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Review of 2008: press
by Andrew Brown
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| THE MOOD among newspapers is apocalyptically gloomy. They were already threatened by the internet, without having any good idea about how to make money when competing with Google. Now that the economy in general is heading for a really nasty recession, it is commonplace to speculate how many papers will close next year.
The weakest of the nationals looks like The Independent. Everyone I know assumes it will not last the year in anything like its present form, if at all. For the past ten years it has been a rich man’s toy, but however rich Tony O’Reilly (or Sir Anthony, as the paper is constrained to call him) may be, this is no longer a time for toys.
The decision to raise its price just as the recession started biting was not just a dreadful blunder, but one that echoed horribly the mistake that first ended the paper’s independence back in 1992, when we raised the price just as that earlier recession began to bite. Circulation never recovered.
In 1992, there was some excuse, since the paper had not noticed how much better its rivals had become since it started. But for today’s tabloid Independent to charge 20p more than its rivals is insane.
It is edited now by a man who boasts that he prefers the Chris Moyles breakfast show on Radio 1 to the Today programme. Most days this month, one of the most popular stories on its website home page has been a guide to the ten best sex toys.
The only thing that may save it is a full-scale takeover by the Daily Mail group. If that happens, and if it is relaunched as a conservative (rather than Tory or right-wing) rival to The Times and The Daily Telegraph, it might survive or even flourish, though it will not make money for years. Failing that, it’s gone.
But can the Mail afford it? It is losing something like £25 million a year (twice what The Independent loses) on its London evening papers, the 50p Standard and the free London Lite, as it struggles to fight off the giveaway evening thelondonpaper. All three of the free papers (the third is Associated Newspapers’ Metro) are absolute crap, to use a term that they would recognise. They try to look and act like a print-out of a web page full of celebs, but they are well worth what people pay for them. Every copy given away is a copy of something else not sold.
THE Telegraph group has had the second worst year. Like a teenager panicked by the prospect of adult life, it has embarked on compulsive self-harm. All of the things that made it distinctively attractive have been hacked at.
Among the ugliest consequences for readers has been the sacking last week of A. N. Wilson, whose Monday column has been for years the one thing I really did not want to miss. It was simply a musing of some sort on books that the writer had read that week. Very few of them were new, or even read for the first time.
It cannot have sold an inch of advertising. But it showed up almost everything on the proper books pages simply because it was so obviously a working writer’s diary and a labour of love. It was the only bit of the paper that resembled the worthwhile bits of the internet. Everything else is hastening to resemble the more worthless bits.
THE GUARDIAN gave a huge amount of coverage to the Lambeth Conference, and then rather lost interest on the news pages. The paper did start a website on “belief”, which I edit.
The experience has led me to think a fair amount about what newspapers should be doing on the web. There is a great temptation to suppose that because opinion is cheap, this is what we should be supplying. But the reason opinions are cheap is that they are a drug on the market.
Hanging on the wall of the old Guardian offices in Farringdon Road was a quote from Keith Richard about blogs: “Why should I care about what some arsehole on the other side of the world thinks about this or that?” This is not a question newspapers on the internet ask themselves often enough. If the answer is not “to indulge in hate-filled fantasies”, then it will have to be to learn stuff that they did not know. For this reason, for a second year, I commend Ruth Gledhill’s blog, because it is full of moments where she picks up the phone and asks someone what is going on, and then publishes the results. It is an old trick. It used to be known as “journalism”. There will be a market for it all through the recession. |
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