Out With A Bang

Given my Mrs is, as we speak, filling out a time-sheet as part of an ‘editorial review’ within Archant (Norfolk), I’m very, very wary when it comes to discussing job cuts.

For thousands of decent men and women in the media industry, their lives are being turned upside down; their careers being put through the mincer called ‘the web’.

But as much as we can decry the callous and calculating means by which management dishes up news of potential impending redundancy, it is – to my mind – still beholden on us to recognise that there is an inexorable process at work deep within this perfect storm.

So, quite rightly, Alex Salmond has condemned Newsquest for the way in which it has put the lives of 235 of its employees on hold over the Christmas period and urged the parent company Gannett to think again…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/04/newsquest-gannett-alex-salmond

But the line to really ponder is near the bottom…

“As well as dealing with the general advertising slump, Scottish newspaper publishers are being hit by the decision by all Scotland’s 32 local councils earlier this year to centralise nearly all their jobs advertising on a single web-based recruitment website…

Or rather the the last five words.

A ’single web-based recruitment website…’

By which, I presume, the author is referring to this…

https://www.myjobscotland.gov.uk/fe/tpl_scottishportal01.asp

Which, from a distance, looks as if it must be the very worst nightmare of every ad sales manager from the aforementioned Glasgow Herald, to the Dundee Courier, to the Aberdeen Express & Journal, etc, etc…

But, then again, from a distance it would also appear to be Clay Shirky’s thoughts on geography-lite networks made flesh… a block that we have already been round before…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=44

And more particularly therein, his thoughts on geography. And how the web really doesn’t do the kind of tight, medieval circulation fiefdoms as religioulsy plundered by the Glasgow Heralds of this world for centuries….

“Now that we have ridiculously easy group forming,” writes Shirky, “that stricture is relaxed and the result is that organizations that assume geography as a core organizing principle – even ones that have been operating that way for centuries – are now facing challenges to that previously bed-rock principle.”

I’m sure that the launch of MyJobScotland wasn’t a ‘ridiculously easy’ example of ‘group forming’ – not when it involves 32 local councils.

But I’m equally sure that there was some ‘It’s a no-brainer…’ thinking going on among the Treasury Depts of those said 32 local councils as they worked out whether their money would be better spent lining the pockets of the Glasgow Evening Herald every night in their jobs section – or, actaully, launching a networked jobs portal for themselves that could allow a kid in Ayr and a kid in the Orkneys to go to a one-stop shop for local government jobs in Scotland.

Of course, it still has geographical restrictions; it is still, only Scotland. But it is far, far more to Shirky’s way of thinking than the jobs sections of Johnston’s various titles and those of TrinityMirror, Newsquest, etc, etc…

And if you are that kid in the Orkneys and aren’t really that fussed whether your first job in local government is in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leith or Paisley, what makes you life easier? Going to MyJobScotland or trawling through the various job portals of said fractured newspaper groups?

Is that a cyclical factor at work? When times improve are those jobs ads ever coming back? No. That’s the structural challenge of the web in all its fearsome and frightening glory.

What can Alex Salmond suggest that reverses that tide? Orders those 32 local councils to start re-booking their job adverts with US-based Gannett?

He has, you suspect, about as much chance of succeeding there as he has of asking a young mum in Stirling not to look on e-Bay for a nearly-new cot; of asking a couple in Surrey not to look on PrimeLocation for their retirement home in Peebles; of persuading a young man in Kilmarnock not to look for his XR2 spares on AutoTrader.

Huge swathes of our audience and, indeed, our advertisers have gone; they’ve discovered that, actually, you’re not the only show in town any more… And they ain’t coming back.

Period.

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