Regional press news – this story published 9.3.2006

No longer a newspaper, but a product: How the industry has changed
By John Williams
Space Press News & Pictures, Goostrey, Cheshire

More than 50 years ago I came into journalism via the copy room of the defunct Manchester Evening Chronicle.

Now in later years I fear I have a ringside seat at the tragic death of an industry that I was proud to have belonged and still serve.

As a humble hack on regional weeklies, evenings and finally the Daily Telegraph in Manchester before joining an army of freelancers, I think I have suffered with colleagues the worst and best of managements.

There rarely has been a time in all those years when editorial staffs were not at war over costs and expenses.

Pay always was relatively pathetic but you worked for the love of the job.

Whatever the hours, however inconvenient to your personal and family life, the adrenaline flowed when the “big” story came along.

Sometimes a little note from the Editor saying a job well done was worth as much as any cash bonus in your monthly or weekly packet. (yes even journalists were once paid in real money – however little !) for the many extra hours worked.

I am sure the same enthusiasm exists among younger colleagues today, many of whom will have arrived in newsrooms via university, media studies or colleges of journalism than the copyboy route. I don’t knock modern recruitment methods as sound journalists with the urge to get-into-print will always make it in the end!

When I owned a monthly I sent many aspiring journalists with little qualification on their way to bigger things. But that is another story…

What has changed today is the attitude of monopolistic management however, not only to their staffs but to the concept of the newspaper itself.

It is no longer “the paper” but “a product,” just as a bag of frozen chips or peas. And even if it makes loads of cash for its shareholders (and managers) the future, according to them, looks decidedly bleak.

We oldies have seen it all before. TV and freesheets will destroy newspapers, they said. Didn’t happen. Now it is the Internet age they are blaming for falling revenues and declining circulation.

But how strange, as I look at reports on this site, and in the trade press, the newspaper is still very much a cash-making enterprise.

Profits by and large are up year-on-year. Yet it is journalists by and large who are paying for mismanagement as staffs are savaged to the bone, editions cut and district offices of regional evenings closed.

Managements meanwhile are scurrying like headless chickens from conference to conference (on occasions I am told in five-star hotels) discussing a cash-boosting-income agenda with cut backs as their number one item.

I believe they should be giving more thought to saving their product (if that is what they want to call it) than pressing the self-destruct button.

What do YOU think?
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