Wordblog

Given the state the regional press, the news that Trinity Mirror in the Midlands is making 300 staff redundant but telling them they can reapply for their jobs is hardly surprising.

The marvel is that the Birmingham Post, one of the titles involved, has survived at all. I left the paper in the early 1970s, made redundant in a cut-back of local news coverage. This came after it was realised that most of the sales were to business premises: they sat on tables in the reception areas of almost every foundry reception, solicitor’s office etc in the region.

At that time most of the papers in the Midlands were healthy. I had worked previously for the Sunday Mercury which sold particularly well in the Black Country and my wife worked for the successful Coventry Evening Telegraph.

But it was clear even then that there was a better business model. The Wolverhampton Express and Star was making inroads into places which the Birmingham Evening Mail thought it owned.

In the past 30 years there have been many changes in ownership and management of the papers which no make up the sorry group that is now Trinity Mirror in the Midlands.

In the 1970s the Mail was the big paper, ahead of the Express and Star in Wolverhampton. Now the Evening Mail’s circulation at below 70,000 is half that of the Express and Star, which has thrived, relatively, under its independent ownership.

In the East, where I now live, Archant-owned dailies are also doing better than regionals in other parts of the country owned by Trinity Mirror and the other giant groups.

Peter Wilby picks up on the ownership issue in his Guardian column today:

Despite the circulation declines, the local press, until very recently, enjoyed buoyant advertising revenues and profit margins sometimes above 30%. Surely, journalists say, publishers should lower margins and protect their own future. But this misunderstands how capitalism works. As investors see it, perhaps rightly, newspapers have few prospects for growth, even if they are well-managed. With no expectations of long-term gains, they demand high, short-term dividends.The recent plunge in share prices shows how quickly investors pull out when profits fall. Most national newspapers are, to some extent, protected from this crude capitalist logic because, even if they are not run by a Guardian-style trust, individuals such as Rupert Murdoch and Tony O’Reilly, seeking influence or kudos, hold controlling stakes.

There are other issues which Wilby picks up on in his fine analysis of the state of the regionals — papers  not conveying “any sense of covering local events”  and the loss of local government power at the hands of centralising governments.

In the village where I live the East Anglian Daily Times is holding its own judging by the size of the bundles in the news agent. But I hear complaints. Last week a member of a local drama group was bemoaning the lack of proper reviews in the EADT.

Wilby concludes his piece with this:

Somehow, an editor has to overcome what has been called “the pothole paradox”. To you, news of repairs on your own street, or on your route to the pub, is far more interesting than, say, a plane crash in Madrid, but similar news from a mile away is the most boring thing imaginable. Whoever finds a solution to that conundrum, and develops a business model to sustain it, will surely be hailed as the saviour of the local press.

While the “pothole paradox” is real it is hardly in the power of an editor to overcome it if he or she does not have enough reporters to find the potholes in the first place. While a good editor will go someway to solving the conundrum with limited resources, it is the business managers who have to replaced the failed business model.

If I was now a journalist working on Trinity Mirror papers in the Midlands I would be feeling very angry with the suits.  They are making it more difficult for their editors to solve the “pothole paradox”.