A city daily can no longer report on everything happening on its patch, its parent company has admitted.
Setting out details of the latest changes to its operations in the West Midlands, Trinity Mirror says the days when the Birmingham Mail could afford to be the paper of record are “long gone.”
As previously reported on HTFP, a total of 25 jobs are under threat in Birmingham and Coventry as a result of the proposals.
It will leave 46 editorial staff in Birmingham and 22 in Coventry.
Saturday’s Birmingham Mail front page
A memo sent to staff at the two centres features a question and answer section, with responses to queries such as “How can we possibly get more from fewer staff?” and “Fewer content people puts paper at risk, how can we cover the whole of Birmingham as fully as we do now?”
The memo, which has been seen by HTFP, reads: “The days are long gone when we could afford to be a paper of record and dutifully report everything that happened on our patch.
“With our digital content approach, we are increasingly understanding what content works for more people across the city.
“We are very confident that we will be producing both the right kind of content for our audiences as well as enough content for our print products.”
The memo also outlines an increased need to work weekend shifts among remaining staff, while individual targets will be set for journalists in terms of attracting readers online.
It reads: “Targets are important to help everyone understand how their work contributes to our ambition of growing our online audiences.
“Targets will take into account the subjects and geography you cover, your historic performance, and the growth we need across the board, so will differ according to the area you cover and the levels of audience that follow ie. football compared to politics.
“The focus will be on achieving growth in all areas…..everyone will be expected – and helped – to grow their audiences, albeit from different starting points.”
The new job descriptions for some of the individual roles also make it clear that journalists’ performance will be measured in terms of how their stories perform online.
“Your performance will be assessed regularly, taking into account audience traffic to your stories and therefore encompassing page views, unique users, local audience and other metrics. You will be expected to grow your page views and uniques in line with the growth we require as a business,” they state.
Three Coventry MPs have demanded a meeting with Coventry Telegraph editor Keith Perry over the plans, while Birmingham Post editor Stacey Barnfield announced his departure from the role just 24 hours after the plans were first revealed.
It is not believed that Stacey’s role among those under threat.
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“The days are long gone when we could afford to be a paper of record and dutifully report everything that happened on our patch.” – Translated – let’s give up on journalism and concentrate on clickb8
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“The focus will be on achieving growth in all areas…..everyone will be expected – and helped – to grow their audiences, albeit from different starting points.”
This sounds like something an ad rep (sorry, ‘media sales executive’) would be asked to do. Which begs the question, are the lines between journalists and sales reps being blurred to the point of no return? Does a journalist work on commission going forward, based on the ‘targets’ he or she has achieved?
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Most people were left almost speechless when we were addressed last week and told how little our work is valued, but this memo speaks volumes about the sheer impotency of the Birmingham Mail and Coventry Telegraph.
Forgive the cliche, but this startling admission from the bosses is a very large nail in the coffin.
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“while individual targets will be set for journalists in terms of attracting readers online.”
Shudder.
I sat in a meeting with a senior TM figure (who was later made redundant before surfacing in the same role at another publisher, naturally) who said they were taking the ‘Facebook approach’ to growing audiences and then they were going to work out how to make money out of them.
Good luck with that!
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This sounds absolutely horrendous and I’m interested in what those affected have to say. Being appraised by how many people click on your story is no reflection on anyone’s quality, more the subject matter. And weekend shifts? You get those on the nationals, friends, at many more pounds per hour than our little coffers yield. Minim knows.
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That word ‘historic’. Historical, please, before I go hysterical.
Pedantry aside, what a load of awful, dreadful cobblers this internal memo spouts.
Let’s summarise: ‘We can no longer afford to be a local newspaper, reporting on community events or issues (unless you send them to us for free, which we’ll then use unchecked).
“Instead, we want you, our content creators, to create content that drives ‘likes’, tweets and other digital analytics (don’t know what it means, but it’s what drives us today) which we can show to advertisers as hundreds of thousands of ‘eyes’ on our brand.
“Whether this helps anyone locally or is even that relevant to any suburbs narrower than ‘Birmingham’ doesn’t really matter, because there ain’t no cash in it.
“Oh, and if you don’t like it, please refer to that good old acronym we used to use in earlier Trinity Mirror leadership memos: FIFO.
“Eg, fit in, or f*** off, as there are loads of digi-savvy kids coming for your chairs at half the cost…
“Thank you and goodnight.”
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“You will be expected to grow your page views and uniques in line with the growth we require as a business.” – Translated: “We can’t manage to promote this tat ourselves, so we need you to plaster every word you write over your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc accounts. What’s that, you don’t have a Facebook page, a blog and a Twitter updated every 5 minutes? Better start getting them, then.”
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They’ll be lots of cat photos and amazing diet tips then.
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Churn out a few dozen football ‘transfer rumour’ stories a month – mixed in with a dash of cute pug pictures – and Bob’s your uncle. Targets will be hit and the resulting click revenue will save us all.
What’s that you say? Holding officials to account? Exposing malpractice? No thanks, that’s not the kind of ‘content’ our brand consultants say we should be delivering.
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What a load of BS.
Getting a bit sick of TM editors ducking responsibility and putting the blame on the staff for their failings.
Who runs the show here? Do reporters just go their own sweet way and follow whatever line of inquiry takes their fancy on any given day?
Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.
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The more I see the word “content” in these stories, the more I want to scream. It just means crap between the adverts.
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And the digital dark ages begin to descend!
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One day someone will wake up to the fact that digital content and news are two entirely separate things and there is still good money in the latter if only it’s managed properly.
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Hideous. This latest round of Emperor’s New Clothes actually turned my stomach.
It’s farcical because while busy “managing decline” those responsible know full well that no regional digital model will ever support the top-heavy structure over which they currently preside.
Eventually there will be no place for them, either. Regional giants (perhaps that should be ogres) are not the future. But in the meantime they can order remaining journalists to spend weekends sharing fluffy kitten vids to hit pointless targets.
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How depressing. So the people of Birmingham and Coventry are not fit to be served by first class print media? It’s time for local business people to get together and form a new daily (or dailies) to serve and champion the West Midlands and its institutions. Trinity Mirror should stick to covering London.
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PS: staff detail very useful. 46 in Birmingham. For three papers. Mail six days, Mercury seventh day, Post weekly. News, sport, business and features. Desk heads. Editor. Deputy. Plus Post and Mail websites. Social media taken as read. And pictures. Creation and production all in (production for Coventry too). Taking seven-day operation, early and late shifts, and holidays into account, that’s an average of 25 staff on duty at peak. Blimey, they’re over-staffed aren’t they?
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Of course the Mail can no longer report on everything happening on its patch – it’s gotten rid of most of its staff who actually went out in to the patch speaking to people and finding stories, Nowadays it just seems to be loads of meaningless but cheap to produce lists and surveys.
As for this ‘targets’ business be very afraid! It won’t be long before people are paid on the amount of views and likes they get over the course of the year.
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Seems Trinity Mirror do a good line in white flags
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Desperate state of affairs caused by the people in suits wrongly believing everyone is keen to get their news – and pay for adverts – via digital media.
And it’ll be interesting to see what an industrial tribunal makes of any journalist fired for not having enough on line followers!
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See, this is why the waters always get muddied when people come on here defending digital. Digital vs print isn’t the argument, the argument is ‘content vs journalism’.
If these internet sites were filled with page after page of quality sports coverage, features and news which has been gleaned from something other than a police Twitter feed, anyone who values the profeession wouldn’t be as bothered, but that’s not the case.
This is all pure garbage and not journalism worthy of the name, the sad thing is nobody is even trying to pretend any more – it simply is dead.
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The Birmingham Mail ceased being a paper of record many years ago. They stopped sending reporters to cover local ward committees, where an enterprising journalist might have picked up some gossip about a local issue like a planning application or council goof up which might have led to a front page story. Now, the paper and website seems to be filled with regurgitated press releases, celebrity cobblers and very little hard news that has been discovered on the ground.
I also remember the days when the Mail used to be a campaigning newspaper over issues such as hospital closures with the editor appearing on national television. Now, it appears there is no capability to do any form of campaign as the remaining reporters time will be spent behind a desk generating “click bait”, rather than getting out into the field and speaking to the community it serves.
It’s clear Trinity Mirror has no idea and the best solution would be for it to demerge its regional business. But who would buy it?
It will also be interesting to see if the Post and Mail campaign on the poor deal the Midlands gets from the BBC following years of cutbacks will now be scaled back, as TM now seems to be following the same path.
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As an aside, my dictionary gives “churchwarden” as one word (see headline on rag out). Correct use of English seems to be going out of the window too.
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I can remember when The Birmingham Post and Mail was a campaigning investigating paper which not only reflected, but served the community it covered. It had a proud history and I’m sorry to see it laid so low.
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Who wrote the e-mail?
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Why is anyone surprised?
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How many young piece-rate content staff wracked by Listicle Deficiency Syndrome will qualify for Tax Credits if they have families to support?
And no, I’m not joking.
But it is funny in a bleak kind of way that the national/regional editorial management voices in TM are silent, as usual, on a subject that cuts to the heart of journalism.
Shouldn’t their roles be recycled as “Content” Directors?
Or, better still, scrapped to save cash as ” editorial” no longer exists?
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In my view, one aspect of the destruction of modern journalism isn’t just about declining print sales and the rise of the internet, it’s more about how modern Britain has changed, mainly how the ‘corporation’ has taken over everything.
A newspaper job was never purely about showing something immediately for your efforts, it was often a slow burner, it was about sowing seeds with contacts and getting to know your patch, this breed of management would see that as a total waste of time.
It’s not just this industry though, it’s the same with everything – a post man used to be able to go home when he’d finished his shift, (and why not?), that’d be treated with outrage now. You must be PRODUCING something at ALL TIMES otherwise you’re not doing your job.
Amazon delivery men get 2 minutes to drop your package, AA patrols get half an hour to diagnose your engine trouble, journalists have to produce 400 words of ANYTHING.
This is just another symptom of a more general problem, the removal of all joy from the working life.
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“The focus will be on achieving growth in all areas…..everyone will be expected – and helped – to grow their audiences, albeit from different starting points.”
It come from the Circulation Manger’s guide of 1982. For heaven’s sake. People have been trying to achieve circulation growth since the year dot and for the most part have failed abysmally. Most, incidentally, hoisted on the petard of their understanding what their audiences required.
Now comes the bread and circuses approach tailored especially for the Facebook generation. One can only shudder in trepidation of the results.
Running a newspaper (or media outlet as they now prefer to known) puts a proprietor in a position of some power, and, more importantly, a position of some responsibility.
Boldly to say that you can no longer be a media outlet of record, is a dreadful abrogation of that responsibility. It is but a small, steep and very slippery slope that leads to a media outlook becoming nothing more than a repository to the dross and tittle-tattle that seems all pervasive these days.
What a sad,sad day for us all when responsible, structured journalism of record is replaced by the doubtful pneumatic charms of Kim Kardashian and celebrity tittle-tattle.
May the Lord preserve us: for Trinity Mirror with this crackpot scheme most certainly will not.
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Kevin, the Post has recently run such a campaign on how the Beeb ignores the Midlands. As for this, it’s been slowly coming for the last 20 years since the odious Ms Bailey first started to admit they were managing the decline of print. That was because they thought there was enough money to be had from the internet. There isn’t but since they’ve spent two decades winding down staff levels, they have nowhere to go other than providing clickbait. Proper journalism at a regional level is now dead, thanks to the likes of TM, Northcliffe and Johnston.
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Agree with all the comments about sad decline etc, but look at it from this perspective.
Say you are a young reporter who is digital savvy, and by that I mean well versed in use of twitter, FB, instagram, and all the other digital platforms.
Then, armed with brains or advice, you work out that the clickbait followed in local newspaper terms, as has been proven time and time again, is stories featuring, sex, crime, violence, cute animals/pets mutually exclusively in most cases.
It’s a gift for those type of people isn’t it?
There is another perspective as well. If the future of local newspapers is trawling your locality for likely clickbait, that will be a deal more attractive as a job than sitting through a council meeting about the local drains.
So the future could be a sort of local version of Youtube.
It will definitely lead to the death of the printed product for regional newspapers, although that is probably less than ten years off in any case.
The future’s bright, the future’s a skateboarding dog in Dudley.
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DickMinin, there is the perfect example of why subs, and even editors, have become surplus to requirements! Gone are the days when they actually had the time to help a reporter fashion a story into a concise and exiting piece of journalism. They’re now reduced to cutting copy to fit, writing SEO-friendly headlines and nitpicking about ridiculous issues like whether churchwarden is one word or two!
Seriously, no one cares about such a silly issue. I remember my old team of subs arguing about whether there should be an apostrophe in Halloween (or Hallowe’en). My take on it has always been, who cares? Let’s just pick one and stick with it for consistency!
Jeff makes some good points. The big publishers are just chasing targets, rather than focusing on actually serving smaller communities in more effective ways. This all comes down to shareholders’ dividends.
Newspapers will survive longer if they end up in the hands of private SMEs. Although there will still be a need to restructure staff and other costs, setting up a local business based upon smaller profit margins than newspapers have had historically will see them thrive for years to come.
As long as the regionals are in charge, they’ll focus on national advertising, clickbait and hitting crazy non-localised targets. This will result in them labelling some sites as ‘poor performers’ resulting in more unnecessary cuts and/or closures.
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So depressing. I can only thank heavens that I have retired after half a century in journalism.
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What’s the problem here?
No one’s expecting them to cover ‘everything’. All they have to do is keep the staff who actually know what they are doing, and get them to just report the stories that matter, and leave out the dreck.
Everyone’s a winner. The readers get a product stuffed with quality journalism, so inevitably circulation and advertising revenues will rise; and management get the wage bill by down by a third.
Bingo!
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A skateboarding dog in Dudley would always have made the newspaper. It just comes with video now.
When people say ‘this shows how little our work is valued’ surely the challenge should be to make people value it more, rather than just assuming the readership is wrong for not reading your work. A bit like Labour blaming voters for picking the wrong party, the solution is to work out how to make what we do something which people want.
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As for the Red Postman’s comment about Sly Bailey, she did precious little to support any digital growth but she was right to say newspaper companies are managing print decline. Pretending otherwise was to ignore the reality of the world – people have found other places for their news, a lot of it is free, and a lot of it comes in a format they prefer. Pretending extra reporters, a return to banks of sub editors and in-depth discussions about whether a headline should run over two or three decks would turn newspapers around sounds lovely to me as a journalist, but I also know it’s not true. Sad, but true.
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Oliver: Er, churchwarden is one word, no two ways about it, old chum. Wrong is wrong. Also, my name is Dick Minim, born 1709 in Lichfield, Staffs, in the days when spelling, grammar, punctuation, correct names and all that stuff you seem to hold in contempt still mattered. Some of us still think it does, Olivia.
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Roy Challis – spot on. That is of course the challenge, but whether enough managements team have the nerve to grasp it, rather than following the digital herd like a flock of sheep, remains to be seen.
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“The readers get a product stuffed with quality journalism, so inevitably circulation and advertising revenues will rise; and management get the wage bill by down by a third.”
Yes, that really is exactly what is going to happen. A glorious future for the Birmingham Mail awaits. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!
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Dick Minim, you are so right. If Oliver’s view was the one of most modern journalists, which I personally doubt, then it would help explain why the final bell is tolling.
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The Birmingham Mail is no different to any news organisation in the country. It has a different audience, a different way of delivering news and a different level of audience. The Mail is actually ahead of the game in realising what the future holds.
There is still quality journalism coming out of Birmingham and it seems there is much gloating from ex hacks on here with a clear axe to grind but no real suggestion or knowledge of what could have been done differently.
Yes, journalism has changed, drastically.
Who doesn’t know that? Every company in the land is trying to move with the times to determine what scale and format they should exist in.
The golden days of papers are gone, they are still an important revenue stream but people don’t read them like they used to.
All those sitting in their rocking chairs remembering the halycon days need a wake-up call.
The business model has to change for everyone and sadly that means the role of a traditional newsroom will be much smaller and have different realities.
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I think it is rather patronising of Groan to suggest that the comments on here are from people with an axe to grind, or who are too old to understand the digital age. Perhaps – unlike you, Groan – they actually care about quality. Wonder, who you could possibly be. Yes, there are good journalists at the Mail, it’s the woefully poor management that is at fault. I suspect these are managers who are completely out of their depth, who have spent a considerable time spouting off to London about how they can turn things around, and so here we are. If I were Simon Fox I would be keeping a close eye on how the situation unfolds.
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Biter got it right. In the digital world you don’t need to be bright or be a good writer, just good at systems. That is why writing on websites is shameful quality .
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Groan – are you serious?
Furthermore, what business model? There isn’t one. That’s the point behind much of what is being said towards lambasting Trinity Mirror’s appalling failures with the Birmingham Mail and Coventry Telegraph.
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There are many different ways to get eyeballs on stories but I suppose the success of this ridiculous idea will be which of those reporters has the knowledge and the time to maximise their effort.
After all, while they’re seeding stories in web forums, on Facebook, Twitter and various other places, they’re not out there getting more stories. Disaster all round I’d have thought.
Not much incentive to offer to do crown court if you can only produce one story a day. No matter how good it is, it’s unlikely to trump the office junior’s three nibs and a filler.
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Yes, yes, yes, things have got to change. But we’re still playing Emperor’s New Clothes here. This is what will be needed in future for a good regional website: 2 busy, qualified news photo journalists, at least one with sports interest/ understanding; an obsessed apprentice, knowledgeable online, to source other content and help build ads; 1.5 ad reps who could sell sand to Saudis; .5 person who does all the admin, finance, mucks in. You need to bring in £3K a week is my guess, to start moving into real profit against salaries and on costs.
What this doesn’t need at all, and never will: a big group like TM, or any management at all, as the corporate structure cannot be supported.
So really TM chiefs should be starting to sack themselves instead of measuring everyone else. Their end game should be having something of value to sell, with goodwill, before more agile others have set up and overtaken them. Perhaps that’s the eventual plan.
Use your redundo wisely, clever people.
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Dick… and 70pc, if you honestly believe that the error of churchwarden being used as two words on the front page makes any difference to sales, the quality of the story or the integrity of the paper, you have been living in cloud-cuckoo land for the last 20 years. I guarantee you that few of the readers knew it was wrong and, of those who did, not one of them actually cared.
70pc, you think that’s the reason the final bell is tolling? No. It’s partly because journalistic dinosaurs were so busy obsessing over things like ‘church warden’ (sic) and the pedantry about where the apostrophe should sit in Mother’s/Mothers’ Day, that they dismissed digital journalism as ‘untrustworthy and unreliable’.
Well, guess what, they were right for a few years until technology and accessibility allowed the public to become more discerning about how they received information and who they trust… and it now often isn’t local papers!
Plenty of local digital news sites, bloggers and even YouTubers have popped up and built strong, engaged social media audiences around a variety of topics. They have few overheads but a loyal and trusting audience, who don’t really care about the occasional typo or small error, and that, with a subtle amount of advertising, is often enough to make a living.
The regionals then decided to play catch-up during a prolonged period of cuts and their desperation now shows. Just look at the Local World sites, full of pop-ups and aggressive national ads. That’s topped off by poorly written clickbait and advertising features which are then just regurgitated into print. I don’t trust a word of it!
When journalists, like yourselves, should be looking at your own options for the future or asking questions about the digital direction of the papers you work for, you’re still wrapped up in style guides and pointing out spelling errors and grammatical mistakes in order to make yourselves feel a little bit superior (as poor subs used to do in the olds days). The fact is you’re terrified of actually appealing to the modern reader and risking making a few mistakes which they will call you on.
Mistakes happen and what’s most important is how you deal with them.
Dick, yes, I spelt your surname wrong. On my own website or social media, I could apologise and correct that. Even when I can’t change it, in print or on this forum, I can still acknowledge my error and apologise. I don’t need to wait a week to publish a correction, if you’d even get one, and no one else except you really gives a monkeys about that typo.
The reality is that a slave to the ‘golden era’ of print will not survive much longer in this industry but, judging by the Birmingham Mail memo above, neither will that. What this means is that there are opportunities for people like yourselves to carve out a niche in the city now. If you don’t, someone else will, so stop with all the nonsense, put your genuine skills to the test, learn something new and let the job evolve.
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Dumb waiter.
I’m someone who used to work at TM who still has friends there and for one can see what they are trying to achieve with little other alternative.
They won’t be the first or the last to do it.
Some of the content that websites like the Mail have to put out do have a varying degree of ‘journalistic’ quality – they have to, this is the marketplace now.
The sad fact is to have any type of future, newspapers like the Mail need to down scale.
And yes I did say there are people on here with an axe to grind, but not everyone.
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No, I don’t think poor grammar and getting words wrong are major reasons for the decline – that’s poor management and in particular changing social trends. But they don’t help. It’s like a bank cashier saying: “You wanted £50, sir. There may only be £48 there, but hey, who cares? Now buzz off.”
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Some serious ad hominem spiel being peddled by Oliver and – particularly – Groan here.
The idea that anyone who’s gutted about the demise of the industry is some kind of dinosaur is rather laughable.
I’m 35 and got out of the industry when I was 33 and got into SEO writing, with all the guff I’ve picked up I could probably blag my way back into a half a dozen newspapers but I won’t, because they’re garbage.
I still freelance at a national and whereas in the past I’d get an email from a news editor with someone’s number on – just their phone number – with which I’d have to fashion a story, now these news editors send me links to existing stories on other newspaper websites which I’m asked to plagiarise. The fact I don’t approve of, or enjoy that – doesn’t make me a dinosaur, it makes me a good journalist.
You mention blogs, youtube channels etc – what you fail to mention is that the vast majority of them are absolute garbage.
Here’s the crucial point – there probably is scope to modernise and get involved in the digital world, but it’s not being done properly and THAT is what annoys people.
When we changed to the ‘digital newsroom’ several years before we left, we did the following:
(1) Appointed a head of content. This was later abandoned because it didn’t work. You can’t have the same news agenda for four or five different patches.
(2) We put big screen TVs on the wall. Two of them broke and weren’t replaced. People used to watch cricket on them, good times.
(3) We gave everyone Nokia N96s and told staff to film on them. The film quality was awful, you had to hold them in front of people’s faces to interview them because the microphone was so bad, people regularly laughed at us.
At the time there were lots of staff who were underemployed, what the company could have done is hired, or retrained staff to function as a proper high quality camera crew. We could have booked them for jobs the way we booked photographers, rather than go chasing around town with a smartphone like some kind of spotty teenager at a One Direction concert, alas no – this would have made too much sense.
That was one of a litany of disastrous decisions, from paid for ebusiness magazines (why would anyone pay for perochial business news limited to one city like Birmingham and Liverpool?), to appointing people’s mates into top jobs (I once encountered a head of online content who didn’t know what a hyperlink was – true story)
If it was me making these decisions, the very first thing I would have done is poached someone from Google or Microsoft, or even Currys, who knew what a computer was, what the internet did, and what an online strategy actually looked like.
I would have partitioned the business. Rather than just using the newspaper as a place to throw everything you’ve already used, I’d have concentrated on good weekly newspapers as standalone products.
Weeklies and dailies are different animals, people read dailies for news, people read weeklies for a mix of obscure local news and pure entertainment. They have a future, dailies do not. I would have filled these weeklies with good quality editorial. Made them more feature-led and entertaining. (I know people who regularly still spend £20-25 a week on magazines but don’t buy a paper, do you know why? Because magazines are usually beautifully designed, thick, and usually well written – they don’t tend to contain UGC images of the back of a policeman’s head, or regurgitated press releases almost identical to the story you read last week.
By all means, after that, replace the big city dailies with online journalism, – but make it journalism, not content. Write things people really want to read (there’s a lot of it out there, the BBC, Guardian, Independent etc regularly have stories and features being shared on my Facebook page, local newspapers virtually never do – unless it’s a picture of a sunset or the rain (no seriously).
Do digital by all means, but make it good. Get a camera crew, not a work ex with a phone, write journalism, not content and clickbait, put web experts in web roles, not former subs and news editors you go to the pub with. Don’t throw the weeklies in with the dailies, they’re a different beast, they have a future.
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Olivia: it’s hard to follow Jeff Jones’ brilliant analysis above but his general message about maintaining quality, in whatever medium, is crucial for the future of our “industry”. Some 16 years ago I was the editor of a national financial magazine and the pointy-heads duly arrived to ease my progress online. My first question was how this operation would increase our profitability. Apparently, that was the wrong question because it was all about being “out there”, getting click-through, building synergies (eh?) and so on. My second question was about the editing process to ensure our readers, if there were any, would be perusing useful, well-written stuff. That was irrelevant too, it seemed. Just put it out there and the magic would happen, even with headlines like “Motorists Should Shop Around For Car Insurance As Motorists Could Save On Car Insurance”. That was called “optimisation”, though I had another word for it. So, in summary, I’m fine with digital – but never at the expense of proper use of our language. That is base camp for Mount Quality. Back to you, Olivia.
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I second all of Jeff Jones’ comments, articulate and insightful as they are, but am particularly grabbed by his thoughts on video as that’s my area of expertise and interest.
I trained as a print journo but got heavily into video around 2010, a few years into my traineeship. At the time, my employer was pushing it in a big way and it struck me that this was a good skillset to master.
Thinking it would be a sound investment in my future career, I went on courses and spent a lot of my free time learning to use broadcast cameras and edit to a high level in the main packages. If you’ll excuse a little trumpet-blowing, I got pretty darn good at it.
I assumed that, a few years from then, there would be loads of plum roles in the industry for skilled, dedicated videographers and I’d be at the top of the list for just about any position I wanted.
Imagine my disappointment as, one by one, the big groups announced that their ‘video strategies’ amounted to firing half their reporters and giving the overworked remainder an iPhone to point haphazardly at things.
A lot of you reading this may have no interest in video, and that’s no bad thing – the industry needs people who specialise in different areas and, to be frank, I’m a mediocre writer at best.
But this story is illustrative of a wider malaise at the heart of the corporate-owned local media industry – the desire to squeeze more and more work from fewer and fewer people with little or no regard for quality.
There’s nothing wrong with embracing digital but we need more people working in the industry and we need more specialists – whether that’s reporters with a specific brief (e.g. crime, education, environment), photographers, social media managers, web editors, video teams or anything other role you can think of.
This drive to try and shape small teams of naive, overworked graduate trainees into “jacks of all trade” will simply lead to a terrible product, disillusioned readers and ultimately businesses with no viable operating model.
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On the issue of spelling and grammar, imagine you received a letter from a bank that was riddled with mistakes. In itself, it might not actually matter but it would give a poor impression of that bank’s level of professionalism and might even be regarded as disrespectful to customers. It’s exactly the same with newspapers, which build their reputations on accuracy. Small details matter.
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P.S. Jeff – A Nokia N96?!?! You could make a better video by reconstructing the event with stick-men drawings and one of those flip-book animations…
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Kendo – you make a good point, I think a lot of people’s disatissfaction with newspapers is often subliminal, they often know it’s rubbish even if they don’t know why.
I honestly have never encountered an industry which reasonably expects customers to pay more money for worsening products. If you loved Ford motor cars but every successive model was noticably worse than the last yet dearer, how long before you stopped buying them?
It’d be the same with anything, from beer and sandwiches to cinema tickets. You persevere for a bit hoping it will regain some quality, after a while you give up. There is no great mystery here. No great data-led credit crunch of changing habits, it’s just that people won’t spend their hard earned on rubbish – and rightly so.
Now, forgive me I must run along, I’m being contacted by a comunity content curator with one GCSE and a penchant for the word ‘babe’, she wants my weekend drinking pics for the website. Time and content wait for no man.
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Go back hundred years and you’d find people, like the old heads commenting above, trying to reverse the decline of the horse and cart by employing more blacksmiths – leave the motorcar to the young ‘uns! Besides, how will they replace the quality of a cart ride with something so complicated as a car?
As day turns to night, newspapers will turn to dust. We’re just in the fiddly bit between old and new.
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Think they need to get rid of a few more chiefs rather than the Indians.
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Comparing the growth of online in its current form to the advent of the car. Oh dear.
‘Old heads’? What, 2013 is when I finished.
The decline of newspapers is yet another straw man being bandied around here, the decline of newspapers isn’t the issue – it’s the decline of journalism that’s the issue.
Journalism isn’t quaint, or old, it’s still very much alive – just not in our big, shareholder-led newspaper companies.
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Jeff, some good points well made but, like Dick, you appear to be dismissive of all bloggers etc as ‘garbage’.
What you see as a level of ‘quality’ is not usually matched by that of your audience. It’s simply your opinion and that’s where newspapers have been getting it all wrong for years!
Many local websites, blogs and even YouTube channels deliver content which the intended audience enjoys – mistakes and all. They are forgiven their occasional errors by being fully engaged with the community they serve and are more trusted because of it.
I’ve heard newspaper editors suggest things like a computer games column, just because there’s been some national hype about the latest Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. Would you trust a column from a random reporter at the Daily Blah with its 20,000-a-week readership or would you trust GamerX with his 1 million YouTube subscribers and 200k Twitter followers?
Jeff makes that very point about the getting experts involved rather than a random sub editor, but why would GamerX want to write the column for a couple of hundred quid a time, when he does it all from his bedroom and makes a few grand a year from YouTube ads?
There are numerous bloggers writing great content about all sorts of topics and the clever ones have developed trusted audiences within that niche which they can either make a standalone living out of or run alongside their own local business as a promotional tool.
Newspapers are not only losing out on advertising, they are losing out on quality content because the experts have the tools and means to do the job for free!
‘But that’s just rubbish feature content, not journalism,’ I hear you cry. Okay, let’s look at website start-ups like The Lincolnite in Lincoln or HU17 in Beverley, near Hull. These have both been running for several years now, growing from a lean cost base and building respectable audience figures. Both are, arguably, now turning a profit but what matters is their engagement with the local community.
Take the Lincolnite, it focuses on Lincoln and claims 500,000 monthly visitors, has 46,000 likes on Facebook and 19,400 Twitter followers.
Compare that to the Lincolnshire Echo which boasts 480,000 monthly visitors, has 13,000 likes on Facebook and 16,900 Twitter followers. Yes, the Echo has an additional weekly readership of 18,000 but if the focus is now on digital, where does that leave them in the market place in terms of overheads in the future?
The Lincolnite and HU17 are now often talked about in the same breath as the rest of the established media in those areas. The public trust them and they now get invited to all the same press calls and events. The Lincolnite is the most remarkable as it was set up by a couple of uni graduates who use a handful of students and other part-time resources to gather ‘content’.
No, they don’t cover court or sport, in general, and they don’t go looking for the in-depth analysis of a ‘council scandal’, but the readers don’t care. They’re not interested. They go to the BBC for that (separate issue). They just want to see pictures of the crash on a city road causing a tailback, they want to see inside a new shop opening in the High Street or watch a video of a local event… and they don’t mind a few rejigged press releases from the police or councils in between.
They give the readers what they want no matter how small – and they respond. More than that, they don’t fill the website with overly SEOd nonsense, non-local content like the Euromillions numbers or endless, mind-numbing articles about the weather. Now, that’s garbage!
With low overheads, you can make money from ‘perochial business news’, in fact, The Lincolnite launched a new digital business magazine a few months ago aimed at doing exactly that! What they’ve done so well is build the trust with a community of local businesses, by getting involved with awards nights and even cheque presentations, and can now demonstrate value in what they offer in terms of a B2B audience.
James is right about the industry needing specialists, but where do they come from? Many of them, like himself, are the journos who have kept up with technology, but that evolves too and you can’t rely on one area of expertise. We’ve gone from £40k-plus live satellite links to Periscope in a just a few years!
Jack-of-all-trades is perfectly fine when your audience are also in competition with you on social media etc. So, camera crews? No. A work ex with a phone can do a great job if given the right guidance and/or additional tools. Just look at the team of Winchester News students who covered 20 election counts live for just £100. Right kit and well prepared! Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for many of the regional publishers!
Many ‘specialists’ are coming straight out of university with average writing skills but a fantastic awareness of how to maximise the readership of their work. The last thing they need is for some sub to point out that church warden (sic) is one word as, to them and the audience they serve, it’s irrelevant. If a typo is an issue, they’ll tell the reporter/blogger themselves and might get funny about it, but it’s up to the writer whether they care about it enough to respond.
When it comes to determining ‘quality’, the audience will ultimately decide and it’s hard to deny that, at present, local newspapers are losing that battle both in print and, especially, online!
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Johnny – I think you’re oversimplifying the argument that some of us “old heads” are making (I’m 30, incidentally, but thanks).
I don’t think anyone is denying that the internet is here to stay and that journalism will have to radically transform if it is to meet the new challenges posed by that medium.
But the one constant across all platforms, whether print or online, is that people are drawn in greater numbers to quality content.
If editorial copy, photographs or video are inaccurate, shallow, generic, sloppy, blurred, unfocused, non-exclusive, misspelled, shaky (continue list of adjectives ad infinitum), people will not be as interested and will not want to keep buying / visiting.
To build a loyal audience and thus attract enough eyeballs to justify charging a sustainable advertising rate, news organisations must hire enough editorial staff to create something that hooks people in and makes them want to come back every day, or better still several times a day.
I don’t see that happening at many newspapers (or media outlets, call them what you will) and I don’t see how Trinity Mirror’s latest mad scheme is going to reverse the trend.
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Jeff strikes me as a bitter ex employee, or at least one of those people who likes talking about his old work in dismissive terms to justify why he chased the PR dollar (carping on about clickbait when you admit to going into SEO writing? Come on!) Stringing a few bad examples together to paint a complete picture is never a good sign of someone up for a reasonable argument, so far be it from me to mention the fact that many of these websites now have record audiences online and tens of thousands of people talking to them on social everyday. He’s right that digital has to be good, and those audience numbers aren’t just from clickbait. Cheap shot to make though by an ex employee.
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James, while I admire your enthusiasm, I don’t completely agree about things like the quality of photos, video etc and a few errors here and there. Just look at the first draft of a Mail Online story and watch it change. Littered with spelling errors and dodgy images, but it’s arguably the most-read news website in the world.
However, one of your adjectives raises the biggest issue in local newspapers today. Genuinely exclusive content or rather the lack of it!
Investment in staff would definitely help, but that has to be balanced by the advertising revenue to pay for it. Don’t swallow the corporate nonsense about getting people to visit multiple times a day. The vast majority just won’t. Newspaper websites are not social networks!
It’s not part of people’s daily habits and they’re not loyal to a brand when it comes to news. Around 60 per cent of newspaper web traffic arrives via search, 20-25 per cent via referrals and 15-20 per cent directly. Your loyal readers barely account for a fifth of your total audience.
Your whole audience typically spends less than five minutes a month engaged with your site. So, if they read two or three articles each visit, they’re barely coming once a week, let alone once a day or multiple times a day.
I know I’ve said it plenty of times, but while in the hands of regional publishers the local press will be bled dry by continued cuts and closures.
Smaller business models, targeting and engaging niche audiences and communities with enthusiastic, digitally-talented staff will prevail in the long run, even if the quality isn’t as good as it once was!
As you said,
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Trinity Mirror should show more honesty and start publishing all titles in a toilet roll format.
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RSI – bitter in what sense? That modern journalism is being slowly destroyed? I am indeed, because I loved it.
I write about commercial products – it’s incredibly boring – but the writing style isn’t intended to bring people to the site ‘at all costs’, it’s intended to let people searching for those products actually find what they’re looking for higher up the Google rankings than competitor sites, bounce rate is a bad thing – so there’s no ‘find out Arsenal’s number one transfer target!!! type stories there’.
I could probably make a whole load of assumptions about you, maybe you’re one of the Stockholm Syndrome brigade who’s still fully onboard the sinking ship as a digital content community bofin curator or whatever, I don’t know, I don’t care really either – but if you can actually show me a good example of some top journalism practices being encouraged by the three big local newspapers companies rather than just drop some jibe grenades before walking off, I’m up for a discussion.
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Also, the ‘PR Dollar’ isn’t quite right either, I’m on about 2 grand a year more than I was at a city daily, but crucially am not on the verge of a nervous breakdown at having to read a 30 page council report on the lavatory before the morning meeting then getting home at 7pm.
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When I said ‘old head’, I certainly wasn’t referring to age.
Crying over the carcass of the newspaper industry won’t do any good – either try and make a difference or move on.
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Crying over the destruction of council services following the credit crunch won’t do any good either, it’s still worth getting upset about – no?
I posted a long post before which didn’t appear in response to RSI. I’m a commercial SEO writer, we don’t do clickbait as bounce rate is a bad thing here, we write to improve Google rankings so we can get higher than our competitors, that’s bye the by anyway because it’s a dull job and I don’t value what the company does the way I valued journalism.
Am I bitter about journalism’s decline? Of course I am, because I loved it, anyone who doesn’t feel that way obviously missed out, and I pity them.
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Oliver’s numbers are probably right, but there is more to it than that. News websites get a lot of casual visitors, and they will make the majority of total visitors, but newspapers should be focusing improving loyalty. It can be done, and it’s why sites such as the hyperlocal ones he mentions are successful.
Obsessing over 1m page views a day without actually asking what it really means is dangerous.
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RSI, summed up very well! Head office wants national ads, local journos want to support and serve their communities. At present, the two things aren’t compatible.
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