eBusiness Weekly
It has been disappointing but not surprising that the British media has largely reacted to the creation of two credible Covid vaccines in such a downbeat way.
This is why: back in the pre-digital day, Britain’s news output consisted of a couple of bulletins on BBC and ITV every day, a brief hourly round-up on the wireless and around ten newspapers, with limited space, running only the biggest and most interesting stories.
Now we have 24-hour news channels on TV and radio and the newspapers’ websites are competing with online providers for attention. Capacity is suddenly vast and there is a need to find things with which to fill the void.
There is a commercial objective and for most sites that means getting as many people as possible to click on stories so they can maximise advertisement revenue.
Where the pandemic is concerned, the best way to do that is to accentuate people’s sense of anxiety so they keep on clicking.
That has been the recipe that has seen traffic numbers surge since March, but it has left most news providers unable and/or unwilling to see when there are some genuinely good tidings to serve up to their audience.
When Pfizer and then, a week later, Moderna announced they had developed a vaccine with prevention rates of more than 90 per cent there should have been a cascade of stories spelling out why this was such a wonderful breakthrough, an explosion of hope after so many months of misery. – BBC
