Guardian Cities: Local sites for local cityfolk?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 17 November 2008 at 13:54
Tags: Guardian Media Group

So now, courtesy of How Do, we’ve got a name for it: Guardian Cities.

The rumblings about Guardian Media Group’s ambitions in regional markets have been ongoing for a while.

Not so long ago, I heard they were looking for someone to lead the effort. There were whispers — probably wrong, it now transpires — about large amounts of unused print capacity, too.

If you think about it, GMG’s position in local newspaper publishing is intriguing.

Small enough not to be entirely mesmerized by the need to preserve print profits. Big enough to have plenty of experience and resourcing on tap.

GMG also happens to be a dab hand when it comes to classified job advertising at a national level. (”Couldn’t we do something at local level, too? With our audience of young professionals in big cities?”)

On that basis, I occasionally half-wondered whether GMG would skip the awkward evolutionary step that involves printing freesheets for every British conurbation. (Tactical distribution of free copies of the Manchester Evening News aside.)

So perhaps we’ll see McCall & Co proceeding directly to local sites for local people.

How Do’s report suggests that GMG’s researchers have been asking Mancs how they’d react to “a Guardian-branded website that would connect you with your local community, cover local issues and provide you with information that was highly relevant to your area”.

A spokesperson from Farringdon cautions How Do: “The fact that we are doing research doesn’t itself mean we will or won’t launch a new product.”

No. But the fact that you’re putting research money into the concept is intriguing. Encouraging even.

Especially when so many print-addled newspaper executives poo poo the idea of web-only local publishing. (A consensus this solid makes me suspicious that too many in the industry are simply repeating conventional wisdom.)

Interesting, too, to note that Tony Elliott of Time Out (which has sites for London, Edinburgh, Manchester) is looking for funding to help transform his empire for “a situation in two to three years where the comprehensive role that we play is online”.

In an interview with the Guardian in September, Elliott described the BBC as a “perfect partner”.

Perhaps we should take this to mean that Elliott views GMG — which does have a few quid in the bank and seems to like joint ventures — as an imperfect partner. . .

The mystery of Lord Carter’s Digital Britain: Tactical tweaker or a new Keynes?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 14 November 2008 at 14:58
Tags: Daily Mail & General Trust, Guardian Media Group

Stephen Carter (or Lord Carter of Barnes as he is otherwise known) published his preliminary manifesto for Digital Britain in the Times last week.

The former Ofcom boss and No.10 strategist has been instructed by Gordon Brown to find a replacement for the billions of tax income that won’t be generated by the City during the next decade or so.

As Lord Carter puts it: “We need to nurture those parts of the economy that can generate the growth potential and jobs that we have got used to from the financial services sector.”

Hence the hoary old idea of. . . Digital Britain.

Fairly clearly, Carter is aiming to re-kindle the enthusiasm for all things white, hot and technological that characterized the early years of the first Blair administration.

Only this time, hopefully, for real.

In the past, Carter (a former chief operating officer of NTL) has been accused of overweening fondness for telecoms infrastrucuture.

True to form, Carter spends much of his outing at the Times wittering on about. . . well, infrastructure.

Interestingly, he does this without mentioning the rather problematic prospects for Fibre To The Home (a.k.a. the kind of super-fast broadband access that’s already available in France, and which will be required here, too, before we can start exploiting the full promise of web video).

According to estimates I’ve seen, FTTH (or something like it) would require a capital investment of £10bn-£15bn.

Even during the boom years, BT was stand-offish about getting involved. Perhaps, therefore, this really has become a job for Alastair Darling.

Attempting to reflate the economy with a build-out of fibre optical capacity could neatly update Mr Keynes for the 21^st century.

Writing at the Times, Carter does eventually get around to content — the stuff that will flow through those pipes. And yes, his plans include you. Apparently.

We can focus on the continuing supply, only partially guaranteed today, of the flow of UK-originated content, and in particular news, nationally, regionally and locally, that works on and across all those platforms we will have built, providing competition for quality.

Only partially guaranteed today? As Alan Rusbridger hinted in the Guardian recently, Carter’s plans in this respect might have a bit of Lord Reith about them.

Spreading some monetary love in the direction of regional newspapers would be controversial.

At DMGT and Johnston Press, for example, the promise of public subsidy (plus concomitant regulation) would probably go down like a cup of cold sick.

At the moment.

However, if the current declines in ad revenue continue into 2009, that cup could yet start to resemble a piping hot portion of goodness from the No10 soup kitchen.

Lord Carter of Barnes expects to publish a preliminary report in the New Year. This will be followed by the Full Monty next summer.

So we’ll soon find out whether Lord Carter has been asked to tweak Digital Britain at the margins. Or to re-imagine Lords Keynes and Reith for 21st century.

If it’s the latter, we might yet need to dig out another prop from New Labour’s early years from the back of the cupboard.

Back in the day, John Prescott used to stitch together an emotional majority at party conferences by deploying the maxim “traditional values in a modern setting”.

That sly old maxim might yet turn out to have some left in it.

UK news media job losses: To October 2008

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 14 November 2008 at 12:00
Tags: Guardian Media Group, Independent News & Media, Media, United Business Media

As requested by one reader, a graphic. Prepare yourself for a big increase in November.

PS: Jeremy Dear (NUJ) and Jon Slattery (ex-Press Gazette) make the point that these reported job losses understate the real magnitude of the problem.

Plenty more jobs are being burned off by non-replacement of staff, for example. Here’s Dear on the subject:

The true picture in some newsrooms is grim. For example yesterday I spoke to a journalist at a daily regional paper who was the only reporter there that day. The reporting staff as a whole has dropped by half. It’s a familiar story for those working in local newspapers. But it is also now becoming more familiar to those working across the media.

A reader called hizz makes the same point — with reference to Northcliffe.

Certain parts of Northcliffe are doing drip drip redundancies and saying nothing about it in public at all, because it’s a sub here, an exec there, and a strict policy of non-replacement when the overworked and underpaid hacks who are left quit.

True enough. All we can do, I think, is capture the trend.

That said, If you’re reading this blog, you can help us by submitting news of unreported redundancies. Get in touch with me: 0208 670 0039 / fullrun [at] googlemail [dot] com.

Do remember to use a non-work email address. A non-work broadband connection might be a good idea, too. When you submit info, I’ll do my best to confirm it. . . and add your numbers to the running total.

Scandal or the public purse: How to underwrite the cost of journalism?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 12 November 2008 at 13:25
Tags: Daily Mail & General Trust, Guardian Media Group, Johnston Press, Newsquest, Trinity Mirror

At first, the concatenation of Paul Dacre and Alan Rusbridger at the front of Monday’s Media Guardian looked a bit like one of those combinations the Dulux Colour Wheel warns you against.

Lime green and purple. Or brown and blue.

The extract from Dacre’s speech to the Society of Editors was mostly a rant against the encroachments of privacy law. (Full speech here.)

By contrast, Rusbridger argued that Britain’s local newspapers should join the lengthening queue of industries seeking a government bail out.

Colour is only skin deep. Dacre and Rusbridger were arguing on behalf of completely incompatible philosophies of ownership. But both maintain that society needs to pay a price to sustain the newspaper industry.

In Dacre’s view, society must put up with regular invasions of privacy, and the resulting salacious exclusives, if newspapers are to have a commercial future. He doubts whether mass circulation newspapers can survive if they aren’t free to write about scandal.

The encroachments of privacy law, he suggests, are therefore a direct threat to the “reporting and analysis of public affairs” conducted by the popular press.

Rusbridger argues for another kind of subsidy. He can’t see why local newspapers shouldn’t feed at the trough of public subsidy alongside the BBC.

If ITV no longer wants to adhere to its public service remit, government should think about giving the money to local newspapers.

Who is to say that Channel 4 (not to mention some aspects of the BBC output) is any more deserving of state funding than those responsible for the sometimes humdrum, but essential, task of keeping people informed about what their local councils, courts, police, health and fire services are up to?

If there’s going to be a digital switchover surplus shouldn’t local newspapers be in with a shout, rather than shuffling the money around a limited pool of broadcasters - who are, in any event, rather urgently re-inventing themselves as digital content providers?

The real importance of both these pieces is their timing. Perhaps a real — and long overdue — debate about the future of news media may be about to start.

Unsurprisingly, the recession is going to be the catalyst. That, plus the doings of Ofcom, Mr Justice Eady and Lord Carter of Barnes.

Rusbridger can see it coming: “As the mists clear from the banking crisis it’s not clear if many MPs are aware of the potential for a similar one on their own doorsteps.”

He’s right about that. The real question, however, is whether anyone really cares about the fate of a business whose practitioners regularly rank below estate agents in terms of public esteem.

We might be about to find out.

Why newspapers exist: Simon Jenkins vs. Will Hutton

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 15 October 2008 at 01:50
Tags: Guardian Media Group

Perhaps I’ve been gulity of praising The Guardian’s coverage of the crash too much in a column I’ve just filed for Press Gazette’s October edition.

You can judge for yourself if you’re a subscriber.

But look at this: Jenkins vs. Hutton. One day apart, this duo define what’s at stake. If you want to measure the spectrum, Farringdon is a decent spectrometer.

Am I alone in thinking that Baroness Thatcher might yet leap forth from Steve Bell’s poignant wheelie bin?

The discreet charm of non-executive directors: Sharp hires at The Guardian and The Telegraph

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 15 October 2008 at 00:59
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Daily Mail & General Trust, Google, Guardian Media Group, Independent News & Media, News Corp, News International, Trinity Mirror, United Business Media, emap

What do non-executives get paid for?

Actually, the money isn’t great (at least not by the standards of Masters Of Universe).

The official version is that non-executives act as neutral voices, mediating between management teams and shareholders. Occasionally, they are called upon to mediate between chairman and chief executives, too.

If that sounds a bit like working as a counselor at Relate, the marriage guidance service, think again. Non-executives also have some serious (fiduciary, in the jargon) responsibilities. In extremis, neglecting these responsibilties can get them prosecuted.

As I say, that’s the official version. In many ways, the unofficial version is much more interesting — particularly at non-quoted companies, where there’s less pressure to appoint directors who are deeply acceptable as guardians of the City’s interests.

Away from the public markets, copper-bottomed presentability in the City doesn’t matter so much as a gilt-edged contact book.

Nothing wrong with that at all. It’s the stuff from which deals are made. In particular, today brought two stunning examples of the genre.

First up, Telegraph Media Group appointed Lauren Twohill, Google’s European marketing boss, as non-executive director.

Twohill has worked at Google for the past six years — long enough to assimilate the DNA of a company that lies at the heart of the web economy.

Meanwhile, over at the Guardian Media Group, in the wake of Paul Myners’ departure, the company has appointed venture capitalist Judy Gibbons as a non-executive director.

Like Twohill, Gibbons is unusual — in the sense that she’s a female Brit with extensive high-level experience of Silicon Valley.

But Gibbons’ track record in the tech industry — all 25 years of it — is deeper and wider. After stints at Hewlett-Packard and Apple, she switched allegiance to Microsoft, playing a big role in the development of MSN.

Next, Gibbons ascended to tech exec heaven — that’s to say, she became a partner at one of Silicon Valley’s largest and most respected venture capital firms, Accel Partners. (Its portfolio of investments include Facebook and a bunch of established and well-respected deep-tech companies.)

No doubt Gibbons will play a big role in advising Carolyn McCall on how to invest the tens of millions that GMG has banked from the part-sale of Auto Trader. (There’s a rather large “investment fund” waiting to be spent — although some of it may already have been blown on the £30m acquisition of Paid Content).

We know less about Telegraph Media Group’s investment plans. Have the Barclays ponied up cash for a 2.0 spending spree? Given the desperation of so many start-ups, they could do a lot worse. No doubt Ms Twohill will help the Barclays to spend what’s available.

If anything, the corollary these appointments is even more intriguing.

At Wapping, can we expect James Murdoch to tear down the walls that traditionally separate News Corp’s operating units — and bring in some digital expertise from his dad’s empire? You’d hope so. But there’s little sign of it.

If anything, the recent promotion of two insiders to take over Anne Spackman’s role as editor of Times Online points to a continuing preference for autarky.

What about Daily Mail & General Trust? This is a company that has excelled in snapping up high-margin B2B and database publishers. But its top table visibly lacks a digital star. (Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse is a retailer at heart, and a superb one. But he doesn’t quite make the cut in tech terms IMHO.)

Endearingly, five of DMGT’s non-execs appear to be over 70 years of age.

At Independent News & Media, there’s no News Corp-style pool of talent to call upon. Here, the roster of non-execs resembles a procession of stuffed shirts, old mates with Irish surnames and the odd bloke who has some expertise in international relations. Plus Baroness Jay.

As at DMGT, this is a boardroom policy minted in the 1980s. The appointment of Twohill and Gibbons elsewhere will steadily increase the pressure on the O’Reillys — and the Rothermeres — to confront the recent arrival of the 21^st century.

And what of Trinity Mirror? Sly Bailey has made some interesting-looking digital acquisitions. But have you looked at Trinity’s line-up non-execs lately? To say the least, it lacks digital oomph.

There’s Gary Hoffman (a vice-chairman at Barclays, who seems well-versed in the credit card business); Laura Wade-Gery (an ex-management consultant and investment banker who runs Tesco.com); Kathleen O’Donovan (former beancounter-in-chief at industrial widget company Invensys); and Jane Lighting (former CEO of Five).

DMGT, IN&M and Trinity Mirror need to get their backsides in gear. Their non-quoted competitors have just raised the ante. Significantly.

Web 2.0: Chronicle of a death foretold

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 9 October 2008 at 12:34
Tags: Guardian Media Group

The recession will have some positive side effects for Big Media. Among them: a massive cull of the tech-flavoured start-ups that aimed to siphon off a large portion of the media’s advertising revenues.

The business models underpinning social media and user-generated content are in big, big trouble.

Funding is drying up. The space available for experimentation in media planning is closing down rapidly. The cult of free looks decidedly vulnerable.

First, funding. This week, one of the Valley’s most respected venture capitalists told the FT that many 2.0 start-ups would end up “splattered on windshields and radiator grills and be forgotten”.

In the Valley, angel investors and private equity firms are disappearing from the start-up scene. The idea of the IPO market recovering any time soon is risible.

Doubt about the revenue potential of social media has always existed. Now, it’s chronic and widely-discussed. Here’s Roger McNamee, a lionized Valley VC, talking to the FT this week:

“We all have huge hopes for the user-generated content space, but it turns out not to be very significant economically. All of Web 2.0 rounds to about $1bn of revenue in Year Five. The web has struggled to produce meaningful businesses since Google.”

Social media never solved the credibility problems it provoked in the eyes of advertisers. Now, almost certainly, it’s too late (at least this time around). Here’s what Will Price, the chief executive of a US start-up called Widgetbox, had to say about this back in May:

“Real [advertising] spend [on social media] has been held hostage by that lack of analytics and what we’ve been relegated to is fighting for experimental budgets that don’t require clear proof of value.”

If this was true during the boom, what will a recession look like? Going forward, everything (apart from residual print and TV budgets) will require “clear proof of value”. The pool of experimental ad revenues is shrinking rapidly.

As a result, the cult of free (championed by Chris Anderson of Wired) faces its sternest challenge. Suddenly, and rather miraculously, ad-funded web sites are becoming unfashionable. Paid content? It’s the new black. As one VC puts it: “Free is over; I am only interested in investing in services that customers pay for.”

Here in the UK, there are signs of denial. At the Guardian this week, 2.0-watcher Jemima Kiss wondered aloud whether we might expect “a shake out of some of the weaker business ideas”.

It’s going to be a damn sight worse than that.

This time next year, I predict, the $30m that Guardian Media Group allegedly handed over to buy Rafat Ali’s Paid Content will be spoken of in the same hushed tones in which chroniclers discussed sightings of unicorns during the 15^th century. (My point: Paid Content is a great site. Perhaps it’s also a good business. But everyone knows that $30m was daft money.)

In this respect, two things are worth noting. The first is how negative Richard Waters, the FT’s highly-regarded Valley-based tech correspondent, has become about ad-funded social media.

Recently, Waters has taken to musing about the “fundamental bankruptcy of the web 2.0 economy” and the “sickening sense of unease” that now surrounds the Valley’s start up scene.

And then there’s the current situation at Facebook, the company that more than anything else defined the social media boom of the Naughties.

Even Jemima Kiss has been alienated by the site’s recent (and ill-judged) revamp. But if Valleywag is to be believed, even more serious problems are afoot. Meanwhile, at Breaking Views, the judgement is that the world’s largest social networking site “risks becoming a piece of Silicon Valley history”.

Welcome to the future. The breaking of web 2.0 will look a bit like the dot com crash of 2000 — only this time, everyone will be scared.

Yes, some bright prospects will survive and prosper — as Google did last time around. But the winners will be few and far between.

Former Guardian chairman spins Alastair Darling’s story for business hacks

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 8 October 2008 at 12:40
Tags: Guardian Media Group

That was quick. On 3 October, Guardian Media Group announced that chairman Paul Myners was stepping down to become Gordon Brown’s Financial Services Secretary (at HM Treasury).

Five days later, Myners this morning found himself chairing an off-the-record briefing on the state-led recapitalization of Britain’s banking system for the nation’s business hacks. Like this:

Following the RNS announcement to the markets at 07.30 this morning,
HM Treasury will be holding an off-the-record, background briefing
chaired by Financial Services Secretary, Paul Myners at the Treasury at 10.00 Wednesday 8 October 2008.

The really funny bit about Myners’ appointment was the way in which the Guardian’s rivals reported it.

At the Mail, Rupert Steiner simply omitted to mention any connection between Myners and GMG.

Instead of describing him as the chairman of GMG in its headline, The Times referred to Myners as a “former M&S chairman” – a job he left in 2006. Mention of Myners’ role at Farringdon was relegated to the third par of Carl Mortishead’s report.

Similarly, at the Telegraph, deputy political editor Robert Winnett mentioned Myners’ work for Marks & Spencer — but not GMG.

Elsewhere, the Telegraph took a tilt at Myners’ membership of the board at a hedge fund — before mentioning Myners’ work at GMG in the seventh par of its report.

Even amid a national emergency, it’s heartening to note that the ancient policy of denying the oxygen of publicity to one’s rivals is alive and well.

Backlash brews for US financial journalists: Guardian man mentioned in despatches

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 17 September 2008 at 12:08
Tags: Guardian Media Group

The crash will reshape the City. It will probably strip Gordon Brown, the erstwhile Iron Chancellor, of the last vestiges of authority.

But what will it do to financial journalism?

In the US, a little backlash is brewing.

At Marketwatch, Jon Freidman says he “cringed” as he watched Monday’s press conference in which the mighty investment bank Merrill Lynch announced its rescue by an unfashionable hick outfit based in North Carolina known (somewhat misleadingly) as Bank of America.

According to Friedman, the media at the press conference in New York were “so polite and deferential”. They acted as if the press conference was a “victory lap for the financial services industry”. Reporters offered no “tough, in-your-face questions”.

(It should be said that there was plenty of scope for asking them. Bank of America’s rescue shows every sign of being cobbled together overnight. Analysts were disconcerted by the lack of detail available on the deal.)

The exception, writes Friedman, was “a fellow from the Guardian“, who asked Merrill Lynch’s chief executive “if he judged himself to be a success or failure in his relatively brief reign”.

(I reckon this is a reference to David Theather: see here.)

Not a particularly tough enquiry, admittedly. And the UK media will itself need to answer a different set of questions once the crisis dies down.

But in the US, the inquisition has started. It seems inevitable that the US media will experience a re-run of post-invasion scepticism about its supine acceptance of the Bush administration’s position on Iraq.

Also worth noting the fact that Marketwatch, one of America’s leading sources of financial news, highlighted The Guardian. There was no need to explain to readers that this was a British newspaper, a liberal newspaper, the paper formerly known as the Manchester Guardian, or anything else. Just: The Guardian.

This is good news for Carolyn McCall. She should send Mr Teather (or whoever was responsible) a bottle of something nice — and encourage them to do more of the same in the coming weeks.

Only louder.

Structural x cyclical = hysterical market

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 26 August 2008 at 17:38
Tags: Guardian Media Group, Trinity Mirror

Ahead of tomorrow’s six-monthly financials from Johnston Press, here’s an intriguing quote captured by the Independent’s Sarah Arnott from Steve Liechti at Investec:

“There are three factors all happening at once: the structural, the cyclical, and the structural multiplied by the cyclical.”

Er, the structural multiplied by the cyclical? Is that what happens when Carolyn McCall and Sly Bailey lock horns? We think we should be told.