The expected ‘shock and awe’ response to Trinity Mirror’s absorption of Local World has already been well-aired on this and other websites, so I won’t harp on about it here.
Yes, the action of a merger will have consequences, and yes, some of those consequences will be the £3.2m ‘content generation’ savings which Trinity Mirror itself has estimated. C’est la vie, I’m afraid.
That said, when the inevitable editorial task force is gathered around a long boardroom table somewhere central like Coventry to consider those savings (that’s how and where it starts, and it’s chilling stuff) they must – in my humble opinion – think local.
I know, I know, it’s almost a cliché, and I’m sure it’s something that experienced head honchos will be saying, thinking and acting on already.
But although ‘local’ will be their intention, the danger is that it will be so, so tempting – especially when that savings target is nearly within reach, or is even increased – to resort to one too many pan-group content solutions.
Trinity Mirror’s daily titles already share various columnists, political correspondents, news campaigns and features sections.
Features is fair game in many minds, although too much common beauty, travel, films and music reviews and show business interviews make some pull-outs read like national facsimiles, with little or no serious local content for local readers.
Some critics might even suggest that features pages that take fashion from the thriving nightlife of modern Manchester to the very different Bigg Market of Newcastle are only helping to make the UK more and more homogeneous.
Nevertheless, features content is almost certainly up for grabs in terms of finding those savings.
Solid political reportage, however, along with in-depth opinion and quality campaigning surely needs to be born on each and every news room floor, refined in various remote conferences and given local flavour and factual detail.
Because a local read without politics, opinions and campaigns that are that paper’s own is a bit like standing on a wooden crate in Birmingham’s Bullring and talking in London-centric BBC tones, rather than the relevant dialect. And don’t even get me started on sport!
Again, these reasons for acting more like ‘Local Mirror’ than ‘Trinity World’ will almost certainly be on the minds of the powers-that-be. But there’s no harm in reminding them here.
Meanwhile, I’m fascinated by the price paid for that large stable of Local World titles, which once you take into account Trinity Mirror’s 20pc share makes the deal worth some £220m.
Why? Well, I’m long enough in the tooth to remember when John Bills – now group managing director at Johnston Press – attempted a management buy-out of Trinity Mirror’s titles here in the West Midlands back in 2007.
Guess how much he, his MBO team and venture capitalists nearly paid? The princely sum £160m.
Yep, £160m – give or take a few million – for what was then three dailies (Birmingham Mail, Birmingham Post and Coventry Telegraph), one Sunday (the Mercury) and a collection of 20 or so paid-for and free weeklies.
Whereas Local World has just been swallowed in a deal that values it at £220m for a print portfolio of 83 publications including 16 dailies, two Metro franchises, 36 paid-for weeklies and 29 free weeklies.
I discussed this chasm of a difference with an old senior colleague who was very, very close to that MBO team, and while he or she must remain anonymous their insight is worth sharing.
“I think it’s [the Local World purchase] a strange deal in some ways, and makes perfect sense in others, short term,” my source told me.
“Cambridge taken out of it, Archant paying more for it? The Archant personalities would be a better fit with Lord Iliffe, and he always hung onto the print plant. The deal is a major securing exercise for their contract print business.
“Trinity Mirror is taking a big punt on this one: immediate bottom line improvement from the inevitable synergies, but a mid-term background of collapsing sales all round and the print advertising market shot to bits.
“I am afraid that I no longer really buy a big revenue future for local digital. This deal is basically field dressing for a big chest wound.
“The Northern and Shell deal [Trinity Mirror were rumoured to be talking to Richard Desmond about the Daily Express and sister titles] would be far more interesting to me, and could have given them real clout for what’s left of national print advertising.”
All of which is interesting banter for those involved in Trinity Mirror and Local World. And how times and fortunes have changed for regional newspapers in the past eight years.
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Ref: “I am afraid that I no longer really buy a big revenue future for local digital.” As I have repeated here ad nauseam, around 15 years ago I was editor of a successful personal finance magazine when the digi-geeks came calling to tell me (and my boss) that we had to go online to gain “vital” exposure for our product. All our questions bar one were answered: What is the profit for years one to three? A naïve and quaintly analogue query, apparently, not fit for discussion. Anyway, 15 years have scooted past and that website’s profits can be expressed in very round numbers indeed. Local news has even less chance and though I don’t hark back to the Golden Past of papers (I wasn’t in them then), there is certainly no future online for local outfits owned by a corporate monolith like TM. Income won’t feed the office cat let alone pay salaries, so keep dodging the bullets, folks.
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A thoughtful piece Steve. For many years now publishing companies have been slashing the “intangible asset” column on their balance sheets as the accountants realise the dwindling value of individual titles’ publishing rights. In the £160m case you highlight, that soon officially became a value of zero on the books. I cannot be convinced bigger is best in regard to regional and local publishing and I think the track record of the last seven years especially bears this out. You may be talking cliches over “local” but that doesn’t make you wrong.
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Hey you two, it’s “harp on” not “hark on”.
harp on
Dwell on; talk or write about to a tedious and excessive extent. This expression is a shortening of harp on the same string, meaning “to play the same note over and over.” It was first recorded in 1518.
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Steve – you should try harder at keeping your sources secret.
I immediately recognised your Deep Throat as an industry insider I knew who would often mangle the English language with phrases like: “I think it’s a strange deal in some ways, and makes perfect sense in others, short term,”
The only way their quotes could appear in print was to insert the gist of what the hell they were talking about in straight [not curly] brackets – or for those born before 1990, to paraphrase or use an indirect quote?
I will also not name them as I believe they are suffering from that nasty and currently incurable disease [Parenthesisisis] which spread from the USA a few years ago and took hold among media students before, sadly, becoming entrenched in the mainstream media [via The Guardian].
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Cambridge/Norwich would be a perfect fit – perhaps pad for in part by selling off some Archant dross. Robert Iliffe had his eyes on Norwich years ago.
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For me the frustrating thing is that if the newspapers groups actually took a risk back in the past and whole-heartedly took on digital right at the start of the industry – when they had some highly skilled developers and IT staff employed – they could now be making good money out of it – instead they have resorted to a simplistic model of advertising/page views model powered by clickbait – because they have no other ideas left.
Instead of developing exciting new digital products and platforms and taking care of the ones that were growing they either let them go, sold them off – or they let competitors like Right Move create much better products focusing narrowly on the comfort zone of stories.
Unfortunately it’s too late now as the sectors that local newspapers used to dominate and make money off like housing, jobs and motors have now been lost to other brands who were prepared to put in the time, effort and money and the digital skills have been lost or outsourced.
And in the areas such as comment and opinion – that has long been lost to Facebook and Twitter – who goes to a local newspaper site to have their discussions nowadays apart from a few curmudgeons?
Newspapers websites should be much more that containers for newspaper content – they should be vibrant portals for people to go off to all sorts of other areas but the ones I look at nowadays can’t even do a good job of showcasing their own content let alone having any other use.
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Whoops – you’re dead right, ‘DAVE’. It is, of course, ‘harp on’ (I was incorrectly thinking of ‘hark back’, which is an entirely different thing). Thanks. I will edit the error, as it’s in the intro. But let this message stand so folks know the mistake was made and spotted.
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where would you start to sell off the dross at Archant ivor?
none of the titles are credible any longer ,all have lost thousands of readers, some weeklies can hardly cover the cost of producing them with the amount of overheads ,staff and offices they have and all are pale imiatations compared to when you were there.
Archant don’t need to be buying more, they need to be either investing in the ones they have or closing them altogether.
The carnage created by Mustard tv and its crippling losses must surely mean further announcements and cost savings are to come?
now is not a time for them to be “investing ” more money to speculate, merely a time to be attempting to recover losses.
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“Features is fair game in many minds, although too much common beauty, travel, films and music reviews and show business interviews make some pull-outs read like national facsimiles, with little or no serious local content for local readers.”
Trinity certainly does not seem to have a great deal of respect for the idea of local features. In the 1990s, the Manchester Evening News features department had about a dozen writers and subs. By 2013 the MEN apparently did not need a features department at all, just a ‘shared content’ unit in Liverpool, those two cities having so much in common, of course.
Dedicated local features were replaced with generic lifestyle space-fillers. Do savings such as this affect readers’ enjoyment of a newspaper? I would say so. Will exactly the same ‘cost synergies’ be sought at Trinity’s newly acquired titles? You bet.
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Anyone trying to turn local content into national syndicated content truly doesn’t understand the difference between a local newspaper and a national one.
Gardening columns should vary according to local soil types. Wine choices? Depends on what the local wine shops can get in stock.
Big name interviews? What did they make of the city/town/hamlet when they last played there?
You can go on and on. Local sells. National smells.
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With all due respect to Mr Dyson, it’s all very well to say that Trinity Mirror MUST act like Local World. It remains to be seen, however, whether they will.
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I was hoping for some insight from an ex Trinity Mirror editor who delivered his fair share of bad news to staff over the years, so this blog was very disappointing.
The whole ‘local mirror’ or ‘trinity world’ is a nonsense. Newspapers have always had similar content tucked away beyond the local news and local sport – it’s called the Press Association. It’s also a nonsense to say that strong local features don’t exist in Trinity Mirror titles, they do – just in different parts of the paper. The idea that a fashion feature in Liverpool can’t work in Manchester or in Newcastle is nonsense in a digital age where the same brands are available to everyone, with shoppers not restricted to just their high street.
For all the hand-wringing about things which have changed, no-one can ever point to it costing newspaper sales. Do newspapers with strong features desks enjoy smaller circulation falls than those that don’t? Not as far as I can tell.
There’s also a suggestion in this blog, and in the comments, that somehow cuts are only coming because of this deal. The economic challenge facing the industry means they would have been coming anyway, it’s just that we know the numbers involved.
As for Dick M’s repetitive moaning about digital, and Steve’s not-so-anonymous source going on about local display, both are guilty of failing to answer the question: What was the alternative? Readers moved online, and I get tired of reading people on here pretending it would have been all OK if we’d just said to readers that they can only read us in print. It’s a nonsense to suggest it. Local advertisers will need to advertise somewhere, and they’ll go where they can get the right local audience. It’s as simple as that.
The NUJ like to sneer at digital journalism and sneer at the big businesses involved, but it’s obvious from comments here and elsewhere that the NUJ understands little about digital or business. And in pretending the future won”t happen, the NUJ keeps failing members.
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Employee x is right , archant have enough on their plate as it is particularly with the Norfolk titles and set up without taking on more titles elsewhere.
Had investment or even a plan been put in place to invest in and develop the ailing Norfolk weekly and daily titles and to retain the best staff to achieve this they would be in a far stronger position than they are now. The urgent need is with the papers they have now not increasing the portfolio further, unless they really have given up on the Norfolk ( and Suffolk ) titles and are leaving them to decline even further making the decision to close an easy option.
The strategy of not throwing good money after bad is a sensible one especially in light of the staggering losses incurred by Mustard tv and I would imagine any further investment on anything other than their core business was a highly risky one
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I know this is a strange place to discuss what I have been thinking about for a while. Why do papers now link words together that did not used to be linked? I give below some examples
anymore
everyday
toybox
freestanding
redroute (writing about dangerous roads)
It is awful writing.
Do I need to go on? In The Times the other day was an article about the Privy Council. They spelt Councillors as Counsellors.
Mon Dieu!
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As a “repetitive moaner” about digital can I just say that, apart from the asthma inhaler, the internet has been the most significant invention of my 250-year lifetime and I love it, for all the associated problems and downsides (porn mostly). Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, BBC Weather (oh yes), online ticket purchasing etc are all excellent and I admire those who have grasped the opportunities and become very rich indeed, as did those who embraced analogous things in the 19th and 20th centuries. BUT… tell me how a rubbishy local paper website that is mostly obscured by pop-up advertising, displays headlines of a primary school standard and, most grievously of all, seems to need endless layers of overpaid and mostly useless management to “support” it can ever work? It can’t! So the answer Ronald, my lovable old clown, is small, fit for the media landscape purpose outfits, locally based, with no £1m per year + bonuses “Chief Executive Officer” and cronies to reward for their non-existent efforts. These mega-mergers of clunking corporations are as old hat as the thinking you attribute to me, Ronald, and there is no future there, despite the deluded views of some.
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Well done Dick, that’s the first constructive comment I’ve ever seen from you. And I agree with you to some extent, but I’d have more faith in what you’re proposing if there was evidence of it working. But if you look at the Oldhams, Carlisles and other smaller publishers out there – even the mighty Express and Star in Wolverhampton – it’s clear that small doesn’t equal success. They too are getting smaller, and finding it even harder than the ‘big boys’ to compete in a world where the biggest audience number wins. I’m not saying that’s fair, but it’s true.
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Interesting that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the TM takeover, all the talk (here and elsewhere) has been about the number of newspapers involved, or have I missed the bit about all those wonderful profit-making websites involved? Odd, given TM’s much-vaunted ‘digital first’ strategy, or has the great moment of tipping point when digital revenue would overtake print been put back yet again?
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AS for not being local the first editions of my old weekly carried reports of pirates in the China Sea. That was about 1880 and it is is a good deal more local, though it no longer has local reporters.
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Ronald – I don’t think Dick means smaller ‘established’ publishers, ie the ones you mention. Or if he does, I certainly don’t. Even these smaller set-ups can tend to have way too many overpaid chiefs. I would argue for a couple of subs, a reporter or two, one at least who is social-media savvy to the nth degree and a somebody or two who does advertising. Forget the big regionals – they’re about as relevant as the dodo. Instead, think local (and I mean real local) and concentrate on the stuff that the nationals aren’t interested in and the punters aren’t going to get elsewhere.
Print dead? Don’t you believe it – all you have to do is check out any Waterstones on a Saturday afternoon. Without writing a book, what is dead is the way we approach it, as evinced by the generations of managements who responded to the advent of the internet by digging a deep hole, jumping into it and hoping the nasty new rival would go away.
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Hater gonna continue to hate personified @dickminim
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