Former editor-turned-newspaper entrepreneur Chris Oakley has delivered a downbeat assessment of the industry’s prospects in a forthcoming book.
The former Liverpool Echo editor who later led a management buy-out of the Birmingham Post and Mail predicts further closures among big-city regional dailies and suggests moving to weekly publication may offer only a “temporary reprieve.”
He is also critical of the industry’s failure to get behind the online jobs, property and motors platform Fish4, which he says could have been “bigger than Rightmove.”
Chris was writing in the forthcoming ensemble publication What Do We Mean By Local? which has been put together by former regional editor Neil Fowler and journalism lecturer John Mair.
Much of Chris’s chapter, entitled ‘The men who killed the regional newspaper industry,’ is taken up with charting his own involvement in a series of 1990s mega-deals including his £125m buy-out of the Post and Mail and the creation of Midland Independent Newspapers.
However he reserves some of his strongest words for the way newspaper companies failed to deal with the threat of the internet and for leaving the joint venture platform Fish4 “paralysed by a lack of investment and direction.”
“Perhaps no-one can honestly claim to have recognised fully the competitive pressures that the internet has brought,” he says.
“However, if the industry had supported Fish4, regional newspapers could now have the largest and best-used property, motors and situations vacant sites, and online estate agency Rightmove would not be worth more than even the biggest regional newspaper group.”
On the prospects for regional titles Chris says that the big city dailies will be “first to arrive in the cemetery.”
“Converting evenings to weeklies, as Northcliffe is doing, may save smaller titles in places such as Bath, Torquay, Scunthorpe and Exeter, but is unlikely to offer more than a temporary reprieve for big city titles like the Birmingham Post and the Liverpool Daily Post.
“In a couple of decades, managements who have overpaid for acquisitions, over-promised to City investors and failed to recognise the threat of the internet have come close to destroying an industry.
“You be the judge of the extent of the MIN team’s culpability in creating the financial climate that brought this about,” he adds.
- ‘What Do We Mean By Local? ‘ will be launched at 6.30pm on 27 March at Coventry University’s London campus, East India House, 109-117 Middlesex Street, London E1.
Tickets are £5 and places can be booked in advance at www.coventry.ac.uk/londoncampusevents
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At last, someone gets close to the truth! That, and allowing (group) editors to move beyond what they should have been doing – looking out for their papers’ interests – and moving into the realms of senior management. Editors as much as executives should take a heap of blame for not being aware to threats to the business and in many cases being utterly out of step with changing technology. I repeatedly said in the early 2000s at my Northcliffe regional that we had people in charge who were old-school newspapermen, not modern thinkers and students of the multi-media revolution. When video came in, they jumped on it like it was the greatest development of all time. That was old hat in the mid 2000s and they had to look deeply at the changing marketplace. Alas, they were rooted in the era when everyone read newspapers. They couldn’t get into the heads of those who had been brought up with access to info at their fingertips. Not saying I would have done much better, but then I didn’t go online until 2000 so I was a dinosaur in terms of new technology. But blind loyalty to the old guard was just plain wrong. Content may have been king, but so was the ability to understand what was happening. Ah well!
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Ah, Chris Oakley, who spotted an opportunity to make money, inflicted more cuts on what were good performing “big” newspapers. Just look at the sales performance of the Birmingham Post, Mail and Coventry Telegraph today compared to the days when his lot were in power? Methinks people like him should look in the mirror and wonder how they’ve played a part in the decline of “big city” regionals in the Midlands.
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How has Oakley got the nerve? He was one of the architects of the asset stripping of Yorkshire Post Newspapers with his iniquitous RIM that started a decline which seems to being finished off by the woeful Johnston Press.
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It’s interesting to get a take on what went wrong in the past but I’d be more interested in Oakley’s views on what local media owners should be doing now to sustain / grow their businesses.
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Editor-turned entrepreneur – an oxymoron methinks. Why did the regional heavyweights pay up 20 x to acquires free sheets in the mid to late 70’s – it was for their revenues, it was the people who launched them may have been initially not editorial savvy … but they were already forging a new ethos – page yield … new technology .. target-ing demographically. No, I think anyone who was in the business will agree that entrepreneurs could possibly end up becoming editors, but rarely vice versa. I was around to witness the stupid sums settled free newspaper owners … who sometimes bought them back again for a much more justifiable price.
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So in summary – build a time machine – go back 10 years – create a few top notch pureplay classified verticals….ooh and keep you eye out for investment opportunities in Google, Facebook and a slice of Apple….and we’d all be just fine.
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