Opinion

Bad management is what is hurting the newspaper industry. Journalism can save it

The Brisbane-based journalist Jason Whittaker has written another excellent piece on the future of journalism over on his blog Importance Of Ideas.  

In it, he argues that if Google wants decent news content to aggregate, then it needs to be a part of the solution to newspapers’ current malaise. In the comments thread, the conversation turns to considering when problems began for newspapers. It’s a subject that feels particularly poignant for me as I discovered this morning that in the UK, Press Gazette – the weekly newspaper, and more recently monthly magazine, for journalists – is to close.

But it made me realise that this all began long before online took hold.

I became a hack nearly 20 years ago. At the time, I got the distinct impression from my seniors that things had been much better ten years before. Now I realise there never really was a golden age of journalism.

But the moment where I really began to realise there was a problem for papers was about 14 years ago. The company I was working for at the time in the UK – TrinityMirror – had the bright idea that it should make the editors of its various local titles redundant, and have the (much cheaper) deputy editors report in to a single group editor. So my brilliant, experienced, passionate, local, editor got the bullet. I voluntarily made my own move to B2B about a month later.

At the same time the company centralised subbing of the papers in the area – so copy was often  laid out  by someone who had never even been to the town in question – and instituted a hiring freeze. All this while profits were booming.

It made the management at the time look good – while circulation fell, say, 5% as readers drifted away because the paper now  had no character, the savings outstripped that, so the bottom line was great. After a year or two, the management moved on to better things, of course. The next lot came in and trimmed another chunk off the costs, and of course, there was another slight readership decline. But the bottom line was good, so all was well.

Before you knew it, the place was staffed by inexpensive juniors who had no time to do anything but publish press releases between the ads. And even the advertisers started to notice that the readers were deserting.

So they took it free, which at least apparently gave the advertisers a bigger audience. But of course, without subs revenue, even more costs had to be cut, so they merged the editions of a couple of neighbouring towns.

And so it went on, with each subsequent round of managers taking out some cost and adding some efficiencies to maximise the return from what is effectively a series of local monopolies.

Long gone from the DNA were the owners and managers and journalists who had built up the audience and the business in the first place. Until, suddenly, they weren’t monopolies any more. People could get their news – such that it was – elsewhere and do their advertising online. It wasn’t that the newspaper-finds-out-interesting-things, reader-buys-it, advertiser-advertises model was broken, it’s just that managements started trying to do the first bit on the cheap.

And this takes me to why I think that the newspaper model will survive. It needs owners who remember the reason why they were successful in the first place. And that’s the journalism. Invest in good, original content, and there will once again be a market for it. The problem is that there is a whole generation of newspaper management which has forgotten it. It’s not been a part of their business model.

Newspaper owners that succeed will need to get back to a model of 15, 20, 30 years ago, where the content is what matters. That means a model that involves a modest profit, not gouging.  

But there will still be a place in the market for it.

Funnily enough, something has just made me smile. I’d not thought about him in more than five years, but I wondered what happened to the manager who made my editor redundant all that time ago, and began the decline of the feisty paper I worked for at the time. So I’ve just Googled him.

The first story was from Press Gazette. Earlier this year, to save costs  Trinity Mirror merged three of its newspaper divisions, making two managers redundant, including him. It’s funny how things work out.

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