Out With A Bang

It just so happened that this weekend we were stopping with my best mate, a good Oldham lad. Or Shaw, if we want to be more precise.

Either way, he knows his Greater Manchester suburbia better than me; that said, in 16 years of following Norwich City Football Club the length and breadth of the country, the joys of the M62, M60 and M61 haven’t gone unnoticed.

OK, all of which brings us to this…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/05/trinitymirror.pressandpublishing

The fact that within the next 15-18 months, the Liverpool Post and Echo will be printed in Oldham.

Now, clearly there is a very strong commercial rationale behind this; just as there clearly is/was for Murdoch to concentrate his printing resources in Broxbourne.

Greater use of colour presses; greater use of flexible working practices; greater use of modern technology. For the suits, it all makes perfect sense.

However, switching print production from Liverpool to Oldham also involves the greater use of the M62/M60/M61. A journey which can, roughly, take up to an hour.

http://www.theaa.com/travelwatch/inc/planner_places_redirect.jsp

OK, 47 minutes for the 46 mile trip. But you get the gist.

Of course, the exact time will be heavily influenced by the time of day and the volume of traffic. I’m guessing slightly, but if the first print run of the morning Post title starts at 10.30pm at night and goes through into the early hours, those 46 extra miles on the northern stretch of the Manchester ring road won’t be too much of an issue. Not when your circulation-stroke-print run might be, what? 35,000-odd for 21,000 paid and free sales…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/28/abcs.pressandpublishing1

So it’s not the fate of the Daily (morning) title that’s the issue; the roads will be relatively empty. It’s what happens when it comes to the distribution of the 102,000-circulation Echo that’s more problematic.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/01/abcs

… because let’s say your first edition is off at 10.30am. And that’s late by many an ‘evening’ newspaper standard.

Now all of a sudden, your van run has an extra-hour to it; in the middle of the day. Again; question for the distribution manager… are you sending your whole fleet of vans to Oldham and then wtaching them scurrying out across Liverpool via Warrington and the M62? Or are you ferrying them in to the city, in bulk and then re-loading them again once they’re that much closer to home – with the inevitable additional delay that would build in?

Keeps those ever-spiralling diesel costs under slightly greater check…

So, how do you compensate for that missing hour? Particularly if you want to have the Echo in the hands of your street vendors in the city centre by 11.30am-12pm – in time to hit the lunch-time shoppers?

You bring the deadline back an hour; from 10.30am to 9.30am…

Or if it’s already 9.30am then you pull it back to 8.30am in time for the vans back in Oldham to venture forth onto the Manchester ring road at the fag end of the morning rush-hour. Nice….

It’s exactly the same argument that’s going to face Archant, if and when they decide not replace the ageing print press beneath their Brook Street offices in Ipswich; print the Ipswich ‘Evening’ Star 40-odd miles up the road in Norwich and you’re at the mercy of the single-lane A140 every day…

Squeeze your evening paper deadline ever nearer breakfast time and with a morning paper being pumped out of the same city, the opportunity to be fresh, different and distinct with your ‘evening’ news becomes less and less – particularly if your journalistic staff is shrinking and shrinking.

Certainly if Trinity apply their Birmingham Post/Mail way of thinking to their Liverpool operation; the Post and Echo’s staff will soon be as one; with the differences in deadlines between the two narrowing and narrowing; just as they will with the East Anglian Daily Times and the Evening Star out of Ipswich once their print presses relocate across the border into Norfolk.

For the morning nationals, being ferried through the night on nigh-on empty roads, none of this matters; centralising your print operations to the Broxbournes of this world makes perfect sense.

For the morning and evening regionals, it’s a different matter. Not for the first time, time and geography do the ‘locals’ no favours. None at all.

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