Why is There No HuffPo Equivalent in the UK?

On a recent trip to London to meet with media execs, I was struck by the lack of pure play media sites in the UK. 

It seems the England is the perfect place for a smart, edited blogging network and news aggregation site.  There are lots of high-quality news sites to aggregate.  There is a highly engaged (and often outraged) readership.  There is a growing and increasingly respected blogging community.  Isn’t this a huge gaping hole in the media landscape?

As I met with folks at the Guardian, WSJ Europe, Sky, Northcliffe Media someone formerly at News International and more recently the BBC, I asked why this was the case.  Surprisingly, none of them had ever even considered the possibility of such a site launching.  

When pressed, my interviewees came up with a few theories, none particularly satisfying:

1.  The marketplace is already too cluttered.  Ten paid dailies, two (or three? I can’t keep track) freebies, BBC, Sky.  A new site wouldn’t be able to cut through the clutter and build enough traffic to be profitable

There is clutter for sure, but couldn’t an aggregator find a niche – say football, cricket, fashion, travel, gardening, DIY, film, music, theatre and aggregate content from the other news sites to create the ultimate vertical thus garnering higher CPM’s?  How many staffers would you really need?

2.  Another take on traffic - Britain isn’t big enough for these sites to achieve scale to build enough traffic to be profitable.

Maybe, but again, costs could be very low, especially if someone went the vertical route.  And isn’t at population of 59 million enough to create scale?  Not to mention the worldwide traffic British news sites attract.

3.  British ad agencies are very focused on MSM, a new site wouldn’t be able to sell ads.

I don’t buy it.  What about ad networks?  Don’t tell me there’s no ad networks in the UK either?

4.  British media still very much falls under “the cult of the editor”.  It just hasn’t occurred to anyone that it is possible to create a site not affiliated with a major news organization.

Somehow, I suspect the last theory is the closest to the truth.   Of course London is still deep in recession so it is highly unlikely that anyone will start such a site anytime soon.  Though I wonder if we’ll see something in a year or two. 

Come on Brits!  There’s an opportunity here!

And I have one more question.  Why the hell do you all keep referring to Fleet Street when speaking about your industry, even though there are no newspapers there anymore?

Comments

[paul canning]

Good points, though I seem to recall Labour List being sold as the UK's HuffPost :]

The thing with HuffPost is that it's in a different situation. It's national where it's competing with other national news sources like much-maligned cable news and apart from maybe the NYT newspapers aren't national there. Here it's different. It also gained momentum from the US elections and from being the anti-Drudge.

Huffpost also has its faults. I can see why they do it but their celebrity-driven posting is annoying, their international coverage is weak, the health section is a joke and they've become overburdened with widgets and add-ons.

Their real strengths are in stuff like Nico Pitney's amazing coverage of the Iran election aftermath and the citizen reporting now of the Town Halls.

[Ren Reynolds]

"Why the hell do you all keep referring to Fleet Street when speaking about your industry, even though there are no newspapers there anymore?"

I'll answer that if you tell us which Main Street Americans refer to in the phrase "Wall Street and Main Street". I've been to Wall Street, that's in NYC and I can find many Main Streets, but which one is it exactly and how does it manage to generate so much of your country's economy?

[Ren Reynolds]

One reason as to why there is no UK HuffPo is that there is a conceptual seperation between national and local media which does not exist in the US. While they NYT and Washington Post are respected brands that stand-ins for national papers and of course there is USA Today and The Wall Street Journal non of these hold the same public position as a UK National daily. As such I think that an aggregation in the UK has a higher bar to get over as there is not the same notional gap in coverage as there is in the US. And then there is the BBC.

[nabba]

Idiot

[John]

"Why the hell do you all keep referring to Fleet Street when speaking about your industry, even though there are no newspapers there anymore?" It's a convenient label for the industry, not much more.