Football, bloody hell…big transfer news as regional newspaper journalists jump ship to join new American sports website The Athletic

Regional newspaper journalists have been poached by American-based sports website The Athletic to join its new UK operation.

So what is the big transfer news of the summer, Pogba off to Real Madrid or Neymar to Barcelona?

Not in the world of journalism, where sports journalists have been leaving regional newspapers faster than you can say clickbait to move to the American-based sports website, The Athletic.

Some of the cream of the regional newspaper footballing world have been poached.

Meanwhile, those at the top of the regional newspaper world must be pondering if The Athletic can gain a major foothold in the UK by picking up audience.

According to holdthefrontpage.co.uk those who have transferred to The Athletic include include the Liverpool Echo’s Liverpool FC reporter James Pearce, Yorkshire Evening Post Leeds United writer Phil Hay and Express & Star Wolverhampton Wanderers correspondent Tim Spiers.

It is understood more are following the pilgrimage including Leicester Mercury’s Leicester City reporter Rob Tanner, Birmingham Mail Aston Villa reporter Gregg Evans and The Argus Brighton and Hove Albion reporter Andy Naylor.

In a way, with the demand for football stories and the growth of football journalism, it is one of the few areas where recruitment seems to be rising.

But to leave the relative comfort of their regional newspapers and head for The Athletic is, from an outsider looking in, a gamble.

Cynics would say that the reported double your money offers may have helped this leap of faith, with the writers said to be on about £37,000 and being offered a nice $75,000 to join their new mates from America.

So is it safe for these journalists to leave for an organisation which is in its infancy? The Athletic only started a couple of years ago and is firmly based across the Atlantic.

It is making a big play for the Premier League audience by looking to recruit 50-55 people, mainly writers, prior to the season starting in August.

The Athletic is different to most regional newspaper models. Its business is based on a paywall, there aren’t any intrusive ads dive bombing you as you attempt to read each paragraph of a story.

James Mirtle, the editor-in-chief of The Athletic, Canada, makes the case for subscription. He points out that it’s difficult to make decent money based on clicks suggesting that a top story would only ever make $75-$100, hardly enough to pay a journalist.

He has a point.

James argues that while most people question the need to pay for journalism, the reality is that the existing businesses based on clicks may not generate the right levels of income to make them sustainable. Thoughtful stuff.

Finally, he says that the New York Times and Washington Post are pursuing subscription models because after doing their sums, it’s better to get two subscribers in terms of money than 20,000 clicks.

This is interesting if we reflect on what is happening in the UK. The Guardian, which is free to readers, has managed to get people to pay for its journalism.

Latest figures show that they have 655,000 subscribers and 300,000 readers who have made one-off contributions.

Meanwhile, The Sun ditched its paywall when it only had 200,000 subscribers in 2015 and by 2018 overtook the Mail Online by becoming the UK’s biggest newsbrand with more than 30m unique users a month.

The Times, Telegraph and Financial Times are three other titles which are appearing to sit comfortably behind a paywall.

UK regional titles have also flirted with paywalls. A decade ago Johnston Press, now JPI Media, tried to put smaller titles like the Whitby Gazette behind a paywall with little success.

The firm announced earlier this year that it was to put a partial paywall on two titles, The Star, Sheffield and The News, Portsmouth. Readers will have to pay £2 a week.

I’m unsure whether this will be a success, history so far tells us it won’t be. Readers don’t seem keen to pay-out for local news, local sport maybe different.

The only bright spot on the horizon is that there is a generation of people who now expect to pay for media, the culture of our country is changing.

Today they pay for TV (Netlflix, Sky), music (Spotify, Apple) and, of course, mobile phones.

So what can we conclude from these examples of paying or not for content?

I guess it is that you need to find a model that works best for your audience…that’s a bit of a cop out statement, sorry.

Clearly, Guardian readers are benevolent so dig deep while Sun readers would rather spend their cash on something else, in other words, there’s no clear pattern.

As I’ve said before, the issue with online is turning a coin. Newspaper groups have to fight tooth and nail to grab any cash online as both Google and Facebook hoover up the lion’s share of advertising.

This means for a company like Reach Plc, the largest newspaper group in the country, that revenues look lob-sided.

While to steams ahead with a web first policy with content as audience grows rapidly, back in the forgotten print rooms, the cash is still coming in as the newspaper sales decline.

The  group revealed a few days ago that its digital revenue had increased by 9.7pc on a like for like basis from £41.5m to £48.7m, with average monthly page views on its websites growing by 16pc year on year to 1.2bn in 2019. Big tick.

But look at the print revenues. Ok, they declined slightly from £306.4m to £301.8m…but compare it with the £48.7m from online. Effectively, print is still the cash cow.

Fact, the income from online is closing that of print which is also in decline; fact, online will never make the same amount of money as print once did. This is because online is so competitive, print has never really faced the same fight for money.

So, back to The Athletic. Is it worth the risk for a group of well-respected football writers with reasonably comfortable lives at decent newspaper groups to leave for a project effectively in its infancy?

I guess the answer is probably ‘yes’. If the rumoured salaries are right, in a year they will get paid double what they would have received and more than any redundancy, if that became an issue.

Any company worth its salt would sit this project out for at least two to three years, in which time they will have earned what they would have received in six years if they had sat it out in their old jobs.

Then there’s the idea that the content required is different to the terms of engagement in traditional regional newspapers web operations.

This is what James says of The Athletic philosophy: “We’re focused on fans who want high quality, in-depth coverage of their teams, content that isn’t designed to service advertisers or clicks.

“It’s designed solely to be informative and entertaining. The Athletic would not happen on the ad revenue model. So far, we’ve seen that it can work through low-cost subscriptions. By all indications, we’ll be around for a long time.”

It seems James, maybe unwittingly, has taken a swipe at the publications his organisation has been so keen to ‘steal’ their writers from with an attack on click culture.

The good news for the journalists is that The Athletic wants ‘high quality, in-depth’ content, a dream for most hacks.

So the model for success according to The Athletic is to write brilliant journalism, ask readers to pay for it, go for quality, not quantity and don’t get hung up on getting thousands of clicks which won’t produce enough cash to pay the writer of the article.

In America, The Athletic has been a comparative success. Just a couple of days ago it was reported that the company now had 500,000 subscribers in the States.

In the UK it is expected that it will cost around £8 a month or £40 a year, possibly up to £60, to be a subscriber. The question is whether there’s a big enough market of football fans in the UK who will pay for content?

I hope so for the sake of the journalists who have taken the gamble to join up. Also, for the future of all up and coming football journalists, including those my colleagues and I teach, I hope it’s a success.

• Today (August1), holdthefrontpage.co.uk has reported that three more local journalists have left their posts, 24-hours before the new English season starts. While it’s not confirmed they are joining The Athletic, it adds to the major upheaval going on in the regional newspaper sporting world.

Gloves off for the Johnston Press blame game as Reach goes back to regional subbing hubs with a difference and my part in the creation of a newspaper production monster…

The writing has been on the wall for Johnston Press for a few years due to the massive debt the company was juggling with, so it was no surprise that the firm went into administration.

 

Where do we lay the blame for the chaos that surrounds the collapse of Johnston Press? The management? The journalists or journalism? The changing media landscape?

I know that some of you won’t want to play the blame game, but hell, I just feel like it.

As soon as JP went up for sale for £250m we all knew that no-one from outside JP was brave enough to empty their bank account to buy into a turbulent newspaper business.

The CEO of JP and now the CEO of  the newly-formed JPIMedia, David King, put his finger on the button when he announced that the business was going into administration.

He blamed the firm’s acquisitions in the early 2000s as the cause of the firm’s financial mess, you’re not joking…

Obviously, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it was in the 2000s that Johnston Press made some astonishing moves, not astonishing for what they bought, but what they paid.

I remember raising an eyebrow as the firm splashed the cash like a drunken gambler who believes they can’t lose so they keep spending.

In 2002 the managers paid a staggering £560m for Regional Independent Media (RIM).

“This is a transforming acquisition for Johnston Press at a fair price,” said Roger Parry, the then chairman of Johnston.

Fair price. Really? Mr King said that it was not obvious that the business would suffer from the impact created by the rise of the web in 2002 with the loss of classified and motors and the rise of Google and Facebook.

Maybe, in 2002 he was right, it was not too easy to see what lay ahead for the newspaper industry with the rise of the web, home wi-fi, smartphones and Facebook.

But we all knew something was in the air, even back in 1999 as I sat in an office in Lincoln with a ‘dial-up’ to get online. Ok, it didn’t work very well, but even for a then naive deputy editor, I knew things were on the cusp of changing.

This was also pointed out by David Higgerson, Reach’s Chief Audience Officer, who at a conference I attended last summer pulled out a copy of the Birmingham Mail from 1999.

That paper had a puff across the top welcoming a new health and fitness supplement.

As he rightly said, it was an attempt by the paper to grab new readers as sales of the paper continued to slide. It was almost unspoken pact, that we dare not talk of what lay ahead of us, but we all knew, didn’t we?

But when Johnston bought the Scotsman Group for a mouth-watering £160m and were said to be in the frame to buy Northcliffe for £1.6bn in 2006, you would be rightly concerned about who was giving out the advise.

Ok, I accept that this maybe easy for me to say, but by 2006 the writing was firmly on the wall.

In early 2006 Northcliffe had brought in Aim Higher, yep, the accountants were in the corridors of most newspapers in the group counting stories and paperclips.

Job losses were firmly on the card, it was a big clue for the Johnston managers. The second clue came when Northcliffe decided to sell its cherished regional newspapers.

The papers, once loved when they used to bring in £96m profits a year, went from being the most-cherished child to the black sheep of the family.

Oh, the final bit of evidence surrounded the fact that newspaper sales had been in decline since the early 80s anyway. Yes, financially they had held up well, but that was without the threat of the web.

The problem was that the business model was too fragile. It relied too heavily on certain areas of advertising and failed to pull in more income in from cover price, which only ever crept up a penny or two and therefore was never enough to prop the business up.

Despite this evidence, Johnston ploughed on and snapped up the Scotsman titles which only made £7m in pre-tax profits in 2004 anyway, hardly a great acquisition for £160m.

So there were some pretty good indicators around that maybe it wouldn’t be worth paying such large sums for a newspaper business in decline.

And here we are today, a company riddled with debt it cannot pay. Administration had been on the cards for a long time.

Now a new company, JPIMedia, made up of those who were owed money by the old Johnston Press, has been created to run the business.

Under the deal, £135m will be wiped off the firms debt, £35m injected back into it and more time to pay off the remaining £85m debt.

The new company has body-swerved taking on the pension scheme which did not transfer and will come under the Pensions Protection Fund, a scheme set up by the government to provide pension benefits to members of scheme whose employers have become insolvent.

While the pension should be safeguarded, according to holdthfrontpage, some of the pension pay-outs may not be as high. This is a bitter pill for staff.

On the up side, we are told by the new company that jobs are safe, there’s not even that good old ‘for now.’

It is a grand statement to make as the regional newspaper continues to reconfigure weekly to meet the needs of its consumers and the business.

The reality in my opinion is that JPIMedia, like its fellow media groups, will inevitably make editorial cuts once the dust has settled and there’s a debt to service.

This is because, with falling newspaper profits and circulation to consider, despite a growing online presence, I think the only way financial targets can be hit is via streamlining.

We have seen the latest remodelling of the industry with recent job losses at Reach Plc, the old Trinity Mirror, where 41 more production jobs are going.

A few years ago I welcomed the steady move away from regional subbing/production hubs to a return to producing the newspaper on your home soil.

But the latest plan, on top of regionalised sports departments and centralised page units, does see a return to centralised subbing hubs, of sorts.

Before I move on and because I was feeling nostalgic, I managed to dig out some old notebooks (see photographs below).

They show my wild scribblings as I put together a new workflow plan for the then newly-created subbing hub in Stoke-on-Trent, the home of The Sentinel.

Stoke was one of several hubs which took in pages from other Staffordshire newspapers including Tamworth, as production was streamlined and subs lost their jobs.

This rough diagram shows how I was trying to provide a new workflow system for the subbing hub in Stoke-on-Trent, the home of The Sentinel.

My jottings also show my attempts to calculate how many pages had to be subbed per paper, per day, per sub. Yep, terrifying.

In this picture I’m attempting to work out the number of pages to sub per day per newspaper and how many staff in the would be required in the Stoke-on-Trent subbing hub, the home of The Sentinel.

It is different this time, as I understand it, looking from the outside in. This time there will be production staff still in the local centres.

The subbing hub will be virtual, so, for example, as I understand it, in my area there will be one big production unit covering the East and West Midlands.

While the local teams will take care of their paper, they will also have the capability of helping out the other centres when the pressure is on and there is a greater ability to share content/pages.

The outcome of all this? Probably more generic pages, similar to the ones which appear in the regional papers at the moment.

You know which pages they are because it’s like you are reading two different newspapers every day, but that’s just my design snobbery coming out, but boy do they look ugly…

Secondly, based on some recent research of one of my University of Derby students looking over the last 30 years, which shows that story count in the local press is way down, I’m wondering if this trend will continue?

Please note, at the moment I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, it’s a debate for another day, particularly on around what is local?

One of the issues is that most of the content comes from the web. This is a bit of a poison chalice, because while the content is perfect for the web, it can be more difficult to translate that into newspaper content.

It’s the reverse of the argument in the late 1990s early 2000s when newspaper content was uploaded onto the web.

The problem with that was it was impossible to search for a story online with a newspaper headline.

Let me assure you, somewhere in the ‘cloud’ are a load of stories no-one will ever find, because they have a newspaper headline, not a web head.

Finally, there’s the thorny issue of errors. holdthefrontpage used to have a field day during the old days of the Northcliffe subbing hubs when it found an error in a newspaper, for example, such as Lincoln, because it was subbed in Hull.

The difference this time is that at least there are some local staff at the local centres who should be able to pick up any problems, hopefully.

So is this latest move good or bad? My old journalist bones shout out ‘oh no’ but I’d rather have journalists employed and a newspaper to buy.

The newspaper industry has to use the technology it has at its disposal, for too long it relied on the old ways of production.

From what I know, there’s still some terrific journalists in the print units who through sheer love of the job will continue to turn-out newspapers to the best of their ability.

For too long, newspapers buried their heads in the sand. You can see by going to www.archive.org and checking out some of the regional websites and realising how far behind they were even in the mid-2000s.

The industry failed to modernise quickly enough. Now it’s all coming at such a pace, it’s hard to keep up. Let’s hope it works.

So back to my original question, is there anyone to blame for poor old Johnston Press going under?

OK, none of us claim to be Mystic Meg, but the foolhardy nature of Johnston’s spending in the early 2000s suggests, without sounding like a shop steward, I think the blame must lie with those in charge.

If Lord Rothermere was prepared to sell Northcliffe without looking back in anger in 2006, surely JP’s top team must have had a whiff of what was going on…didn’t they?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do we need football match reports? Why journalists control the cash…with a touch of Alex Ferguson, the good old Saturday sports specials and journalism, but not as we know it Jim…

When I thought about the row over covering football matches, the first thing that came to mind was Sir Alex Ferguson’s famous quote after the 1999 Champions League final.

 

‘Football, bloody hell’, said Sir Alex Ferguson as Manchester United won the Champions League in dramatic fashion in 1999, thanks to a late goal.

And it was this quote that swirled around my head as I watched from the touchline as a debate raged over whether you have to be at a football match to cover it?

In brief, a journalist was worried that at a recent Brentford game, there wasn’t a local reporter covering the match at the ground, but more of that later.

So, for a few weeks, I have thought long and hard about this debate on whether you have to be at a match?

A couple of points came to my mind, firstly, if there’s no online audience, can you afford to pay for a journalist to sit in the press box at a game?

This idea of whether to send a reporter to a game depending on whether it is cost effective is an alien concept to many journalists, but a fact of life for many 21st century reporters.

Let’s face it, if no-one bought the newspaper, you would have to shut, so really there’s nothing new here.

Secondly, do we need match reports at all? This week, I suffered the fate of having to watch Manchester United in action against Valencia, it was a far cry from that night in 1999.

So, dealing with the second point, the following day after the Valencia game, I decided to put together a lecture based around the coverage of that match.

I nipped onto the Mail Online, which to be fair, is obsessed with United, much to the disgust of other fans.

But as we all know, this obsession is due to the fact that Man U gets the biggest audience.

This is not necessarily down to their own fans eager to read about the latest spat, but because so many opposition fans love having their say on the team they hate.

However, the point of the coverage was not that the Mail loves United stories, but the variety of the stories.

It was hard to actually find the match report buried in so many of the other things going on.

In the end, with TV and social media, do we really need a blow by blow account of what’s happening?

Most journalism students are taught how to Tweet from a game anyway and if you are a football fan, you know the result and what were the major incidents without picking up a match report.

Do we really want to know about a pass, a header, a goal when we already know the result and probably seen video clips of the key moments?

And I’m led to believe that match reports don’t get the same audience as so many of the other stories surrounding a team.

So as I pored over the Mail Online after the United game to prep for a lecture, I was slightly bemused, not only about the amount of stories coming out of the game, but how far they were removed from the match report.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved match reports. Was there anything better than sinking a pint in your local as you read a Green ‘Un or Sporting Argus printed just 45 minutes after the final whistle?

I, like so many other football fans, would greedily read the match reports and picture the moments of glory or despair.

But that was a different time. Today, football fans don’t need that kind of detail, there are so many more interesting stories to tell.

The 11, yes 11 online stories about the Man U and Valencia game were at the time I clicked on the website:

1. Paul Scholes speaking on BT sport saying that Jose Mourinho and his mouth are out of control;
2. Mourinho refusing to discuss what Paul Scholes said;
3. Mourinho waving his little finger at the camera for no apparent reason;
4. The United team bus being late due to traffic;
5. Rio Ferdinand, on BT Sport, being critical of United striker Lukaku;
6. A comment piece on United being boring;
7. Another comment piece on why the fans booed the team;
8. Player ratings;
9. A poll on whether Mourinho should be sacked;
10. The team’s captain Antonio Valencia liking an Instagram post saying Mourinho should be sacked;
11. Another Paul Scholes piece on why he was surprised that Mourinho wasn’t sacked after the defeat against West Ham the previous weekend.

Of course, one of the reasons for all these type of stories is that football clubs are too keen to control the message.

Add the restrictions of the footballing authorities and TV stations and it’s hard for football journalists to get a decent story, away from the bland nonsense quotes often served up.

It’s a far cry from the time when you could ring a manager or player up for a chat.

There is a benefit of doing a match report of a Man U game, if you can find it, due to the size of the possible audience compared with Brentford.

But the reality is that the audience is after so much more these days, they are likely to have watched the game and seen what is all over social media.

So the fans want something different, something to debate and interact with so the job of today’s modern football writer is to look far beyond what they see in front of them.

So are match reports a thing of the past? If this is the case, do you have to attend the game to cover it?

The reason for this blog is that Jim Levack, formerly of the Birmingham Mail and Coventry Telegraph, attacked Reach plc (formerly Trinity Mirror) in an article for Beesotted, a fanzine for supporters of Brentford FC.

In his piece, Jim claimed there had been no local media representation at Brentford’s Griffin Park stadium, for the first time in the club’s professional league existence.

But Reach came back at Jim and said that it was now bringing its coverage of the club to “a bigger audience than ever before”.

David Higgerson, Reach’s Digital Editorial Strategy Director, entered the debate.

He set the cat among the pigeons by daring to suggest that you don’t have to be at a match to produce credible coverage.

Bringing in my first point at the start of the blog about making journalism pay for itself, David argued that the audience was not big enough to cover the costs of sending a reporter to the game.

He didn’t say Reach wouldn’t cover Brentford, but they would cover them in other ways, which is what has happened.

Of course, other journalists were a bit steamed up by David’s stance.

In defence of David, he clearly states that he is not against reporters being at games, far from it. However, big decisions have to be made when considering whether a match/event should be covered.

Simply, because something has always been done it doesn’t mean it has to continue this way.

Journalism has to find a way of financing itself. Today, I know some of you won’t like this, but it is through gaining the best audience possible.

If there is no audience, then you are leaking money to send a reporter to a game. Would Tesco sell a product no-one wanted?

OK, it’s not what most journalists want to hear, but for the first-time ever journalists can help the company they work for by providing the right content which brings with it the vital cash to pay for the work.

It makes economic sense, even if it is a little unsavoury to some.

What some, dare I say older journalists, also forget is that technology does allow coverage of games without actually being at the ground. Many organisations already watch games in the office before producing content.

This may be unpalatable to some, but this is the way of the new world.

General news reporters often don’t have the time to cover stories by going out, but can use other tools to get the story, such as social media.

The worry for journalists is that stories which hold authority to account will not be covered, because they maybe deemed not cost-effective.

But this leads us full circle. The stories that get an audience and therefore ad revenue should help pay for journalism which is not necessarily audience grabbing, but important.

I’m not saying this is easy, but in principle, it could work.

I want journalism to survive, but it can’t on a wing and a prayer. There has to be some sense of realism and expectation that reporters understand that what they do brings in money.

There also has to be an understanding that a business has to make money and if it doesn’t, it has to move to the place where cash can be made.

It doesn’t mean that journalists have to prostitute themselves to turn a coin, just produce top-notch quality journalism which has an impact on the lives of the communities in which they serve and it is read by a large audience.

It all sounds so simple…

P.S This isn’t the first time I have written about the outrage over football coverage, here’s another story which stirred up emotions, click here

Trinity Mirror job losses, new-look newsrooms, Newsquest shuts press, editors go and 30p on the cost of buying a newspaper…phew…

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For a moment I had to close my eyes and squint. There was carnage everywhere.

It has been difficult to consume the media websites Press Gazette and holdthefrontpage in the last few weeks as job losses, editors leaving and presses closing have created a tale of sorrow across the regional newspaper business.

I considered at one point to take a picture of the holdthefrontpage web site and show my students the carnage, but I thought it would be overwhelming.

And the other point is, before I move on, there are many jobs for journalists, but they do not exist in the numbers they used to in the old regional newspaper industry.

I know many of my former colleagues will shiver at that thought, but this is the reality.

We are seeing the decline in one area and the growth elsewhere, everyone is a publisher, so every organisation, business, charity, school, needs a journalist to write for and about them.

So here we go, to all my students, look away, to the rest of you hardened hacks, here’s the front page of the holdthefrontpage.co.uk …ouch.

From holdthefrontpage, a press closure and two editors leaving their posts.

Editors disappearing at a rate, another press closure as a news giant, in this case Newsquest, gobbles up a smaller company, and all this as Trinity Mirror was announcing yet another re-shape of its business with the loss of 49 jobs in the north east following the loss of 49 jobs in the Midlands and west.

Unlucky number that 49.

By chance, I was discussing the structure of the newsroom with my students when I first started in newspapers and how it (roughly) looked now in this age of online first news.

OK, I’m not an artist, but this is how the discussion developed and the drawing evolved on the white board.

Below is how the structure looked (from memory) and below that, roughly what it looks like today with on the right side the newspaper side and one the left a boiled down version of the web.

OK, I admit, fine art wasn’t my strong point.

Hopefully, though, the point of the lecture was well made. So many newspaper jobs/titles have gone.

One of the key areas decimated is the good old production area, where the subs are few and far between and never mentioned in the world of digital news.

However, having heard about the loss and re-organsiation of TM jobs in the north east, it made me think that I might be out of step with some of the new structures.

TM has gone for the regional approach to cut costs. It has decided to get rid of some editors and merge departments.

The idea, I understand, is to move TM towards a brighter/profitable digital future while the decline of the newspaper continues at a pace.

You can completely accept this theory. The readers are disappearing from newspapers so build where the audience is growing, online.

The tough thing is that newspapers still make more cash than online and while the gap is closing, it is not fast enough, Grand Canyon comes to mind.

In reality, the business will have to accept it will never again make the profit it once had, the golden egg is more like a tin pot.

The north east areas consist of Newcastle and Teesside, in many ways, close geographically, about 40 miles, but a distance in terms of identity.

For those in the know, Teessiders don’t find Geordies agreeable and Geordies feel the same about Teessiders with Sunderland (and Durham) stuck in the middle.

So, there would be uproar if they end up in a properly merging content teams, with all the reporters put together, because they will argue that they can’t cover their own areas properly due to a lack of knowledge.

For now, in some key areas, there appears separation.

I guess the plan is to have a North East umbrella group allowing certain content gatherers to produce stories for both areas, in other words a lot of the new roles will be regional, the new local.

As I understand it, Neil Hodgkinson, the editor at Hull, will control the whole region while an editor for print and digital will report into him.

This plan also involves merging certain areas of the newsroom, I guess some parts of the  digital, social media and sports areas, will come under the regional banner.

There will be a few reporters specifically covering Newcastle and Teeside, but as I understand, they are on the digital side.

It would appear there will be three print reporters who will have regional roles with the idea that they cover stories not touched by the digital team and a further three writers will be harvesting content for the newspaper.

I reckon the total workforce specifically for print could be around 12 for two newspapers, in my sums are correct.

It has to amount to fewer local news stories in the newspapers and fewer journalists writing for the paper as mentioned above.

In many regional newspaper these days it’s easy to identify where the local pages are and where the centralised content begins.

I recently did a random local story count in The Sentinel, my local newspaper, where I once worked, I used to have a special story counting method, so applied that.

The number of local news stories was at least 60 per cent fewer than four years ago (and I was being generous), but with staff numbers down and the demands for online news greater than ever before, it’s easy to see why.

There is an argument as to whether story count matters and, on reflection, I feel we tried to provide too many to the detriment of the better stories.

However, the old ‘pack it full of local stories mantra’ was designed to give value for money, but with fewer local news pages and stories, it is no wonder that readers are turning their backs on newspapers.

Add to this the rising cover price cost of newspapers and we have a recipe for further decline.

Here are the latest ABC figures. They sadly show that once great beast of the north, the Yorkshire Post, is 29 per cent down in the last six-month period, selling just 11,494 compared with a decade ago when it sold 42,337. These figures reveal many other tales of woe.

Back to cover price. One of the key survival tools of the regional press has been to put up the price of the newspaper to bridge the decline in income as sales fall.

I have said before, newspapers steadfastly used to put their cover price up at one or two pence a year.

However, that has increased rapidly as the sales fall has set in. Cynics have suggested that it is a case of milking the business dry as it sinks…

What I can say is from some research I have done looking across at a decade of sales decline and price rises, and it looks like I’m telling you the obvious, that while online has pinched the audience, the policy of increasing the cost of the product while reducing the number of local stories in the newspaper, is a recipe which has accentuated the decline.

I was taken aback slightly when the Western Mail, which sells 13,149 daily, decided to do a relaunch, redesign its magazine and slap 30p on its Saturday edition, more expensive than The Times on a Saturday which costs £1.70.

The odd penny always knocked a few off the sale, a grimace at the thought of what 30p might do.

And I can’t help but feel some sympathy with the paper’s editor, Catrin Pascoe, who came out with the well-worn ‘it will now be bigger and better’ for the new package on offer, readers just don’t get this.

They’ll look at the price, then head for their mobile phone or laptop to read something for free, however good it is.

I’m afraid this has all looked a little bleak. But I have some good news.

The University of Derby journalism department recently held a workshop (see below) with TM journalists with the inspirational Christian Payne to help guide them through a range of news apps which can help them tell their stories online.

There is so much innovation and creativity in the way stories can be told. In a way, this should be the most exciting times for story-tellers, but the shadow of cutbacks takes the sparkle off a new industry growing from an old one.

Just let this rabble loose on the streets of Derby. Lock up your stories! #journalism #mojo #TMLive pic.twitter.com/i0HKJN48Ub

— Christian (@Documentally@Octodon.social) (@Documentally) March 13, 2018

P.S A colleague of mine just sent me this link on Delayed Gratification. I love this concept of taking time to write the news and give it greater perspective.

I believe that, in time, we might all get fed-up with the chatter of social media news and look for a more complete picture, this offers that solution.

Do I now quality for the position of ‘happiness correspondent’? Read about that here.

Trinity Mirror rolls the dice again, will the punch drunk regional press be able to get off the ropes and come out fighting once more to stay aLive?

 

Trinity Mirror has decided to remove the names of newspapers from the title of its websites to create large Live sites, reflecting what Birmingham has already done.

So big is beautiful then? The unique selling point of most regional newspapers was about their affinity and closeness to the area.

They were small compact units with reporters, subs, advertising reps, and managing directors sitting in the heart of their communities.

But the survival package or new business model has changed.

It has been an extraordinary couple of weeks for Trinity Mirror, as it grows in size nationally while slicing its regional newsroom workforce.

TM bought Express Newspapers group for £127m, bringing into its stable the Daily Express, Star and magazines like OK!

Richard Desmond, who sold the Express gleefully told the Financial Times 
that there were huge opportunities to save some £20m and increase revenues.

He added that it was all about scale ie being big, and instead of the advertising agencies stitching individual titles up over price for ads, they would get a better chance of turning a few more coins by being a monster.

Trinity Mirror’s chief executive Simon Fox was equally upbeat about the new clout they had acquired and the chance of being in a better place to negotiate with advertising agencies.

The theme of big is beautiful carried on over the shuffling of the pack and redundancies in the regions.

The news that the excellent newsman Rob Irvine had stepped down from the role of MEN editor was a surprise (well, it was for me).

I worked with Rob many moons ago in the Derby Telegraph newsroom, he was an excellent operator highlighted recently by the way he masterminded the coverage of the Manchester bomb attack last year.

He has also done wonders in growing the Holy Grail for TM, the online audience.

But with Rob leaving it opened up the whole of the north east to Hull Daily Mail editor Neil Hodgkinson, an equally excellent editor.

It was revealed that he would take control of the titles in the Newcastle with the Newcastle titles editor, Darren Thwaites, heading to Manchester.

So, hang on, the editor in charge of the Newcastle papers is actually based in Hull, just, 147.4 miles away, or two hours 34 minutes in the car, as long as there aren’t any roadworks on the A1(M), according to AA Route Planner.

Meanwhile, it was announced that the Tamworth Herald editor, the talented, hard-working Gary Phelps was also to step down.

As I finally finish this blog, news of who is going to be put at the helm of his newspapers has not been revealed.

Facetiously, I could say any editor within 147 miles of Tamworth, which would leave the field wide open, but I guess it will come under Birmingham Mail editor Marc Reeves who is at least not 147 miles away.

Does it matter where the editor resides? I think I may have opened a can of worms, so let’s move on…

I worked with Gary for a number of years. I had the unfortunate job to tell him his whole production department was moving to Stoke when the original Northcliffe subbing hubs were created back in 2009.

He took it on the chin and didn’t bear any grudges against me (or didn’t say it to my face) for dismantling his operation.

Perhaps he knew that one day production would return to Tamworth, which it did, a slimmer version than before, but nevertheless a victory for returning subbing back to its hometown roots.

In latter years, with fewer and fewer staff to put together the Tamworth Herald and its beast of a sister the Sutton Coldfield Observer, Gary has managed to hold it together.

So he will be a big loss to these publications.

So we have editors in charge of huge regions, we have websites disappearing, such as Burton being swallowed up by its big sister in Derby.

Then there’s the name changes to the online parts of the business as TM divorces the newspaper from the website.

As all of us who trod the boards in the newspaper business will remember, some of the most heated debates took place in those redesign of the paper meetings.

Thankfully, we employed a top-class referee, the brilliant editorial guru, Peter Sands.

There was always only one conclusion, never touch the design of the masthead, or at least keep its integrity. It’s the thing that identifies you and offers comfort to readers, a symbol of trust.

But in a blink of an eye, TM has ditched those names for its online offering, the decree absolute moment, separating print and online forever.

Should we be concerned about a name change?

Certainly, a site like The Sentinel in Stoke has had different titles on its journey such as thisisstaffordshire and latterly thesentinel.co.uk before its new reincarnation Stokeontrentlive, to go with BirminghamLive, BristolLive, DerbyshireLive and so on.

The unanswered question is whether readers go to the online sites of regional newspapers because they are a trusted brand with their traditional title or do they simply not care?

I would think that the generation who no longer read newspapers will not be bothered or understand the significance of whether the website was a Mail, Sentinel or Post, their trusted brand will become Live.

So, this is the old line in the sand moment. It splits print and the web and creates new boundaries with larger audiences and increases the advertising potential.

I have said before, that I firmly believed the web sites and their content should be separated from newspapers.

Over the last few years I have watched as those few print production journalists left have had to copy and paste off the web and squeeze that content into the newspaper.

In so many cases, the online content simply doesn’t match up to the requirements of print.

Online has so many variations when it comes to telling a story such as video, audio, slideshows and being able to aggregate social media via software such as Wakelet.

It has always been clear that the audience for print and online is different. My own little straw poll recently proved that.

I asked an audience at a lecture of the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society if they still bought a newspaper, there was a forest of hands raised.

The following day I asked a group of students, not one twitch, no-one bought a newspaper.

This is the changing face of the media landscape. If TM or any other newspaper group are to secure their future, they cannot rely on print.

Similarly, newspapers cannot rely on online content. There is simply too much content which appears online which is not any good for newspapers.

Is this the brave new world then of the regional press? No-one likes to see job cuts, so many of us have felt the pain.

But, it’s all about preservation, so should we be thankful that still a lot of journalists are employed, despite there being fewer jobs?

The regional press has become like the punch-drunk boxer, wondering around trying to find away back into the fight.

Maybe, the re-shaping of the business will be the key. It’s another big gamble.

What it will achieve is a huge online audiences across the TM titles. This power will give it space to negotiate with advertisers while on the front foot.

As for print, the ability to run newspapers as standalone businesses is fine in principle, however, you need the staff to allow that to happen and it does look a bit thin on the ground.

STOP PRESS: Back to big is beautiful…family-run newspaper business Carlisle-based CN Group, sells to Newsquest.

Another move by a media giant to swallow up a minnow. Is it good for the newspaper business to have fewer owners? The argument again is, better to be big than not to be around at all…discuss.

Why ‘death knocks’ are an essential part of the journalist’s toolkit to find out the truth in a world of fake news…and how police are doing the jobs regional newspapers use to do…

Journalists were criticised for approaching the relatives of the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire disaster, but so-called ‘death knocks’ are an important way of telling a truthful story.

Where angels fear to tread…it is with some trepidation that I have decided to write about the unfortunately named ‘death knock’.

The subject is high on the agenda after the terror attacks in Manchester, London and the fire at Grenfell Tower flats.

Journalists have been criticised for even considering door knocking the relatives of the victims. It is because of this that I have considered for sometime the merits of writing this blog for fear of recriminations.

But, it has to be debated.

Dominic Ponsford, editor if the Press Gazette has been given a bit of a kicking by critics who say his attitude of ‘it’s ok to door knock’ to be out of kilter with the way people are thinking in this, read his article.

Like Dominic, what I can say is that door knocking is just about the toughest professional experience a journalist can have.

However, it can also be the most rewarding.

You may now think I have already stepped across the line by saying that, it could appear callous.

What I mean is that from my experience, many families who have lost a loved one are often happy to talk to a stranger about the death of someone who is near to them.

Dare I say that it is actually a cathartic experience for many of them because, simply, it is just too difficult/traumatic to talk to another member of their family.

I hated the thought of doing death knocks and even today the first one I ever did is a clear memory.

Asked by the newsdesk to talk to a family about the loss of their teenage son I drove round for almost an hour before plucking up courage to knock on the door.

The angst wasn’t required because I was welcomed in and spent an hour listening to the story about of their teenage son. There were tears and laughter as his life unfolded before me.

A few days later they rang to thank me for the report, telling me it was a beautiful tribute.

When I was a reporter on the Express and Star, Wolverhampton, I was asked to door knock the family of a lad who had been murdered.

After spending 10 minutes plucking up the courage to knock, I was left speechless for a few seconds when they berated me for not having turned up sooner, they actually had been expecting me.

I walked out with a wonderful tribute and two bags of pick-up pictures, three of them housed in ornate gold frames.

When I worked at the Derby Telegraph I met the kindly Neil Kerr, Ripley district reporter.

The legend was that he had never failed on a death knock. Even to this day, I’m not sure how true this was, but I certainly never knew of a time when he didn’t come back with the story.

Neil was an old-fashioned district reporter, well-known in the area and respected for his faithful reporting. Families expected Neil to be at council meetings, in the courts, at summer fairs and door knocking.

The humour surrounding why he always came back with the story was based around the fact that people just thought he was from the Co-op undertakers.

However, it was the fact that he was known for telling the truth and that he had a winning way about him. He would knock on the door and simply say, ‘it’s Neil from the Telegraph, pop the kettle on, I’ve come to have a chat about xxxxx’ and across the threshold he went.

Dominic mentions a report by Liverpool John Moores University which actually suggests that journalists hard-pressed for time are using social media to pick up tributes leaving the bereaved families unhappy with the outcome of what is written.

I would argue that death knocks are more important than at any other time in journalism. Why you may ask?

The answer is that in this world surrounded by fake or unverified news, or controlled news from the authorities, we need to do everything in our power to get to the root of the story.

It is too easy to accept a bland press release from the police about a sudden death. That’s not our job, just to take it and not check it.

A lot of the public do expect to have their story in a local newspaper. They expect reporters to go to them to check the facts, not just lift from social media or copy from a press release.

If media organisations are serious about telling the story fairly and accurately, they really have an obligation to knock on the door.

Of course, to those outside the profession, a ‘death knock’ might seem outrageous and heartless, but there are many working practices that happen in other professions which to those looking in seem odd.

If the families of the victims of the Grenfell fire hadn’t been able to tell their story, where would we be now?

Certainly, the pressure brought by these interviews, or door knocks, has helped to tell not only the story before us but the story behind the story, the ticking time-bomb of a disaster waiting to happen.

For those who worry about door knocking, they should be reassured that journalists adhere to the Editors’ Code, here are the sections:

3. *Harassment

i) Journalists must not engage in intimidation, harassment or persistent pursuit.

ii) They must not persist in questioning, telephoning, pursuing or photographing individuals once asked to desist; nor remain on property when asked to leave and must not follow them. If requested, they must identify themselves and whom they represent.

iii)  Editors must ensure these principles are observed by those working for them and take care not to use non-compliant material from other sources.

4. Intrusion into grief or shock

In cases involving personal grief or shock, enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion and publication handled sensitively. These provisions should not restrict the right to report legal proceedings.

In the end, for those who don’t like the idea of door knocks, they will never change their minds. But if these are the same people who want the truth, maybe, just maybe, they will think again.

A final thought on another matter. I admit I have a bit of inside knowledge on this, but it concerns me deeply that a court case I’m about to describe was reported in this manner.

I’m told by a close friend that they were looking out for a court case involving a member of their family.

It was a nasty stabbing incident at a time in Birmingham when knife-crime is high on the news agenda.

My friend tells me the court story appeared on the police press web site first and then an hour later on the Birmingham Mail web site and later the front page of the Sutton Observer and on its web site.

What concerns me is that it would appear that no news organisation was in court. The police reported it online, of course there was no mitigation, and it was lifted with a few tweaks by the two newspapers.

West Midlands Police, like so many other forces, have clearly taken to covering the news that newspapers can no longer cover.

However, more worryingly, is that if a reporter had been in court they would have surely challenged the order prohibiting the naming of these youngsters.

This case was of such significance that naming them was an important part of the judicial system in ensuring that justice was seen to have been done.

Instead, we have a bland, one-sided version of events, copy and pasted for wider publication.

There probably is a decent follow-up story about the victim who lost a kidney, his spleen and was left permanently deaf in his left ear.

But with the failure to life the ban, who wants a story about an anonymous victim?

While I appreciate the staffing issues of regional newspapers more than most, you can’t help but feel rather sad.

Here are the stories for comparison:

West Midlands police version:

Sutton Observer:

Birmingham Mail: 

 

Why Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press editors have embraced pleas by The Samaritans to report suicides with greater sensitivity

Keith Perch, Head of Journalism at the University of Derby, opened the conference which tackled the issue on how best to report suicides in the media.

The editors sat quietly and pondered the question from the back of the room. ‘Why’, said the man ‘do you have to report suicides at all? You don’t report the fact that someone has died of a heart attack’, he added.

It was an uncomfortable question for many journalists, do we really need to tell the story of someone who takes their own life?

One editor I know has already decided not to cover all suicide inquests, but only the ones he considers are in the public interest.

Of course, public interest can cover a multitude of sins, but at least there’s an acknowledgement that there’s an issue in reporting suicides and this guidance allows time to consider publication or not.

This week I attended a conference at the University of Derby, there were around 30 editors there from Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press.

The point? To raise awareness over the dangers of reporting suicides, which can often lead to copy cat incidents.

Obviously, the media is not being asked to stop reporting the deaths, just be careful.

The Samaritans offer a best practice guide to the media and it has a hotline where its staff are willing to discuss the content of a story prior to publication.

Similarly, the Editors’ Code offers advice to journalists when reporting suicides which is based around not putting in too much information about method of death.

As Editor-in-Chief and deputy editor of the Stoke Sentinel I was faced with numerous issues surrounding the reporting of suicides. Two stood out.

One inquest involved the death of a man from carbon monoxide poisoning. The paper was reported by the charity Papyrus to the defunct Press Complaints Commission for breach of the Editors’ Code by giving too much detail.

Did we overstep the mark? Debatable. I argued and proved that we had not printed a huge amount of information which I detailed to the PCC, but what I still ponder today is perhaps whether there was too much information in the article.

Now, I’m sure that I would have removed even more information from the original article because the ground has shifted.

I wasn’t proud of being accused of putting in too much detail, this wasn’t a gung-ho attitude from me or the editorial team, but the matter did make me think twice when faced with similar dilemmas in later years.

There is a line in the sand as to how much can be reported, but drawing it accurately can be hard. There is a grey area between putting enough information in to tell the story fairly and putting in too much detail which could have repercussions.

Another issue I had was a number of suicides on a rural section of railway. We had what would be described as a cluster. For me, five was too many in a short space of time.

This figure rose to nine deaths in under two years and The Sentinel came in for a lot of criticism for reporting the deaths.

At first we reported the inquests, but as concern grew and local communities started to feel unhappy at the situation, we asked for something to be done to prevent what was happening.

It was through this campaigning that the Samaritans became actively involved within the communities and with the newspaper and certain safety measures such as new fencing and CCTV cameras were put up on the stretch of line.

The result is, as far as I know, that there has not been a suicide on this stretch of line for several years. If we hadn’t raised the issue would more people have died?

On the flip side, was it because of the reporting that there were nine deaths? Reflecting on this time, we were careful on the reporting and despite this the incidents continued to happen.

It was only after we took action with the help of the railway authorities and the Samaritans that the deaths stopped.

However, one of the growing issues today is the response on social media to suicides, particularly the death of a teenager.

The outpouring of grief is difficult to report. Sorry, that’s wrong, it’s not difficult, the difficulty is getting it right. It is all too easy to lift the social media quotes and build a story around that.

How often do you see words like ‘another angel in heaven’ followed by ‘we’ll be with you in heaven soon.’

The sentiment that someone will join their friend in heaven soon shouldn’t be taken literally, but often impressionable children may just do that.

Also, a lot of social media almost glamorises suicide, this is a long distance from the reality.

The response on sites such as Facebook look easy pickings for journalists attempting to get a reaction to the death, but the media has to be careful how it uses this information and reflects the outpouring of grief.

Simple phrases like ‘another angel in heaven’ pulls on the heart-strings and can entice vulnerable people to believe that suicide, wrongly, has some sort of romance about it. It hasn’t.

Most senior editorial staff believe more than ever that they have to be careful in reporting suicides.

One of our journalism students at the University of Derby, Eleanor Crone, in her research on reporting suicides in The Sun and the Nottingham Post ,showed that the press has become more alert to its responsibilities.

But being careful in reporting suicides and the drive to get page views, provides editors with dilemmas.

Editors know that they have a responsibility to report some suicides that are in the public interest.

But the pressure to ensure they fulfil their requirements in getting an audience will inevitably lead to them having to make difficult decisions about pushing the boundaries to maximise page views.

Some of you reading this may gasp in horror, but the reality is that good court copy, whether from an inquest, crown or magistrates court does well online.

And undoubtedly, in the pressure cooker world of an editorial room where staff are forever watching the audience stats, that fine line of reporting responsibly or chasing audience may become blurred.

This isn’t just something I believe, it is also what a number of editors talked about on the day of the conference.

On the flip-side, the other point made to me was that often the reason for not covering inquests was not based on a moral opinion but more down to lack of resources.

There is also real audience pressure, not just the stats.

With the world in conversation it is impossible to control certain web platforms from having a full and frank discussion about a suicide.

They are not governed or feel responsible to abide by the advice on reporting suicides.

This often leads to criticism of the main media for failing to report as much information and accusations of a cover up.

Once again, more pressure for an editor to decide how much can and cannot be written.

What we do know is that at least the debate is ongoing and this can only help editorial staff to make better, more informed decisions in the future when it comes to covering suicides.

Just one last thought, it seems this is often forgotten. Only the coroner can decide if a death is a suicide, the press should not speculate.

Why the thought of Trinity Mirror production hubs brings back nightmares and the endangered species…the editor

Trinity Mirror wants to introduce production hubs as it looks to restructure its business. Other newspaper groups, like the defunct Northcliffe Newspapers tried this method of subbing and design and confined it to the waste bin.

 

Production hubs. Those words. They always bring me out in a sweat. After the accountants had finished picking over the bones of the then Northcliffe Newspapers in 2007, the meat slicer came out, it was time to cut jobs.

I’m not sure how, but I was tasked with not only implementing a unified editorial system across large parts of Northcliffe, but also help be an architect of the production hubs.

At the time, I argued that if jobs had to be lost, the best way was not to create large hubs, but to use the technology to improve and speed up production and keep the subs at the local centres.

Ultimately, I was right, as the hubs collapsed in bitter recriminations and production was returned to the local centres.

Now Trinity Mirror is set to create those beasts of the newsroom once more.

One of the main problems with Northcliffe was that they used an editorial system which was being developed as it was rolled out.

This meant that most centres used the system differently and often this meant poorly.

Many editors didn’t like an inferior deputy editor like me coming in to tell them how to work, so the battles were long and hard to get one system in across the group.

One of the main advantages was that we needed to have the ability to share content, this could only really be done if we had one system and a shared server.

Getting in the new software, however, was only one tip of the iceberg. The real battle started with which centres were going to have the subbing hub and which centre would have their content subbed in a darkened warehouse many miles away.

This was the true war of the worlds stuff for editors who quickly realised that having a production hub on their site gave them enormous power and influence, plus it gave job security to their own workforce.

In many ways, a lot of newspapers benefitted from the hub system. The reason is that subbing at some centres, I’m afraid to say, was not brilliant and they benefitted from being subbed at centres with more experienced staff.

But, there were many, many downsides. The errors due to lack of knowledge about an area were extraordinary.

If you sat in a hub in Hull or Nottingham your knowledge of Lincoln or Leicester was often not up to scratch and errors were made by hard-pressed sub-editors.

There was also a proliferation of headline boxes which went out with the standard ‘Headline 42pt in ere ereere’ or ‘Fill this J please ere ere’ and a lot worse.

There was also a massive amount of posturing from editors as pressure to churn out pages increased.

In the hub I looked after with some excellent, extremely hard-working colleagues, we chucked out 1,000 pages a week.

It got competitive, the fight for survival and which centre produced the most pages most efficiently, a ‘who had the biggest balls’ contest.

To say the least, it was gruelling, it was like working in a factory, just churning out page after page.

I was tasked to spend time working out how many pages one sub-editor could do a day.

Of course, if every page had a 20×7 ad on, you could do a lot. So an average figure of eight pages per day became the agreed task for every sub.

I was not happy with the figure, but there had to be a benchmark, ‘let’s weed out the lazy ones’ one of the most senior editorial gurus in Northcliffe growled at me down the phone.

‘Mmmmmmmmm…’ I said, with a hint of desperation.

A colleague of mine bravely agreed to sub and design eight blank news pages as a trial. This experienced sub and designer worked flat out without a proper break for 10 hours and managed to achieve the task.

He admitted to me that after just one day of that, he was on his knees, how he said would he feel after two or three days having to do this? ‘Knackered’, I said.

I believe he may still be on medication…

Yep, eight pages without ads every day would break most subs, no wonder errors rose dramatically. The other major issue was getting copy through quickly.

Traditionally, as all us hardened subs know, reporters have a knack of delivering copy as they put their coat on and head for the pub at their close of play.

In the hub, this wasn’t possible, content had to be sent with military precision, each page had a deadline and if you couldn’t fill it, the front page lead would be grabbed and whacked in as a 140-worder so Page 47 could be sent.

In a way, the hubs were a sprat to catch a mackerel. They allowed major reorganisation of production, code for making a lot of people redundant.

It forced editors, who had fought tooth and nail to keep staff, to rethink their strategy.

They simply agreed to take subbing back to their own centres with a massive reduction in the original staff who used to sub and design the newspaper.

It wasn’t a case of back to square one. Most news pages were templated, you could have taught a child to drag and drop a page.

The boxes on the pages were sent to reporters to fill, including the headlines. At the end of the day, a quick refresh and the page was full and ready to go…sort of.

The main issues were that despite some training, reporters struggled with headlines, particularly making them interesting.

Reporters, under huge pressure to fill a quota of boxes as well as feed online often filled a box which was 200-words when the reality was that the story was only worth a nib.

Anyway, Trinity Mirror does seem fixed on going down the hub route. It will probably mean large, actually, not too large (there aren’t that many left) offices with rows of subs.

It could also mean that some production people stay at their centre, but have to sub copy from across a large area.

Whatever the outcome this time, it was clear to me when Northcliffe brought in the hubs that subbing copy a distance away from the patch was far from ideal.

It also goes against my view of the industry. I think newspapers should be light on their feet, able to change at the drop of a hat, not being at the mercy of a vast subbing pools weighing down the rest of the business.

Also, it surely contradicts the philosophy that journalists should be multi-skilled and not tied to one particular part of the business?

An editorial floor should be a place where journalists can turn their hand to any job if a gap in what is required for the day’s business appears.

The silos in a newsroom should be confined to the spike.

Newspapers including the Grimsby Telegraph and the Lincolnshire Echo will no longer have an editor. Sad news.

The Telegraph has for more than 30 years been one of the better performing titles in the former Northcliffe Newspaper and Local World group.

It’s consistency of performance and great journalism has been in no small part to the editors, the late Pete Moore and the present editor, the excellent Michelle Lalor.

As for the Lincolnshire Echo, I had some of my happiest times at this fabulous paper under the editorship of Mike Sassi, now editor of the Notts Post.

It was a newspaper which truly championed the community with the editor being the heart and soul of this.

Local newspapers without an editor to represent the newspaper and be part of the community can only mean a disconnection between the newspaper and the city, town or village it represents.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regional newspaper top brass take on ‘sniping’ university academics over newspapers’ golden era comments…online v newspapers (Part 346)

Academic Sean Dodson has come under fire from the media industry for his criticism of regional journalism in his book Lost for Words: Can journalism survive the death of print?

 

To those working in the regional media I am poacher turned gamekeeper. I was squeezed out of the the profession  and ended up teaching the fine art of journalism to the content gatherers of the future.

For the last few weeks, I have stood on the touchline as the classic row of how it used to be better in the golden era of journalism has rumbled on between academics and those still plying their trade in the industry.

KM group’s Ian Carter admits that ex-journo now academic Sean Dodson hit a nerve in his book Lost for Words: Can journalism survive the death of print?

Sean, a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, is critical of today’s journalists complaining about listicles and user-generated content.

But Ian and David Higgerson, Trinity Mirror’s Digital Publishing Editor, were a bit miffed by this, with Ian describing Sean as sitting on the sidelines and ‘sniping’. Ouch.

To be fair to them, the regional newspaper crowd have probably had a bellyful of criticism, unfortunately though, in journalism, it comes with the territory because it is a public-facing industry.

I digress.

It is as easy for those in the business to criticise academics who are no longer on the frontline as it is for academics to write despairingly about the industry they love/loved.

What it does show is a passion for journalism and I for one rather like that.

Having said all of the above, here is my defence of Ian and his colleagues.

As an academic, even though I still also consider myself as a journalist as well (dual professional), it’s our duty to to stay in touch with what’s happening in the industry.

I was surprised in the summer when an academic almost choked on his nicely chilled Sauvignon Blanc when a journalist lecturer friend of mine told him he now never bought a newspaper.

He gathered all his news online, he added.

What most startled me was the response from the wine drinking lecturer who couldn’t quite believe what he had heard, his blood pressure seemed to spiral out-of-control.

Of course, the outcome was that he ranted at my friend about throwing in the towel and being a traitor to the newspaper industry and journalism.

Far from it, my friend’s comments were just a reflection on reality and not past glories.

Indeed, my friend is one of the most passionate advocates of journalism, in whatever form, I have ever had the pleasure to meet.

As I left the conversation I was left to ponder on whether some parts of academia were still stuck in the past.

As for me, I fret that I may have missed the latest trend in journalism or a different way of working as I sleep, let alone during the time I’m awake. Yep, I need to get a life.

Here’s the plug (but it’s truthful) I want my journalism students at the University of Derby to have the most up-to-date education in the ways journalists work.

So, not only do I spend time in newsrooms, I speak regularly to people in the business so I have quality intelligence on the latest techniques or theories.

Attending conferences where cutting edge news organisations talk about how they work and why they work in that way is also essential.

As an academic/practitioner it’s all about having up-to-date professional currency.

The course I teach on is a digital journalism course. Do I expect all our students to work in so-called traditional media?

No, I don’t, some will, others will write content for businesses, charities, football clubs or anyone or any organisation which wants quality, modern content with high journalistic standards.

Everyone is a publisher now, so they all need quality content. We teach the core skills of journalism, like being able to tell a great story, but we also teach that once a journalist has a story, there are many, many ways to tell it now.

I’m in the camp where I don’t think that regional journalism is any better or worse than it used to be, there’s an argument for both.

In the so-called golden days of journalism, when Northcliffe Newspapers used to have annual profits as high as £96m, I saw, like Ian, some terrible, lazy journalism in newspapers.

I remember having to wake up journalists to do some work, I found reporters sleeping under their desks.

A colleague of mine recounts a tale of how in a district office the old copies of the newspaper were laid out in the shape of the bed, so the reporter could have a sleep after a liquid lunch.

However, these are just great anecdotes, they do not define the journalism of the era.

There was some amazing journalism in the so-called golden era, but there is equally some brilliant journalism and journalists now, it just might does not look the same.

So who do I back the academics v industry battle of the golden era?

Like most former regional journalists I mourn the past, we were a cash rich industry and we had a blast, producing sparkling newspapers and enjoying the riches of the industry.

We worked really hard, we played hard as well.

It’s a difficult argument to say one generation worked harder than another. However, from my knowledge and recent visits to newsrooms, the 21^st century journalist is working very hard.

The business is more demanding now, it’s bound to be with the massive reductions in staff, but we mustn’t forget, that technology has helped journalists to get stories easier as well.

But the modern journalist has many more skills and jobs to do, as Ian rightly points out. At the university we are teaching students to tell stories for print, online, video, broadcast, radio, audio, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.

They need to understand audience software and how to interpret that, be masters of SEO, take pictures, understand content management systems, aggregate/harvest content and maybe do some html coding.

Why are we teaching this? Because this is modern journalism, these are the skills a journalist has to have.

With regards to content, I have often said that I was worried the traditional news agenda was not necessarily fit for today’s audience.

We used to have little intelligence on buying habits compared with today’s constant analysis of audience.

However, I do feel that the newspaper and online audiences are different. The issue is that it’s becoming increasingly more difficult or if at all possible to write different content for both online and newspapers, which I think is needed.

As for the nature of the content, no-one read every story in a newspaper.

What online offers is an immediate understanding of what interests readers, so why write content that readers are not interested in?

There’s the argument that much of this online content does not fulfil the Fourth Estate principle, but the reality is, how much content ever did tick this box?

There is still a lot of investigative journalism going on and it’s a fallacy that regional newspapers spent everyday chasing after Fourth Estate stories in the ‘golden era’.

Criticisms of listicles by the golden era brigade is also futile. The reason listicles exist is because the online audience like that presentation of this content and if researched well and with good information, they are an excellent way of presenting content.

Anyway, listicles are hardly a new concept. Throughout my career in newspapers we constantly produced added content to a lead story.

We used to call them panels or sidebars…not as sexy as listicles.

Are they trivial? Well who are we to say that if they are ready by thousands of people? I actually find many a good, fun, informative read.

I ask my students to produce listicles but apply good journalistic practices, well-researched, well-written and quoting people when appropriate.

As for the  concept of click bait, it is also old hat. We have always been keen to flog a story hard and get people to read it.

Why did we spend so much time on the front page, fretting over as cracking headline, a hard-hitting intro’, the right photo and intricate detail in the front page puff?

We didn’t sweat buckets over this to turn readers off, it was to lure them in, call it newspaper bait.

So what we are creating at the university is multi-skilled geniuses, journalists who can tell a story in many ways.

Why, because that is what a modern journalist needs, whoever they write for.

Forget the bickering over better or worse than this or that era. We need to start to appreciate the difference and let the industry evolve.

Don’t worry, I have not been paid off by the regional press…yet…but I do try to seek balance, I know, it’s a bit old school.

Just maybe, this is the golden generation of change for journalism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trinity Mirror’s editorial big guns Neil Benson and David Higgerson stirred by Croyden Advertiser’s Gareth Davies after Twitter storm

Former Croyden Advertiser chief reporter Gareth Davies created a social media storm with his criticism of Trinity Mirror.

 

There have been few occasions as far as I can recall when two such prominent editorial executives such as Trinity Mirror’s Neil Benson and David Higgerson have been moved to respond in such detail from the criticism of one reporter.

I understand that there was an emotional outcry when former Croyden Advertiser chief reporter Gareth Davies spilled the beans on how he felt TM was destroying his beloved newspaper.

The response from Mr Benson and Mr Higgerson showed as much passion for what TM is doing as Mr Davies obviously has for the Advertiser and his belief that TM is ruining it.

As stated eloquently by Mr Higgerson, TM hasn’t banned stories which generate less than 1,000 page views.

But, from what I know one of the firm’s digital documents states that 43 per cent of stories on TM’s top 12 web sites have generated an audience of fewer than 1,000 page views.

This is in a section which asks how well the firm’s journalists know its audience. The inference from this section clearly is that 1,000 pvs is a benchmark for stories…

Based on this, you can perhaps conclude that there’s a misunderstanding by some of the TM team over what is required, this isn’t a ban, just a quiet word of guidance.

What is clear, is that TM has a plan, this has not always been the case for many newspaper groups. It is based around growing its digital audience, so the focus of the newsroom is clearly geared towards this.

Analytics of the audience is a tool to help this growth. Never has an editor had so much quality intelligence about its audience.

It means, for the first-time, editors can base decisions on hard facts and not just finally-tuned instincts. I do think Mr Benson describing journalists as ‘arrogantly’ choosing what they want to write about as slightly harsh.

Most journalists I have worked with write stories which they believed were important to their readers. There was never a day when an editor and his top team worth their salt didn’t talk about sales and how to improve them.

The times a gleeful newspaper sales manager entered a news conference to proclaim a sales spike on the back of a top story are too many to remember.

No, the newspaper men and women I worked with were obsessed with their ‘audience’ (readers) so there is nothing new on that front.

The difference is that now there is more evidence available to work out which stories the audience is reading.

What would you rather rely on, fact or instinct with a teaspoon of evidence from the sales history of a newspaper?

However, there is a word or two of caution here, the web audience is different to the newspaper audience, so what works well online doesn’t necessarily reflect what might work well in print.

There is little evidence to suggest newspapers are doing well thanks to the digital-only policy, indeed, sales decline for many still smashes double figures.

I was also concerned with the point raised that there’s more content in the newspapers. Recently, sadly, I spent a day counting stories and pages in a couple of TM’s biggest regional papers.

I used the same formula as I had used when I was a deputy editor and editor and it was clear to me that rather than there being more stories there were fewer. I used to aim for between 65-100 local news stories a day in my papers and a minimum of 15-17 overnight pages.

Clearly, from my research, this wasn’t the case and there were a lot of centrally produced pages, which I didn’t count, because I wouldn’t have previously.

This is not a direct criticism, but there are fewer local stories, fewer pages and newspapers cost a lot more. With staff cuts and an emphasis on digital, something has to give.

One of the reasons for fewer stories is because a journalist will be asked to go out on a story, cover it live, write Tweets, post it on Facebook, a version or two online and then it is shifted to the paper.

This takes time, so one story will be polished, but there’s many other stories that won’t be written due to lack of time. The idea is to get, say 20, great stories online and get the audience to come by building content around them.

I guess the way to resolve this is to harvest content from elsewhere to publish, but once again this takes time, unless you can get out the automatic content scrapers.

When we got rid of the editions of the newspaper and printed overnight the newspaper felt dead, we dreamed of those adrenalin busting days of swapping stories around and writing breaking news.

This died with overnight production, but the web gave us a continual edition and I think reinvigorated the newspaper office, the buzz returned and that was great.

However, the demands are many for the journalists at any newspaper group. The 21st century journalist has to have an array of skills, which is exciting for the next generation.

At the centre of this is the ability to tell a great story using core journalistic skills but they also need to understand how to attract an audience using analytics, understand Twitter and Facebook, after all, just view these as modern day bill boards, the ability to use Facebook Live or Periscope, to edit video and write great SEO.

Challenging, yes, but this multi-skilling has helped to reinvent a business which was floundering. It is because a journalist is asked to do so much that massive effort is put into key stories.

What these stories are, is now based on a history of performance online. Is this click-bait then or the ability to give the audience content they want to read?

After all, a newspaper and a website are products which have to be sold, I can’t see Tesco’s selling something no-one wants to buy.

Similarly, why would a media organisation provide content no-one wants to read?

Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of concerns about the ability of firms to hold authority to account, for example, how many local councils and health authority meetings are covered today?

Newspaper groups may well argue that the reality is that no-one wants to read this anyway, where is the audience, so why cover them?

I completely understand Mr Davies for being so annoyed with the way TM has developed. But what choice did the firm have?

Newspaper sales are in terminal decline and there’s a chance to keep the business going by throwing resource into digital.

The issue however comes down to cash. Most of the money still arrives from newspaper advertising and sales, as sales decline, so will the cash.

However, no newspaper group will ever be able to get the same revenue returns online, even if the cuts go deeper.

So we will all have to accept that it’s a different business, one with less income, better audience knowledge, journalists with different, but more skills.

Is it better or worse than when I started? Difficult to say, it’s just different. I often had the discussion with my newsdesk about content.

I constantly challenged them on whether the stories newspapers had traditionally covered were the stories for the 21st century readership?

What we are seeing is that the content produced has to reflect the new needs of the audience.

The web has proved that a re-focus of what is good content is needed and that is why it has changed and Mr Davies is unhappy, as are many other journalists who plied their trade when regional newspapers were in their pomp.

There is an argument to say that the policies of modern newspaper groups has accentuated the decline.

But for at least two decades the industry dithered over what to do with the web and while this went on the world passed it by.

Now there’s a lot of catching up to do.

Regional journalism has some great challenges ahead. My hope is that surely, continuing to tell great stories means that it will continue to be the best job in the world…for now.