One of the things I have learned as publisher of HoldtheFrontPage is that our readers love stories about newspaper office closures.
There have been a fair few of them of late, and they invariably get good page views.
Johnston Press and to a lesser extent Local World appear to be embarking on a systematic programme of office moves, with the Scarborough News, Yorkshire Post, Portsmouth News, Western Morning News and Stoke Sentinel among the JP and LW titles which either have moved or are in the process of moving offices in the past year or so.
It certainly makes commercial sense, particularly where reductions in the size of newspaper staffs have turned the old buildings into white elephants, but inevitably arouses a certain sense of wistfulness among the journalists who once worked there.
Take the Yorkshire Post, for instance, whose former building at Wellington Street, Leeds, is now likely to be demolished and the site redeveloped.
Even this monument to 1960s “brutalist” architecture, with its windowless newsroom dubbed “the bunker” has its fans, if the comments on HTFP and the YP’s own website this week were anything to go by.
At least the YP has had the good sense to stay in Leeds city centre with its new base at nearby Whitehall, but some other titles have moved farther away from their city or town centres.
I think that’s a missed opportunity. If offices are going to close – and given the changes in the industry that is inevitable – publishers should at least see it as a chance to bring titles closer to the people they are trying to reach.
To my mind, The Sentinel is a good example of a newspaper that has done this.
Its old base at Etruria, which also contained a now-defunct print works, was rather out of the way but it is now moving to a new HQ within Stoke’s ‘cultural quarter’ in Hanley which will put it within easy reach of The Potteries Museum, Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court, Hanley Police Station, the new £15m Hanley Bus Station and the new £41m city council headquarters.
This, surely, is the way ahead for other regional titles who moved out of cramped old city centre premises for huge business park developments in the 80s and 90s only to find themselves stuck with thousands of square feet of unused office space.
If more of them could follow The Sentinel’s example, then more office closures would surely be no bad thing. And not just for our page views.
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I agree and it is good that the YP remained in Leeds (when so much ‘hubbing’ seemed to head to Sheffield). That is good for the product and the local economy. A paper should fare better when readership feels a connection to it. It’s just a shame some content is outsourced far from locally. Love it or loath it, the site will look very different when the building is gone, but it is depressing to see it as it is when in the 70s/80s it was a hive of activity. The Scarborough office seemed to be in a prime location and a fine building, so not sure about that decision to move.
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Over a career that stretches back more than 30 years I have worked at, and I’ve counted through them, 12 different offices on a permanent basis. Of those, two are still in operation as bases for a newspaper team – perhaps more sobering is to tick up the number of newspaper titles which were produced from those buildings which are no longer being published. Where I once worked you can now find retirement flats, a fabric showroom, a mixed housing development…the list goes on, the world turns.
I’ve worked in offices where the press shut down and there was a big empty space at the back, rattled around in offices which were grandly taken on in expectation of further expansion which never quite came. The only benefit is that there’s usually enough parking…
I’m currently bunkered down in one big room of a four floor block that was once packed with ad sales, circulation, marketing, planning, artists – all gone. Looking at a move in the new year, since you ask.
It’s depressing to work in any office full of empty space, and it’s a sensible move for anyone to decamp to somewhere more suitable for the modern world. The key – and for some the advantage over the current base – is that this can mean a move back into a town centre, where there is all manner of empty office space available at decent rates. If you don’t need a lot of square feet in the first place, that can be a winner.
But that won’t stop the march of reporters carrying the office with them in the form of a laptop and a camera phone, and if they learn how to use these to their advantage that can be a good thing too.
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Agree with Herts Hack above. You can run a newspaper from the back of a car these days, or the local McDonalds with its free WiFi, with smart phones for reporters. You don’t need huge offices anymore. BUT, a paper should still have a prescence in the town it serves, even if this is just a room in a shop with its name somewhere over the door.Not everyone has a computer or wants to submit ads online. The “walk-in” story is becoming a thing of the past. It is still the off-diary stories which make the difference between a good and bad local newspaper. Having a small office in a town might not make hard financial sense, but what it does for the perception of the paper is priceless. Here endeth the first lesson…
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I wish the dump of a late 50s/early 60s concrete monstrosity I work in would be flattened. I wouldn’t care if it did move out of town if we didn’t have to put up with a leaky roof, rotten windows, non-existent air conditioning, inadequate heating, rusting plumbing, electrics which surge/fail and crash computers regularly, dripping loos, a potholed and often flooded car park the size of a pocket handkerchief…… Yet apparently the stinking heap has some kind of preservation order protection because somebody somewhere (who’s never had to work in it, obviously) thinks it’s distinctive. Grrrrr.
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Well said John. After 37 years in the centre of our circulation area, we really missed local contact with the public when we moved to our head offices three and a half years ago. All our titles were brought under one roof, but with time and a great deal of effort, the newspapers involved won back that contact. But a paper should still have a presence in the town or borough it serves. It shows you care about your community.
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I agree with you John Nurden. With the YP/EP move in Leeds there is no longer a “name over the door” and the assumption must be that readers know where the No1 building is. Keeping the delivery vans with branding would have retained the local awareness. As it is, the only noticeable advertising of the products is on the building due for demolition.
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The Scarborough building, like many old newspaper building, used to contain the printing press for the paper. Obviously this is not used any more meaning the size of the building is very out of proportion to the number of people that use it (thanks to job cuts and subs going to Sheffield as well).
I can see why the company would look to move to somewhere small, and ultimately cheaper.
As a journalist I would much rather money was saved on building costs rather than staff cuts.
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“It is still the off-diary stories which make the difference between a good and bad local newspaper”
Well said. Many people are not confident or literate enough to write an email to a paper about their problems, or phone a stranger. However, sit down face-to-face with a reporter in reception and it all comes out.
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Quite right John. We used to get some cracking walk-in stories when the Dover Express was based in the High Street, but they obviously dried up when we were moved over the hill to Folkestone.
Although the trend has been for centralisation, the Croydon Ad has recently shown that having a base on patch need not be a thing of the past: http://www.croydonadvertiser.co.uk/Croydon-Advertiser-launches-new-base-Whitgift/story-19520970-detail/story.html
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Some good points here. I would also suggest that the closure of well-known newspaper offices sends an unappreciated signal to the public. From my own experience, I know that the big ‘for sale’ signs at the Yorkshire Post building have persuaded some people to think that the papers once produced there had gone out of existence. Sometimes the buildings are part of the brand. More thought needs to be given to presenting these changes in location.
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