arrow Products
Glide CMS image Glide CMS image
Glide CMS arrow
The powerful intuitive headless CMS for busy content and editorial teams, bursting with features and sector insight. MACH architecture gives you business freedom.
Glide Go image Glide Go image
Glide Go arrow
Enterprise power at start-up speed. Glide Go is a pre-configured deployment of Glide CMS with hosting and front-end problems solved.
Glide Nexa image Glide Nexa image
Glide Nexa arrow
Audience authentication, entitlements, and preference management in one system designed for publishers and content businesses.
For your sector arrow arrow
Media & Entertainment
arrow arrow
Built for any content to thrive, whomever it's for. Get content out faster and do more with it.
Sports & Gaming
arrow arrow
Bring fans closer to their passions and deliver unrivalled audience experiences wherever they are.
Publishing
arrow arrow
Tailored to the unique needs of publishing so you can fully focus on audiences and content success.
For your role arrow arrow
Technology
arrow arrow
Unlock resources and budget with low-code & no-code solutions to do so much more.
Editorial & Content
arrow arrow
Make content of higher quality quicker, and target it with pinpoint accuracy at the right audiences.
Developers
arrow arrow
MACH architecture lets you kickstart development, leveraging vast native functionality and top-tier support.
Commercial & Marketing
arrow arrow
Speedrun ideas into products, accelerate ROI, convert interest, and own the conversation.
Technology Partners arrow arrow
Explore Glide's world-class technology partners and integrations.
Solution Partners arrow arrow
For workflow guidance, SEO, digital transformation, data & analytics, and design, tap into Glide's solution partners and sector experts.
Industry Insights arrow arrow
News
arrow arrow
News from inside our world, about Glide Publishing Platform, our customers, and other cool things.
Comment
arrow arrow
Insight and comment about the things which make content and publishing better - or sometimes worse.
Expert Guides
arrow arrow
Essential insights and helpful resources from industry veterans, and your gateway to CMS and Glide mastery.
Newsletter
arrow arrow
The Content Aware weekly newsletter, with news and comment every Thursday.
Knowledge arrow arrow
Customer Support
arrow arrow
Learn more about the unrivalled customer support from the team at Glide.
Documentation
arrow arrow
User Guides and Technical Documentation for Glide Publishing Platform headless CMS, Glide Go, and Glide Nexa.
Developer Experience
arrow arrow
Learn more about using Glide headless CMS, Glide Go, and Glide Nexa identity management.

Are UK publishers being fair to Big Tech?

A study commissioned by the UK's News Media Association is coming under scrutiny. Is it as even-handed as it appears? 

by Rob Corbidge
Published: 16:47, 19 May 2022

Last updated: 13:07, 06 July 2022
Vector scales of justice

Setting out the relative positions of UK publishers versus Big Tech platforms last week, Professor Matt Elliott performed an invaluable service in carefully and transparently highlighting the importance of quality news content to such platforms, and how little they reward the providers of such content.

No less than Rasmus Kleis Neilsen, professor of political communication and Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, addressed Elliott's work on Twitter this week and to some extent plays devil's advocate. In that, he's doing us all in publishing a service - the inconsistencies in our near-universal view that Google and Facebook are eating our cake and we're only getting what burps they direct at us must be laid bare. Otherwise they'll be laid bare by Big Tech themselves.

By and large, any fair-minded individual will find food for thought in Neilsen's response. One thing I feel it omits is any mention of the cultural aspect of impoverishing a nation's news media and leaving Twitter and Google et al to fill the vacuum: unless local media survives to tell its own stories, it may well be filled by stories told by others, and for English-language countries that can quickly mean US issues disproportionately dominating local conversations. As Elliott puts it "the fact that high quality news content generates wider benefits to society makes this problem acute". 

Looking at the demands for Big Tech to pay for content it monetises but does not produce, Neilsen points out that were such a negotiation position taken by a journalist union towards a publisher, for example, it would meet short shrift. 

It's a nice point, but we're in an era when the starting salary for a newly minted local newspaper journalist is much the same as it was 20 years ago. We could argue that the media is at least gaining people who really, really want to do the job - as they must with so little financial incentive.

However, the fact is many publishers can't afford to pay more and hope to continue to exist. I read almost weekly of some brave new venture in news publishing, particularly in the US, that has collapsed under "market pressures" - i.e. not making enough money to survive. There are few success stories such as Axios out there, and - to the NMA's point - even fewer in the UK. Something is wrong, and I don't think the blame sits at the door of media companies in the UK or elsewhere.

Neilsen also makes the point that a unilateral withdrawal of content by major news publishers from the platforms could leave a wide open space for new market entrants. Anyone who cares about the plurality of media recognises this as an issue connected to the reasonable demand that platforms pay more for news content - such payments could simply cement the already dominant positions of a few publishers. 

If your vision of the future of news is simply incumbent titles competing against each other for eternity, then it's not a problem - but no-one really wants such a situation. 

However, that does a disservice to big publishers. Many of us in the publishing industry, myself included, came through the Big Publisher system. It didn't kill our independence of thought, or ability to see our employers for what they were, yet we benefited from purpose, standards, organisation, mentoring, a brand, and much more. Once we left their employ, we were equipped to do many useful things elsewhere in media and beyond.

So we can recognise that the costs to entry in the news market are reasonably high, and making them higher is not good. But equally, if we're all minnows relying on the goodwill of Mark Zuckerberg to put bread on our table, that's a sad lookout indeed. 

You may have your issues with your own country's media, but at least it is your own country's media.