A media pundit has called on a regional daily to go “up-market” after its editor announced he was leaving.
As reported on HTFP yesterday, Michael Beard is to bow out as editor of Brighton daily The Argus after nine years to take up a PR role with Public Health England.
Now the Guardian media blogger Roy Greenslade, who lives in Brighton, has urged the title to embark on a radical change of direction in order to win back lost readers.
He said the Argus should reinvent itself as a Times Literary Supplement-style publication to appeal to an affluent, middle-class audience.
Roy was challenged to say what he would do to improve the Newsquest-owned title’s fortunes by a correspondent on his Media Guardian blog.
He replied: “The chance was missed several years ago – that was to take the paper up-market in a city with two large universities plus several colleges.
“When its audience was large enough to take the risk, it could have been revamped as an up-scale TLS/TES-style publication.
“In fact, that’s what Newsquest should consider doing even now, while it has the brand: long-form journalism in print and online.
He went on: “It should concentrate on attracting an affluent, educated middle-class audience.
“It might not work, I admit, but better to go down doing something really radical than to drift away as it has been doing (no disrespect to Michael Beard, by the way, nor his staff – they haven’t controlled the paper’s fate).”
However Roy also ruled out applying for the vacant editor’s post himself when asked if he had considered doing so.
He added: “Newsquest wouldn’t touch me, of course, but I would hope that there is someone at the company willing to rise to the challenge and appoint an editor with that kind of up-market brief.”
The blog and comments can be read here.
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Terrible idea, Roy. Long-form journalism whilst feeding the web with breaking news would be fine if there were more than the handful of reporters left rattling around Hollingbury.
Journalism must be the only industry where the imbalance between the number of people pontificating about the job compared to those actually still trying to do it is so great. I’m looking at you too, Dyson.
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Admirably unselfish advice from the great man, since if Brighton’s bourgeoisie started reading the Argus there’d be no on left to read Roy’s column in the Guardian.
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Genius by Roy! A newspaper no one will buy so will be hugely loss-making but which feeds the ego of its editor and some of its self-indulgent columnists. Oh wait, doesn’t that sound a little like The Guardian? Greenslade spends a lot of time pompously telling other publishers what they are doing wrong (and he’s even right sometimes, though it’s usually blindingly obvious) but he hasn’t got a clue about what is required to run a successful modern-day newspaper or business.
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Roy SHOULD put his name forward…local man for the local job (be interesting to see how Newsquest react).
He could write about what happens in his HTFP slot.
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Interesting but a terrible idea. Mr Beard’s predecessor tried something similar and lost shed loads of readers.
People attracted to TLS-style publications do not read local newspapers.
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Really? Dear God.
This is what they tried a few years ago.
They lost tens of thousands of pounds on market and reader research and thousands of readers almost overnight.
The Editor at the time (whose name escapes me) went from being Newsquest’s golden boy at Editor’s conferences to exiting swiftly left.
The team was under firm instructions NOT to write about crime, stories on the big local housing estates, but instead to focus on yummy Mummy issues.
It was a crippling failure. The paper has never really recovered.
Good plan Roy. Was the original one yours too?
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Wait up! Please don’t be overly negative about the idea (being negative about me personally is, of course, fine).
To do nothing, just going on as at present, will inevitably end with no newsprint Argus. And, what is just as concerning, no credibility or audience for a possible online legacy. I am trying to divine a way to create a journalistic platform for the future. It may well be idealistic. It may sound bourgeois. But it would be terrific to have a go, would it not?
What’s so terrible about trying something radically new?
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These kind of upmarket, long-form local weeklies (Greenslade surely doesn’t mean a *daily* TLS?) are not uncommon in the States and they’re often terrific papers. But I suspect the much greater reach of the quality nationals is one reason they haven’t taken off here.
I do like the idea and I’ve tried spreadsheeting it a few times over the years. On every occasion, though, the bottom line is that the ad base and cover price revenues just aren’t sufficient – at the kind of readership levels one could realistically expect – to support the editorial investment this kind of product needs.
Just maybe you could carry it off in a larger city with a strong regional identity and fewer London commuters – somewhere like Bristol, perhaps.
Didn’t the Argus try something a bit like this around 15 years ago, anyway? Not as upmarket as Greenslade is suggesting, but shifting the emphasis from news to newsy features.
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Students do not buy newspapers, even in the high fee era which has seen a greater proportion of candidates choosing courses closer to home.
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The Argus should stop pretending to be a paper covering East and West Sussex and concentrate solely on Brighton. Its depressing slide started when it closed its district offices and became a rather stale single edition morning paper instead of a once exciting multi edition evening.
Its few remaining staff work wonders getting a paper out. Will the new editor demand more staff or be like the rest, do as he is told by Newsquest?
Roy is right about one thing.The Argus lacks authority and top class writers and has gone relentlessly down market. It once managed to please every class of reader. But then it used to attract top class journos from all over the country. Good luck to it.Brighton deserves a good paper.
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Up-market, down-market, middle- market … what is wrong with just covering the news that is most important to the residents of Brighton and Hove? Oh, wait, that’s too old-fashioned.
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Okay, the Argus looks terrible, has low pagination and a low story count. In theory, the only way is up. Make it look better, increase pagination and story count. Job done.
Probably not. There’s precious little evidence, I suspect, that people are in the habit of buying print editions of their local newspapers these days. And why would they, since the lemming-like charge to “web first”? It’s all available online for free. That’s a win/win for readers, a lose/lose for Newsquest, which probably can’t monetise its websites fast enough (or at all) and so continues laying people off left, right and centre, for lcm of a better idea. That means there are even fewer people left to fill a website, let alone a print edition.
I’ve got printers’ ink in my veins but even I don’t by my local paper any more (or any paper, come to that).
Shame, but game over surely?
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I am afraid the Argus is over reliant on easy copy like court and cops, instead of seeking genuine scoops. But you need staff and time for investigation for those.
Its coverage of the Albion remains excellent, indeed some might say excessive compared with thin news coverage (again no fault of too-few reporters).
I does really need to focus more sharply on Brighton and Hove and leave the rest of Sussex to weeklies.
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All the best to Michael Beard, who has fought a good fight — and to those still working so hard to give Argus readers a decent daily paper. Don’t let the clever dick critics get you down.
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Upmarket potential readers will be too much into their Android & iPhones + twitter etc to care about what goes on – and by the sound of it, the once impressive Argus has forgotten – or lost / disposed of staff who knew how to tell the readers – what goes on in the town.
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