I know – it’s not a headline that feels at all comfortable, is it?
After all, Sir Ray Tindle is quite rightly a hero to anyone serious about local newspapers, opening titles left, right and centre and virtually avoiding redundancies in the midst of the industry’s worst ever recession.
But ‘Shortage of news in Tindle weekly’ is a fair, accurate and contemporaneous account of the state of the South London Press.
Don’t get me wrong: I like the look of the paper, I like the way the front page shouts out ‘buy me’ from the newsstands, with its powerful, emotive splash headlines and clear boosts, and I also like the simple white-on-blue masthead which projects a sense of calm while immediately letting you know what you’re buying.
The pictures are good too – local faces directly involved in the stories throughout the book, with no messing around with angles or reflections.
And I just love the style of writing – short, snappy 10 to 15-word intros, and then healthy, lengthy news stories with lots of facts, names, personal details and colourful quotes.
But – and it is a big but – there are far too few news stories.
In fact, in the 27 months that I’ve been penning this blog, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a paid-for newspaper with such a small news story count.
On Friday 30 March, for a cover price of 50p, readers were given just 33 reports on 21 news pages.
On top of this, there was a busy spread of letters, and another 13 stories were carried in seven pages of features, which included leisure, TV and a memory spread.
But even if you included these as a total news and features count – 46 reports on 28 pages – they were dwarfed by 60+ stories on just 12 sports pages.
So what’s gone wrong? Or is this wrong… do readers in south London actually want little news and more sport?
I doubt the imbalance is for the benefit of readers. While sport is crucial and many papers give it too little coverage, it seems to me that this paper is skinny on news because for some reason there’s a lack of it in the system.
The splash was a strong follow up from the conviction of five-year-old Thusa Kamaleswaren’s assailants, with local MP Kate Hoey leading calls for ‘draconian’ sentences.
The importance of this story made it totally justifiable that pages four and five were devoted to special reports and backgrounders, and this was all captivating stuff.
But there was not the same reason for devoting other pages to single stories, including:
- ‘We just got used to the bombs’ on page six, a news feature about the blitz;
- ‘Tempest takes the stage by storm’ on page eight, a news report on a local singer;
- ‘Race to the South Pole’ taking up all of pages 10 and 11, a news feature story about a local man on Captain Scott’s legendary ill-fated journey;
- ‘Vital to support creativity’ on page 14, a column penned by MP Harriet Harman; and
- ‘Best businesses can paint the town red’ on pages 32 and 33, covering the local business awards.
All of the above were worthy stories – but none of them apart from the shooting case should have dominated entire pages or spreads, and I don’t think they would have been designed that way if extra news had been available.
Quite why this is the case on news is a mystery. I know, many readers might point to recent coverage that paints a picture of an unhappy, reduced editorial staff.
But if that is the case, why is the quantity and breadth of sports coverage so comparably huge, with detailed reports on Olympic preparations, Charlton, Crystal Palace, Millwall, Wimbledon, local boxing, Surrey cricket, athletics, rugby union and junior sport?
The only answer I can fathom is that big changes are afoot, and this was certainly hinted at in a single paragraph in media commentator Ray Snoddy’s interview with Sir Ray in the current edition of InPublishing.
“All the signs are,” wrote Snoddy, “that one of Tindle’s larger papers, the South London Press, which is believed to be losing close to £500,000 a year, will soon get the ultra-local treatment and be sub-divided into separate papers for areas such as Brixton, Streatham and Tulse Hill.”
It rings true to me, the starvation of news perhaps explained because the existing paper is temporarily being left to dawdle in terms of structure while resources are devoted to future relaunch projects.
I certainly hope that there is an explanation along those lines, because otherwise what are obviously a skilled team of news journalists have either too little resource, pagination or both to produce a healthily sized newspaper.
And that, after 147 years of the South London Press, would be a shame.
Footnote: The South London Press is no longer registered with ABC. Its last recorded sale was 18,942 for the second half of 2008.
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Hi Steve. A few comments. I don’t think everyone would consider Sir Ray a hero of the local press. Many of his papers are poor, and the ‘no redundancies’ line is a smokescreen as some of his newsrooms are stretched beyond breaking point.
Non-replacement of staff, which has been the Tindle way, is just as damaging as redundancies. More so in many cases, as cuts across the board at least give you the option of deciding which areas have to bear the brunt.
I suspect that’s what has happened to the SLP, which before the Tindle takeover was a fantastic paper in an admittedly very challenging area for both circulation and revenue.
Many of the SLP news reporters have used the paper as a stepping stone to the nationals and haven’t been replaced when they have left. Sports reporters, on the other hand, tend to stay in their jobs for an awful lot longer and I suspect that as well as an imbalance in sports and news content, there is an imbalance in sports and news staffing.
OK, you could always shift some sports reporters onto news, but as you know it’s never that easy. A great sports reporter might be an awful news hack, and vice versa.
If the hyper-local future is true, then very good luck to them. It’s obviously daft to try to cover a huge chunk of one of the world’s great cities in just 33 stories. I hope Sir Ray realises that South London isn’t the Forest of Dean or Farnborough though and gives the local editorial team the freedom to craft a paper appropriate for their market.
Streatham’s changed since you were a lad, Sir Ray.
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I’d second everything RT has said. When I first moved to Clapham some years ago, I remember buying the South London Press back when it was owned by Trinity Mirror. It was a decent paper (one of the few bi-weeklies in London, don’t know if it still is) and one of the more prestigious outfits in the capital, well-staffed with a good reputation for hard-hitting in-depth investigations. 33 stories for the huge area (certainly population-wise) it covers is just ridiculous.
Frankly every Tindle title I’ve seen has been poor quality including the Enfield Advertiser (which again was far better, if nothing special, under Trinity) and the frankly disgraceful Yellow Advertiser (if it’s still around) which manages to cover about three London boroughs and as many districts in Essex with two reporters.
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RT is right.
Steve, your headline should read: Shortage of staff at Tindle weekly.
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Tindle is the emperor who wears the new clothes. He might have a lot of titles but there’s naff all in them.
Practically every Tindle title boasts inept typography, appalling layouts, no sense of a style guide and pages that look as if they were slung together in the free version of Serif Page Plus.
The South London Press is no exception. What newspaper designer worth their salt would use Impact for its masthead, let alone the page leads? It’s a dinosaur of a typeface, looks bad and can be knocked up at home rather than on a subs bench or design studio.
The whole thing looks cheap, add in that depressingly low story count and you end up with a product that’s being killed by a owner who doesn’t care about the quality, he just wants you to feel the width of his portfolio.
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Agree with fishyphil – the SLP is an eyesore. It’s also gets very little out of a massive area in what must be one of the better patches in the country. Other than the front page, the stories Steve has listed wouldn’t look out of place in a title like the Surrey Mirror but hardly realise the potential for great, off-diary stories in an area like south London.
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I don’t think you can blame Tindle for the headline typeface . . . It has been more or less the same for the sixteen years I have lived in the area.
Any plan to make the paper more local by having different editions would be one way of dealing with the shrinking number of pages. In the issue reviewed by Steve Dyson, it works out at fewer than ten non-sport stories for each of the boroughs in the paper’s main area. Some years ago, the paper did for a while produce editions for each borough, with the local news in a centre pullout of, I think, eight pages.
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Hi Steve
As a former reporter at the South London Press, I can tell you the lack of staff that is the main issue.
In mid March, a whole load of redundancies were made at the SLP. Voluntary ones. People who were so keen to leave that morale-sapped newsroom that they were prepared to take unemployment in this market. A deputy editor, news editor, chief reporter and two other reporters have gone in a newsroom already starved of numbers. This follows three years of Tindle not replacing staff when they leave.
Since the changes were made, two more reporters have resigned, in a desperate bid to get out of there. They were the last two full time reporters at the SLP. It now means that, until Tindle recruits replacements, the SLP is being staffed by a news editor from the Mercury free title, a freelance reporter and two part time reporters. People who are doing their best but simply don’t have the time in the day to write the number of stories needed.
Stories are having to be stretched, pictures made larger, and shorts and NIBs reduced or cut out completely.
I’m only glad I’m out of it. Loved most my time there but the situation at the moment is totally unworkable. Sir Ray and the managing director Peter Edwards need to scrap the Tuesday edition, make it a Friday weekly paper and employ more staff.
Will not happen though…if I was to take a guess, I’d say SLP will close within the next year.
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I would echo RT of Croydon and add the following: there are no full time reporters at SLP anymore. A few weeks ago the paper lost its deputy editor, news ed, chief reporter, feature writer and two part timers through a voluntary redundancy programme.
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@Streatham2
If the SLP has had that masthead for 16 years and Tindle has owned it for part of that time, then he’s had ample opportunity to do something about it.
But look at the Tindle website – http://www.tindlenews.co.uk/editions.cfm – you’ll see that getting that Tindle crest on to every front page matters more to Sir Ray than producing a decent newspaper.
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@fishyphil
The SLP masthead was changed about 4 years ago. I can see your point about Impact looking dated but, believe me, the alternative was the SLP being transformed into a doppelganger of one of their other, more rural titles, serif fonts and all. South London is a lively news patch and lends itself a busy tabloid style – turning it into the Tenby Observer would not have gone down well.
Overall I think, for all his good intentions, Sir Ray has never known how to handle the SLP while pursuing the Tindle policy of trying to eke out a profit rather than speculating to accumulate. It’s a huge shame as it’s a great title and with a bit of investment could thrive again.
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The thing is, you can’t pretend the internet doesn’t exist. Sir Ray has completely ignored the web and has made the paper and all who work for it look like right mugs. The rivals (including not just newspapers but blogs and the new ‘citizen journalists’ on Twitter) have the story, quite often, three or four days before SLP. It has caused terminal damage to the brand of the print edition of the paper.
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Steve, you found 33 news stories in the edition you looked at, and said it was the lowest number of stories you’d seen in a paid-for paper. You might have thought that that would have an impact on the South London Press. And it has: two weeks on, on Friday April 13, including news in brief items, I counted only 24 non-sports news stories in a 56-page paper – with six different by-lines.
The paper looks pretty determined to keep the award for the lowest story count.
How low can it go?
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