It's a shame that Northampton no longer has its Herald and Post free newspaper. It closed its doors, or rather had its doors closed for it in 2016 by Trinity Mirror, who ended up being its final custodian. Its closure was inevitable. The newspaper marketplace has changed beyond recognition since the Post, as it what originally called, first hit the streets in the mid 70's, and its true to say that it had never been the same since it moved from private ownership - owned by people who launched and nurtured it, to being just another very small cog in a mammoth corporate wheel (of misfortune).
I began my newspaper career at the Post in the late 70's as a paper boy and then as a van driver (part tine while still attempting to be a pop-star, details of which you'll find elsewhere on this blog). I think I joined full time about 5 years into the life of the Post. It had begun as a paid for title competing with the Chronicle and Echo, but the owners quickly realised that that wasn't going to work and turned it into a free. And then it blossomed by leaps and bounds.
I moved from delivering it in a van to the boys and girls who did the paper rounds, into a full-time position selling leaflet distribution. The network of papers grew and soon there were editions in Daventry, Brackley, Towcester, Wellingborough, Kettering and Corby as well as Northampton - around 280,000 copies per week at its height. It was stuffed with advertising and leaflets of course, and with hindsight, these were definitely the golden years.
When it moved from its original cramped offices in Guiuldhall Road to the old post office building in Derngate, (see above) everyone went in over the weekend to paint the offices and get ready for the move. In the distribution office there was some trunking running across the ceiling. On that trunking we used to put the corks from the bottles of bubbly we opened every time something significant happened. Every newspaper launch had a cork. The first time we delivered 1 million leaflets in a week earned one and also I think there was one to herald the arrival of my first daughter! There was a team spirit at the Post that I've never experienced in the workplace since. There was no easy circulation revenue to rely on. All we had was ad and leaflet revenue and so everyone went all out to get every penny they could.
The UK was awash with free newspapers at the time. In the midlands you had Lionel Pickering's Trader group covering Derby, Nottingham and Leicester and all points in-between and south of us was the Herald group belonging to Keith Barwell. .Most towns had 2, perhaps even three free newspapers being delivered each week.
Around 1985 Thomson Regional Newspapers (TRN)came calling and bought the lot and turned them all into Herald & Post's. (although of course we argued that it should have been Post and Herald). I've never seen 4 directors simultaneously looking so happy! At the same time TRN turned all of their defensive frees at their major regional sites into H&P's - the intention being that they would cover most of the UK with a similar looking national free newspaper ad platform. Except that they didn't really have a clue. In short order most of the original entrepreneurs and heartbeat of the free's had left and TRN struggled to maintain the vibrancy and team effort that had made all of these papers such a success in the first place. It just wasn't the same.
It did give the likes of me the opportunity to progress though. I moved to Luton first (never again!) and then to Derby where I became (briefly) the distribution manager for the network of 750,000 deliveries a week.
Thomson had given up though and sold these three main groups of frees and just kept the ones that were attached to their core regional titles. The ex Pickering group that I was working for was sold to Midland Independent newspapers, (owners of the Birmingham Post & Mail), who in a matter of months made everyone redundant, including me!
That was 1993 and still living in Northampton (I had been driving to Heanor in Derbyshire each day!) I found myself with two options: I was offered a job selling inserts at the Sun, which would have meant commuting to London each day, or move to Cardiff, to work at the Western Mail and Echo (now Media Wales) as the distribution manager on their group of Frees, which were, because it was a TRM centre, called the Herald and Post!
So I chose Cardiff and on 6th June 1993 pitched up at Thomson House in the city centre, eager and ready to start, only to be told that my office was based in Merthyr Tydfil in the valleys. Where? On a tangent. there's a funny story that when my team, the Cobblers, were trying to attract players when they were playing at the county ground, which was easily the worst football ground ever, they would sign them up at a local hotel or pub, so that they never actually saw the 'stadium'. It was like that with me and Merthyr (no offence intended, but...). It was a bit of a shambles to start with. For those of you who know about such things I found out straight away that instead of knocking on doors each week to collect a thousand or so signatures from people to verify the distribution, these were being forged in the office by people who had learned to write in all sorts of different styles and colours of pen, (sorry VFD). Still after that it became a happy time with responsibility for 500,000 frees and taking leaflet distribution from £0 to £1m pa. Which took 5 years. My family moved down with me and we're all still here.
Also during this period TRN sold its regional papers to Trinity (from Liverpool and who eventually became the Trinity Mirror that they are today) who also owned the Birmingham Post and Mail - the people who had made me redundant.
Then someone invented the internet. 500,000 papers became 400, then 300 and all over the UK the writing was on the wall for the frees.Property advertising, the free paper bedrock of sustainability - along with motors - vanished almost overnight, and what advertising remained was channeled into the paid-for titles to help support them. Around 2004, things were getting very dicey indeed. At this time I jumped ship and started working for the paid-for side of the office where things were still relatively sound, but before long the restructures that everyone in today's media world are familiar with started coming, and didn't stop. As every 10,000 copies fell off the sale, 10 people went, and it became apparent to everyone that we probably weren't going to make it to retirement! As an aside, its at this time that the regional press should have got together and invented Autotrader and Rightmove, but they didn't. The internet complacency at that time was a sight to behold and considering the quality of most regional websites even now, still is!
There was still a lot of money sloshing about though. Even though we were tightening our belts everywhere there were many occasions where you thought the world had gone mad. Our MD at the time, an F1 fan, decided that we shouldn't have a fleet of blue vans plying the streets of Wales delivering our papers and painted them silver. Mclarens colours. Every van re-painted silver because he didn't like blue. Unbelievable. But there were lots of areas where we quite rightly had to cut back. In the Newspaper sales department, in every town, there was a rep for the Western Mail, one the South Wales Echo, one for the Celtic weeklies and one for Wales on Sunday. 4 people trooping into newsagents each day to talk about their respective titles, but nothing else. What a complete waste of time, unless you happened to be a manufacturer of tea bags.We used to call the rep team the beach boys, because most of the time, that's where you'd find them, eating a 99. One memorably used to boast that unlike everyone else, he had 8 weeks holiday each year. 5 official ones and the three he took off 'on the sick'. And he did too- usually when he needed to get the spuds in from his allotment.You couldn't make it up!
With things looking ropey in Cardiff around 2004 I took the opportunity to go and work for another Trinity Mirror title, The Liverpool Echo. And so ensued 5 great years in Liverpool - capital of culture, Istanbul etc working for one of the UK's largest selling (it still is) regional papers. I guess Liverpool is an acquired taste, but I loved it. Back to the Cobblers for a moment. They were playing away at Tranmere, 5 miles from me, but I still chose to go and watch Liverpool vs Arsenal. Something I was never allowed to forget. Sorry NTFC! Due to working with a bloke whose daughter worked in the Anfield ticket office, I got to watch any game I liked, and so I did, including that game vs Chelsea when Luis Garcia (below) scored 'the goal that wasn't' in the Champions league. That was quite simply the most amazing football match I've ever been to - from an atmosphere point of view if nothing else. Anfield was rocking! I don't remember a great deal about working for the paper in Liverpool, but I certainly remember the football! To demonstrate how important sport used to be to a regional paper...at the time the Liverpool Echo was selling about 100,000 copies a night. The day that Liverpool came back from Istanbul with the Champions league cup, the paper sold 205,000. (Today it sells less than 50,000 each day).
Moving swiftly on to 2009 and the opportunity came to go back to Cardiff as the Newspaper Sales Manager, so I did. When I left to go to Liverpool they were still in Thomson House. When I got back, Thomson House had been knocked down,and had become a very large hole in the ground, which it still is and the company had built itself a new building in what was the old car-park and Media Wales is still there today.Just.
When I first moved to Cardiff in 1993 1500 people were employed by The Western Mail & Echo. There was Thomson house, satellite offices in every town and two press sites; The one in the bowels of Thomson House and one in Methyr. Now, Thomson House is a hole in the ground, all the offices and most of the people have gone. The Merthyr press was first to go and now, the 'brand new at the time' press site in Cardiff Bay is due to close after a life of only 15 years or so. Whats left of the company occupies 1 floor of the new 6-storey building in Cardiff.! Such is the fate of the UK's publishing industry.
I was charged with turning around the performance of what had become some of Trinity Mirror's worst performing titles. And we did. Helped by Cardiff City getting promoted to the Prem and the Wales Rugby team occasionally pulling their fingers out, for a time it looked promising. But each sales lift was only temporary and never sustainable.Instead of worrying about newspaper sales I became the master of making people redundant and shutting things, including our own Herald and Post free.The NS department used to have well over 100 people, probably 200 if you included the van drivers. I made most of these people redundant. Every time I did it my name got closer and closer to the top of the list until in 2014 the inevitable happened and it was my turn again.
And get this - by 2014 the person who years ago had made me redundant in the Midlands was my boss again at Trinity Mirror and it was him wot done it this time too. So I think I may be one of the only people in history to get made redundant by the same cretin twice.(not that he actually spoke the words himself of course) Hes still there, which may explain the shambles that was Trinity Mirror's launch of a new national newspaper in 2016, 'The New Day', which lasted, what, 2 months! Me, bitter, no, really. It was inevitable. No-one buys newspapers anymore and I became an expense who literally wasn't needed.
So there we are. My newspaper career in a few pars. Starting as a paper boy with the Post in Northampton and ending as the NS manager with Trinity Mirror in Cardiff. By the time I left the Post too was owned by Trinity Mirror - I cant recall who they bought it from - and now its gone. Where there used to be two or three free newspapers in Northampton as well as the Chronicle and Echo (now weekly) and the also defunct weekly Mercury and Herald, now there are none. We used to say that the best things were free, and they still are.I still read newspapers online, for nothing and I'll do that until they close. The free Internet model doesn't work, because the only income is from diminishing newspaper sales revenue generated by old folk who still buy papers each day, and they are literally a dying breed. Recently ad revenue has fallen through the floor too, so goodness knows where it'll all end up - but that's not for me to worry about thankfully.
I don't miss the Post because I don't live in Northampton any more and I don't suppose many people who do live their miss it either. But if your memory is as long as mine you'll remember the time when it really was cooking on gas. We used to love pinching advertisers from the Chron, because they were complacent and and didn't try very hard and we did. We entered every local carnival with a float - I drove the lorry - and entered a raft race on the Nene where we sank without trace, which still ranks as one of the funniest things ever. We even sat in a pub one lunchtime (as you did) listening to the directors of the Chron,who seemed to be having an impromptu board meeting, discussing a new property supplement they were about to launch, and so of course we did it first! I know I have my rose tinted glasses on and as it all comes back to me I guess I'll edit this with a few more funny and not so funny bits and bobs, but they really were great years and I hope it was that much fum at the Herald and Post right to the end, although unfortunately I doubt it.
When they closed the door for good I wonder if anyone remembered to take those corks home?
More about the Post here:
http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2015/news/newspaper-which-wouldnt-last-six-weeks-celebrates-40th-birthday/
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| The second home of Post Newspapers: Newspaper House in Derngate |
I began my newspaper career at the Post in the late 70's as a paper boy and then as a van driver (part tine while still attempting to be a pop-star, details of which you'll find elsewhere on this blog). I think I joined full time about 5 years into the life of the Post. It had begun as a paid for title competing with the Chronicle and Echo, but the owners quickly realised that that wasn't going to work and turned it into a free. And then it blossomed by leaps and bounds.
I moved from delivering it in a van to the boys and girls who did the paper rounds, into a full-time position selling leaflet distribution. The network of papers grew and soon there were editions in Daventry, Brackley, Towcester, Wellingborough, Kettering and Corby as well as Northampton - around 280,000 copies per week at its height. It was stuffed with advertising and leaflets of course, and with hindsight, these were definitely the golden years.
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| The gang of four. The original group of Post Newspapers directors, who literally made it what it was. Sadly, Ben (on the right) is no-longer with us. A great team |
The UK was awash with free newspapers at the time. In the midlands you had Lionel Pickering's Trader group covering Derby, Nottingham and Leicester and all points in-between and south of us was the Herald group belonging to Keith Barwell. .Most towns had 2, perhaps even three free newspapers being delivered each week.
Around 1985 Thomson Regional Newspapers (TRN)came calling and bought the lot and turned them all into Herald & Post's. (although of course we argued that it should have been Post and Herald). I've never seen 4 directors simultaneously looking so happy! At the same time TRN turned all of their defensive frees at their major regional sites into H&P's - the intention being that they would cover most of the UK with a similar looking national free newspaper ad platform. Except that they didn't really have a clue. In short order most of the original entrepreneurs and heartbeat of the free's had left and TRN struggled to maintain the vibrancy and team effort that had made all of these papers such a success in the first place. It just wasn't the same.
It did give the likes of me the opportunity to progress though. I moved to Luton first (never again!) and then to Derby where I became (briefly) the distribution manager for the network of 750,000 deliveries a week.
Thomson had given up though and sold these three main groups of frees and just kept the ones that were attached to their core regional titles. The ex Pickering group that I was working for was sold to Midland Independent newspapers, (owners of the Birmingham Post & Mail), who in a matter of months made everyone redundant, including me!
That was 1993 and still living in Northampton (I had been driving to Heanor in Derbyshire each day!) I found myself with two options: I was offered a job selling inserts at the Sun, which would have meant commuting to London each day, or move to Cardiff, to work at the Western Mail and Echo (now Media Wales) as the distribution manager on their group of Frees, which were, because it was a TRM centre, called the Herald and Post!
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| Thomson House in Cardiff, now sadly gone |
So I chose Cardiff and on 6th June 1993 pitched up at Thomson House in the city centre, eager and ready to start, only to be told that my office was based in Merthyr Tydfil in the valleys. Where? On a tangent. there's a funny story that when my team, the Cobblers, were trying to attract players when they were playing at the county ground, which was easily the worst football ground ever, they would sign them up at a local hotel or pub, so that they never actually saw the 'stadium'. It was like that with me and Merthyr (no offence intended, but...). It was a bit of a shambles to start with. For those of you who know about such things I found out straight away that instead of knocking on doors each week to collect a thousand or so signatures from people to verify the distribution, these were being forged in the office by people who had learned to write in all sorts of different styles and colours of pen, (sorry VFD). Still after that it became a happy time with responsibility for 500,000 frees and taking leaflet distribution from £0 to £1m pa. Which took 5 years. My family moved down with me and we're all still here.
Also during this period TRN sold its regional papers to Trinity (from Liverpool and who eventually became the Trinity Mirror that they are today) who also owned the Birmingham Post and Mail - the people who had made me redundant.
Then someone invented the internet. 500,000 papers became 400, then 300 and all over the UK the writing was on the wall for the frees.Property advertising, the free paper bedrock of sustainability - along with motors - vanished almost overnight, and what advertising remained was channeled into the paid-for titles to help support them. Around 2004, things were getting very dicey indeed. At this time I jumped ship and started working for the paid-for side of the office where things were still relatively sound, but before long the restructures that everyone in today's media world are familiar with started coming, and didn't stop. As every 10,000 copies fell off the sale, 10 people went, and it became apparent to everyone that we probably weren't going to make it to retirement! As an aside, its at this time that the regional press should have got together and invented Autotrader and Rightmove, but they didn't. The internet complacency at that time was a sight to behold and considering the quality of most regional websites even now, still is!
There was still a lot of money sloshing about though. Even though we were tightening our belts everywhere there were many occasions where you thought the world had gone mad. Our MD at the time, an F1 fan, decided that we shouldn't have a fleet of blue vans plying the streets of Wales delivering our papers and painted them silver. Mclarens colours. Every van re-painted silver because he didn't like blue. Unbelievable. But there were lots of areas where we quite rightly had to cut back. In the Newspaper sales department, in every town, there was a rep for the Western Mail, one the South Wales Echo, one for the Celtic weeklies and one for Wales on Sunday. 4 people trooping into newsagents each day to talk about their respective titles, but nothing else. What a complete waste of time, unless you happened to be a manufacturer of tea bags.We used to call the rep team the beach boys, because most of the time, that's where you'd find them, eating a 99. One memorably used to boast that unlike everyone else, he had 8 weeks holiday each year. 5 official ones and the three he took off 'on the sick'. And he did too- usually when he needed to get the spuds in from his allotment.You couldn't make it up!
With things looking ropey in Cardiff around 2004 I took the opportunity to go and work for another Trinity Mirror title, The Liverpool Echo. And so ensued 5 great years in Liverpool - capital of culture, Istanbul etc working for one of the UK's largest selling (it still is) regional papers. I guess Liverpool is an acquired taste, but I loved it. Back to the Cobblers for a moment. They were playing away at Tranmere, 5 miles from me, but I still chose to go and watch Liverpool vs Arsenal. Something I was never allowed to forget. Sorry NTFC! Due to working with a bloke whose daughter worked in the Anfield ticket office, I got to watch any game I liked, and so I did, including that game vs Chelsea when Luis Garcia (below) scored 'the goal that wasn't' in the Champions league. That was quite simply the most amazing football match I've ever been to - from an atmosphere point of view if nothing else. Anfield was rocking! I don't remember a great deal about working for the paper in Liverpool, but I certainly remember the football! To demonstrate how important sport used to be to a regional paper...at the time the Liverpool Echo was selling about 100,000 copies a night. The day that Liverpool came back from Istanbul with the Champions league cup, the paper sold 205,000. (Today it sells less than 50,000 each day).
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| Selling newspapers is easy - just get your team to win the Champions league |
When I first moved to Cardiff in 1993 1500 people were employed by The Western Mail & Echo. There was Thomson house, satellite offices in every town and two press sites; The one in the bowels of Thomson House and one in Methyr. Now, Thomson House is a hole in the ground, all the offices and most of the people have gone. The Merthyr press was first to go and now, the 'brand new at the time' press site in Cardiff Bay is due to close after a life of only 15 years or so. Whats left of the company occupies 1 floor of the new 6-storey building in Cardiff.! Such is the fate of the UK's publishing industry.
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| One of the legendary Western Mail front covers |
And get this - by 2014 the person who years ago had made me redundant in the Midlands was my boss again at Trinity Mirror and it was him wot done it this time too. So I think I may be one of the only people in history to get made redundant by the same cretin twice.(not that he actually spoke the words himself of course) Hes still there, which may explain the shambles that was Trinity Mirror's launch of a new national newspaper in 2016, 'The New Day', which lasted, what, 2 months! Me, bitter, no, really. It was inevitable. No-one buys newspapers anymore and I became an expense who literally wasn't needed.
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| The Herald and Post at 40 in 2015 with only one year left |
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| The end of the road... |
When they closed the door for good I wonder if anyone remembered to take those corks home?
More about the Post here:
http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2015/news/newspaper-which-wouldnt-last-six-weeks-celebrates-40th-birthday/
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