Welcome to this week’s Press Gazette Future of Media newsletter on Thursday, 14 August.

Industrial disputes have been something of a rarity at Rupert Murdoch’s UK media empire since… well, 1986 (when he fired 6,000 unionised print workers).

So it is an intriguing sign of the times to see the company-funded News Union (which represents employees at News UK) get ‘a bit bolshy’.

News Union general secretary Jeremy Vine (not the DJ) has written to members expressing disappointment over a 2.25% below-inflation pay rise for most staff. He is also concerned by a mandated three-days-per-week return to office working and the impact a company directive to embrace AI tools will have on headcount.

Vine is also evidently miffed that News UK can waste £140m failing to launch a new UK TV station (TalkTV), yet can’t afford a more generous pay award for staff who he says are working harder than ever due to waves of redundancies.

Today we also take an in-depth look at publisher referral traffic sources going back to 2019 based on extensive data shared by 565 leading news websites in the UK and US.

Our analysis shows that despite everyone’s best efforts (launching apps and newsletters), direct traffic to publishers as a proportion is going down. Google traffic is broadly stable, suggesting predictions that Google Zero is coming any time soon are wide of the mark.

But as we have previously reported, Discover has replaced search as the main source of Google traffic.

And we speak to a leading executive at news aggregator Smartnews (which is also a handy source of revenue for many publishers via its revenue-split model). It has launched a new AI-driven app which aims to counter the trend towards rage-bait and political polarisation by offering readers a more nuanced take on the news of the day.

In my humble opinion, a better news aggregation platform is desperately needed. Google Discover’s algorithm has no quality filter and appears to encourage moronic clickbait (or maybe that is just what I click on). Samsung’s news app only offers a narrow range of sources. Apple News also offers a narrow range of sources, and is only available on Apple devices.

Publishers have long collaborated to ensure physical newspapers are able to reach every newsagent in the UK.

If only news publishers could collaborate on creating a news aggregation app which fairly allocated revenue and clicks and provided a platform for all professional journalism outlets.

Have a great weekend when you get there! (We aren’t publishing a daily newsletter tomorrow, Friday.)

On Press Gazette

Publisher traffic sources: Google steady but social and direct referrals are down

Chartbeat data reveals traffic trends to 565 publishers since 2019.

Read more

Smartnews launches new app to counter rage-bait and polarisation

Smartnews tries something new in tough market for aggregators.

Read more

News UK staff union blames NI increase on below-inflation pay deal

News Union also concerned over return-to-office mandate and AI rollout.

Read more

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