Wordblog

The forthcoming departure of Roger Alton from the Observer is starting the produce a fascinating debate. At its heart is whether the web sites are taking over as the central element of traditional newspaper businesses.

First Patience Wheatcroft said her farewells at the Sunday Telegraph. Last week the Observer’s Alton was “defenestrated” as Stephen Glover puts it in the Independent.

Perhaps stung by comments on the lack of full coverage in the Observer and Guardian, Peter Wilby’s On the Press column in Media Guardian today is devoted to the subject. Wilby sums up the issue neatly:

But as newspapers develop 24-hour web operations, journalists who write once a week for a distinctive brand are increasingly anomalous. As I pointed out here last month, no newspaper group gives its Sunday paper a significant profile on the web. Even the market-leading Sunday Times is absorbed into timesonline. The Observer may be for the Iraq war and against inheritance tax, while the Guardian takes the opposite view on both, but the latter’s approach prevails on the group’s website. The Observer’s personality is overshadowed by the Guardian’s more conventional left liberalism.

This cannot continue. Sunday papers as we know them are, I believe, doomed. The Independent on Sunday has long been a Potemkin village, with a separate editor and distinct design, but drawing almost entirely on the daily paper for news and features staff. I expect most other Sunday papers to go the same way. But the Altons and the Wheatcrofts - strong-minded, independent journalists - cannot be expected to go gently into that good night.

Stephen Glover takes the more conventional position that merging daily and Sunday papers from the same stable does not work, writing:

For months there have been talks about integrating parts of The Guardian and The Observer. The justification is that The Observer is losing money, as, to a lesser extent, is The Guardian, and economies can be made by merging departments and turning The Guardian into a seven-day paper, though the integration of daily and Sunday titles hasn’t worked for other publishers in the past. According to one source, news, business and sport will be brought closer together.

Clearly the demands of the 24-hour newsroom have changed things, as has the way in which the dailies have followed the Sundays into the multi-section fill as many niches as possible approach.

Yet Sunday papers have continued to have clear identities (in print, if not online) because of the tension involved in finding distinctive stories — inventing their own news agendas, as Wilby puts it.

Economics as well as the traditional rivalry of stablemates comes into this. Newspaper businesses are having to finance the online operations while print circulations generally (not the Observer’s) fall.

I have a fear that if the separate identities and different approaches to news are lost there will be less reason the shell out a couple of quid for weekend editions on both Saturday and Sunday.

There is a place for Sunday-style journalism. Maybe, it just does not fit any longer into the economics of the Guardian-Observer, Telegraph-Sunday Telegraphy, Times-Sunday Times operations. But that could open up space for a kind of weekly newspaper or magazine which has not previously been viable in the UK.