently revealed that the outlet has seen “huge traffic declines” because of these changes, leading to “seven-figure” advertising revenue impacts per week.
“Trying to plan your business, to budget and to invest for the future is increasingly difficult when you have no control over the means of supply,” he stressed.
As Dinsmore also noted, trying to keep up with digitisation and new consumption trends means outlets have been faced with big challenges and cost pressures to boot.
News UK notably experimented with TalkTV, which is now YouTube only, in a bid to utilise its journalism and provide original video content. It has now landed on a more selective approach, launching a weekly political broadcast, Never Mind The Ballots.
The show, fronted by The Sun’s Political Editor Harry Cole, landed an early coup by having Labour leader Keir Starmer appear on its debut programme.
Clips of the interview were shared across social media platforms and some of the soundbites were written across News UK outlets, including The Sun and The Times.
It was a very strong start to the show, which airs every Thursday on thesun.co.uk and The Sun’s five-million-strong YouTube channel.
Equally, the paper has effectively launched its own focus group, something no other outlet has achieved. The Sun’s ‘Cabinet’ includes a plumber, trainee GP and a black cab driver.
“As politicians waffle, we want to listen to those who really run the country,” Cole declared at its launch. All these initiatives complement the paper’s other day-to-day activities, namely writing and reporting on the news.
And when it comes to the political news, The Sun has an advantage. Relatively speaking, the outlet has one of the larger teams covering the beat.
Beyond Cole, The Sun’s political team includes political correspondents Martina Bet, Sophia Sleigh and Noa Hoffman, Chief Political Correspondent Jack Elsom, Deputy Political Editor Ryan Sabey and Sun on Sunday Political Editor Kate Ferguson.
That’s a lot of reporting firepower. It will be interesting to see if The Sun continues to give their stories away free online, or if a subscription model may be embraced further down the line, as The Mail has now finally introduced.
As for who the outlet is backing at the local and mayoral elections in May and the general election expected later in the year, Sun Editor Victoria Newton has been non-committal on the matter.
But Rupert Murdoch, who is still Chairman Emeritus of News Corp and an astute watcher of political winds, has been known to back a winner in the past.
The media tycoon also isn’t a stranger of Starmer’s. The pair reportedly had a discrete ‘brush-by’, as my American friends would put it, last year at a champagne reception.
But how will that soft power of The Sun be deployed? There is now a “99 percent” chance that Labour will form the next government of the UK after 14 years of Tory rule, according to British polling guru Professor John Curtice.
Jumping on the Starmer bandwagon may make short-term sense, but it could turn sour if a Labour government only achieves higher taxes and not much else. Sun readers, who are closely aligned with Britain’s petite bourgeoisie, would be among the first to revolt.
🤔 Other tech and media news I’ve found interesting
Donald Trump’s media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, saw a bumper debut when it went live on NASDAQ on Tuesday. The stock soared to $70 per share in early trading, falling back to around $58. The business is still yet to make a profit and I’ve outlined how it may never disclose key audience metrics, including how many sign-ups Truth Social has.
Amazon has put an additional $2.75 billion into Anthropic, the OpenAI rival which was founded in 2021 by former members of Sam Altman’s company. Much like the Microsoft-OpenAI tie-up, Anthropic, which is still very much a start-up, will use Amazon’s infrastructure services, including its cloud servers and chips, to build-up its LLM’s capabilities. The two companies have also partnered with Accenture to provide consultancy services.
The Rest is Politics, a Goalhanger production and sister podcast to The Rest is History, has been profiled in the New York Times. Hopefully it doesn’t go to the heads of Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, who are already planning an ‘election tour’ in October.
Sticking with British politics, The Telegraph has the scoop on who will be hosting the BBC’s flagship political interviews for the general election, with former Political Editor turned Today Programme presenter Nick Robinson taking on the role of inquisitor-in-chief.
Substack-backed Mill Media now has 100,000 subscribers across its portfolio of local publications, including The Manchester Mill, The Birmingham Dispatch, The Sheffield Tribune and The Liverpool Post.
Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, will be available to X subscribers this week.
BuzzFeed posted its Q4 results for 2023 earlier in the week. The business saw a net loss of $60 million in Q4 '23, with cash down to $35 million from $55 million last year. The company expects revenue to shrink to as low as $42m in the first quarter of 2024. CEO Jonah Peretti, who is optimistic about 2024, said BuzzFeed is now at an “inflection point”.
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📖 Essays
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Operation Southside: Inside the UK media’s plan to reconcile with Labour
📧 Contact
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