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Tangles of journalism indecision

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Reviewed by Peter Preston Posted Tue, Feb 20 2007

You can sum up the state of journalism in a single word these days. That word is: confusion. Most industries, when they hit crisis or a period of transition, huddle closer for mutual protection. Those who stick together, survive together. But print (and, to an extent, television) shows few such signs of self-preservation. Rather, its big names fall out and carry their fights all over town.

Consider Fleet Street a few miles from where I live. Sales — on 17 papers out of 20 — are heavily down, at worst by 12 percent a year. Several once “popular” papers are dying a slow death by attrition, down six percent after six percent in circulation as every 12 months pass. You couldn't invent a more competitive or destructive scene. What's the problem? The internet, to be sure, coupled with changing habits amongst readers under 30: the usual stuff. But then there are particular problems, including the problem of London itself — a metropolis that, relentlessly, seems to be getting out of the habit of buying a newspaper.

And that isn't surprising, of course. It is natural, logical, almost inevitable. For who, during a hectic working day, needs to pay for a paper when so many are being given away free? If you travel into the city center to work every morning, then you're sure to find a copy of the Metro series somewhere close to hand. It carries all the main news of the day plus some lively if anodyne features, and they give away half a million copies (making some ad money in the process). But that's the start, not the end of it.

Once the Metro — owned by the Daily Mail group — goes off sale in mid morning, the paid-for Evening Standard (another Mail product) comes on sale. But you still don't have to pay for it if you know the right coffee café or bar to go to: more than 50,000 free Standards are dished out a day. And then, before the first sandwich is cut for lunch, there's a third Mail entry: almost 400,000 copies of something called London Lite, which is a parboiled version of the Standard, designed to be dished out by hundreds of eager “merchandisers.” It's impossible to walk along Regent Street without having two or three copies thrust into your hands. There's no Lite escape route available.

Yet, before tea time, the gauntlet to be run grows still more difficult to run as Rupert Murdoch's free London Paper (or thelondonpaper as its titlepiece insists) joins the revels. This newcomer gives away 420,000 or so free copies. Add in City AM, another free for the business community, and you have around a million newspapers dominating train stations, bus routes and main shopping areas with not a penny to pay anywhere.

Is anybody making money? The morning Metro makes a tolerable return — £12 million nationwide last year — but otherwise there seems nothing but black holes in sight. The paid-for Standard certainly loses more than the Metro makes. London Lite and thelondonpaper are both pretty light on ads and heavy on costs. Here's a bloody afternoon contest which, for the moment, only impoverishes those battling it out — and drains resources from their national morning titles. To what end? Only the end of exhaustion. And to no good purpose anybody involved can nominate. Perhaps there'll only be one London afternoon freesheet left in a year or three. But afternoon sheets are the runt of the free litter anyway, under threat from changing commuter and working practices, just like paid-for evening papers across Europe and America. This is pit bull warfare: biting lumps out of the opposition because mindlessly, instinctively, that's what you do. Maybe “confusion” is too mild a word. If the net is an enemy you can't control, why not create an even more terrible adversary of your own?

So the malign muddle goes on. Are free papers blighting paid-for sales all over Europe? Indeed, they are: just as in the U.S., where a rash of freesheets for the “youth market” appears to have made very few converts. What young target person would want or need to buy a newspaper? He can get all the news he wants where the electronic news is free. Ads? Craig's List will do them free, too. What's the main threat unleashed by the web? Most would put Google — and Google News — top of the shop. But Google gets its news (from newspapers) free.

There is, on examination, no single strand of strategy here — only tangles of indecision, illogic and opportunism. Newspaper chains are broken up and sold off because they can't be twice as profitable as a big supermarket. Such chain disposals lose efficiency and the ability to grow from strength. They probably make papers more, not less vulnerable; but the break-ups go on as media giants fail to bring their swollen strength to bear.

Does anyone really know what's going on? The old titans such as Murdoch keep changing their minds. The new wonder companies like AOL keep falling off their pedestals. No genius knows whether to give the net away for nothing — or put a high price on it to signal quality. Nobody has found a suitable peace in the wars of the free and the paid-for.

That's what I mean by confusion. It is the din of editors and columnists loudly lamenting what they see as the end of their world — and the chill silence of their managers in a back room who, for the moment, don't seem to know which way to turn.