In many ways, it is none of our business.
In other ways, however, it is very much our business. It is after all ‘our’ business that the NUJ and the Scott Trust are now fighting over as two tribes go to war in the suburbs of Manchester.
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=43350&c=1
The vote of no confidence in the eventual and spiritual owners of the soon-to-be-shredded newsroom of the Manchester Evening News makes for very uncomfortable viewing – not least for the numbers involved.
It is the savagery of the cuts at an institution widely presumed to be less enslaved to the God of Wad than most that has caught many a commentator and FoC by surprise – and had the NUJ beating such a furious path to the door of The Scott Trust and calling on its noble spirit to save such venerable institutions as the Rochdale Observer and the Stockport Express.
And, in particular, the dedicated and decent journalists therein.
What’s fascinating to observe – albeit from a very distant vantage point – is the delicate high-wire act that the Scott Trust is going to have to perform if it is ever to stay true to its’ founders ideals. And give The Guardian itself a viable future.
How does it ever do both The Stockport Express and Guardian US; be both hyper-local and hyper-national, in an age where the likes of a Clay Shirky will insist that only the truly networked will survive?
Dig around in the family vaults and the relationship between the MEN and The Guardian has always had this under-lying tension; that one was only ever there to support the ideals of the other.
The following paragraphs sum it up; the noble spirit of the man himself – and the grubbier reality of what the MEN always offered. Or rather, once offered.
‘In 1921 The Manchester Guardian celebrated its centenary giving Scott the opportunity, in a famous and much-quoted leader, to express his creed for his paper:
‘“Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation must the included face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”
‘Despite the acknowledgment that The Manchester Guardian under Scott deserved to be considered as a great newspaper, it did not always make profits.
‘Nevertheless, careful accumulation of reserves during prosperous years had made possible the purchase between 1923 and 1930 of The Manchester Evening News which, in the years to come, was able to provide a “cushion” for The Manchester Guardian with its profits…’
Given GMG was predicting an 85% fall in profit for the ‘local’ wing of its operations, that ‘cushion’ is clearly flying out of the nearest window – with dread implications for all-too many concerned.
But as the world and his wife scrabble around looking for a sustainable business model for the future of hyper-local news provision, so the prospects of the Stockport Express or the Rochdale Obsever – or, indeed, the Reading Evening [er, Bi-Weekly...] Chron – ever offering anything resembling a cushion again look more and more remote.
Silos won’t work – whatever Deloitte and the Local Media Alliance might claim.
We have to look at a networked future; a linked in eco-system of both news and advertising that is both elegant and sustainable; that what someone can be empowered to do out of one Manchester postcode, so someone else can be enabled to do out of Norwich.
And may well be without profit.
But might provide the right kind of willing, hyper-local news and ad gatherer with the kind of kitchen-table, part-time living that kept an army of village correspondents in by-lines and shillings for 00s of years.
For me, if we can deliver that kind of opportunity; that kind of platform then – particularly in age when ‘big’ business and ‘big’ Government is increasingly seen as both morally and fiscally bankrupt – I think we can stay true to the ideals of CP Scott.
That if we set out with no greater ambition than to deliver our stay-at-home mum with her school play-ground ‘patch’ a few hundred quid a month, then with the right tools and the right networked thinking we can still ensure that a hyper-local news-curating operation can still be ‘much more than a business’ ; that it can still ‘reflect the influences and life of a whole community’.
We can still aspire to put CP Scott’s vision in place, but it won’t happen in single, suburban silos; the whole structure of the digital landscape that is opening up before us demands that what you can do in SK3, you can do in NR2…
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=259
… and, maybe, for now you do it without much hope of a profit. Something that CP Scott clearly understood.
‘Despite the acknowledgment that The Manchester Guardian under Scott deserved to be considered as a great newspaper, it did not always make profits…
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