Common sense, a decade late: James Murdoch cuts 20% of sales jobs at News International

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 9 July 2008 at 16:40
Tags: News Group Newspapers, News International, Times Media

James Murdoch’s decision to merge the separate sales teams that used to service Times Media and News Group Newspapers might sound a bit radical.

In reality, it’s hard to describe the move as anything other than common sense, implemented a decade late in a sector well-known for its old school approach.

From September, News International’s sales teams will flog space through “agency-focused hubs, each housing between six and 10 people”.

The stated aim, of course, is for sales folk to build deeper relationships with the big agencies that generate most of NI’s ad revenues.

The unstated aim involves cutting perhaps 20% of the employment costs out of NI’s sales organization. News International is planning to make 100 out of 450 sales staff redundant.

From a bean counter’s point of view, the timing is excellent. The reorganization was worth doing anyway. But no doubt Murdoch Jr. has grabbed the chance to add a bundle of recession-related job cuts into the total.

The anonymous jeers from rivals quoted in Media Week cut very little ice. One suggests that asking the same team to sell space in both The Sun and The Times is “not a natural fit”.

Why not? Despite demographic differences, both papers trade in the same currency of eyeballs. By selling across a portfolio of titles, News International will hope to generate more incremental revenues than it will inevitably lose by demolishing title-focused sales teams.

The second complaint from an anonymous competitor goes like this:

“I am not convinced it is the best way to go forward. The changes will not grow their revenue base, but it will be a more efficient way to generate sales. This is about cutting out costs.”

. . . Which, last time I looked, seemed to be a perfectly sensible response to recession.

Welcome to The Great Unbundling, Mr Rusbridger

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 25 June 2008 at 17:11
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Guardian Media Group, Independent News & Media, Telegraph Media Group, Times Media

Scientists say that falling in love alters our brain chemistry, and therefore the way in which we perceive the world.

Presumably, it’s the same with losing.

Last week, the Mail Online overtook the Guardian and the Telegraph to become the UK’s most-trafficked national newspaper site.

Now, suddenly, the Guardian is suggesting that it’s becoming increasingly “anachronistic” to compare ABCe data for newspaper websites.

Yes indeed. That’s because the Mail’s great surge in online visitors hasn’t been generated by what Mike Butcher, the author of the piece, would call “news”.

No — it’s all down to Keira Knightley’s “razor sharp” collarbone and pictures of an emaciated and distressed Amy Winehouse wandering around the streets of London in the small hours dressed only in her underwear.

Butcher argues for a purist view. He accuses the Mail Online of playing fast and loose with link bait (which is patently true).

Sites like the Mail Online and The Sun — with its three lane pile-up of tits, bingo and fantasy football — aren’t really news sites at all, he argues. They have more in common with the US celebrity site TMZ.com.

As for The Guardian, well, it seems tempted to pick up its toys and walk away. Now that the Mail Online has bested it, Butcher tells us that:

guardian.co.uk. . . will be more interested in how it is faring against the Huffington Post, a liberal US blog network, than comparing itself to other domestic newspapers.

Of course, tinkering with competitive sets in the wake of commercial defeat has a long and venerable history within sales organizations. It goes on everywhere, and it’s symptomatic of denial.

Commercially, no-one will be fooled. That’s because the web’s animating force is all centripetal, not centrifugal. Competitive sets are getting bigger, not smaller.

In terms of advertising revenues, the Guardian must compete directly with the Mail Online as well as Google, MSN and Yahoo — and a host of others.

In the absence of pornography, violence and racism, the quality of news coverage that brings in the punters simply doesn’t matter to advertisers.

That said, Butcher’s piece does point to something important.

The Mail Online’s successful experiments with link bait are a prime example of what the author Nick Carr calls the “unbundling” of news content.

No longer do we have to pay a set fee to buy a newspaper that contains a mix of highbrow and lowbrow content.

Zooming in from Google in 0.25 seconds, we can get our fix of “+keira +knightly +baftas” and exit just as rapidly as we arrived, leaving any “serious” content undisturbed.

The real question for editors at the Guardian and the Telegraph is how to preserve resources for the news content that Rupert Murdoch calls “boring”. They need to do this in a digital world where 20%-30% annualized growth is a minimum requirement.

The pressure to unbundle, to encourage links with bait, is enormous. It can only grow. For better or worse, it will influence news agendas.

If mentally cordoning off a bit of cyberspace and labeling it “serious news sites only” helps editors to manage the pressures, fair enough.

But let’s not pretend that this will influence the ad market.

Because it won’t.

Succeeding together with passion and trust: James Murdoch sends in the secret policemen

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 13 June 2008 at 16:08
Tags: News Group Newspapers, News International, Times Media

There are times when the role of management consultants is akin to that of the Stasi.

The classic example involves the arrival of a new chief executive in an organization that has grown used to doing business successfully under a long-lived predecessor.

The consultants are told to fan out, get under the surface, find out what’s going on and report back. Woe betide any manager whose pitch to the new CEO is contradicted by the consultants’ findings.

The other day, a News International journalist told me that “everything at Wapping is in flux”.

On the commercial side, I fancy it’s worse. According to Media Week, News International has entered a “consultative process”. Whether that means consultants doing their jobs, or consultation prior to redundancies, remains unclear.

What’s clear enough is the belief that James Murdoch wants to knock down the walls that separate NI’s publications into title-specific silos.

Instead, the talk is of “three separate units across News Group Newspapers and Times Media comprising commercial, digital and operations”.

In other words: a big restructuring, in which jobs will be lost as high-level commercial folk apply for new roles.

Take Paul Hayes, managing director of Times Media, and Mike Anderson, managing director of News Group Newspapers. Media Week suggests that these two are likely to find themselves competing to run operations, digital or commercial matters across the whole of NI.

Mike Gordon, deputy managing director of Times Media, seems likely to be caught up in the same contest.

And don’t even get me started on marketing, where the likely outcome of BCG’s review is a new chief marketing officer’s role.

Presumably, both Roland Agambar, News Group Newspapers’ sales and marketing director and Katie Vanneck, sales and marketing director for Times Media, will end up competing for that particular plum.

At Boston Consulting Group’s web site, the firm lists its mission as “succeeding together with passion and trust”.

No doubt there’s plenty of both circulating around Wapping at the moment.