It may, however, be worth hanging in there – if only for an insight into just how scarce traditional media is becoming.

As we’ve long maintained, that – in theory – is where the value remains; where media is scarce; beyond the ‘gatekeeper’; to those places where not ‘everybody’ of Clay Shirky’s fame can get to.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=53

This Saturday and it was Norwich’s first home game of the new season.

They haven’t, in fairness, been pulling up too many trees of late; they are at the end of a long and windy road called the A11; their opposition were a club of even smaller stature on the English footballing stage, Blackpool.

The game was still watched by 23,000 people; the Championship remains the fifth richest professional football league in the world and is, after all, only one step away from entry into the richest, the English Premiership.

And yet it attracted just just two Sunday newspaper reporters and no-one from a national daily title.

The News Of The World and the Sunday Mirror were the only two papers ‘to send’; otherwise everyone else picked up their copy – all three or four paragraphs of it – from various odds and sods.

‘I’m doing four today,’ was one claim from an old hand. ‘Mind you, they’re only looking for 250 words…’

In part, that is simply down to the huge shadow that the Premiership casts over the English sporting media; it is as if no other games are played outside either London, Liverpool or Manchester where the ‘Big Four’ reside.

Of course, out there in the provinces there are a whole wealth of ‘local’ teams that are crying out for coverage; all of whom have a passionate niche community of supporters hanging on their heroes every word.

But there is more to it than that; the half empty Press Box that greeted us all on Saturday, is equally symptomatic of these straitened financial times – that the national newspapers are slashing back on the cost of their provincial football reporting just as much as they are from their foreign reporting – witness the Daily Telegraph today announcing the closure of its Berlin bureau…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/18/telegraphmediagroup.dailytelegraph

…. which until they re-appoint, will leave the Telegraph with just one man to cover Europe; their man in Paris.

In fairness, the opening of their new Shanghai office suggests that Lewis and Co haven’t altogether given up on the world, but it was little or no surprise to find the esteemed Frontline Club – www.thefrontlineclub.com – at www.2gether08.com recently; quite rightly asking a fairly fundamental question of our masters – ie, just who were they expecting to find out there on ‘the frontline’ informing future electorates as to what, actually, was going on in the wider world..?

For clearly the Telegraph’s man in Paris is going to have his work cut out for the next few months…

There was no man from The Telegraph at Carrow Road on Saturday; nor from The Guardian. Nor from VirginSport; they relied on the bloke from PA; The Sun, The Mirror and The Mail were all to be serviced by one of the two stringers…. otherwise there was just the usual gaggle of ‘locals’…

The Blackpool Gazette, the Lancashire Evening Post, the Norwich Evening News, the Eastern Daily Press and, of course, the veritable organ that is MFW…

And while no-one round here would say that MFW has a safe and secure future, you can only wonder how many seasons the four provincial newspapers have left in them.

And when they go..? The Press Box will be left to the club’s own ‘media team’ – these days four-strong. The media teams of Arsenals, Chelseas and Manchester Uniteds are now into the double figures as they not only ‘own’ the news, but produce and present it themselves as the traditional competition withers and dies…

And therein lies the biggest danger; that any last, lingering hope of a plurality of voice, of a different opinion beyond ‘the gatekeeper’ is starting to ebb away… media is getting scarcer and scarcer. And we will all be poorer as a result.

Me? I’ve always had a hero of the flesh variety; particularly given that in our little life as a football news and analysis provider we’ve wandered along the path marked ‘Facility Fee’.

It was a nettle that Rupert Murdoch grasped years ago; from the moment that Sky and the Premiership teamed up together they turned football on its head; maybe right from the very start, he saw that the value would lie in ’scarce media’ – in exclusive interviews ‘beyond the gatekeeper’ – and he did what it took to get there.

Hence I might be tempted to write a rival tome: ‘What Would Murdoch Do?’

It was a thought that returned to me when I went in search of a line about: ‘If we newspaper executives know that the Internet is killing us, why is it that we still spend millions on new print presses – marking our tombs with the most expensive of gravestones..

I can’t lay my hands on the quote now; maybe it wasn’t him.

In the course of that search, however, I did come across a speech he gave in Washington three, long years ago…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/apr/14/citynews.newmedia

Once again it is spot on in its analysis of where the audience has gone – and just how difficult it may prove for us to ever recapture that ‘lost generation’ of news, ad and community seekers.

Three years on and you wonder if the great man’s views have become even more entrenched. “That the newspaper sector is changing is clear,” Murdoch said, as he announced another big leap in global profits.

“But companies willing to invest in new forms of delivery, which have a commitment to quality, will prosper.”

Which might be short-hand for saying that the current delivery mechanism for newspapers – the one that involves trees, ink, diesel delivery vans, corner shops and school kids – is bust beyond repair.

Doesn’t stop the man, of course, from building the greatest – if not the last – ‘cathedral’ to ink-staining at Broxbourne; a state-of-the-art operation that has already cost many an Express-Telegraph printer a living as the latter hastily abandon the former and save a few more pennies on Uncle Rupert’s towering machines.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/17/pressandpublishing.rupertmurdoch

Why all the interest in print presses and their cost?

It was just a line from the interim statement issued by Archant this week – not the one about the dividend staying unchanged as profits on ordinary activities after taxation slip by 53.8% year on year…

No, it was the line that said that ‘The £7.8 million project to add four print towers to the Thorpe Print Centre continues according to plan…

‘Print trials are currently underway. The full project will be completed in 2009.’

In fairness, perhaps the contract print market is robust enough to take additional capacity; perhaps Archant will be in a position to mop up one or two decent contracts that Broxbourne doesn’t.

Perhaps.

But I couldn’t help recalling what I thought was Murdoch’s line, that if the Internet will provide a tomb for the regional newspaper industry and beyond, people still insist on buying some very expensive gravestones…

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Well, someone had to say it… Google bleeding this, Google bleeding that…

Don’t get me wrong; it’s a great post. Big and thought-provoking. And Mr Wyman remains a very switched on guy; even if he does now appear to work for you-know-who…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=72

But if we guess how the conversation went during ‘Breakfast With Jeff’ there is, to my mind, a very real danger that the powers-that-be down Buckingham Palace Road are allowing themselves to slip into the mind-set of becoming The Daily Google….

Or maybe, that’s the answer.

No, please not. Let’s not go that quietly into the night… Not just yet.