As newspaper sales fall and digital efforts stumble, just what is the point of Reach?
Editors were important, once. They wielded mighty power and influence, could make or break political careers, even sway elections.
Proprietors could harness this power to their own ends and, if it suited them, deny they had ever interfered. Editors edit, proprietors run the business, they would sigh; what can you do?
Newspaper giants such as Arthur Christiansen, Hugh Cudlipp, John Junor, Larry Lamb and Kelvin MacKenzie were lauded and richly rewarded for their ability to produce exciting stories and pile on readers.
But these attitudes date from another age, when the Daily Express sold 4,000,000 copies a day and the Daily Mirror 5,000,000. Circulations now are a small fraction of those.
How times have changed was evident in the appointment of a new editor of the Daily Express last week. Tom Hunt, who previously headed the online operation, was named as the paper’s editorial director.
Hunt is not exactly a household name in journalism. But he is young – though his age is not given in any report I have seen – and crucially, he is a digital wizard.
He has been with the Express for more than eight years and takes over from Gary Jones, who was appointed editor in March 2018 after Reach bought the Express group from Richard Desmond.
Jones, who was well liked by his staff, may turn out to be the last of the paper’s old school editors. He left in mysterious circumstances and some reports say he was not even given time to clear his desk and collect his belongings.
Jones had fought for the Express, for adequate resources to collect and print the news. But he was brushed aside by a management that is obsessed with changing the culture of the company from a print news organisation to a digital one.
Alison Phillips, who edited the Daily Mirror until last January, fought the same battle and also lost, even though the group’s print operations continue to bring in more money than the papers’ websites.
Insiders tell of constant infighting between Jones and Reach’s chief digital publisher David Higgerson. Jones’s lieutenant, David Wooding, editor of the Sunday Express, is left to decide whether to continue the battle or accept the reality.
Reach, meanwhile, can find reasons to be cheerful. Their share price is up; the crippling legal costs associated with phone hacking have eased; and the pension deficit is down. The City is pleased with all of that.
But it is hard now to see what its reason for existence is. The papers’ circulations are falling relentlessly and they cannot have long left – months in some cases, not years. But the digital operation is muddled and scrappy and seems aimless.
Their sole strategy is a quest for clicks. Each time someone clicks on their website, that click has a value. Properly analysed, it can provide insight into the user’s life, interests, habits. And this information can be taken to advertisers: See? This is why you need to advertise with us.
But apart from clicks, what is Reach selling? Well, news, allegedly. In among reports of floods and the Labour Party conference yesterday, was this gem on the Mirror site: “Man, 21, went for drink after work, started speaking odd language and then died”.
It turns out his name was Jakub Jarzecki, which might explain the odd language. And he had been taking ecstasy, which could account for his death. It is not news, it is clickbait. But Reach doesn’t know the difference.
Reach, or perhaps its forerunner, Trinity Mirror, was a £1 billion enterprise. It is now worth £325 million. It is cutting costs savagely, with anxious staff expecting more jobs to go, amalgamation of some titles and a subbing pool that serves all the newspapers.
They are trying to bring in a new pay structure that would mean salaries would be aligned with those on their provincial papers. I am told that would mean a specialist or chief reporter would be on £40,000 a year.
Their only hope is to come up with a long term strategy that would transfer their expertise and experience in news gathering to a properly planned and constructed digital platform.
Intriguingly, we might soon find out what that looks like. The Guardian, faced with a £36.5 million loss, is trying to offload its Sunday paper, The Observer, to Tortoise Media, a start-up specialising in podcasts.
Tortoise, founded in 2018 and led by James Harding, 55, former editor of The Times and director of news and current affairs at the BBC, lost £4.6 million in 2022 but is busy raising capital to fund its plans for The Observer.
Britain’s oldest Sunday paper, founded 233 years ago, it sells about 100,000, down from 1,300,000 in its 1979 heyday. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem a great buy. But, with the Guardian, it has an outstanding website, one of the world’s largest.
It had an estimated online readership of 22 million in July. Its digital income last year was £88 million, up eight per cent. The problem for Tortoise will be to disentangle The Observer from The Guardian after 31 years of fractious partnership.
Among the directors of Tortoise are Nick Jones, founder of Soho House, who is advising on how to build a subscription base. Shareholders include David Thomson, chairman of news and financial data giant Thomson Reuters.
Along with Harding, these are heavy hitters. No one knows quite what their plan is yet. But bosses at Reach would do well to follow events closely. Watch and learn, as they say.
*****
I love this time of year. Shiny conkers spilling from their spiky cases. A plate of purple figs. A pile of earthy wild mushrooms. Autumn’s bounty.
And last Saturday, the Great River Race. Thousands of rowers take part in the annual marathon 21.6-mile slog from Millwall in the east to Richmond in the west. By the time they reach my part of West London, they are plainly exhausted.
But there’s not long to go to Richmond, even if some of the oars are making futile flaps against the grey water by then.
The rule is that they adopt the “watermen principle”. Back before London’s bridges had been built, watermen carried people across the Thames, while lightermen carried goods.
Each boat in the race has to have fixed seats, a 3ft by 2ft flag, a cox and at least one passenger, as well as the rowers.
The Company of Watermen and Lightermen, founded in the 16th Century, is a guild to this day. Express journalists will recognise it from Doggett’s, the Thames-side pub across the road from their Blackfriars office.
The race is organised by the Great River Race Trust, set up to attract young people into traditional rowing. It is a wonderful spectacle but I neither know nor care who won. I just hope they had a good time.
*****
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all the people some of the time, which is just long enough to be president of the United States.” – Spike Milligan
RICHARD DISMORE
24 September 2024
