Some greater force has prevented me from doing any work today. And so this blog post is an attempt to at least do *something* constructive today. I am half expecting my laptop to blow up just before I hit “Publish”. One of those days.
Talking of blogs, I had a tour round the blogs I have bookmarked and got around to Roy Greenslade’s which as ever contained a hell of a lot of interesting information – interesting, that is, if you’re a UK journalist.
I went there to find out whether he has reviewed if the Daily Express is losing readers, for the simple reason that it has become a joke newspaper. Worse than The Sun is its angled nonsense, more reactionary and hypocritical than the Daily Mail, just dreadful. But really does it is the endless Diana front pages, every one purporting to provide some new revelation, and every single one a complete joke. I spotted a mentally ill man in Sainsburys this week standing stockstill at the newspaper stand, reading the Express’ Diana conspiracy spread and making notes on a tiny piece of paper.
Anyway, some good news – its circulation is plummeting. Some bad news: it still sells around 700,000 a day – and that is 300,000 more than The Guardian. You can get all this information at the ABC circulation site.
Online news, offline blues
But to get to the point of this blog post – the impact of the Internet on news. Greenslade – who used to scoff at the Net but has finally woken and is taken to it like a duck to water – had taken a look at the figures and determined that newspapers are surely doomed because the rate of decline in circulation is increasing, and the future was providing information over the Net.
When you get to the Net, it is a different story. The Guardian leads the way here, followed by The Times and the Telegraph. You can also get all those figures at the ABC’s electronic arm, ABCe website. What has always been interesting is the people that pay for the auditing of their numbers. The Register for example has been doing it for years and occassionally challenges its rivals in IT news to do the same, and would you believe it, but they are still crying off.
Anyway, Greenslade has started looking at website figures and promises to do comparative analyses from now on. Good lad. This is proper journalism: knowing your subject, watching the trends, creating original content and informing the wider public about what you have learnt.
Vital statistics
What Greenslade hasn’t grasped is the intricacies of the Web measurements as his post on the ABCe changing its approach makes clear. He (rightly) praises the move away from page impressions to unique users as a measurement of a site’s size, but has missed the subtleties. Thankfully, the Telegraph’s online news editor Shane Richmond saved me from having to give an explanation of all the complexities of website measurement by noticing the same thing and producing a very good, clear and informative explanation.
It was then that it occurred to me. The thing I have been going on about for years is finally happening – mainstream journalists are starting to *get* the Internet. Starting to learn about it and treat it seriously rather than this rather pathetic dismissive attitude up until now. It’s because Greenslade is right – the future of the news media is online.
This revelation has two impact on me though. One, I was delighted and relieved. But secondly, I felt anxious. Anxious because soon everyone will be swarming over my specialist area. Maybe it’s time for me to get my foot in the door of a national full time.
Press Gang-Gazette
One place I won’t be working though is Press Gazette. Press Gazette is the UK journalists’ weekly trade mag and it has had a tough time in the past decade or so. I freelanced for Press Gazette very briefly about 10 years ago, and I have written the odd feature for it, but it has always been in some sort of trouble.
It was moribund when Mirror editor Piers Morgan decided to spend some of his massive payoff on buying it, along with PR pal Matthew Freud. That jazzed the Gazette up, but neither of them for all their talents know the first thing about the newspaper business, and it inevitably started haemoragging money and then the pair of them jumped into various dodgy deals so they could walk away from it without losing any more money.
It has now been taken over by Wilmington – a trade mag specialist. And if you were in any doubt that there is a business brain behind that decision it is in the email I received today from Chris Ashton, Circulation Director.
“It’s not over…
“Further to the recent media interest and speculation concerning the impending closure of the magazine, I am pleased to inform you that Wilmington Media Ltd. has acquired assets from the administrator of Press Gazette Limited and is resurrecting the magazine heralding a new era in the life of Press Gazette.
“I have noticed that your subscription to Press Gazette lapsed recently, and we would love to welcome you back. There are several ways to get your hands on a subscription.”
It then has a “hotline” and an email address and a subscription website – and it stresses they now have a digital edition of the mag you can sign up to.
What is remarkable about this is that my subscription with the Morgan-run Press Gazette ran out about just under two months into his reign, and I never received a thing. And obviously nor did anyone else – because the subscription plummeted despite the vastly improved content (although the column by Max Clifford was a complete waste of alot of money). The very first thing Wilmington do is get onto subscription – they know the trade press market. Morgan and Freud were playing at being press barons and learnt the hard way.
But despite everything telling me to subscribe again for the re(re)born Press Gazette, I’m still holding off. Why? Because a bloke called Tony Loynes is editor-in-chief. I know Tony Loynes. He was the publisher when I was a sub-editor on Accountancy Age, and his sole mission in life appeared to be pressuring the editor into providing the absolute bare minimum resources but making sure no one knew it was his fingerprints on the decision.
Is this art?
I remember when we were told we couldn’t use any pictures in the 40-page paper if we had to pay for them. And so all illustration was reduced to the very small portfolio of free pics we had. We did our very best not to use the same pic twice in the same mag but it wasn’t easy. The editor at one point suggested giving reporters cameras when they went to interview someone. You wouldn’t have to pay for the snaps then. The idea was shelved when the first results appeared.
When the art editor inevitably quit, Loynes made the decision not to replace him. But told the three of us on the production desk that he would be replaced as soon as possible. Suddenly we had to learn how to do page layout, and organise all the pictures on top of the sub-editing. We were told we’d be put on a training course. It never happened. We killed ourselves until we finally realised there was no intention of replacing the art editor. And then we got our pay rises – three percent when inflation was five or six. That was the VNU fuck-you that most journalists that have worked there will know only too well.
I also have a bone to pick with Loynes over him passing off a blueprint of a future Accountancy Age website as his own. Even then I thought the Net was the future, and frustrated at the utter inaction of the management, wrote up a strategy for the website (that I found again about a year ago in my cupboard and managed to impress myself).
I wrote it off my own bat, and presented it to Loynes and the editor, Douglas Broom, and they were very complementary and promised lots of plans and budgets and action. Of course they never turned up. I quit soon after to go to PC Week as a reporter. And then VNU belatedly woke up to the Internet and started demanding that publishers think about the Internet. And, I have it on reliable information, Loynes turned up with my extensive report (it was about 25 pages if I recall) and pretended it was his.
So I will have to disagree with Mike Magee on Loynes. And I really pity the people that haven’t jumped ship at Press Gazette and will stay there in the vague hope that things will improve. The Press Gazette is going to make money alright, it will become a profitable enterprise, the managers will see to that, and Loynes will make sure the bare minimum of money is spent.
The problem is that no money spent on copy means dull, lifeless, shit copy. And I don’t want to pay for 12 months of beige reporting. I can only guess at their freelance rates as well.
No, the fun future is the Internet. And that’s where I plan to spend even more of my time.
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The problem with ABCe is the cost.. and I don’t think they’re alone. I think there is a general lack of reasonably priced auditing services. ABCe analyse logs whilst they could probably gain the data by means similar to Google Analytics etc. If you run an e-commerce website then the cost may not be too unreasonable but on the other hand smaller sites (still with hundreds of thousands of visitors each month) which make no direct revenue from users cannot always justify the cost. There is a real scope for something like Google Analytics to corner the “medium sized site” market.