Real numbers have been crunching in public these last few days. The gallant editor of the Oldham Evening Chronicle, on stage at the Society of Editors conference, remembers the days when his paper (all departments included) employed some 250 people. Now that’s shrunk to 40 – including just 17 journalists – plus long-distance subbing from Newport, 185 miles down the M6.
Meanwhile that journalists’ strike against yet more cuts – 12 reporters providing all copy for 11 papers and eight websites – ratchets on in south-west London, with Newsquest managers citing “the need to reduce our cost base to ensure a sustainable future”. But how sustainable is journalism itself in such straitened circumstances?
Newsquest, of course, is owned by the Gannett company of McLean, Virginia – the chain media group to end all chains. And it’s fascinating to see how such chains still grow with a rush of venture capital. The University of North Carolina has been crunching numbers for a report expansively titled The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts.
It shows how, in the last 12 years, papers have become simple investment targets. In 2004, the “three largest investment companies owned 352 newspapers in 27 states”. Today, the “seven largest investment companies own 1,031 newspapers in 42 states”.
The media correspondent of the Washington Post, rootling around in the report’s text, comes up with some brilliantly desultory quotes from the manual of one chain that owns nearly 50 papers in Texas and Arizona:
• “Many companies in our industry have wrongly divided their focus among many customer groups. We do not. Our customer is the advertiser. Readers are our customers’ customers.”
• “Our newspapers have a highly defined approach to specific content features and a template approach that produces high recognition for readers and specific locations in the paper for advertisers.”
• “Staffing levels should be as high as possible in sales and as low as possible in all other areas. In sales, that means we should have as many sales staff members as our products and market can support. Generally speaking, more sales staff means more sales.”
Don’t mention that in Oldham, Twickenham or Richmond, of course. They’re still trying to believe in journalism.
