Newspaper entrepreneur Chris Bullivant has apologised to the freelance journalists left unpaid when his ill-fated Birmingham Press collapsed with debts of £343,000.
As exclusively revealed by HTFP on Wednesday, freelances were owed more than £37,000 for contributions to the short-lived newspaper, with some individuals chasing bills of up to £9,000.
But it has since emerged that Mr Bullivant had already proffered an apology to those affected at a creditor’s meeting held on 11 November.
Yesterday’s Birmingham Post published a full report of the meeting, quoting Mr Bullivant as saying: “I am truly sorry, especially for people who didn’t receive a penny. It is outrageous, but I didn’t know.”
Mr Bullivant was responding to angry accusations from some of the freelances affected, including cricket writer George Dobell, who is owed £5,500.
Mr Dobell told him: “You have to take the responsibility. The buck stops with you, you are the chairman, you are the chief executive.”
Sally Jones, another freelance at the meeting who claims she was owed £2,000, called for a government inquiry into the collapse of CJB Media, the company set up to launch The Press.
Speaking after the meeting, she told the Post: “I think it is important that the Department of Business looks very closely into the behaviour of Mr Bullivant over CJB Media.”
“I was shocked that Mr Bullivant seemed to be trying to gloss over the essential fact that he had failed to ensure that The Birmingham Press had an effective financial structure and was able to pay its bills.
“Whatever the demands of the competitive regional newspaper marketplace, it was inexcusable that he, via the paper’s editor, should solicit widespread coverage from scores of dedicated freelances over many months, but should then allow so many to remain unpaid for all the hard work they had put in.”
Speaking at the meeting, Mr Bullivant claimed he could not compete financially with the advertising rates offered to estate agents by Trinity Mirror, the publisher of the Post and sister daily the Birmingham Mail.
“I have nothing to hide. I am very proud of what my team did in Birmingham. I do not think I have done anything wrong at any time,” he added.
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I fully sympathise with any freelancer left out of pocket. It happens too often on speculative ventures, and I would support any legislation that offered greater protection. However, let us not forget that Chris Bullivant, in the middle of a recession, decided to ‘have a go’. If he had succeeded, there would have not only been plaudits all round, but in the medium to longer term an alternative place of employment for poorly-paid journalists on nearby local papers. The resulting competition might therefore just about managed to get a better pay deal for everyone, or at least the prospect of alternative employment for journalists stuck in a career rut on a particular local paper, where management can treat them with any amount of disdain if they know they have nowhere else to go. As it is, the collapse of yet another challenge to an established company’s local monopoly again serves to underline the fact that they are now far fewer well paid jobs, or even jobs at all, for the amount of journalists both full time and freelance that there are in the profession, and no amount of bleating by the NUJ will do anything about this or the market forces of supply and demand that result from it. The government should ask whether it should continue subsidising media courses at university if there is little likelihood of sufficient jobs for graduates being available. Also, if the unions want to do something truly meaningful, they should explore all the possibilities that exist for their members to retrain for better paid jobs elsewhere. Throwing brickbats at Chris Bullivant here is missing the point: the picture is again one of a much wider malaise that is desperately crying out for positive ideas and energy to tackle.
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One wonders then who signed off the cheques? Perhaps the lady workingf rom home who looked after the invoices just decided to hoard them and not forward them for payment on her own initiative. One wouldn’t wish to dispute Mr Bullivant’s story, but when I spoke to him on the day of collapse, explained who I was and what I did for the paper, and asked who would be handing the winding up for creditors to contact, he strangely didn’t say ‘I’m aghast, you mean you’re a freelance journalist who wrote for my paper and wasn’t getting paid. I’m truly shocked.”
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There’s no point praising someone ‘for having a go’ when the result is this. It is one thing to try and fail and ensure only you suffer personally as a result, it’s quite another to try and fail but leave lots of others out of pocket as a result. And then there’s trying to reclaim your lost ‘loan’ and your other company pushing for cash from the failed company as well. Bullivant has behaved very badly here, and no amount of accusing Trinity Mirror of trying to protect its interests can disguise that. There’s an honourable way to do business, and I’m not sure this is it.
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Hold on a minute, Mr Bullivant: if you’re sorry and if you’re so outraged, why not dip into your millionaire pockets and pay the mere (to you) £37k that erstwhile hacks who trusted you are owed? That would go a long way towards restoring your name. A hollow ‘sorry’ from a rich man means nowt.
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I think Surfer Joe’s thinking has been clouded by too much time spent at the beach. I think Mr Bullivant wrote the rule book as regards poorly paid journalists. The salaries at his newspapers make Trinty Mirror pay cheques appear positively huge in comparison
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