Am I missing something?

August 27, 2005

We are always being told how fast our culture is changing. Nowhere is this more true, apparently, than in the media. Satellite and cable have changed television for good. Newspapers are struggling to compete with the internet. Now that the ratings of ITV, the people's channel, are in free fall, where can advertising companies place their television ads? What is surprising, then, is how extraordinarily old-fashioned the recent Media Guardian 100 seems. Here are all the movers and shakers, and they seem positively Edwardian.

The demographics are not promising. 15 per cent are women, 99 per cent are white. Fewer than a fifth under 40 and only nine of those are in the top 50. The top ten going up include such exciting young Turks as Richard Littlejohn, Charles Allen and David Bergg (ITV's 48-year-old director of programming strategy).

More surprising, perhaps, is the stranglehold of the old media. More than one in three are from terrestrial television. Of the 16 names from the BBC, only two are from new media or digital BBC. Almost 30 on the list are newspaper editors, owners or executives. Compare this with four in the top 50 from non-terrestrial television (all from BSkyB) and two in the top 50 from non-BBC radio. However, most surprising of all is the tiny number of names from new media, six in the top 100. These are Steve Jobs from Apple (iPods); the two co-founders of Google; the BBC's director of new media; hip and happening Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of Pearson; Anurag Dikshit ("pronounced Dixit"), co-founder of online poker company Partygaming; and "Holy Moly" (a pseudonym), who runs a gossip website. (Do you detect a note of panic about the last two choices?)

There are two possible interpretations of this strange list. First, the Guardian panel just got it completely wrong. Its people in the know (including Janet Street-Porter) are out of touch with the emerging new media world and have just stuck with the old familiar faces from the Ivy—Michael Grade (joint first), Charles Allen (fourth), Paul Dacre (tenth)—and have added a few big names to spice things up a bit (Matt Lucas and David Walliams, Jamie Oliver, Paul O'Grady).

The more interesting possibility is that all this guff about a changing media world is simply wrong. The reason the Guardian's circulation is falling is not because of the internet or because young people have gone blog-crazy but because G2 is full of uninteresting new columnists and the op-ed page has a kind of infantile ultra-leftism that no sane person would go near. Similarly, ITV is haemorrhaging viewers not because of the challenging new multi-channel environment but because it keeps making programmes like Celebrity Wrestling and Celebrity Love Island. After all, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times do not seem to be losing too many readers and the viewing figures for BBC2, Channel Four and Channel Five are remarkably stable. Interestingly, it is the losers in the ratings wars who tend to be the hardcore technological determinists.

Which is the future: the brave new world of Google and iPods (two in the top 100) or those old warhorses, the BBC and News International (24 of the top 100, eight of the top 20)? One clue might lie in the fact that Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, listed under publishing and "new media," has fallen from 22 in 2004 to 51.