A revolution you’re not supposed to notice starts on Sunday. The little i, orphan print child of the ethereal Indy, sets out alone under a new owner, the Johnston Press, and with a new survival challenge: not to prop up an ailing national paper, but to give new focus and impetus to one of Britain’s biggest local paper groups, some 220 titles strong. Instead of 17 journalists refettling Indy news and views into a buzzing format, there’ll be a 50-strong staff producing this terse, successful tabloid. Same offices: the Daily Mail atrium. Same editor: Oly Duff. Very different mission.
It seemed pretty odd, a couple of months ago, to find Ashley Highfield, the JP CEO, spending almost £25m to take over the i. Highfield’s gritty role, year after year, has been grinding down the mountain of Johnston’s accumulated debt. 2015 was that same old story: operating costs slashed another £13.6m, pension deficit chiselled from £67m to £27m, net debt down from £194.4m to £179.4m million, interest on servicing that debt cut from £29m to £19.1m – and pre-tax profits up 22.6% to £31.5m. A long, tough march. Where’s the sense in grappling with Evgeny Lebedev’s bereft national baby as well?
But there is, in fact, a reasonable case for a reasonable gamble. The i, with a circulation of around 270,000 copies a day, some 200,000 of them paid for at 40p a time, provides a cash stream that flows continually. It gives Johnston a national salience so that ad agencies take notice. It is also a fit with other JP dailies – say the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post – so that one-stop ad buying packages have ABC1 appeal. Persuading big national advertisers to try local wares is one of the regional press’s eternal disappointments: but partnerships like this, with an added digital twist, give it that chance again.
Will it work? There are no easy bets here. If the eventual future is digital, then the print i is a detour along that path. But how long is “eventual”? The Johnston Press grew its digital audience by more than 40% to 22.6 million monthly users at the end of 2015. Highfield, an ex-BBC digital chief, is catching up for lost time fast. Online ad revenues – at £30.6m – bounced upwards by 12.4%. Which is all fine and dandy – except that digital still accounts for only 20% of the cash the group needs to flow in. Print ads and print subscriptions remain its bread and quite a lot of its butter. Highfield may talk of pushing digital to 40% over the nextthree or four years, but he can’t presently do away with dead forests, pounding print rooms and vans carting his wares to newsagents. That magic word “transition” is a series of leaps in the dark, not an easy hop and skip. Which is where the i comes in.
Here’s a paper with a smart, young, upmarket audience. It is tolerably well established, seemingly at least, as a pocket Indy: but the smartness and youth of this audience doesn’t extend to making the Independent connection. Some 90% of those surveyed didn’t twig that this was part of Lebedev’s mini-empire. And the Johnston Press has tricks of its own it can bring to bear – a range of weekly titles in Ulster, for instance, that can help establish the i in Northern Ireland, an army of sales reps who can get just the right number of copies in just the right shops, an editorial resource that, 220 times over, can chip in to fill news gaps.
Of course, there are also doubts and sorrows to reckon with. That’s part of taking a gamble. (You wouldn’t bet on Trinity Mirror’s New Day making the grade on current performance.) Fifty journalists may find themselves terribly stretched when they have to originate so much of their own material – but load on too many extra staff and the mathematics of profitability begin to fail.
The Johnston Press hasn’t made much of a fist of the Scotsman in its old Edinburgh home: too emaciated, too bedraggled, too much a provincial rather than national product. The i will have to develop views of its own, to tilt at windmills and tip over tables. It will need the force and conviction of true independence – and the ability to investigate and break stories of its own, the best advertisement any newspaper can have.
There is, moreover, a bit of a hiatus where digital linkage ought to be. The Independent, in its digital-only state, charges app cash to read Cockburn, Fisk, Dent and sundry stars of the bygone print edition. The i, as part of its own independence now, has those stars under print contract. It can put their columns and articles on the printed page. But the new i website won’t carry those pieces. It will be a fast-moving résumé of the paper’s own-staff coverage. Finding Fisk means going back to his old Independent haunt.
That’s more confusion than transition. No normal progression – and no broad highway for development and change as the months tick by. But perhaps this merely delineates the basis of the i challenge more clearly. Is a relatively cheap, essentially intelligent quick read part of the next few years? Can it carry on hitting the spot? At root, Johnston Press’s bet is about the potency of print on paper, with 270,000 or so existing examples to buttress the case – which is, in turn, really a test case for print, for local talent, for national salience, and for what comes next.
• The good old days? Alex Brummer, once a brilliant Guardian man, now distinguished City Editor of the Mail, came to the funeral of my old colleague and friend, Ian Wright – and remembered the distant, penny-crunched time in 1979 when Guardian managing editor Wright dispatched young Alex, plus wife and baby, to his first Washington posting. Yes, they had to go standby. And no, there wasn’t another budgetary way. Needs must when the pot runs dry.
