Journalists at a series of regional titles owned by Trinity Mirror are set to be balloted on industrial action over plans for invididual traffic targets.
The National Union of Journalists is planning to ballot members at Trinity Mirror chapels in Birmingham, Coventry, Newcastle and North Wales over the company’s digital audience goals.
The targets were introcduced at the Birmingham Mail and Coventry Telegraph this summer in a bid to make journalists more focused on digital audience growth, and are set to be rolled out company-wide early in the New Year.
The NUJ says the targets will undermine public interest journalism and encourage so-called “clickbait,” but Trinity Mirror has rejected the tag, saying the scheme is based on creating relevant content to build a “loyal, local readership.”
Ballot papers are due to go out from Tuesday 1 December and Wednesday 2 December in Newcastle and other Trinity Mirror chapels are also meeting to consider balloting.
If industrial action were to go ahead, newspapers affected would include Newcastle-based dailies The Chronicle and The Journal, the North Wales Daily Post as well as the West Midlands titles.
The NUJ says it has been given “some reassurances” by the company’s senior management about the scheme, but added members are “very concerned” at the impact individual targets could have on the culture of cooperation and collaboration in their newsrooms.
It has told Trinity Mirror the goals could add to significant stress on individuals who do not always have a choice on the stories they cover.
Chris Morley, the union’s coordinating officer for Trinity Mirror, said: “We very much want to resolve the key concerns our members have about these proposals, but because of the way the law forces our hand on balloting on industrial action, a number of our chapels feel they need to reserve their position on click targets because of the strength of feeling.
“We acknowledge that the company has sought to reassure on a number of points, but it is clear from what our members are telling us that that has not been enough to deal with fundamental concerns they have.
“We will be meeting the company in the coming days and looking to resolve these differences, but the company should be in no doubt that the fact chapels feel compelled to give notice of balloting shows that it is very important to members.”
Neil Benson, editorial director, Trinity Mirror Regionals, said: “Our proposals on audience goals are essential to ensuring we produce content that is reaching a relevant audience, which is absolutely crucial to survival for all media companies as we face up to the significant changes in our industry.
“It’s disappointing that the NUJ continues to refer to ‘clickbait targets’, which is a gross misrepresentation. As we have explained to them and to our staff, our audience goals are based on creating relevant content that builds a loyal, local readership.
“We have had extensive conversations with colleagues and the union at every stage of these proposals and have responded to all concerns in detail.
“The feedback following the staff sessions we have run is that the vast majority understand why audience goals are needed and are comfortable with their introduction.
“There will, of course, be a bedding-in period, during which the process and the goals themselves will be refined to ensure they reflect the different genres of content our staff produce.
“We pride ourselves on the hugely important role we play reporting on local news and issues affecting our communities, and we will always remain committed to that.”
Sign up for our free daily email bulletin
Follow HTFP on Twitter
Got a story? Email the Editor at
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this debate at least someone from TM has come out and persuasively argued their case. The crux of the matter is the shift in reporters’ remits from a journalistic ethos – where the value of work is not usually assessed in numbers – to a sales culture, where it always is. Changes all around and it’s easy to see why some people feel threatened… On the other hand, doing nothing is not an option.
Report this comment
Its no different to the sales reps i know who are given “web targets” that they need to get each month/period irrespective of whether its in the best interests of the advetiser to be on the web sites or not,such is the pressure to achieve from their managers that they move revenue from print onto web to keep them off their backs.
This is also part of the reason why print ad revenues have been in decline and the web revenue figures are falsely inflated.
simply moving money to achieve a targtet and often as not a bonus to go along with it!
web hits/traffic/presence call it what you will, has never been in the best interest of the users,just the business itself
Report this comment
sums up why journalism is dying. Journalism LEADS the debate, content FOLLOWS it.
A journalist’s pride and sense of achievement comes from uncovering things nobody knows about and bringing them to light.
Under this model, they will be chasing stories similar to what’s already proven popular.
Report this comment
The company should be warned that the union with stick up for the rights of its members and the public and not hesitate to go on strike if necessary.
Trinity Mirror management have never considered the needs of its employees or the reading public, that much is obvious from the reports on HTFP.
Journalists should try and enlist the support of MPs and other influential people instead of fighting them all the time.
This is an issue that goes far beyond the profit needs of a few shareholders.
It’s about the destruction of the British media by corporate monsters. I’ve just bought a Manchester Evening News and nearly every page has an advert publicising Black Friday, cashing in on an annual event that’s even more deplorable than Halloween.
You cannot reason with something as bloody-minded as Trinity Mirror. If you start talking about ethics to them they will treat you like they always have…as a smelly old doormat.
Journalists should get a grip and start showing a strong moral lead instead of acting like a load of blooming…well, I won’t say the word in mixed company.
Your fighting for Britain, not just your jobs!
Report this comment
Reminds me of a time when I was with IPC when an editor tried to measure a reporter’s worth by the amount of space his/her stories took up. I argued that such a move was like trying to judge the worth of an artist’s painting by the size of the canvas. Sorry to say but the sales people – and they are important in terms of sales – have taken over and yet again the worth of journalists is being downgraded.
Report this comment
Perhaps Neil would like to tell us what kind of relevant content is needed to build a loyal readership? I mean, he must have some idea.
Report this comment
This just smacks of the NUJ being out of touch with reality. This sort of information would be used to work out if a reporter was writing stories which appealed to readers anyway. The NUJ leadership are just trying to look active to their members to justify the ever increasing cost of being a member of a union which, out of all the trade unions out there, probably has the worst track record in saving jobs. The ‘it’s the law, we have to do it’ is a pathetic excuse. Either have conviction in what you’re doing or be straight about why you’re doing it.
Report this comment
If reporters should fail to hit their web targets, will there be a sanction? Perhaps a written warning? Will journalists find themselves out of work if their council copy doesn’t prove as attractive to web users as ‘what time do the clocks go back’ stories? Who decides how many hits stories should attract? Can journalists expect a bonus payment if they hit their targets?
But, most importantly of all, if journalists are able to successfully feed the voracious hits monster, can all the commercial managers, digital editors and digital sales executives actually deliver the revenue needed to justify the effort?
Report this comment
Lord knows, there are many reasons to consider strike action.
This just isn’t one of them!
Report this comment
Re TM’s web traffic targets – am I the only person concerned/interested that JP’s share price has for the past week plumbed new depths. Currently (@2.30pm Nov 27) it is at 45.74p and for the past week it has been 50p or below (from £1.70 a year ago).
Am I right in saying that if you cancel out the share ‘consolidation’ just over a year ago that would put the ‘actual’ value at less than 1p?
The current market capitalisation is £48.3million or about 40 times Ashley Highfield’s salary.
Just sayin’
Report this comment
Er, I’m not sure how the JP stuff is relevant to TM, Confused. Please elucidate the connection for a bemused old (306 last birthday) gentleman.
Report this comment
If they are to be targeted then why not bonus them on achievement?
That’s what happens in the ad depetmebr and as most if not ALL of the suits come from a non journalistic background it’s a language they understand
If it’s that important as they claim it is then it’s worth incentivising
Report this comment
All well and good but journalists will only have so much power over their web figures – If you have spectacular news one week or a controversial sports game one week your hits will go up, if there is a ‘slow’ news week the next they will go down.
There is only so much work you can do with listicles, clickbait etc to supplement this, and once you start doing them if you stop you’ll have a spectacular slide in your figures.
Editors and managers need to realise this and make their targets realistic.
Report this comment
This looks like yet another case of the ex-sales people on a newspaper board thinking they can measure journalism like they did ad sales. Benson objects to the ‘clickbait’ tag, but what other view can anyone take? Someone who gets a dozen copied and pasted press releases online in a day is going to get more clicks than someone who spent the day investigating crooked councilors or pedophile priests but didn’t get a web-ready story.
Report this comment
@black shuck, Dave et al
We have a very clear view of the content mix we want to offer our readers. It is a natural evolution of the wide range of content that has driven industry-leading growth in page views, unique users and local market penetration for our sites over the past two years.
As we have explained to our journalists and the NUJ, journalism – and, specifically, local news and sport coverage – will be at the heart of our content offering. These are our key strengths, they are what make us unique and they will be central planks in building a loyal, local audience.
But to achieve our aim of being the turn-to digital source in the regions we cover, news and sport alone are not enough. We need to provide a raft of other content, from traffic and travel updates to ‘news you can use’ and non-news content that entertains and engages a substantial audience, stimulating them to return to our sites more frequently.
So listicles, picture galleries and other light content have their place in the content mix but will not be the dominant elements. This is no different to the typical mix of content in any print edition, where non-local, non-journalism content is an important part of the total package.
Audience goals will be reviewed monthly, with peaks and troughs in the news cycle taken into account. This is not about the figures for a single month but about writers producing content that reaches a worthwhile and growing audience consistently.
At the moment, our biggest stories do superbly well but too much of the content we publish online goes virtually unread or isn’t read at all. That might be because the story wasn’t promoted well enough but – equally likely – because it just isn’t of interest to readers. And if that’s the case, we would be foolish if we didn’t divert our effort into producing different content that people want to read.
Our titles will continue to lead the debate in their communities, as they always have. The difference is that modern-day analytics allow us to judge whether what we are saying is relevant, rather than simply shouting into a void.
The level of individual writers’ audience goals will vary depending on the beat being covered. Clearly, football stories are likely to generate more traffic than, say, council stories. That will be reflected in individual writers’ goals.
In one of our briefing sessions, it was asked if writers would be sacked if they fall short of their goals. The answer is no. This is about giving all of our staff the skills to build their appropriate share of the overall audience, to focus on creating content that is well read and encourages repeat visits, and to enable us to achieve the growth that will lead to a sustainable digital business.
Report this comment
But webhits are so unpredictable.
One fine summer Sunday this year I was working hard in the office of a regional daily.
By 4-5pm it looked as if the shift would soon be over.
But the editor emailed to say we needed more stuff for online as the webhits were well below target and could we pull the stops out.
We did and managed to feed the best, as it were, in time for tea.
And guess what, the webhits did pick up in the evening.
But was it because of the extra stories?
Or was it because it had been such a fine summer’s day, that everybody and his wife had gone out for the day.
Only by teatime when the weather turned to its usual English summer day custard did people decide to go online and see what goodies had been written for them earlier that day.
Report this comment
As I said in my earlier comment it’s good that someone from the company has made a plausible case for a move which puts journalists into a whole new professional arena – i.e. that of sales, a wholly numbers-based enterprise. Many comments here focus on those who fail to reach targets but what of those who meet or exceed them? In a sales environment this surely entails bonuses, as has been mentioned above. Or is this to be a “selective” sales environment? We shall see.
Report this comment
That was a very comprehensive answer from Neil – One interesting thing this does bring up is perhaps that when newspapers are currently uploading all their content nibs and all is that maybe some of it is a wasted exercise and they’d be better off putting up the top five or six headlines, ignoring the rest then making bespoke web content for the rest of the day.
Report this comment
Bagsy me be the ‘What time will the fluffy kitten be flushed down Kim Kardashian’s toilet’ Correspondent when TM come a-knocking on the Oxdown Gazette’s door.
Report this comment
As a long-time newspaper journalist who worked the newsroom before and after the Internet and the glory of Google Analytics, I feel that I have a pretty good vantage point to see the benefits and drawbacks of the Internet age for the press. For readers who don’t know, Google Analytics (and like software) allow news outlets to see very clearly what stories readers are reading, how long they are spending reading it, where those readers are sitting as they read, whether they have visited before, what kind of device they are reading on, how they came to the site (via Facebook, LinkedIn, on their own, … ) and many other attributes, many of them in real time.
What I have found after two years of publishing is that traffic is driven almost entirely by the stories that sources promote for their own reasons, both selfish (usually) and non-selfish. If I’m driven only to pump up my viewership, my incentive is to write only stories that I know subjects or sources themselves will promote, which means that if I were corrupt, I would only write stories that I know a source is going to like. That is the problem that I see. These dynamics are probably somewhat different at a big metro newspaper but not entirely.
What Neil is saying above is completely reasonable and accurate: What he and others in the industry are running up against is that every journalist wants to be an investigative reporter or Franzen-esque writer, not be in charge of keeping the online events schedule up to date and accurate, which is the kind of news-you-can-use that generates page views but which brings no glory or psychic reward or even professional recognition to any reporter or editor. A person might do it for a decade but at some point every person asks himself or herself: Aren’t I wasting my life? And the answer is probably a big fat … yes. How do you make such jobs palatable? Greater pay or lesser people, I think.
Report this comment
@Flossie the Sheep
A very valid point, and highlights an issue. You won’t succeed digitally by constantly cranking up volume, as at some point you hit a brick wall (which you very nearly did by the sounds of it). It’s about the right content, at the right time.
If you’re using the analytics, along with looking out of the window in the summertime case, you’d see your weekend readers are more likely to be on mobile and therefore most likely to access through social media. Technically you could have scheduled all your content/social media promotion for post-6pm on the Sunday and you’d have breezed through your target (potentially, I don’t know how steep your targets are).
If you have an editor who just shouts ‘more, more, more’ you need to question the wisdom of that editor when it comes to digital as it’ll give short-term bursts but not the kind of steady underlying growth that’s needed in the long-term when it comes to increasing a local, loyal audience – who come back on a regular basis.
You might find this blog post I wrote last year interesting about publication times; http://www.edwalker.net/blog/2014/04/17/the-return-of-the-evening-publication-2/ – a strategy that’s worked really well on the hyperlocal news site myself and others run in our spare time, which funnily enough when you can only post x number of stories due to time constraints it really makes you focus on what’s going to get read and is important.
Breaking news is a volume game, I admit, as the more there is, the more you’ll cover – but away from that regional media are generally in control of what, and when. So you build a publishing schedule for your audience which takes into account what you know they like and are more likely to read at certain times. Knowing what they like can be subject matter or formats.
Report this comment