"A swamp of muck and crap": Martin Lewis on how clickbait broke journalism
Plus: Is London getting new Bakerloo line trains after all — and the council chasing a property billionaire over a £3m scaffolding bill.
And now for something a little different.
One of the main reasons for setting up London Centric was the idea that the corporate model of doing local journalism on the internet is broken. In my old job as media editor of the Guardian it was clear how the incentives to chase online clicks at all costs are destroying public trust in once-loved local newspapers.
On one occasion I found a fake story about Woolworths published in dozens of local news sites had been placed by a teenage media studies student as a test of how easy it was to trick newspapers.
Just three companies — Reach, Newsquest, and National World — control almost all of the local newspapers in the UK, including most of the traditional titles in London. They retain some brilliant journalists doing great reporting in tough circumstances. But in many places their work is undermined by bosses setting click targets which encourage staff to publish false headlines while burying tiny morsels of factual information on ad-filled webpages.
Some corporate-owned London newspaper sites now employ “AI-assisted reporters” to churn press releases into dozens of stories a day. Other London news sites retain real human journalists but ask them to write eight stories a day, often unrelated to the local area they supposedly cover. Suffice to say, these reporters aren’t going to have the time to be out knocking on doors, talking to people, doing investigations, and explaining why things really happen.
Martin Lewis, the boss of MoneySavingExpert and a London resident, has become one of the favourite subjects of these “local news” sites, as they hope to artificially boost their audience numbers by attracting people Googling the name of the “most trusted man in Britain”.
Every day dozens of journalists are commissioned to write about Lewis, with some regional reporters listing “Martin Lewis” as their local reporting specialism. In Lewis’ own words, these people are “writing 12 stories a day, nicking the content, writing it inaccurately, being misleading about what I say”.
Lewis has been supportive of London Centric’s approach to journalism — sharing our reporting into the capital’s poor phone signal the other week — so we gave him a ring to ask him about the disaster facing all British journalism, how regional newsrooms have lost focus on local stories, and what that means for democracy.
“I haven’t got an answer to the existential crisis facing journalism in this country,” he said. “I just know it’s an existential crisis.”
We’ll be back next week with some local investigations that have taken months of old-fashioned work. We’re grateful to the paying subscribers who fund them.
Scroll to the end for our chat with Martin Lewis about the collapse of journalism, or first read a selection of stories about the capital.
Could Mr Aziz please pay his scaffolding bill?
Billionaire landlord Asif Aziz and his property businesses have been regulars in London Centric this year due to *deep breath* their threats to the Prince Charles cinema, their decision to evict the central London YMCA from its premises, their cockroach-infested housing in Croydon, their attempts to run an illicit Forrest Gump-themed shrimp restaurant at Piccadilly Circus, and their role as the landlord of a tax-avoiding Harry Potter gift shop. (We could go on.)
Now we hear of further rumblings from south west London, where one of Aziz’s companies has operated the Britannia Point residential tower by Colliers Wood tube station for many years. In 2022 a video captured a window falling from the 12th floor of the residential block after Aziz’s company did not fix it in time following a bird strike.
Merton council responded by putting up emergency scaffolding to protect residents and passers-by — and now complain that local taxpayers have been left with the £3m bill. A spokesperson told London Centric they are pursuing both the freeholder and Aziz’s MiFlats company over the debt: “We can confirm that the council is taking action to recover the expenses incurred dealing with the dangerous structure at Britannia Point – which are just under £3m.”
Although Aziz’s property company has not settled the scaffolding bill, they’re still asking the same council to give them planning permission next week to build three extra towers on the site.
New Bakerloo trains could be coming sooner than we thought — just don’t ask TfL about the graffiti
The 53-year-old Bakerloo line trains could finally be replaced with new rolling stock by the end of the decade, the boss of TfL said this week, as he also claimed that vigilante tube cleaners may have been spraying some of the line’s graffiti themselves.
TfL commissioner Andy Lord said that a new funding deal from central government means progress on ordering replacement (air conditioned) Bakerloo line trains could happen in the coming months but it will “still be towards the end of the decade” before they come into service, citing the “significant amount of infrastructure upgrade” additionally required on the line.
When asked about political campaign group Looking for Growth (LFG) highlighting the extent of graffiti on the Bakerloo Line, Lord told the London Assembly he had seen “evidence of people creating graffiti and then removing it” and claimed this was now being investigated by the relevant authorities.
TfL’s press office was unable to provide any further evidence or comment on Lord’s allegation of the graffiti being staged, which does not fit with what London Centric saw when we accompanied LFG on a tube clean-up — or what Bakerloo line staff said when we turned up at their depot and began asking questions. (Our reporting on this topic was featured on Radio 4’s Strong Message Here earlier this week, at 17 minutes in.)
The taggers themselves appeared to have seen the press attention gained by Looking for Growth and started daubing the letters “LFG” inside the Bakerloo line carriages as some sort of challenge — but that turned out to be a joke by the LFG guys themselves, just to complicate things further.
After Susan Hall – the leader of the London Tories and a new advisor to the mass deportation policy group Restore Britain – praised videos of the graffiti cleaning, mayor Sadiq Khan dismissed the people taking it into their own hands: “By encouraging people to clean up graffiti, it leads to fewer prosecutions, because action can’t be taken, because the evidence literally has been washed away by others.”
Lord, the boss of TfL, also denied longstanding rumours that the new Piccadilly line trains, whose introduction into service has been substantially delayed, have turned out to be the wrong size for the tube tunnels. But he accepted there are mysterious unspecified design issues that need sorting: "Some of those will require modifications to the trains.”
Doing news the right way
For all our negativity about the corporate-owned local media there are some brilliant independent news sites in London that have been doing amazing reporting for many years and even decades. We love the Camden New Journal and their new newsletter, the work done by Greenwich Wire, and the reporting by Waltham Forest Echo.
This week we’ve been hooked on Southwark News’ coverage of the inter-Labour shenanigans going on in the south London borough. Left-winger James McAsh thought he’d been elected as the new council leader by his Labour colleagues and quit his job as a primary school teacher to take up the role. Then he found local Labour MP Neil Coyle intervening to force a re-run of the internal election on technical grounds. The suspicion is that there’s an attempt to stitch-up the vote for a council leader who is more amenable to the central party.
MoneySavingExpert Martin Lewis on how British journalism has been broken by clickbait
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
London Centric: How does it feel when you see your face and name used by “local” news outlets to drive clicks?
Martin Lewis: What is going on with many of the clickbait outlets — which includes lots of outlets that purport to be regional, even though their stories have no regional basis — is just content theft.
The people doing it are not journalists, they are content writers and search engine optimisers.
This is going to kill — and is already killing — journalism.
If I go on holiday, I'm constantly amazed at the number of “warnings” and “alerts” I put out when I know I haven't said anything in public for the last week.
LC: Such as?
ML: I haven’t spoken about air fryers in two years but I keep reading news reports about “urgent warnings” I’ve given about air fryers. I don’t talk about air fryers. It’s ludicrous and it’s a disservice to the public and it is a threat to journalism.
Also, it just degrades trust. The number of false headlines which are downright lies that me and my team have to spend time and resources on… I put up with it most of the time, even though it’s trite and awful. But there are times that they cross the line and they’re just misleading and dangerous.
The worst I ever had was ‘Martin Lewis warns pensioners not to turn heating on during a cold spell’. They had conflated advice from two years ago with when to put your heating on, had added in pensioners, and had made it specific to a cold spell that was going on at the time. It had no resemblance to anything that was going on in any shape, size or form.
LC: You’ve now got journalists on “local” news websites with their reporting specialism in the biography listed as “Martin Lewis”.
ML: It’s extraordinary. From a rent seeking perspective of my own I work very hard and my website is MoneySavingExpert, I don’t write for any newspapers.
When I put staff on a story my team and I will be on that for months to do the research and make sure it’s right. These people [on clickbait news sites] are writing 12 stories a day, nicking the content, writing it inaccurately, being misleading about what I say — and taking the traffic away.
LC: I find the fact it’s done under the guise of local news somehow more pernicious. The government’s doing a review of local news at the moment. Is there anything you’d say if they were looking for suggestions from you as to what local news should look like?
ML: I’ve never worked in local news and I don’t want to go off on what I don’t understand. I think there is a real challenge as to what is journalism now. Most of what we have is not journalism, it’s content writing.
A lot of the content writers are using AI without checks.
AI is a secondary source information provider. It takes information from elsewhere and regurgitates it in a new format. I think what’s under discussed is if you’re a primary source, as MoneySavingExpert is, we are doing our own research and fact checking.
If everyone goes to secondary source sites, the money being given by the AI sites to primary source content providers is diddly squat. In the future who is AI going to scrape when it’s killed all the primary source sites?
LC: How do we get outlets to have higher standards and not abuse your name for clicks?
ML: I’m very pessimistic.
I see the commercial imperatives coming from the media owners that are just driving to do more and more clickbait. The main thing we need is for the public to move away from it.
The problem we have at the moment is Google who, with Google Discover [the section of Google’s homepage that promotes news stories] are pushing people towards clickbait articles.
There is a potential huge democratic deficit going on. I simply don’t know where people are getting information from. And the whole of society is changing.
I would like to close my eyes and think we’ll get to a place where people will demand proper good factual information. There will be gaps for people like me and people like you who want to do things the right way.
LC: What would you say if you were in the room with the chief executive of Reach [owner of the Mirror, Express, and many local news sites] right now?
ML: I think they know my view. I just think it’s an absolute disgrace, the type of content and copy they write. They don’t give a monkey’s what I think. They only give a monkey’s about utilising and pilfering my name for their content.
You talk to the proper journalists who work at Reach and they are in despair over this.
I haven’t got an answer to the existential crisis facing journalism in this country. I just know it’s an existential crisis.
Politicians do not want to fight with these organisations. Big Tech and Big Media are the two organisations they’re scared of. There’s still a lot of good journalism being done out there, unfortunately it’s hidden in a swamp of muck and crap.
LC: One final proper local news question — where are Martin Lewis’ favourite places in London?
ML: Ignoring what goes on in there, I always am inspired by the Houses of Parliament.
My favourite naughty place to eat is the buffalo wings at Chick’N’Sours — I’m not saying they’re good value.
And I average 20,000 steps a day and I would encourage people to walk around. I’m on Great Portland Street as I talk to you — there’s great architecture and amazing things going on. I do think that, apart from the fact it’s very expensive, London is one of the best cities in the world.
London Centric will be back next week. All our journalism is funded by paying subscribers. If you haven’t already made the jump please do consider taking out a membership and taking a stand against clickbait journalism. Your support enables us to pay more journalists to do more proper reporting.
Now read these recent London Centric investigations:
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He’s right. Big tech and big media have done untold damage to the fabric of society. Martin even took Meta to court and won over his face and name being widely used to scam people and guess what? Still happening. See it all the time. I don’t know how we fix any of this. But Viva LondonCentric. Brilliant piece
An excellent piece of journalism by London centric. Most people don't understand how advertising works and clickbait. There should be enough information in the headline or social media post to know what where and when. if there isn't then don't bother because you'll be searching the whole article, wading through masses of adverts to try and find the relevant information.