Out With A Bang

As news emerged today that three more weekly titles were off to meet their maker…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/22/trinity-mirror-weekly-closures

.. it was re-assuring to discover that OfCom were there to be found with their finger precisely on the beating pulse of this regional media nation of ours…

This is a particularly fascinating and insightful document… one to be pondered at length if it is now to form a bedrock of OfCom policy going forward; which – you would like to presume – it will given that the over-burdened and invariably under-whelmed UK tax-payer has just funded said masterpiece.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/lrmuk/

When in doubt, tis always a good time to get the consultants in – in this case, the boys and girls from Oliver & Ohlbaum – http://www.oando.co.uk/ – and a macro-economic view of the nation’s local news landscape…

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/lrmuk/macroecon.pdf

Which then, presumeably, offered the foundation for this…

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/lrmuk/Salford_local_media.pdf

As presented to a gathering of the great and the good by Stewart Purvis at Salford University.

As a piece of ‘No sh*t, Sherlock…’ it is almost beyond compare.

I know headlines to individual slides can over-simplify, but ‘Online specialists have taken market share from local and regional newspaper websites (p15)…

Or ‘The Internet is drawing traditional revenue steams away from local media… (p14).

You’re kiddin?

The best one is the data chart that offers examples of local news provision (p8); that the Manchester Evening News ‘provides Greater Manchester focussed content, with a few national stories…’ And that the Salford Advertiser provides content focussed on… Salford.

Albeit on a smaller scale than the Manchester Evening News.

Given the crisis currently befalling the world’s great media institutions – the publishers of said Manchester Evening News principal among them as GMG seek yet another round of job cuts in a bid to keep The Observer alive – it is at least heartening to know that the industry regulator knows what the Manchester Evening News does.

The fact that OfCom offers up ‘Channel M’ as a prime example of someone like GMG looking to morph itself into a ‘local media consortia’ of their overly-fond imaginings merely re-inforces the impression that the OfCom clock has stopped c2007… that the ‘Perfect Storm’ in which we are now engulfed still, to them, appears somewhat distant.

There is no sense of what’s happening right now, right this minute… to any of their thinking. As much as the likes of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger might try to emphasise the point.

Twice.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=313

And, in particular… ‘in delivering this line… ’I don’t think our legislators have begun to wake up to this imminent problem as we face the collapse of the infrastructure of local news in the press and broadcasting…’ he actually went over a phrase again.

‘I don’t think our legislators have begun to wake up to this imminent problem – even begun to wake up to this problem – as we face the collapse of the infrastructure of local news…’

Go back to the work of O&O and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Rusbridgers of this world were making a fuss about nothing…

That if you flick through to P30 of this, even the ‘low case’ example would see EBIT margins dipping to, say, 10% by 2013. You can get 15% on P29.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/lrmuk/macroecon.pdf

All the MEN, the Salford Advertiser, etc… have to do is share their print costs/capacity with every other regional newspaper publisher in the North-West and then hack away at their individual ad sales teams to build a pan-regional ad tele-sales operation that could service MEN, Trinity’s Liverpool titles, NewsQuest’s Bolton operation, Granada TV, Key 103, Smooth, Galaxy, Channel M, etc, etc… and all would be well.

There’s a 30% saving to be had there. Chop, chop…

If only someone had a fully-networked, self-serve, 90% revenue return ad system that we could take off a shelf and just over-lay across all concerned and then offer pan-regional, highly-targetted branding opportunities to advertisers large and small…

Oh, someone has…

Of course, it should come as little or no surprise to find ‘big’ Government turning to a ‘big’ consultancy firm in its search for the ‘big’ answers…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=244

The fact that there might simply be no ‘big’ answers doesn’t actually appear to pop up on their radar; this idea of Mr Shirky’s that ‘Nothing works, but everything might…’ appears a conceptual leap too far.

What bugs me most, however, is the underlying assumption that come 2013-2015 we’re still looking at a ‘Newsprint’ Britain, a ‘Television’ Britain and a ‘Local Radio’ Britain. And not a ‘Digital Britain’.

In a ‘Digital Britain’ there is no them and us; no TV, no radio, no newspapers… just this glorious, heaving mass of ‘digital publishers’… all trying to wipe the smug grin off the BBC’s face as we scrabble for survival on the one, single platform that is the web; the ‘big’ now shattered into the small.

Try as anyone might, it is a future that OfCom doesn’t appear to ‘get’ at all.