Once a week we’d nervously approach a sliding glass hatch in the wall, swindle sheets in hand, where a stern woman would hand over hard cash (yes, children, hard cash) with a grim reluctance that suggested that it was coming out of her own purse. Even more trying was any attempt to secure a cash advance even when it had been signed off by the news editor and was necessary for a job. The form would be laid out on a desk and scrutinised by at least three clerks, while suspicious glances were shot at the innocent applicant.

However, these trials apart, I think we mostly regarded them with indifference, if not disdain. As far as the newsroom was concerned, these odd people had little to do with our newspapers. They collected the money from advertisers and paid our wages, but when it came to the hurly-burly of daily deadlines, they were as back-of-house as back-of-house could be.

In those days we all had our own pubs: one for the hacks, one for the management, one for the comps, one for the inkies and one for the advertising staff. The accounts department had their own tea-shop. That just about sums it up.

But then, over the next couple of decades, everything changed. The loonies at Johnston Press started milking profits of 30 per cent from their titles by constant acquisitions, the rest tried to follow suit and suddenly the Accountant was King. I said here a few months back that Northcliffe Newspapers was effectively fucked the Christmas morning that little Michael Pelosi unwrapped his presents to find a bright, shiny abacus inside. From that moment on, his career as a bean-counter was set and would eventually take him to the top of one the the best regional newspaper groups in the country.

But the men in grey suits, who replaced a generation of largely entrepreneurial sales-based MDs, have failed miserably. They’ve left our industry in tatters, starved of staff, editions and innovation, and providing a constantly worsening level of service after round after round of cost-cutting. So that worked well then.

But now the accountants are on the way out and there’s a new kid on the block: the open-necked, sharp-suited digital whiz-kids are taking over and, while I’m delighted to see a bit of flair and enterprise back in the business, I’m not so sure that there’s any great news for print in their arrival.

The appointment of BBC’s former new media and technology director and latterly head of Microsoft UK’s consumer and online division, Ashley Highfield, to succeed accountant John Fry as chief executive of Johnston Press, is a seismic shift for that company. Highfield has no publishing background whatsoever, never mind in the regional press, so we can only assume that the company sees its future somewhere other than in Dead Tree Distribution.

A sad thought, but maybe the time has come to accept that the spiral of our terminal decline is reaching helter-skelter speed. It’s every man for the lifeboats and let’s grab a digital job while we can.

This is an extract from the Grey Cardigan’s column in the print edition of Press Gazette. To get the full version, subscribe now.

]]> http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/greycardigan/2011/12/here-come-the-new-kids-on-the-block/feed/ http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/greycardigan/2011/11/grey-cardigan-meeting-the-invisible-man/ http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/greycardigan/2011/11/grey-cardigan-meeting-the-invisible-man/#comments Sun, 20 Nov 2011 10:32:59 +0000 Grey Cardigan http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/greycardigan/?p=230

Another day, another board meeting, another round of budget cuts.

The week hadn’t started well. I’d spent Monday at the funeral of an old colleague whose liver had disgracefully betrayed him. He was an old school regional daily sub, from the days of marking up triple carbons in pencil and pasting together paragraphs on copy paper with Gloy glue. His claim to fame was that he’d once confronted an idiot, fast-track whiz-kid sent to us from a management training scheme and kicked him cleanly in the bollocks. The whole newsroom stood and applauded as the tosser who is now the editor of a national newspaper slid slowly beneath his desk.

Anyway, the day disintegrated as you would expect given the disreputable company at the wake and I suddenly came round at 11.30pm to find myself slumped in the corner of a fetid, flat-roofed pub just as the police arrived to break up the inevitable fight.

Nine hours later and I’m sitting in a windowless meeting room 30 miles down the road from my Evening Beast haven, for this is from whence we are now ruled. I’ve showered (twice), shaved (badly) and bathed in assorted perfumeries, but I can still smell the beer sweating out of my pores. A team of midget miners is excavating areas of my brain and my tongues tastes like a Turkish wrestler’s jockstrap. The really bad news is that I’m surrounded by bean-counters. Think Zulu, only with spreadsheets and calculators rather than shields and spears. I’m silently humming Men of Harlech as the agenda is passed around.

Since they sacked the Eminence Grease, our local MD (who, incidentally, is now setting up a glossy magazine to compete with the Evening Beast on our own patch), we’ve come under the control of this weird bloke down the road whose most recent retail experience seems to be a few years as an accountant with Lidl and who now runs a rag-bag of failing weeklies and crap frees. He’s had no experience of a daily newspaper in his life, yet Those Who Must Be Obeyed deem him worthy of running the Evening Beast.

Such is his impact on the business, I’m ashamed to admit that I can’t even recall his name. I’m sure I read it in a memo somewhere, but for the moment it eludes me. But I can say that he is grey, very grey. In fact, he’s so fucking grey that he’s almost transparent. He drifts in and out of view like heat haze on the horizon. We shall henceforth call him The Invisible Man.

And so the nonsense begins. The Invisible Man is surrounded by his acolytes, a pack of Jackanory jackals. As each performs their party piece, it turns out that the Evening Beast is overstaffed and over budget. “And how have you arrived at this conclusion?” I ask? Ah, well, apparently it’s all about KPIs: Key Performance Indicators.

One of the junior suits fires up a Powerpoint presentation showing that the Evening Beast costs more to produce than any of the weekly newspapers in the group. They sit, seemingly awaiting an explanation. “You do realise,” I say, “that we publish six days a week? We’re bound to be more expensive.” Amazingly, one of them clearly hadn’t and begins rattling away on his calculator like Jerry Lee Lewis in full flow.

They try again, this time with a year-on-year ‘cost per page’ calculation. Why do we now spend four per cent more per page than we did this time last year? I patiently explain that they’ve hammered our pagination so much that we’re producing fewer pages. Therefore the cost per page has risen slightly. For example, whereas last year we’d routinely do a 48-page paper on a Monday, we’re now down to 36 pages.

I can see where the next one is coming from, and, sure enough: In that case, can’t we get by with fewer reporters? Yes, I say, but what do we do on Tuesday? That flummoxes them somewhat and we move on to petty bickering about shillings and pence.

Yes, I’ve spent quite a lot in The Shivering Whippet this year, but we have had quite a lot of leaving ‘parties’, so much so that I’ve now banned office collections and just stick a few quid behind the bar.

No, I don’t know why one of my best reporters only ever seems to use the same curry house and the same taxi firm and, judging by the handwriting on the submitted expense receipts, the same person works at both.

And no, I don’t know why there’s an outstanding cash advance form for £100 charged to my employee number, with the reason for advance given as ‘Imminent drunkenness’ and signed by ‘M. Mouse’.

After a couple of hours of this, The Invisible Man re-materialises and brings the meeting to an end. I don’t recall him having spoken, even once. Perhaps he communicates with his minions through telepathy.

I emerge feeling like a Hitchcock victim from The Birds - pecked to death by a thousand irritants. I’m disheartened and disillusioned. The proud newspaper that was the Evening Beast has once again been chipped away at by know-nothing number-crunchers. Still, we battle on. Just.

And, 12 hours later, I suddenly come round to find myself slumped in the corner of a fetid, flat-roofed pub just as the police arrive to break up the inevitable fight…

]]> http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/greycardigan/2011/11/grey-cardigan-meeting-the-invisible-man/feed/ http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/greycardigan/2011/06/grey-cardigan-who-put-the-workie-in-the-cupboard/ http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/greycardigan/2011/06/grey-cardigan-who-put-the-workie-in-the-cupboard/#comments Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:50:32 +0000 Grey Cardigan http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/greycardigan/?p=229 This week, Press Gazette was nominated as the best work experience gig in the country by the Wannabe Hacks blog. How ironic then, that this should be an extract from my June column.

THERE’S been much debate over the use, or exploitation, of work experience kids and whether or not they should be paid. (Can anyone tell me why we started using American term ‘interns’?)

Alarmingly, the NUJ has managed to secure around a grand in back pay and holiday pay for an ‘intern’ who worked for a local news website in London.

The suggestion that we should have to pay these kids is absurd. We hardly have the money to pay our dwindling staff, never mind forking out for the chinlesss, dribbling fuckwit in the corner who just happens to be the son of one of our non-execs. It’s not as if he’s any use. He’s superglued to his mobile phone, speaks like Brian Sewell on acid and it took him three hours to fetch a simple lunch order from Gregg’s. The Bullingdon Club are welcome to him.

If we’re made to pay ‘interns’, then we’ll simply not bother taking any on. All that will mean is that students who might have talent and who would benefit from a spell in a newspaper office won’t get the chance of that valuable experience. And that would be a shame. Our last three trainees have come from the ranks of the work experience merry-go-round. Our best reporter was similarly discovered.

Of course, the key thing to discover about these kids on their first day is how they arrived at the Evening Beast. Are they there as a favour to a director or key contact, or are they merely state school riff-raff who’ve got lucky in the lottery of life? You then know how to treat them.

Now not being in an industrial environment we don’t have to opportunity to send them to the stores for a sky-hook, tartan paint or a long weight, but there is still fun to be had from gullible youngsters. (Tell them that there’s no such word as ‘gullible’ in the dictionary for a start. They always go and look.)

Telling them that you’re taking them to doorstep a violent criminal is a good one as well, especially when you stop at some random house, bang on the door and then suddenly shout “Run!”.

Yes, I know we shouldn’t torment the poor mites, but if they can’t take a bit of joshing they won’t survive in a newsroom anyway.

It reminds me of when I wandered over to the newsdesk some years back to discuss an four-page supplement we were doing on the local NSPCC (that shows you it was years back; charity doesn’t even begin at home these days).

I pulled up a chair and sat down. The news editor, a hard-nosed old hack, looked up from his desk and said: “Morning, Grey. Fancy a brew?”

“Why not?” I answered.

He swung round in his chair, opened the cupboard behind his desk to reveal a small youth crouched in the darkness amongst the notebooks and pens, and said: “You, boy. Go and get this gentleman a cup of tea.”

The youth scuttled off towards the big kettle, blinking at the bright lights, leaving me stunned and the news editor impervious to the curious situation.

“What did you put him in there for?” I asked.

“Who? Oh him. He’s on work experience and we haven’t got enough chairs.”

You can contact me, should you be minded, at thegreycardigan@gmail.com or follow me on Twitter: @thegreycardigan.

I wouldn’t say that it’s been a simple process. In common with most newspaper groups, the suits at the Evening Beast’s head office suddenly noticed the collapsing classified ad revenues and managed to convince themselves that all would be OK as long as we shifted everything online. This led to a succession of sharp-suited, tie-less whizz kids being appointed as Group Digital Supremos before being sacked after a year when the magic beans turned out to be of the Tesco Value variety.

We then went down the ‘hyper-local’ route, which meant opening our electronic pages to any lunatic who could work a keyboard. I did argue at the time that this might possibly pose the occasional legal difficulty. Personally, I wouldn’t let a trained journalist write straight to the website without the opportunity for some subbing intervention, but the suits simply saw our assorted nutters as a source of free content so insisted that we went ahead.

It didn’t take long to unravel. Scurrilous – and false – accusations against local councillors, blatantly libellous restaurant ‘reviews’, score-settling by warring neighbours … we were soon taking down stories as fast as they went up, while local lawyers rubbed their hands with glee. (They never actually had to fight and win a case. The letter-writing alone kept them in the manner to which they had become accustomed.)

So now we’ve arrived, accidentally and expensively, at a happy medium. The crap-spouting clowns have departed, we’ve decided what is a sensible level of subbed copy to put up on our sites and agreed that non-journos should take care of the mechanics, and we’ve disabled our forums and now only allow pre-moderated comments.

There’s still a lot of nonsense rumbling around in the background, but life is a lot calmer and we’re actually turning the odd shilling here and there. Which brings me back to Twitter.

I had always dodged the five-day ‘Introduction to Social Media Networking’ courses that the suits set up. Where the fuck am I supposed to find five days from? In the end it took one of the girls from our marketing department to show me the basics in 10 minutes flat. And you know, it really is quite useful.

When we wanted to find a local couple getting married on April 29^th, we had four responses within 20 minutes. (I know, I know … but we’re a local paper and it has to be done.) When I want to push a good front page, it takes 30 seconds to reach my 300 followers – and costs nothing. And just reading it can often find you a decent story. So there. Twitter is A Good Thing. But just remember that everyone can read what you’re saying …

(PS: I’ve found a website called whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com. Click on it and up comes a phrase suitable for slotting into Powerpoint presentations or the kind of bullshit bingo bollocks our masters too often require us to produce. For example ‘Activate audience by giving them compelling social experiences, encouraging advocacy’ or ‘Increase organic growth by exposing audiences to the brand through breakthrough viral communications’ or ‘Maximise buzz by driving word of mouth from relevant influencers’. Brilliant stuff, and very useful. )

This is an extract from the May column in Press Gazette magazine. Subscribe for the full version, every month.

I didn’t even know it had happened. I was in the newsroom when my mobile went. It was the Gomez Addams lookalike calling from a phone box down the road, explaining that he’d been bin-bagged not 10 minutes earlier and left to walk off our terrible industrial estate in search of a taxi. They’d given him five minutes to gather his personal effects and had taken his mobile phone and car keys off him before escorting him to the door.

I’ve never really understood why people are treated like that (apart from the odious Piers Morgan who, incidentally, still owes me two grand). What’s the harm in allowing the victim a bit of dignity and 24 hours to sort themselves out? It’s not as if there’s a nuclear button that can be pressed in anger. There’s no printing press to chuck a spanner in, no havoc to be wreaked. The worst that could happen is that the departing MD might cancel a vital order for paper clips out of spite.

Even the outgoing Prime Minster is granted enough time to clear the porn off his PC and squirrel away his black file of incriminating evidence about his enemies. (Mine’s a belter. I’ve just had a quick flick through and I could easily bring down five editors, three MDs, several ad directors and a Bishop.)

Despite his daily impersonation of a human oil-slick, I was sad to see the back of the Eminence Grease. Yes, he could smarm for England, but at least he came from an advertising background and therefore had a basic grasp of how newspapers worked.

He never asked too many difficult questions about expense claims, turned a blind eye when he knew damn well that I was fiddling the head-count to protect the needy, and let an editorial kangaroo court sort out most disciplinary matters, rather than calling in the group HR Gestapo. Yes, he might have been an oleaginous bastard, but he was our oleaginous bastard.

From what I can gather, we’re to be managed by some bloke 30 miles up the road who already has three daily titles and a slurry of weeklies under his beady eye. He is, inevitably, a grey-suited, teetotal bean-counter. This does not bode well.

How is someone supposed to make life-and-death decisions about a fast-moving daily newspaper business when they’re not even on site? Who, for instance, is next in the chain of command? When it comes to the hierarchy there’s just me, Dodgy Den the ad director, and a fat female accountant with cats and a BO problem. Who will be the link with the boss man? Who will get to put the spin on the daily phone call?

I go back to my black file. I’m sure I’ve got something on Dodgy Den the ad director in there.

This is an extract from the April column. For the full version, subscribe to Press Gazette via links on this site, you free-loading bastards.

I stole the mahogany toilet seat our managing director, the Eminence Grease, had installed in his private khazi and hung it on the wall of the journos’ boozer.

I refused to apologise to a big advertiser after he invented some imaginary error in an ad feature in an attempt to get his bill reduced. And then ran a story based on complaints to Trading Standards about his business.

I signed off Tommy Cockles’ expenses claim for ‘reverse mileage’ – “You know, when you’ve missed an address and have to reverse back? It all uses petrol boss.” I then threatened an accountant with minor violence when he queried the claim.

I created a ‘phantom’ department called News Features where I hid non-existent employees, so when I was told I had to lose staff, I lost non-existent ‘phantom’ staff, rather than people with families and mortgages.

I overdid it one night at a weekend group conference and didn’t emerge from bed on the Sunday until the EastEnders theme tune was on the telly.

I snuck out of that same conference on the Saturday lunchtime, hidden under a blanket in the back of a car, to go and watch the local Football League club play.

I crept into the office of the Eminence Grease to put an open copy of Razzle on his coffee table while he was out in reception welcoming the new Bishop to his office.

I put a tea boy in the bin. I put a news editor in the bin. I put a fag end in the bin, thus setting fire to the newsroom. And the tea boy.

But it’s not all about me, so I hit the phones and spoke to current and former colleagues about their own indiscretions. Here are just a few.

“I wanted to bring back the Saturday night sports paper, but management wouldn’t sanction it. So I ran a poll in the paper which had such an overwhelming result that they couldn’t not do it.”

“I took the troops to the Press Gazette awards via plane, taxi and canal barge. It was cheaper than going on the fucking train, but the bean-counters were still offended by the imaginary extravagance.”

“I sent a freelance reporter to report the bullying managing director’s third drink-drive case, even though he had somehow managed to get it moved to a court 60 miles away from base. And then I stood over paste-up the next morning to make sure that the bullying managing director couldn’t force the comps to pull it from the page.”

“I was caught on CCTV with a coke-addled prostitute complaining that she hadn’t been paid, jumping up and down on the bonnet of my company car outside the office early one morning.”

I can’t verify all of them, but I do know that the last one is certainly true.

This is an extract from the March column in Press Gazette. For the full version, go and subscribe on the home page.

Anyway, one of them managed to sneak through last week and I was conned into picking up the phone to hear the dulcet tones of Lavinia or Arabella or Lucinda or whichever oxygen thief it was. It went like this.

“Hi there. I hope you’re well and enjoying this beautiful day. [Fuck off. I’ve got a terminal chest infection and it’s pissing down here.]

“I represent the publishers Bertie Bollocks and we’ve got an author local to you who has a new book coming out next week and we were wondering if you’d be interested in doing an article on her?” [Upward inflection.]

“What’s the book about?” I ask. “Oooh, good question. I’ll find out.”

[Much plumby-voiced murmuring in the background. I’d normally have put the phone down by now, but it’s a quiet day and I’m now in this for the sport.]

“It’s the story of a former merchant banker who is now a mother of three and it’s about how she’s now moved to the country and launched her own kitchen table internet business.”

“Right,” I say. “It’s cupcakes, isn’t it?”

“Oooh,” says Lavinia or Arabella or Lucinda, “how did you guess?”

 I take a deep breath. It’s January, decent copy is thin on the ground and this might just fit the demographic of our Weekend features supplement.

 “OK,” I say, “If you could let us have 650 words, a couple of pictures, a cover shot of the book and a decent reader offer, we’ll probably be able to find you a slot.”

 “Wonderful,” she says. “And how much would you be able to pay her?”

 “I’m sorry?”

 “How much would you be able to pay for the article? It doesn’t need to be a lot. Say £250 or so.”

 I can feel a vein throbbing in my forehead.

 “Hang on. I’m giving you a page of free advertising space at a value of about £600 to promote this book and now you’re asking me to pay for the fucking words? Are you mad?”

 “Oh dear, isn’t that how it usually works?”

 I smash the phone down with such ferocity that the handpiece shatters and, a few hours later under the cover of darkness, I’m skulking around the accounts department looking for a replacement.

We’ve touched before on the antics of Mr Shaun Robinson, mouthpiece of United Utilities in the North West, but his latest missive takes some beating.

It starts: “LEGAL ADVISORY FROM UNITED UTILITIES: NOT FOR PUBLICATION.” [Their caps.]

“This advisory relates to stories in today’s Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph and Daily Express, which are based on a false and inaccurate story on the Lancashire Telegraph website. The stories falsely assert that a hosepipe ban is expected in the North West; or that there are fears of one; or that one is imminent. All of these statements are entirely false and inaccurate.

“We would therefore advise you not to repeat the false claims of a hosepipe ban, without speaking to us first. To re-publish false and inaccurate information now that you are aware of the true facts would constitute a malicious falsehood under the laws of defamation.”

Malicious falsehood? So here we have a PR wonk issuing his own legal threats and an imaginary D Notice against the very people he relies upon to keep his customers informed? What a ******** **** [editor's asterisks] .

This is an extract from The Grey Cardigan column which appeared in the January edition of Press Gazette magazine. Click here for details about how to subscribe (thus getting Grey Cardigan in his entirety and much more).

Christmassy? Well how about some jokes about receiving your cards or getting the sack? Because that’s all that’s happening around here at the moment. Not only is our one miserable overnight edition being printed on an industrial estate 50 miles away (produced by so-called printers who don’t even leaf through the pages to make sure all is OK before completing the run), but much of our subbing operation has now been force-marched 30 miles up the road.

I’ve managed to hang onto four subs – meaning just two are ever on duty – but more and more of our pages are being homogenised into group-wide productions. We used to be able to disguise this by intervening to localise bits of these common pages – giving a bigger mention to a TV programme with a local link, for instance – but now even that has been banned.

(Remarkably, I’ve managed to protect Mungo, the peripatetic Glaswegian sub who keeps a half-brick in his desk drawer “just in case”. God knows how. I think no-one is brave enough to tell him to go.)

Christmas in this business used to be fun. There were the riotous parties, the ill-judged fumblings with the classified comfort women (it was always interesting to see who got the silence-buying pay rises or promotions on the return to work after the New Year) and the time-honoured tradition of getting the tea boy so drunk that he threw up into the sausage rolls and had to be sent home in disgrace.

But now it’s hardly the season of goodwill. Everyone is thoroughly miserable, we can’t produce newspapers to the standards we want and I honestly think that the suits have given up on us and are just riding the downward spiral of terminal decline. Bah, humbug.

ANYWAY, Christmas has a lot to answer for. Some time in the dim and distant past, well-meaning relatives carefully gift-wrapped a toy abacus and slipped it into Santa’s sack addressed to little Michael Pelosi, Master John Fry or the infant Adrian Jeakins. These small boys, enraptured by the clanking of the brightly-coloured beads, went on to become accountants, eventually happened upon the newspaper industry and now run Northcliffe Media, Johnston Press and Archant.

And that, in my humble, personal opinion, is where it all went wrong. This is a creative business, dependant for success on imagination, inspiration and risk-taking. Accountancy, with the best will in the world, isn’t. The grey suited bean-counters aren’t a stereotypical myth; they’re the Dementors of the business world, soul-sucking fiends capable of draining away your happiness.

Now I’m not saying that the gentlemen named above are completely to blame for the industry’s decline. We must also look at Sly Bailey of Trinity Mirror (former tele-sales girl; no previous Christmas misdemeanours known of) and Paul Davidson of Newsquest (who, judging by the way he refuses to communicate with the rest of the industry – or his own staff – was probably a Trappist monk. Actually, given his soaring salary at a time when the rest of his employees are on a pay freeze, plus the ending of their final salary pension scheme while his own pension payments have rocketed, I think we can safely put him down as a rather seedy used car salesman in a previous life).

This thing of ours has always thrived on flair and showmanship, extravagance and extroverts. Our current crop of bosses might be best buddies of the corporate shareholders (not to mention their own bank managers), but over the past 10 years the dead hand of fiscal prudence certainly hasn’t done our newspapers any favours.

We’ve lost thousands of jobs, millions of pounds in revenue and the ‘service’ we provide to our remaining readers is a pitiful shadow of what it used to be and still should be.

Shame on you, the lot of you.

I’M fucking furious with the Independent group for launching their ‘i’ newspaper – and not just because of the silly affectation of a lower-case name.

No, it’s because when I go into the garage to pick up the papers in the morning, I now have to buy five daily newspapers, an action which is greeted with stunned and amused incredulity by the window-lickers behind the counter.

It was bad enough when it was just the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, The Times and The Sun.

“Ooh, what a lot of reading,” they’d giggle. “How on earth are you going to get through all those?”

Now it’s even worse. The thought that someone might want (or need) to buy FIVE daily newspapers is clearly beyond the grasp of the moronic shopgirls of this nation. You walk out of there, head held high, while they nudge their mates and snigger at your receding back. “Who is this weirdo freak? FIVE newspapers?”

It’s the same when you get trapped into going to a dinner party. The conversation will be flowing when suddenly some arse will say “Ooh, I shouldn’t have said that in front of you. You won’t write about it, will you?”

Well no, love. If you’d told me that Prince Philip was shagging Cheryl Cole, then I might be interested. But the fact that you stuck in a dodgy insurance claim when the dog knocked a cup of coffee over in the sitting room isn’t really going to win me the Pulitzer fucking Prize. Bah, humbug again.

You can contact me, should you be minded, at thegreycardigan@gmail.com