….we're getting what we pay for!
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| The Chronicle and Echo (and Mercury and Herald) building in the market square Northampton |
As a fascinating
aside to the continuing financial
woes at Northampton Town FC there’s an online spat taking place between a
number of twitter and forum posters about the role the Chronicle and Echo has
played in reporting (or not) events at
Sixfields over the past year or two.
In
one case the spat has become personal between the editor and an ex-employee,
where an ill thought out letter from the editor has found its way onto a public
forum, The Hotel End.
I have been very critical of the Chrons coverage of this
story myself and recently emailed the editor with a plea that he ‘grow some
balls’ to which I got a long and detailed reply about the apparent ‘size of his balls’ which I
presume was intended to firmly put me in my place. (Incidentally he didn't reply to the one I sent him last week asking how much the Chron has contributed to the supporters trust fighting fund?)
Unfortunately for those of us expecting the Chron to lead
and break news on this story, we’re going to be a long time waiting. This
isn’t the Chron of my childhood where the presses churned out thousands of
copies each day from the building at the top of the market square. It’s now a
tiny weekly paper, part of a struggling regional media company with a share
price of 61p. The editor’s lack of clout, resource and in all likelihood staff
experience and guile is a product of simple economics.
The last time the Chron had an audited sale figure (when it
was still a ‘daily’) it was selling 15,000 copies a day. At 48p each that meant income of £44k per week just from newspaper sales revenue. Now, the sale isn’t
audited and so what they are selling is anyone’s guess, but supposing it’s around 12,000 copies a week, the
incoming revenue is around £15,000 (at £1.30 each).
Advertising revenue was, and probably still is, considerably
more than that. Never the less, like all other regional titles, the Chron is
severely financially challenged – as can be evidenced by the almost continual
redundancies, mergers and cost cutting. The editor for example now edits 6
titles.
The plan is, as local media companies transition from print
to on-line, that growth in web
advertising will overcome the demise of
print revenue, but any observer of the industry will confirm that this simply
hasn’t happened and given the very poor quality of the Chron website it isn’t
about to happen soon. Error strewn, slow to load, a jumble of clickbait
advertising, it’s hardly a compelling proposition for either readers or
advertisers.
So, a downward spiral of diminishing print sales, a very
poor website - which is meant to be their future - and continual resource cuts. It isn't a pretty picture.
And the point is. Very few young people buy newspapers. They
(and me) are now accustomed to getting our news for free. Everything I have
learned about the NTFC crisis, and I follow all media platforms avidly – I have
learned for nothing and in most cases well before the Chron has published anything. And that’s the root of the problem. I don’t live in
Northampton, so don’t hand over my £1.30 each week and I have to ask myself –
what exactly do I expect from the Chron for nothing?
I'm not making excuses for them. I do think they've been really poor across this whole story. Their website is a constant juddering disappointment and the 'Special Report' they published on it this week was just a cut and paste job that I could have knocked up.
While we all expect the Chron to lead the way on this (and I do still believe that they should) the likelihood is that things won’t improve. The old adage ‘you get what you pay for’ is apt. Few of us are paying, so what we get and will continue to get is unfortunately very little.
Mike Packwood: I
started my newspaper career at the Northants Post, (happy 40th
birthday H&P), as a van driver and over the course of the next 30 years
rose to the giggy heights of Newspaper Sales manager at the Western Mail and
Echo in Cardiff, (part of Trinity Mirror). I was made redundant in 2014, when
it was put to me, quite understandably, that ‘no-one buys newspapers anymore’.
You are right to point to money as being the root of the issue, but the financial performance of the Chron at a local level is pretty irrelevant, certainly these days. Let me explain.
ReplyDeleteJohnstone Press has been in trouble for several years after it bought some Irish newspapers for several millions on tic before the crash. The decline of ad revenue in the economic slowdown compounded it, as did, as you point out, the emergence of people's sense of entitlement to free news.
Why is this important to the Cobblers loan stories? Because it affects dramatically what passes before the readers' eyes in controversial stories. I imagine the company is in an incredibly risk-averse climate where the prospect of a legal case of any description gives everyone instant brown trousers.
Therefore a Chron reporter could pull up trees getting every figure and every allegation and crafting a knock-out story but if the lawyer shakes his/her head, it never sees the light of day. What is rarely acknowledged by the forum die-hards calling for boycotts of the local papers (and can never be acknowledged publicly by the Chron) is that it is the lawyers making the decisions, who get their orders from Edinburgh and are unlikely to have the slightest interest in simply tweaking an expose. They will see a potentially dodgy line and will not risk any of it. And why would they? They don't live in Northampton and have no desire to get to the truth about Sixfields.
As a former hack, it really irritates me to read people conflating JP, the editor, the Chron and all its journalists into one big criticism. I know for an absolute cast iron fact, because I still have friends in the media from my former life, that the journalist looking into this followed up every lead on Hotel End and every tip-off over the phone. I have no idea what was actually written up, but I can guarantee it will be far, far more than has appeared in print. But it would never have cleared the first hurdle.
So, yes, money is important, but how much of it the Chron itself raises is actually pretty irrelevant. I'm pretty confident it is the parent firm's heightened fear of litigation, not a lack of sweat or diligence of Chron personnel, that is asserting a cooling effect on this particular story.
(As an aside, the health of newspapers these days is rarely measured by numbers of copies sold, but by website visitors. Online figures are always a closely-guarded secret but a good yardstick is social media reach. The Chron has just under 50,000 followers on Facebook and over 40,000 on Twitter. Even if half of these people click on the story each day, that's more people reading than ever bought the paper.)