Johnston Press And Observer Prolong Respective Death Rattles
Two stories to faintly warm the cockles of the old-school print journalist today – firstly the Observer isn’t getting canned as previously mooted, and secondly Johnston Press, the nationwide network of local newspapers that’s had a worse recession than most, is heading slowly back towards profitability.
The Observer is having its monthly music, sport and woman magazines dropped, leaving only that kohlrabi-strewn bible of middle-class aspiration, Food Monthly. OK, we scoff – it is actually pretty great, though it’s a real shame they couldn’t find a way to accomodate the nation’s greatest and cheapest general sport magazine. Its business section (never its strongest suit) is being folded into the main paper, and the travel section put into the magazine. Staff have been cut or distributed across the rest of the Guardian teams, and others are being gently prodded towards voluntary redundancy. The National Union of Journalists are also questioning the Group’s faith in the paper.
So not a particularly radical plan then – just make the paper less compelling a purchase, and hope the savings made will compensate for the loss in readership. Not sure that’s going to be enough to turn around the £100,000 a day losses for the Guardian Media Group. In a week where the Guardian has openly announced its intention to stay free as Murdoch’s papers turn towards a paid model online, the paucity of financial innovation at the Group has been uncomfortably laid bare.
Meanwhile, in a damning story whose praise couldn’t be fainter, Johnston Press are sort of beginning to turn around their fortunes. Rather than losing 32.7% year on year in revenues as it was earlier this year, now it’s only losing 22.1%. Put the flags out! Celebrations are dampened by the fact they can’t use any of the cash they’re making on their £424m debt mountain, that they’ve written off the gains made from selling printing presses, that no-one wants to buy their papers because they’re a series of revenue black holes. And the fact their websites look like they were designed in 1996, and just looking at them creates a little core of sadness at the centre of my being. But what’s the most humane way of putting them to sleep that doesn’t screw over the nation’s journalists?
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | November 11, 2009 12:24PM |
November 11th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
I work for a JP title in Ireland and this piece is just spot on.
We’re fresh from a doomsday meeting with our Managing Director, a bumbling incompetent who when challenged on the horrendous look of our god-awful ‘JP template’ website informed the questioning journalist, ‘you do not know what you are talking about’.
The company is a faceless bastard corporation who saw a chance to make what they thought would be easy money by buying a slew of Irish titles a few years ago and have now had their arses well and truly bitten.
They suck the ‘local’ out of ‘local paper’ and fill the void, left by a lack of journalists and resources, with management-speak and ‘think-tank’ meetings on irrelevant company bilge.
They are doing nothing to solve the problem of the paucity of their ideas regarding how to fix the real problems and instead they are trying to block the dam with their fingers. As a result, as the arse falls out of the Celtic Tiger, JP offers nothing to try and improve the papers and instead slashes journos, AND advertising staff, left, right and centre whilst filling the papers with knock-down price ads and attempting to run newspapers like stationary product offices, a la The Office on TV, instead of like NEWSPAPERS brimming with ideas,answers and creativity.
How do you improve the intake of cash to a paper when you let go of ad staff and journalists every month??As Gus in The Wire once said: You don’t do more with less, you do less with less. For shame.