Time to ditch sackcloth and ashes and start rebuilding regional press

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 11 March 2010 at 13:17
Tags: Journalism, newspapers, regional newspapers

Paidcontent has totted up the figures and found that more than £500m was knocked off the revenue of the major UK regional newspaper publishers in 2009.

The detailed breakdown makes fairly depressing reading, especially when you consider that around one in five jobs in the industry appear to have been sacrificed in order to keep businesses in profit.

But taking a glass-is-half-full approach to this, it is pretty amazing that every single major regional newspaper publisher still made a profit in 2009. Typically they delivered profit margins of around 10 per cent.

In any other industry a 10 per cent margin would be cause for celebration at the best of times, but this was the worst year in modern history for the regional press.

At the tail-end of 2008 revenue went off a cliff as everyone suddenly stopped buying cars and houses or recruiting any staff. It seemed like the end of life as we knew it.

But here we are on the other side of the hurricane and every major publisher made money in 2009. How many other industries can say that?

Johnston Press today managed to deliver a 16.8 per cent operating profit margin.

It’s been a tough couple of years for regional newspapers, and no-one wanted to pop champagne corks while so many colleagues were being made redundant - hence the cancellation of the Regional Press Awards and the Newspaper Society Awards.

But isn’t it time to ditch the sackcloth and ashes and start thinking about building again in the regions? With so much cost having been cut, I suspect regional media is going to start making serious money again as the economy rebounds in 2010 if owners can somehow keep the editorial quality up.

Awards are all about celebrating the excellence which underpins the profits, and if Trinity Mirror, Newsquest and Johnston Press (the companies who were most reluctant to support the £39 a pop entry fee to the Regional Press Awards) can’t see that then they are very short-sighted indeed.

And as Press Gazette no longer organises the event, which is owned by Wilmington, my comments are not motivated by self interest. This however is:

BLATANT PLUG

One event that will be celebrating regional press success stories is Press Gazette and Kingston University’s Local Heroes conference on 14 May, for more details click on the link.

PG magazine March edition: Exclusive John Mulholland interview

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 2 March 2010 at 07:00
Tags: Journalism, Press Gazette

In this month’s Press Gazette magazine Observer editor John Mulholland gives his first ever in-depth interview as the title embarks on a make or break relaunch.

In it, he says:

- The relaunch will probably lose readers.
- GMG is now committed to The Observer’s future.
- Web-first is not always the best policy for Observer content.
- The Observer should break even financially from next month.

Other highlights of the March edition:

Insider secrets of the consumer magazine ABC risers: New!, Star, Full House!, Classic Rock, The Week, The Oldie, Good Housekeeping and Stuff.

Emap and Manchester Confidential reveal how charging for online content is working for them.

Journalism entrepreneurs: A special report on the journalists who have packed in staff jobs to launch their own thriving media businesses.

Freelance journalist Brian Deer on his six-year fight with The Lancet and Andrew Wakefield to reveal the truth about the MMR vaccine.

Psychologies editor Louise Chunn explains why her title is now back on track “after moving away a bit from being deep and serious” and why some consumer magazine editors could try harder.

Peter Sands on why editors need a vision to lead their teams through adversity.

A guide to freelancing in the food and drink sector.

Chris Smith from T3 picks out the best video cameras for journalists.

Channel 4 News correspondent Nick Martin on tracking down Mexico’s missing and murdered young women and blowing open a secret sex trafficking ring.

Daily Telegraph chief reporter Gordon Rayner on the secrets of being a great reporter: “Very often it’s that one last phone call or the line buried on page 193 of a report that will give you the breakthrough you need on a story.”

The best press photography in the world: two of the World Press Photo competition judges pick out their favourites images from the winners.

This content is only available to Press Gazette magazine subcribers (£90 a year plus a free USB stick, £40 a year for students). To subscribe, call 01858 438872, or click on this link.

To view the November edition in full (the first under our new look) click here.

Less seems like more for the relaunched Observer

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 22 February 2010 at 13:47
Tags: National Newspapers, Press Gazette, The Observer, newspapers

The new-look Observer is getting a bit of a kicking over on the Inside Guardian blog.

But what do people on the internet know anyway?

I rather liked it. And considering that this relaunch was all about cost-cutting, it still felt like a substantial read for £2.

The 60-page news section has been beefed up considerably so serious readers will feel like they are getting more in this department. The chunky Andrew Rawnsley book extract was easily worth the cover price on its own.

The New Review section has also been beefed and includes a new section called Seven Days, which is a homage to what fast-growing news digest magazine The Week does. It’s worked for them and is a cost-effective way to fill six Berliner-size pages mainly with news intelligently aggregated from elsewhere in the media.

By folding much of what was in the now-axed sections into the New Review this also feels like a substantial read, on 56 pages of posher newsprint which is heavier than the main paper. And the return of the TV listings will resolve a major issue for many of The Observer’s lapsed readers.

Much of the features content has been taken out of the Magazine with the result that it now has a much more feminine feel and there was little left to entice me in. But the sport section appears to have escaped without major filleting and in Paul Hayward retains one of the top writers in the business .

Although there are gripes on the Guardian blog about the loss of the horoscopes and the travel section in particular - on the whole editor John Mulholland has done an impressive job of making less seem like more.

When this cost-cutting relaunch was first revealed there were claims from the NUJ that Guardian News and Media was killing the title by stealth and was not committed to its long-term future. The conspiracy theory goes that GNM still wants its heavyweight Saturday edition of The Guardian to be the main weekend offering long-term.

But the flurry of cross-promotional activity which has accompanied this relaunch surely must put that argument to bed.

Mulholland makes a persuasive case for GMG’s long term commitment to the title, and says the Observer’s financial position is now looking a lot healthier, in an in-depth interview which is appearing in the March edition of Press Gazette magazine (only available to subscribers).

He also provides a fascinating account of what it was like to go through the painful process of coming up with a relaunched and redesigned newspaper while his bosses were looking into closing it.

Press Gazette may have played a small part in persuading Guardian Media Group to back away from proposals to close The Observer last year with our Observer SoS campaign. And on the basis of this relaunch I’m glad we did.

Slideshow: Twitter for Newsroom Leaders - And Press Gazette Twitter milestone

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 17 February 2010 at 08:23
Tags: Press Gazette, new media

Press Gazette now has 6,000 Twitter followers and has made more than a 8,000 Tweets.

To follow Press Gazette, which means you’ll receive a Tweet every time we post a story or blog post, search for pressgazette on Twitter or click here.

For any journalist who still doubts the virtue of Twittering here’s a handy slideshow from Steve Buttry in the US on Twitter for Newsroom leaders:

Twitter For Newsroom Leaders

For Press Gazette Twitter has become a major source of traffic.

Of the 117,000 visitors to the site we had last month, four per cent came in via Twitter - making it our biggest source of referrals after Google.

It’s also a handy way to keep in touch with what our readers are thinking through the more than 1,000 whose Tweets we follow.

Hat tip to Julian Bray’s Duckhouse Blog for spotting the slideshow.

Press Gazette February edition: ‘Being at war is a very big deal - that story has to be told’

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 2 February 2010 at 12:33
Tags: Journalism, Press Gazette

The February edition of Press Gazette magazine is now out (£90 a year plus a free USB stick, £40 a year for students). To subscribe, call 01858 438872, or click on this link. To view the November edition in full (the first under our new look) click here.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s in this month’s magazine:

On 9 January, Sunday Mirror defence correspondent Rupert Hamer became the first British journalist to die covering the current conflict in Afghanistan.

Last year more than 200 British journalists applied to be embedded with the British military alone.

In our five-page special report Mirror colleagues Chris Hughes and Susie Boniface write their own deeply personal tributes to their colleague.

And The Sun’s defence editor Duncan Larcombe, Jason Burke from The Observer, Marie Colvin from The Sunday Times and Alastair MacDonald from Reuters reveal how war reporters have reacted to the loss of one of their own.

Says Larcombe: “Being at war is a very big deal, and I think what motivates journalists beyond their wages, their careers, their egos, their desire to make a name for themselves, is a feeling that there is a lot going on out there - and that story has to be told.”

 Also in this month’s mag:

We reveal the top 50 comment and opinion journalists working in British journalism today selected after carrying out a 1,000-strong weighted public survey and interviewing 22 senior journalists working in the field of comment. We also reveal the public and journalists’ favourites; the public’s favourite journalistic outlets for comment and opinion and the platform (print, broadcast or online) that most people prefer to read/view comment journalism.

Patrick Smith investigates the rise of the journalism mobile phone application, and finds out whether the app presents a viable digital future for journalism. 

James Pallister investigates life after Borders for independent, magazine publishers. As Danny Miller from Little White Lies puts it: “So much shit has happened in the past year that the closure of Borders is just the icing on the cake.”

And Telegraph head of digital development Greg Hadfield reveals why he is leaving Fleet Street for an online business role for a second time in this month’s Big Interview.

Despite the fact that Telegraph.co.uk now attracts more than 30 million unique users a month, he says: “What is important now is we’re on a journey from volume to value. We need to identify our loyal users and pay attention to their needs specifically. What’s so great about 31 million unique users a month? You can’t meet the needs of all 31 million.”

In Comment: Grey Cardigan ambushes the Bishop of Beastville with a strategically placed copy of Razzle; Lori Miles cast her eye over some lacklustre consumer mag coverlines; Alex Thomson looks at how broadcasters covered the big freeze and Haiti; Peter Kirwan asks whether media cost-cutting has gone too far and David Banks pins down Piers Morgan on what he thinks now about those Iraq torture photos.

Also in the February issue:

• A special report on journalism in the Philippines in the wake of the massacre which killed 31.
• A redesign masterclass from Peter Sands.
• Editorial headhunter Martin Tripp reveals how to carry off the perfect interview.
• A two-page freelance section including an in-depth report on making it as a music journalist.
• CNET UK features editor Rick Trenholm looks at ebook readers and finds out which, if any, are best for reading newspapers and magazines.
• BBC college of journalism editor Kevin Marsh explains why journalism trainers could be leading students up the garden path with talk of “entrepreneurial journalism”.
• The Guardian’s David Leigh provides an investigative journalism masterclass.
• As News Corp prepares to take its websites paid-for we investigate at what point aggregation of rivals’ stories becomes plagiarism.
• Mirror.co.uk sports editor Dan Silver showcases his favourite snaps from the Daily Mirror archive of four millon sports photos.
• The author of a new book on journalists in film, Brian McNair, picks out the five greatest journalism films ever.
• Sky News presenter Martin Stanford reveals the latest must-have gadgets and software for journalists.
• Leading defence correspondents reveal what would be learned if the Iraq Inqury were to investigate British journalism’s conduct before and during the Iraq War.
• And Marc Reeves reveals all about his move from editing the Birmingham Post to running an independent business news website which is in direct competition with his old paper.

Rusbridger is winning paywall debate, but my money’s with Rupert

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 29 January 2010 at 14:58
Tags: Guardian, Ruper Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, new media

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s Cudlipp Lecture was a highly intelligent and thoughtful defence of the free-for-all open access content policy at The Guardian.
If I was putting together a dream Fleet Street quiz team, he would be top of my list.
But - at the risk of stretching a metaphor to breaking point - if I was looking for someone to look after the team’s finances, it would be Rupert Murdoch.

For my money Rusbridger is winning the debating competition with Rupert Murdoch on the paywall issue. But the time for debate is over – the time has come for action, to make some money and save journalism jobs.

You can’t argue with the fact that in pure journalism terms, and in terms of The Guardian’s mission to spread liberal values, Rusbridger’s decade-long love affair with all things digital has been an amazing success.

37 million unique users a month is not to be sniffed at (although I’d bet that a huge amount of those are the worthless plankton of readers who drift in via search once in a blue moon from all over the world for a matter of moments).

And being open to all has undoubtedly fuelled some great journalistic triumphs that wouldn’t have been possible behind a paywall: the Twitter revolt which led to the Trafigura super injunction being dropped; the BAE files investigation website which prompted sources to come forward from around the world; the expose of tax avoidance techniques at Barclays prompted, Rusbridger says, by “crowd sourcing” information from readers.

Not to have a fantastic website which is largely open to all for general news is clearly not an option.

Five years ago Press Gazette was a weekly magazine with a gated website. We were drifting towards oblivion as free online competitors covered all the news, debated it and followed it up – while we were labouring away on a declining print-only product.

But it is interesting that Rusbridger’s speech mainly railed against “universal paywalls” – something that Murdoch (unless he has really lost the plot) won’t be doing.

I’d wager that Murdoch and Rusbridger are probably going to end up being not that far away from each other in the paywall debate.

The solution both sides come up with will be more nuanced than free versus paid-for.

With The Guardian losing paid-for £1-a-copy sales at a rate of more than 10 per cent a year, sheer pragmatism means that whatever the virtues of the open, link-fed approach to web publishing – it has to start monetising those 37 million web readers fast. Or more precisely, start monetising the few hundred thousand who delve deep into Guardian.co.uk on a regular basis.

That will mean some form of charging for online content (something which it has already begun doing with the paid-for iPhone app).

And News International will continue to offer much of its content for free online, lest it wants Sun and Times readers to instantly desert the paper for the Mirror, Guardian and Telegraph when seeking their fix of online breaking news.

Jeremy Hunt’s ruthless free market idealism will cost hundreds of journalism jobs

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 21 January 2010 at 19:04
Tags: BBC, Broadcasting

Jeremy Hunt’s ruthless free market idealism will see hundreds of journalists lose their jobs and looks set to remove the only lifeline which had been thrown to the struggling regional media.

Today he stated in unequivocal terms that a Conservative government would scrap the Independently Funded News Consortia which had been set to replace local broadcast news outside the BBC after 2012, when ITV abandons its commitment to public service broadcasting in the regions.

Hunt believes that “sweeping away the cross-media ownership rules at a local level” will be more effective than the £130m of BBC licence fee cash that had been ear-marked to fund the IFNCs.

He says: “This will allow local media operators to follow viewers, as they increasingly switch platform at a moment’s notice, whether from TV to radio to mobile or to online. It will allow a consistent and strong new offering to advertisers: go with us and we will reach consumers in a defined geographical area whichever platform they use.”

Hunt appears convinced that by sweeping away regulations city-based TV and radio franchises of the sort seen in the US will flourish in the UK.

Unfortunately they won’t. MEN Media has a combined TV and print franchise in Manchester which has failed miserably financially, falling into loss in the last six months of the 2008/2009 financial year.

There is already clear evidence that the reduction in journalists nationwide is leading to a crisis in the court and council reporting which underpins our democratic society.

By scrapping the IFNC scheme in favour of a free-market pipe-dream, Hunt is removing the only chance we had of salvaging ITV’s existing network of regional broadcast journalists.

As for the campaign from inside the BBC against “top-slicing” the licence fee to fund IFNCs. Shame on you all from Mark Thompson down.

Under Conservative plans the £130m of licence fee cash currently allocated to pay for digital TV switch-over won’t go back towards funding the next season of Strictly Come Dancing, it will in all likelihood return to the exchequer to be used for some eminently less worthwhile purpose than shoring up the local reporting which underpins all journalism in the UK.

NUJ conference reveals New Ways to Make Journalism Pay

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 18 January 2010 at 09:59
Tags: Journalism, News Ideas, new media, newspapers, regional newspapers

It was encouraging to see National Union of Journalists members get their hands dirty on Saturday morning and explore New Ways to Make Journalism Pay at a special one-off conference organised by London Freelance Branch.

Too often in the past, at NUJ meetings I’ve attended, its seemed like the debate has not gone much beyond Marxism-inspired calls to arms. I remember one NUJ conference a few years ago when a motion was proposed that the union should call for the nationalisation of the top 100 FTSE companies - not the most immediately practical solution I thought at the time.

The fact that Saturday’s event at the NUJ headquarters was sold out showed that journalists realise more and more that we have to come up with some of the commercial solutions to saving our industry.

Among those speaking was former Yorkshire Post business editor David Parkin who in 2007 set up Thebusinessdesk.com. It now employs around seven journalists in Leeds and Manchester covering business news for the north of England.

It’s a thriving and expanding business and shows that the advertising funded online model can work if you’re dealing with high-value readers and have low fixed costs.

It’s also an inspiring example of what can be achieved when journalists fed up with the endless cost-cutting of the big media owners have the courage to strike out on their own.

Another niche-online local start-up which appears to be doing well is Manchester Confidential.

Angie Sammons, editor of sister-website Liverpool Confidential, told the conference: “Local newspapers have destroyed it for themselves because of their reliance on PRs”, Jon Slattery reports on his blog.

She said that Manchester Confidential sees its future in paid-for content and charges subscribers between £30 and £60 a year.

Right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes told the conference that he now attracts two million page views a month to his website (Jon Slattery again).

Slattery reports that Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, said: “I have achieved the Marxist ideal. I own the means of production and distribution. I have job security, I can’t be fired and do much better than many journalists.”

I was one of the speakers in the morning session and noted that the economic climate for journalism is already looking a lot brighter in early 2010 than it was a year ago.

Back then the likes of Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press were selling their shares for pennies - signalling that investors really didn’t think regional media had much of a future.

In December 2009 Trinity Mirror shares were selling for 31p compared with around £1.50 today. Johnston Press were on 8p compared with 25p today.

In both cases they are still far lower than their peaks, but the signs are at least now more encouraging that investors see them as having a longer term future.

And so far (and I admit it is very early days) 2010 has been much more about new launches and new economic activity in the journalism sector than a year ago, when all we were writing about was redundancies and closures.

We’ve had Champion Media launching a new free weekly in the North West, Spear’s launching new digital editions, Sky News opening a new studio in the City of London , and David Hall publishing launching a new international gun magazine.

As for my two penneth on new ways to make journalism pay. When it comes to niche business and local media I think we are going to see ever more small web-based start-ups taking a slice of the pie.

They’re going to make money from web advertising, sponsored emails, events and in some cases free or paid-for print publications. There’s not going to much new in the sources of income (personally I can’t see paywalls working in the vast majority of cases) - what is going to be different is that these start-ups have much lower fixed costs, less staff journalists probably working harder than they did before.

Guardian and Telegraph’s tit for tat battle

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 15 January 2010 at 14:28
Tags: Daily Telegraph, Guardian

The Guardian and the Telegraph appeared to be locked in something of a tit for tat battle.

Today the lead story on Media Guardian states: “Hadfield quits Telegraph group, saying newspapers have no future” - which as a headline, seems to rather over-egg what he said.

The PaidContent blog post from which the story is sourced has the Telegraph head of digital development saying: “The future is much more diverse. There’s not a dichotomy between being a journalist and an entrepreneur - the future is the individual journalist, not big media.

“The challenge is for big, monolithic media to recognise that being entrepreneurial is corporate ethos, to reflect in the structure to leverage the skills of the individual within the organisation.”

When Press Gazette called Hadfield today he said: “I don’t believe newspapers are dying, I just believe they won’t be necessarily about news and they won’t necessarily be mainly on paper, but then they haven’t been that for many a year.”

Media Guardian has minutely chronicled the travails of Telegraph Media Group through successive rounds of cost cuttings and redundancies, much to the annoyance of many Telegraph insiders.

The Telegraph for its part published a weird story about Guardian News and Media this week reporting that it had made an operating loss of £55.3m. It appeared that GNM’s losses had ballooned from the £36.8m reported in the 2008/2009 figures last year.

But closer examination revealed that the story used the GNM Limited Company accounts, which are compiled in a slightly different way from the Plc ones, to re-state financials which had alread been reported by GMG. It was very old news indeed, perhaps explaining why it was not followed up anywhere and did not apparently make it on to the website.

I’m not saying journalists on these two publications are making things up. But they do seem to go out of their way to portray each other in a negative light.

Alastair Campbell: Evidence as convincing as a Karzai election victory

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 12 January 2010 at 17:05
Tags: Alistair Campbell, BBC, Broadcasting

Six years after the Hutton Report brought BBC journalism to its knees, Alastair Campbell’s testimony to the Iraq Inquiry sounded as convincing as Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s summer election victory.

Campbell said: “I defend every single word of the dossier, I defend every single part of the process.”

He even refused to show a shred of contrition for the Prime Minister’s statement in the foreword to the September 2002 report that he believed that what the intelligence “has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons” and that he was “in no doubt that the threat is serious and current”.

Whilst being grilled about the wording of the dossier, Campbell told the inquiry: “I don’t think we would be having this exchange if it was not for the controversy that subsequently existed.”

That last sentence in itself is justification for Andrew Gilligan’s 6.07am Today Programme broadcast of May 2003.

Campbell insisted in his evidence today that no-one at Number Ten had any involvement in “sexing up” the dossier, as Gilligan suggested.

And he condemned the way the media still portrays the Hutton Report, which cleared him and broadly condemned Gilligan, as a whitewash.

But isn’t it a plain fact that Blair did exagerrate the case for war by saying that the WMD issue was beyond doubt? Obviously it wasn’t. And as one of the inquiry members said today, intelligence is - by definition - never beyond doubt.

Gilligan made mistakes - he took sparse notes of his crucial conversation with Dr David Kelly and admits the phrasing of his report was misleading.

If Campbell could own up to mistakes on his side too he might help repair the breakdown in trust between government and media that the whole dossier episode caused.