A senior official of the National Union of Journalists has launched an outspoken attack on ‘big media’ publishers accusing them of sabotaging their own titles.
Chris Morley, the NUJ’s Northern and Midlands organiser, hit out in a guest blog published on the website of Manchester-based Ethos PR.
He said: “Local newspapers are not dead but they are being killed by remote and irresponsible owners who care nothing for them but as a source of ready cash.
“The damage is being compounded by the air of defeatism being generated by often timid editors (with a few honourable exceptions) who refuse to challenge the bean counters to protect their own titles.
“The old line is trotted out that young people are not reading newspapers and older readers are being lost due to life’s attrition.
“No doubt some consumer tastes have changed to some extent. But let’s get real: younger people have never typically bought newspapers and aren’t we all supposed to be living longer in any case?
“The true situation is that newspaper titles changed hands from the old family owners who saw their titles as giving them a virtuous and prestigious place in the community to a small band of corporate giants totally divorced from the consumers they are trying to reach.
“The new breed of owners consistently starved their local newspapers of investment because circulation income was only a small part of their earnings. So long as the advertisers kept on coming back, the money still came rolling in they thought.
“This happened in the boom times and so when things turned tougher the answer was to cut more to keep profit margins of 25-30 per cent going.
“And in this respect I charge the newspaper companies with sabotaging their own titles. They have done this by culling the most experienced journalists and circulation staff who had the best knowledge of what worked in retaining and winning more readers – but were the most expensive in wages.”
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This hits the nail on the head precisely and still the cull continues.
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Come on NUJ, you need to start acting rather than gassing. Ignore the Beeb and the nationals. The regionals enploy far more members than the ‘high profile’ protests. You need to do something nationally before it is too late (which it may already be).
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Chris Morley has provided the most accurate assesment of the local paper industry seen in years.
Junior execs dont want to stand up to top management; there are a hell of a lot unemployed people out there!
He might have mentioned that they dont appear to know whether to kill off papers and go all out for web profit and so veer dangerously between the two. At the moment the accent appears to be on slowly killing papers by denying them enough staff to produce decent quality. It’s a miracle some papers hit the street at all; one day they won’t.
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And not a single mention of advertising decline or the recession? Sums up the NUJ’s problem. Not living in the real world. And as a result, no longer taken seriously by many, if not most, journalists
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Get a load of this guy! Hahahaha!
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As an ex senior regional exec , it sticks a little to say that Morley make some valid points in respect of ownership. However, he fails to appreciate that the conventional business model for regional’s relied heavily on the three pillars of classified to be profitable. Simple maths is that in a business where 60% of total revenue might have come from sits vac, and the business might have generated 30% profit on turnover, a cumulative decline in sits over the years of 75% means total revenue down 45% assuming everything else including costs stays even – result loss making business.
Easy to argue that many companies lost sits to the web by pricing themselves out of the market, but we are were we are and you cant flout technology or the market.
Papers owned by local business people are all very well but without the economies of scale brought by consolidation, many title would have been out of business years ago.
Even in the rose tinted world of the journalist where papers don’t need advertising, in the regions cover price revenue never covers the cost of content and production.
In respect of circulation , fact is that because we use an average daily sale figure, reduced frequency of purchase is the single biggest factor in sales decline. Fact again most people are no longer attached to their local communities, they belong to tribes bound by interest which are not tied geographically.( Man Utd Supporters for example) They are also time poor and have no need for a local daily newspaper.
However the number of unique readers per week for many local papers remains more robust than average daily sale.Hence little or no reduced advertising effectiveness from turning a low sale daily into a weekly. But lots of cost savings, staff and print overhead for example. Hence more will follow the Northcliffe model. Sorry but its sensible and inevitable.
Chris might have want to blow back into the wind of the market but the storm of change will always be too strong.
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Andy – it is so easy to blame the NUJ for being out of touch, but even if you factor in the issues you raise, companies are still claiming to be making huge profits. The only way they can be doing this is by sacking staff. That isn’t a long term proposal for the future of local newspapers or local journalism (whatever the platform).
But what next – the NUJ has acted where it’s members have asked it to. Strikes in South London, Warrington and Doncaster all showed that. They were about trying to make companies invest in journalism, not destroy it.
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The usual low level sniping and criticising on here, trying to turn around a solid argument back onto the NUJ as if the workers organisation is somehow to blame for the failure and incompetence of the corporate clones and boss-worshippers who have been in actual control of the industry for so long.
As Neynox says, if members want to act the NUJ will help them act, it really is that simple. Unlike other trade unions, if members take a democratic decision to move to industrial action they will be backed all the way in that decision. Members would rightly complain they were being led into it if our national officers started banging the drum for everyone to be sent “over the top” into a fight to the death. So the union picks its fights and wins where it can at present and is doing well in them.
The fact remains that most local newspapers are sustainable businesses.
They will not make 40 per cent profits again. They will not make their owners and shareholders rich beyond their wildest dreams. They will no longer attract city banker types trying to muscle in for a piece of the action with wine flowing freely at self-congratulatory shareholders meetings.
Local newspapers, if properly run by competent staff and connected properly to their communities, can still pay the wages and turn moderate profits.
News of their death is still wildly exaggerated – mainly by very managers and corporate beancounters who own and control them as they seek to demoralise staff into believing the game is over and there is nothing left to fight for.
Thankfully, the reign of greed and money-worship in society generally is coming to an inglorious end – and not a moment too soon. We’re seeing it happen across the entire western world right now, and not a moment too soon.
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Andy. point taken about recession etc.
But sacking staff and producing crappier thinner papers full of dropped-in press releases and losuy pictures sent in by the public doesn’t help ad revenue or sales.
JP put some papers up twice this year and reduced size of papers. stroke of genius!!
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Well here’s the thing …….
Depending on if you believe that newspapers first started with a publication called the Corante,which I believe was the first titled newspaper published in London in 1621, a mere 390 years ago, or if you believe that 72 years earlier a newsletter called the Devonshyre and Cornyshe Rebelles was the first local English newsletter. That still makes over 390 years of successful publishing in this country.
No amount of wars, pestulance and ink stopping unions have stopped the press’s. So bring it on.
Change is inevitable, ask the Miners, Steelworkers members of the Autmobile Industry and the countless un named clerical workers who have lost their jobs to technology and so called bad management.
It’s so easy to criticise and so difficult to effect positive change. Please remember all change is not necessarily bad it’s just different
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what this industry needs is to flush out the old men who can’t see past a 30 year model of making money and get some people in who can identify new revenue streams.
Some managers at our place don’t even possess a smart phone and they are trying to tell us about how apps don’t make money.
Get real.
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First, But what next and Andy. There is no gassing here as the NUJ is supporting members every day in the regional press and making a difference. That gives us the right to be the genuine voice of journalists and to speak out on their behalf. As for recession yes, advertisers are nervous but my point is that they will still be there for confident, quality papers. What we have are grey newspaper bosses interested only in managing decline, and fulfilling a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom.
Spanner, you make some valid points that are superficially compelling such as the economies of scale. It is true big savings have been garnered on sharing functions eg payroll and cheaper newsprint. But this has been at the expense of a damaging remoteness of the people at the top. At the same time these people are responsible merely for maximum money-making. The way out is not to allow the big players to get even bigger and less concerned with making their papers thrive but to change the ownership structure to one that recognises the crucial role local and regional papers play in their communities.
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Chris, your article on the PR website – curious place to blog about the future of journalism, but there you go – will play to a union audience very well but doesn’t actually tell anyone how things can improve. There is very little evidence of advertisers having any confidence at the moment, regardless of quality of content, or any idea when they might return. At the same time, as people count the pennies, the newspaper becomes a luxury, not an essential, especially in a world where news is free on TV, radio and so on. Annoyingly, much of that news starts with the regional press. That won’t be solved by the rhetoric you displayed here.
I also think the NUJ – and you more than most – would do very well to tone down the rhetoric a bit. The whole ‘grey newspaper bosses’ thing might appeal to your members, but won’t help create a constructive conversation with managers, will it? And whether you like it or not, you need that constructive conversation to have any chance of keeping the faith of members in the future. Why pay your wages when management prefer to ignore you? A friend of mine is a local NUJ rep, and she finds things get a lot harder with management when national NUJ get involved.
The sad truth is that the NUJ does a lot of good work day in, day out which the union doesn’t tend to promote, probably because it can’t. But then it gets carried away with big attacks on national newspaper companies and, truth be told, changes very little.
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Apparently “Little evidence of advertsiers having any confidence at the moment”.
Nonsense.
Look at Metros succes and the tens of thousnads of pounds pouring into newspaper offices at the moment.
The galling thing for the big company bosses is that the land of milk and honey is over and they are not the only game in town so now they have to come up with somne original ideas.
This is where they fall flat on their faces.
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Doomed, I will take any opportunity open to tell things the way they are and while you call it rhetoric, I would say it is reflecting the feelings of my members. Your point about being nice to newspaper bosses in the hope they will be more accommodating is sadly way off beam. The experience of our chapels is that they are listened to the most where they are well-organised and well recruited. Bosses tend not to talk to us because they like us, surprisingly.
The NUJ strives to get workplace issues sorted at the lowest possible level. Therefore reps tend to call in full-time officials when they find an intractable management. Any decision on how to proceed is taken by a democratic vote among chapel members.
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As an NUJ member, I’ve seen at first hand this ‘democratic process’ at work. NUJ full time staffers will always try to paint management in the worst possible light and push for a big stand off rather than resolution or compromise. It generates headlines and helps the NUJ to be seen as doing something.
Chris Morley would gain a lot more respect from many if he played the bigger man when dealing with management. Resorting to name calling, as seen here, doesn’t help fight the members’ cause. It does, though, help fill the pages of Journalist magazine. Is the NUJ about helping members or convincing members it is doing something? Discuss….
Truth be told, there’s little proof a well organised chapel really achieves anything now because the majority of the people I know in the NUJ don’t feel they can change what is happening. They rely on it to help them out with legal or HR situations but don’t expect the NUJ to be able to stop what’s happening around them.
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