Given the state of this Media Nation of ours six months later, it is worth a re-visit if only to remind ourselves of what the Newspaper Society had to tell their lordships; Point 58, if anyone wishes to go and dust off a copy…

“The evidence we received from the Newspaper Society, which represents the regional and local industry, was very upbeat. They claimed the readership of those papers had increased in recent years: their figures showed that the number of people reading a local paper had increased by nearly a million in the last ten years (p 102). But such figures can be deceptive…”

At which point Fowler and Co then deferred to the evidence presented by The Guardian’s Alan Rushbridger who foresaw a ‘challenging’ future for the paid-for provincial newspaper industry.

In fairness, as we’ve muttered before the Newspaper Society were probably damned if they did and damned if they didn’t… damnation in one sticky form or another lay around every corner and nothing that has happened since would suggest otherwise. Just ask 80 Bolton printers…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=101

But that ‘upbeat’ view of the world in the spring and early summer of 2008 is going to prove a tricky one for the Newspaper Society if they feel a need to return to Whitehall or Downing Street next year with their caps in hand.

Or if they don’t, then dozens of marginal MPs might; a lunch with the local editor later and, of course, I’ll bring your plight up in the House… so sorry to hear about that. Shocking… That’s already in the wind…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=114

One look north of the border will also prove the point – that central governments are soon going to have to get their hands dirty when it comes to the future provision of news as the Scottish Parliament debates the future of its own indigenous newspaper industry – having presumeably sat idly by, if not applauded, the foresight of their Local Government colleagues in ripping out all their jobs adverts and placing it under one, web roof…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=184

Because if 2009 lives up to Emily Bell’s expectations, then at some stage the Newspaper Society and Government will have to engage in a debate…

And if it’s the sort that starts with ‘Go on, give us a hand…’ then Fowler and Co will be sorely tempted to say: ‘Oi, hang on a minute… you were all very upbeat nine months ago…’

No doubt, the line about ‘unprecedented cyclical conditions’ will be trotted out; who of us could have foreseen such a crisis in the world markets?

Perhaps, but the point of MyJobsScotland is that there are two halves to this ‘perfect storm’ of Sam Zell’s description; and the second half is actually the more formidable – it is the structural challenge of the Web; one foreseen by C Shirky some 10 to 12 years ago…

To claim that you couldn’t see that coming won’t wash; someone was asleep on their watch.

Many, many moons ago I did history at university; Social & Economic History, to be more precise. In and around the Industrial Revolution.

The coming of the railways was a fascinating time in the sense of the huge social and economic changes it wrought on this country. And beyond. Suddenly people – and goods – could get to places quicker than they ever thought possible.

They could get to Brighton and back in a day. Incredible.

Just as my lad can get to his space on MySpace. In an instant. Incredible. And all from the palm of his hand.

At some stage, you suspect, the canal owners would have marched en masse up Downing Street to ‘have a word…’ with the Gladestones and Disrealis of the day. Did they not realise what this new-fangled distribution network was doing to their industry? What’s wrong with moving goods at four miles an hour?

Everything when they can be moved at 75mph.

By the same token, what’s wrong with moving news at the pace of a 14-year-old on a bike? Or at the time it takes to get the Liverpool Echo round the M60 and down the M62 every morning once TrinityMirror centralise their North-West printing operations in Oldham?

Everything, when it can be delivered in an instant…

Way back when we talked about the Industrial Revolution before; how the Web was bringing the curtain down on the Press barons; the last great survivors of, effectively, a Victorian Age.

And that as media splinters into a million and one bloggy-type pieces from citizen publishers the world over, so we’re all going back to a cottage industry… weaving our words off our lap-tops and kitchen tables…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=30

Nevertheless, as they proved in fair style in their run-in with the BBC, the Newspaper Society can still mount a formidable PR campaign when needs must.

Which is why HM Government might be well-advised to think up some answers now before the Baileys and the McCalls come a-knocking again.

For example, for me the UK tax-payer, I can see no point in supporting anything that comes attached to a print press, a diesel-powered delivery van and a 14-year-old on a bike. Hello..? Why..?

But here’s the big one… Nor can I see any merit in funding something that is not a network in the true Shirky-sense.

TrinityMirror can rightly be proud of their local offerings out of TS10. Great.

http://ts10.gazettelive.co.uk/local_news/

Trouble is, you try selling that to central Government and I’d want to know how you plan to make that work in NR14, NW4, BS15, etc, etc… why should I fund something to the benefit of one community in TS10 and not in NR14? What are the tax-payers of Norfolk getting out of that?

If it can’t be made to work on a truly, networkable platform then I’m not sure I’d want to know.

Anything that smacks of a local monopoly; that benefits one community and not the networked many isn’t where this world is going; or rather where this world has gone. You are not going to dis-invent the wheel that is Craig’s List, is e-Bay, etc.

For the two parties sat on either side of that fence, 2009 promises to be a year of monumental challenge. And the need for such debates to begin in earnest grows ever more pressing by the day.

Particularly for those of us with any ambition of being a tiny green shoot in all this; we need to know who’s there for us… just as much as TrinityMirror and Co need to know if anyone is actually going to be there for them.

One thing is, however, all but certain. Without some help from above – be it from our masters in this world or the next – none of us will make it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/19/trinitymirror.pressandpublishing

…65 jobs to go; and more to follow if they can’t find a buyer for their clutch of weekly titles…

Several lines stand out… not least this one: Trinity Mirror’s three Birmingham titles will be served by a single sports desk at the new multimedia facility…

Bang go the seperate title football writers that used to follow the Blues and the Baggies; one man from the Mail, the other from the Post. One man will be left to do the job of two… media will become that much scarcer; that the St Andrews Press box will – like its Carrow Road counterpart – have a couple more empty seats come Christmas…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=124

How the poor lad that’s then left – or, indeed, lass – will then fare servicing three titles and a 24/7 rolling football news [Update: 20/08/08; see comments, but Birmingham Banter is not a '24/7' rolling football news platform... which is a shame, IMHO... having taken one step down a bold path, take the next...] platform that is www.birminghambanter.co.uk is an interesting question; as is the provincial newspaper industry’s ‘upbeat’ assessment to Lord Fowler’s House of Lords commission… remember that?

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=99

And then there’s this…

“In addition to the radical overhaul of its Birmingham and Coventry publishing operations, Trinity Mirror is also looking to dispose of several weekly paid-for and free titles from its Midlands business.

“These include its four free weekly newspaper titles in Northampton: the Northampton Herald & Post; Wellingborough, Rushden, Kettering and Corby Herald & Post; Market Harborough Herald & Post; and the Brackley & Towcester Herald & Post. The other titles affected are its two paid-for weeklies in Long Eaton – the Long Eaton Advertiser and Nu News – and its free title in that area, Long Eaton Trader…

And this is from an industry that – every time the BBC’s local video proposals are mentioned – insists that there is absolutely no need for the Beeb to park a 22-year-old with a hand-held camera on its lawn because such local communities are already perfectly well-served…

… which is worth reminding the good people of Market Harborough, Rushden, Kettering, Long Eaton, Towcester, Corby and Wellingborough as their ‘local’ publisher retreats up the A14 and parks itself in Fort Dunlop – a particularly apt fastness given that the enemy is clearly now at Trinity’s gates and is leaving a weekly wasteland across vast swathes of Middle England.

Time to dust off ‘Project Stamford’, me thinks…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=75

Only now we could add www.mylocalwriter.com/marketharborough, www.mylocalwriter.com/wellingborough www.mylocalwriter.com/kettering etc to our list of ‘jobs to do’…

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And apologies about being a couple of days out-of-date; blame www.2gether08.com – and fair play to Mr Steve Moore for organising said event.

But anyway, the suggestion that TrinityMirror and Johnston would be best advised throwing their hand in together…

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/sharewatch/market-report-broker-moots-merger-of-trinity-and-johnston-858351.html

Or more particularly…

“ABN Amro said that, given the problems faced by the media sector, “shareholders and management will increasingly press for industry consolidation”. “These are desperate times, and they call for desperate measures: we believe a Trinity/Johnston combination makes sense,” ABN said.

“The geographical fit is no ‘dream ticket’, but Trinity has an urban bias, while Johnston has a rural bias, so geographically the fit is not bad.”

“According to the broker, a merger of the two will bear estimated cost savings of up to £40m, or 5 per cent of the combined cost base.

“ABN also upgraded Trinity to “hold” from “sell”, citing confidence in national newspapers. The stock fell regardless: negative comment from a number of brokers, and an inclement market, took Trinity down by 13.75p to 95.25p. Johnston Press also succumbed to the market trend and lost 5.25p to 46.75p…

The end of the week has brought little imptrovement, of course. Trinity finished the week at 91.50; Johnston at an eye-watering 31.50. Imagine the cold that Deutsche Bank would have caught had they still been sat on their recent position – of under-writing the rights share issue at 53p a pop.

But, for me, that’s not where the interest lies in The Independent piece.

It’s the use of the word ‘geography’. Twice.

Or rather ‘geographical’ and ‘geographically’ – as in the ‘fit’ being ‘no dream ticket…’

It only improves in the broker’s eyes when you view Trinity in an ‘urban’ light; Johnston in a ‘rural’ one.

Which for me, has a slight air of straw clutching to it.

E-bay makes no such distinction; nor does FaceBook; nor RightMove.

These – as we’ve said many a-time before – are communities without boundaries; the web doesn’t do geography. End of. Hyper-local or hyper-niche – yes, potentially.

Hyper-national (stroke global); yes. It does nothing in-between.

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

The other intriguing point to all this is the ‘very upbeat’ assessment the Newspaper Society chose to deliver to Lord Fowler’s House of Lords committee; which in turn ensured that their lordships recommended little or nothing that would make such consolidation an easy process.

In fact, quite the reverse. Now you could have OfCom’s mits all over any deal as well….

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=99

But it is clear that both recognise that they have to abandon geography as an organisational principle ASAP; it is, you suspect, what Trinity were thinking with the recent launch of their ‘Banter…’ sites…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=80

Team up with ‘rural’ Johnston and now, in theory, they could have a way of pumping, say, MKDons football content through the Banter brand… provided, of course, that Johnston was happy for its own content to be re-branded in that fashion…

The only difficulty being, of course, that Johnston’s title in the rural, rolling farmland of Milton Keynes is their weekly free paper the Citizen… which then poses all manner of integration issues content-wise if you are seeking a 24/7 digital feed out of a weekly – or, indeed, a bi-weekly title.

Again all of these boys have already – at great expense – built their own, bespoke CMS systems; branded their local sites icBirmingham in one case, PeterboroughToday in the other; their classified ad sections can be icMotors or jobstoday… but if consolidation is ever to drive the kind of savings that they need, then this whole delivery structure needs to integrate.

That way an advertiser in Peterbrough can ‘cascade’ his advert down through Birmingham elegantly and easily.

If not yet through Bristol, Nottingham, Derby, Leicester, Hull or Stoke.

Or, indeed, Norwich, Ipswich or Colchester.

Irrespective of whether or not the OfCom-enhanced Competition Commission of Lord Fowler’s imaginings actually allows the kind of consolidation the market is screaming out for – remember: consolidation doesn’t come at the expense of journalists’ jobs – if the geograpical fit between Trinity and Johnston is no ‘dream ticket’, then you can bet your bottom dollar that fitting their existing advertising and editorial platforms together in a bid to re-organise themselves in a truly, super-efficient fashion will be no dream ticket either.

It’ll be the proverbial nightmare. It’ll cost an arm and a leg and take forever.

Right now few of us have got either that much time or that kind of money.

And as those share prices tumble ever further south, as far as TrinityMirror and Johnston Press are concerned day by day they have even less time and even less money before the darkness descends.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=41543&c=1

and, of course, here…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/30/trinitymirror.pressandpublishing

and here…

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/greenslade/2008/06/trinity_mirror_the_end_is_nigh.html

… you do have to wonder just how that all sits with the Newspaper Society’s ‘very upbeat’ view of the world.

The best line came from Citi Investment Research.

“The advertising environment remains volatile and there is no sign of the classified market bottoming yet,” they warned.

“While the new bank facility gives some comfort on the capital structure near term we believe the pension will remain a cause for concern in the longer term. We remain sellers.”

We remain sellers…

Just don’t ask Lord Fowler to buy it.

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The House of Lords’ report on ‘The Ownership Of The News’, Vol 1, is clearly a worthy document and for those of you with a couple of hours to spare, here’s the full monty in PDF form…

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200708/ldselect/ldcomuni/122/122i.pdf

Given the number of influential people that Lord Fowler and friends managed to drag before it, the conclusions that they ultimately reached are, to my mind, likely to stay entrenched within the mind-set of their lordships at least until the turn of the decade. If not beyond.

It doesn’t smack of ‘You know what, let’s look at it again…’ – which given the pace and the urgency of these current times, might not sit easily with one or two of Lord Fowler’s witnesses this weekend.

So, in their eyes, if not that of the legislature, the enhanced role of OfCom is likely to be a given; as is their on-going opposition to easing the current restrictions on mergers; in fact, if they – and now OfCom – sense that any merger will only need to the diminishment of quality journalism, then they are likely to be in even less of a mood to say: ‘Oh, go on then…’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/27/digitalmedia.pressandpublishing ; or equally, http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=41541&c=1 for two, similar takes on the same theme.

Consolidation in the provincial newspaper industry has just got a whole lot harder, not easier. And that’s not good news at all – as Peter Kirwan was swift to point out on his MediaMoney blog…

http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/mediamoney/2008/06/27/why-lord-fowlers-journalism-quality-test-wont-work/

What is worth looking at if anyone gets a mo, is the attention that the provincial newspaper industry is given in the above report… a page. Pages 20-21, to be precise.

It is a read that I commend to everyone. But for those who can’t be doing with the PDF form, here’s Point 58… in all its under-stated glory.

“The evidence we received from the Newspaper Society, which represents the regional and local industry, was very upbeat. They claimed the readership of those papers had increased in recent years: their figures showed that the number of people reading a local paper had increased by nearly a million in the last ten years (p 102). But such figures can be deceptive…”

Ouch.

Come Point 59 and their lordships were reaching their own conclusions; come Point 60 and they even rolled out a star witness for the ‘prosecution’, Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger.

[Point 59] “The regional and local press appears to be facing an even greater challenge than the national press when it comes to attracting advertising revenue…

[Point 60] “… I do not think that the printed local paid-for newspaper has a very optimistic future (Alan Rushbridger).”

That’s the last time he’s the guest speaker at the Newspaper Society’s Christmas bash…

In conclusion, their lordships wrote: “… most commentators believe that local press face a tough and challenging future.”

Clearly this matters for all manner of reasons – for higher points of democratic accountability, if nothing else.

But here it matters for the future of local newspaper provision in the town of Stamford.

Because go back to the evidence that TrinityMirror presented to the committee and within it lies a big finger of blame for the closure of the venerable Stamford Herald & Post this spring with the loss of 23 jobs, including six of Lord Fowler’s beloved journalists – that it was all down to the Competition Commission; look what happens when they refuse to let Trinity divest itself of its weekly title to a competitor.

In this case, to neighbours Johnston Press owners, of course, of the Stamford Mercury.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/20/web20.trinitymirror … and more particularly, this…

“[Sly] Bailey also criticised competition law, saying it should be relaxed in regional markets.

“She added that Trinity Mirror had wanted to sell the eight free newspapers in Derby and Peterborough, that were closed three weeks ago, to Johnston Press in 2001 but had been overruled by the Competition Commission.

“Paul Vickers, group legal secretary and group legal director of Trinity Mirror, told the committee that had the Competition Commission allowed the sale to go ahead “we think they would still be there”.”

Would they? Because while Johnston Press might be have been chomping at the bit in 2001 to snap up the Stamford Herald & Post and consolidate its local advertising and editorial monopoly in the town, come 2008 would our favourite stopping point on the Great North Road still be boasting two, local weekly titles, the Herald & Post and the Mercury?

Or would Johnston have long ago created one paper to serve one community – the Stamford Herald, Post & Mercury?

Equally, that was then, this is now…. In 2008 would you find Johnston still biting TrinityMirror’s hand off for the Herald&Post? Or have they got rather more on their plate right now than to be buying more loss-making papers? Particularly if, in every likelihood, their first action would be to close the paper themselves, consume it within the Mercury title with the loss of a dozen-plus jobs?

No, they let TrinityMirror carry the can on that one; let them do the explaining as to why nigh-on 300 years of newspaper history had come to an end in the town of Stamford with one slash of a TrinityMirror red pen.

It was an argument that clearly cut no ice with their lordships either; a more enhanced role for OfCom; a greater scrutiny on the impact on journalists jobs and no change in the current restrictions on provincial newspaper ownership… everything that Sly and friends didn’t want to read is in that House of Lords report.