In a way its none of my business; in another way its very much my business. After all tis my Mrs who is staring down the barrel of a redundancy gun at Archant (Norfolk) following last Friday’s announcement of 54 job losses.
There’s also the small matter of my old job on the Evening News’ sports desk. That, too, appears to be in the mix again as all my former sports desk colleagues go through that God-awful mill again.
My first ever job in provincial journalism – as the sports department on the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald – went to meet its maker late last year; hopefully for the individuals concerned, my second job won’t follow suit this summer…
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=200
Today and hard on the heels of Friday’s job losses came the 2008 accounts ‘headlines’ from Archant; with chairman Richard Jewson adding a fairly downbeat assessment of where and what next for the Norwich-based publisher.
God knows, appeared to be the gist.
“It is impossible to know the timing and extent of any recovery and difficult to foresee the shape and scale of our industry in the years ahead,” he said.
In that, he is right, of course. It is impossible to foresee exactly what shape the provincial news industry will be in – come 2011 even. Or, indeed, 2010.
For right now – as the first UK newspaper publishing house follows their American cousins and heads for administration http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/mar/09/local-newspapers-freesheets – you feel that we’re fast approaching the eye of the storm; that this forest fire of our worst imaginings is burning with a ferocity and force beyond most people’s comprehension.
All of which had me returning to Jeff Jarvis’ thoughts in the wake of the LA Times’ woes. We might not always see eye-to-eye as to WTFDGD, but these lines are spot on.
“Perhaps it won’t be a legacy player who breaks this digital barrier,” he wrote.
“A newcomer unencumbered by the costs, expectations, processes, traditions, and culture of a print newsroom and business could build a profitable online news franchise at low cost.
“It could operate more efficiently by working in collaborative networks with the community, extending journalism’s reach there. It could serve a vast new population of very small advertisers who never could afford print… “
Clearly, it chimes with all our thoughts and – potential – deeds with MyLocalWriter and Addiply, but it could also offer the likes of an Archant a tiny light in the midst of their gathering darkness.
Lose the ‘legacy’ of print. Free yourself of the ‘costs, expectations, processes, traditions, and culture of a print newsroom…’
Turn your print presses off. Shut them down.
On, say, July 1.
Give yourselves three months to re-train and re-tool all those advertising sales staff that you’ve got left in your building and get them pounding the streets of Norwich, Ipswich and beyond and selling digital ad space like they really mean it.
Rather than as a throw-away bolt-on to your print offerings.
No more print.
Your digital revenues were up 50% last year – so cut your cloth accordingly. Take that £3.8 million figure as your starting point and work out who and what you can afford to do from there…
Send your reporters home. Back into the provincial market towns and villages of East Anglia and arm them with no more than a lap-top and a mobile.
Close your offices; follow the New York Times’ lead and get shot of your Norwich HQ; strip out every production and distribution cost that comes with the Print Centre in Thorpe; don’t leave yourself wide open to the wild fluctuation in the price of newsprint and diesel.
The cost of distribution on the web is nearing ever more to zero; thataway lies your salvation.
Get every blogger, back-chatter and Twitterer in your corner of the land to service you with free content… that’s, after all, what ‘back-chat’ is all about…
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=222
Start again from the very basic building blocks of web-based journalistic life and with the first £10,000 of that £3.8 million digital revenue get a commision-led ad rep tooled up to earn you local digital ad revenue… and build your new empire up from there.
All the time thinking: ‘Who does this better than us? They do – right let’s link… And we’ll link there. And there. And there…
And with the money we’ve saved we can put another lap-top and mobile onto a kitchen table in North Walsham… into Beccles… into Bungay… And, you know what, we’ll sneak one over ‘the border’ and into Bury St Edmunds… Let’s lose the silos and get networking…
Let’s have a word with BBC East about content-sharing; we’ll work on Sundays so our footie coverage can be rolled out and syndicated 24/7 as opposed to us expecting anyone to pay for it ‘fresh’ on a Monday morning.
Let’s have a word with central Government; get some perfectly-targetted advertising for the rural communities we serve; let’s see if they’ll also under-write our hefty pension commitments while we make the switch – all on the promise that the print presses roll to a halt.
Let’s ditch the ‘legacy’ of our past; let’s give ourselves and our people a chance of a future.
And let’s switch the presses off.
Now.
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Great points Rick but, damn, I do miss working at a newspaper when the presses hit full speed!
But, yes, switch them off and go digital.
Except, it’s not the medium that’s at fault, it’s the top-heavy, too-big companies run by people without vision. And unless those bits change they’re dead in the water with or without the presses.
That lack of vision in the industry is probably why we’re both doing what we’re doing now.
And, not being flippant or anything, but hopefully the panic-button redundancies will mean more entrepreneurial journalists joining us out here.
News still needs them even if their bosses don’t.