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Paper Tiggers*

April 7, 2009 @ 2:47 pm

In recent weeks there’s been much hand-wringing amongst the media punditry about the escalating decline of newspaper sales. As an ex-local newspaper editor myself and because it parallels a brooding downturn in magazine fortunes (which concern me even more), I therefore feel moved to rattle my own bracelet.

Following a bleak economic analysis by James Robinson in March 22^nd’s Observer (‘Presses grind to a halt as print passes its sell-by date’), Polly Toynbee’s fairly alarmist but not entirely baseless piece (‘This is an emergency. Act now, or local news will die’) in March 24^th’s Guardian reiterated that same newspaper’s Roy Greenslade who’d pointed out “free news on the web has always been parasitic on the ability of (news)papers to generate print advertising.” Well blow me down.

Some newspapers, most successfully in readership terms probably being the Guardian and Telegraph, have turned gamekeeper and mounted their own extensive websites which essentially replicate much of what’s in their paper editions but with the ‘added value’ of blogs, comments and even complete stories exclusive to the digital version. Trumpeted on virtually every page of their papers, these are supposed to be a bit of a bonus for customers who loyally shell out nigh on a quid a day for the inky version – and at weekends much more. However for the proprietors they are a crude means of driving up traffic on their websites so that they can attract and charge more for their digital advertising. (Having seen its circulation fall by 6% over the past year, my biggest local newspaper, the Newsquest-owned Hereford Times, is now following suit and the dumbing down of both versions is has become depressingly palpable as they increasingly on regurgitated press releases, many of them weasely-worded by opportunistic local politicos).

Ever since I did some serious research on this some three years ago for a major but ultimately aborted magazine launch (“Not enough advertising potential”), I have always viewed this through the eyes of the cynic who sees a naked emperor talking up his new tailor. For just as soon the advertising hoardings were being erected along the digital highway back in the late ‘90s, so too was the cost of filling them steadily pushed down by advertisers as the traffic increased. The net result was that business plans have been regularly torn up as print publishers desperately strove to increase their hit rates whilst having to drop their CPTs (cost per thousand hits, or more likely per 100,000).

Which of course has all too often been done at the expense of the quality of their print journalism, with all the quality ‘papers shedding the experienced journalists that in large part were responsible for attracting readers in the first place. As a consequence I know of a Telegraph and a Guardian reader in my street alone – and it’s a very short street in a tiny Welsh town – who have given up on their daily paper and now buy it only sporadically, sometimes in deference to the Daily Mail whose character they may be uncomfortable with but whose lower price they find comforting.

Replacing the craft and the considered journalism of these writers with fewer, generally less experienced (if photogenic) media studies graduates may still fill the pages, but their output – reduced reportage, shorter, less-nuanced stories, more froth – whilst it may well suit the websites onto which it is streamed, tends to turn off these papers’ core readership and, crucially, does little to address the advertising deficit the websites were supposed to address.

And of course it takes no account of the longterm fortunes of the fourth estate which, as Ms Toynbee rightly points out that whatever their sometime considerable failings, are crucial because “democracy without the scrutiny of good journalism is unthinkable”. Champions of the internet’s immediacy and universal access claim that such scrutiny will simply migrate online, but until publishers can find a model which generates enough income to finance it, that will never happen unless there’s a newspaper newsroom in the background to deliver the goods. And therein lies the rub.

* A fairly obvious reference to A.A. Milne’s over-optimistic if hopelessly naive character in The House at Pooh Corner et al.

Do please visit my website: www.markwilliamsmedia.co.uk

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Comments (7)

7 Comments »

I suspect, as with the record and film bizzes, we’re fighting a rearguard action here and the outcome is inevitable. Physical products like CDs, DVDs and newspapers are going to be superceded.

Large circulation general newspapers will almost certainly vanish. Look at us. We’re all busily putting our feelings down here and communicating regularly with each other because we have a lot in common – we’ve found a community that feels more like our own than the rather disparate readership of any given newspaper. When did any of us last write to a newspaper?

Everything will become more targetted; our prejudices will be catered to by minority digital publications. It’s scary but it’s likely true.

Maybe there’s a way we can work together to think beyond the simple knee-jerk reaction of wanting to preserve what we’ve always had, and try to work out how to live with and improve what looks to be inevitable.

The genie of digital distribution of information cannot ever be put back into the bottle.

We must to work out how we can live with it, influence it, temper it, come to terms with it, and possibly even come to trust it as a reliable source of information.

Of course, that’s a damn sight harder than just whining about how awful it all is and it probably depends on the least likely thing of all – our society becoming responsible for its own actions.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Or am I?

Comment by Johnny Black — April 7, 2009 @ 9:13 pm
Good points Johnny, but the digital communities you refer to which are more comprehensive if narrowly focused than newspapers (and even magazines) have a major downside for all us old hacks who cut our chops on the inkies: there’s almost no way of earning a living compiling blogs and scribbling for websites unless you’re a Big Name. And to answer your question, the last time I wrote to a newspaper was in fact yesterday! And that was to the Media Guardian, commenting on an article about how freelancers are being squeezed out of a living by the recession.

Comment by Mark Williams — April 7, 2009 @ 9:55 pm
I salute you, sir, but I suspect you’re one in a thousand. Anybody else out there written to the nationals lately? If not, why not? Do we not care? Do we not think it will make any difference?

I certainly can’t quibble with your other point, Mark, about the cashflow problems inherent in digital publishing, but I suspect it’s the wave of the immediate future and we have to learn how to adapt or we will be swept away.

Maybe the recently announced Freekly will help, but even if it doesn’t, that’s the kind of initiative we need to be showing if we’re going to weather the changes ahead.

I am by nature an optimist, so I believe that things will find their own level and their own way of functioning and I also believe that most of us, me included, probably can’t even imagine what that way will be right now.

What I can’t believe is that the kind of collected wisdom and memory-bank that we wizened old hacks represent will be thrown aside completely. There will be a place for most of us if we hang in there and don’t just automatically reject new ways of working and new means of distribution.

Now, i’m an old bloke, so I’m off to bed.

Comment by Johnny Black — April 9, 2009 @ 12:00 am
Johnny,

I’m an old bloke too, and maybe that’s why I regularly write to the ‘papers (and mags) – old habits die hard! And whilst I commend your embrace of all that’s new and shiny media-wise, I don’t share your optimism about revenue models adequately benefitting content providers – as we must now be called.

My income from scribbling has dwindled to a thin trickle this past 18 months and for every pitch I make to a mag or paper, they get fifty others from both wizened old hacks like us and, more critically, newly qualified media studies graduates and recently sacked staffers – both of whom have inherent advantages over us lot. Hey, and maybe their pitches are better?

I’m washing dishes a few nights a week for a few quid and doing tons of voluntary work just to keep my brain working… oh yeah, and scrawling Blogs! Haven’t had an consultancy work – my bread and butter for five years – this past 12 months, which just show how the industry is contracting.

I also got a spam from Freekly and it didn’t really impress, but in any case, what do they pay: £25/500 words?!

Comment by Mark Williams — April 9, 2009 @ 8:49 am
I have to admit I’ve been very lucky in my career to have been (through no innate talent of my own) in right places at several right times. So – while income has shrunk in recent years and I’ve had to do more work to achieve this lower level of income) – I’ve survived.

I also owe you a lot, because you gave me a break at New Music News which, although a controversial venture, I thought was a bold move.

I can well understand your anger and your perspective on this brave new digital world must inevitably be a harsher one than mine. I hope I’d have enough grit and determination to wash dishes or sweep roads if there was nothing else even if, like you, I’d hate doing it. In fact, I’d probably do all the things you’re doing just to keep the brain ticking over and the bills paid.

It must be particularly galling when you have, as you do, a wide range of abilities that you can’t seem to get used. All I can do is scribble.

Those of us whose backs aren’t yet against the wall would do well to remember that we’re lucky gits and not get too smug and try not to write entirely from a PLU perspective. Unfortunately, our own experience is inevitably what we draw on when we write.

Thanks Mark for reminding me of all of this. I remember once having a discussion with a genuinely lovely old lady of my acquaintance (a lifelong Daily Mail reader) who told me in all sincerity that there were no poor people in Britain now.

I’m evidently more like her than I realised.

Comment by Johnny Black — April 9, 2009 @ 12:15 pm
I’m very flattered at the reference to New Music News, surely the maddest ever music mag launch, but one done with great gusto. In fact I think had we not produced it, IPC would’ve continued their lock-out for a lot longer.

I also agree that the PLU tendency is dangerous, especially when assessing the relative merits of what lies behind vs. what lies ahead… which is of course what I do almost constantly!

In fact I’m not actually as angry about my current career hiatus (or end) as I perhaps sound. I’ve pretty much accepted that the past is the admittedly glorious past, but that’s, er, it.

Comment by Mark Williams — April 10, 2009 @ 10:17 am
And, if nothing else, I now know what you’re up to and that you’re alive and coherent etc etc … which is always good. Too many of our contemporaries – some of them prodigiously gifted – aren’t even here now, some physically gone, others just mentally out of it.

I remember you took a lot of stick for starting NMN but I’ve always felt that in the world of business it’s dog eat dog. Who was to say that the strike might not have resulted in the closure of one of those other papers and then NMN might at least have there to offer some work to those who were laid off.

I’ll probably get crucified for having typed such heresy, but I do think the business world and the unions are actually just two big power blocs, waving their swords at each other. It’s all very macho indeed. The once ‘pure’ notion of a union as defender of the underdog worker just no longer seems to make sense.

I heartily despise Thatcher for what she did to the unions (and her son Tony Blair too for that matter) but even I can see that once any body gets power it begins to abuse it, and we passed that point long ago with the unions.

We need unions, of course we do, but we must be as wary of them as we are of the capitalist bosses.

Which is a long-winded way of saying I thought you had every right to have a go with NMN, doomed though it probably was from day one.

Comment by Johnny Black — April 10, 2009 @ 11:56 am