T he press
Old Spanish customs
aul Johnson
Last week was a disastrous one for the v .FinanciaConference, ring the Conser- ative Party an excellent pro- ,9nonal opportunity, it lost three entire eultions of its London print, of 160,000 t,?Ples each. The dispute was absolutely eical of the nonsense that goes on in Fleet ritreet: that is, it arose essentially from .t:v,alrY between two unions over differen- i'alS• The machine-room men come mainly trades the Society of Graphic and Allied ‘ rades (Sogat) but there are a handful of t\ nian, -"gers', as they are called, from the I 6;43graPhers' union, the National ZaPhical Association (NGA). The NGA men have traditionally been paid quite a bit :re, and Sogat has been seeking to nar- P,w, the gap. The FT management tried to ,-1.1`. through a necessarily complicated deal on !eh would resolve the differential point ar- a Permanent basis. The sums involved the not trifling, since Sogat seeks to push up Ill average of its members from about 111,1"^A) a year to £12,500. But even more :Portant than the money is getting both LIIII.,°ns to accept a stable wage ratio. At the s,anucktr Party Conference, Bill Keys, the th'64t boss, talked about 'our class', as rt°1101 'the workers' constituted a a Nolithic proletariat. But the FT failed to ,°4,spear last week precisely because his union , engaged in class warfare with the `posh' NQA, cierAilan Hare, Chief Executive of the FT, oiii,`red himself to be 'dispirited and
might by last week's events. Well he blue be,
, A few years ago the FT was the asil,,,e chip of the Fleet Street dailies, with an `daptd"red monopoly position and an unrivall- t monopoly to its advertisers. Now it struggles th,nlake a profit at all, mainly because of Da-ttel normous rise in production costs but Fr-Y because of its immensely expensive waknkfurt edition started in 1979. Its simple 4es and salaries bill has jumped from ye 3 million in 1978 to £21.5 million this aftar It is true that the Frankfurt operation, i4set a shaky start, is now beginning to 40 ilr„,`IfY itself. The print there will exceed sari° by the end of the year (out of total aches of just over 200,000) and overseas athird rtis; ng sales will soon constitute about rt.4[;" of the total. The truth is that the FT tior:,Y, has no alternative but to go interna- linZ .----- frontiers scarcely exist for the viili-e'al world — but doing so has cost and
continue to cost enormous sums. And
the FT is not generating enough profit (£1.6 million before tax in the first half of 1982) for the investment required.
Nor is it the only paper going interna- tional. Fleet Street has been able to put up with its union nonsense and 'old Spanish customs', chiefly because, unlike most British industry, it does not face foreign competition. But that era may be ending, with the FT as the first victim. Next January, the Wall Street Journal will start its new European edition, run from Brussels and printed in the Netherlands, with the hitherto secure British market of the FT as its primary target. The Journal is in some ways the most remarkable publishing phenomenon in the world today. With its archaic typography, many-tiered headlines and serried columns of dense print, it looks at first glance like a newspaper from half a century ago. In fact it is a very up-to-date operation, granted the fact that tycoons and would-be tycoons do not want their essential reading-matter diluted with photos, strips and journalistic hoopla. It contains an impressive amount of hard, accurate news, and when I spent a year in a Washington think-tank not long ago, the Journal was the first paper I read each morning and the one I clipped most often for my personal files.
`Your father died two hours ago but don't worry, we've got the whole thing on video.' It is also probably the first enterprising newspaper user of new technology. Because of its sheer size, the US was until recently one of the few countries in the world without a genuine national daily. The Jour- nal broke through the geographical barrier by using a variety of printing plant across the US and satellite transmission, as well, of course, as all the resources of electronic typesetting. It now sells over 2 million copies daily, coast-to-coast, which makes it easily America's biggest newspaper. Granted the growing internationalism of financial business, itself propelled by the in- stant communications technology the Jour- nal has so quickly exploited, the paper's future clearly lies in becoming the first global daily. It has already broken into the lucrative Far East market, and the Euro- pean printing venture will carry it into the Middle East also.
The more farsighted Fleet Street managers are rightly concerned by the Jour- nal's proposed intrusion into their territory. Union leaders, if they are not too busy play- ing politics, might take an interest also. If there is a major foreign intrusion, Fleet Street's inability to use the new technology will be a disastrous handicap. Thanks to union resistance, the FT does not even have photo-composition, let alone the really new gadgetry a paper like the Journal takes for granted. What many people in Fleet Street do not seem to know is that foreigners have already installed some of the new techni- ques in our midst. The last time I looked in at the Journal's offices in London's Inter- national Press Centre I noted that they were crowded with the electronic machinery ban- ned in British newspapers. Of course in Belgium and Holland, where its new Euro- pean edition will be set and printed, the Journal will be able to exploit all the resources of the latest machinery to the full. So the FT will be fighting with one hand tied behind its back — like so much of British industry which has since disap- peared, jobs with it. The logic of the FT's predicament is, of course, gradually to transfer its entire print to Frankfurt, and a growing proportion of its editorial opera- tion too. That is exactly how, thanks to the unions, Britain is 'de-industrialising' itself.
Norman Tebbit, an impressive minister who sees the core of the union problem with great clarity, should take a close look at Fleet Street's impending problem because in many respects it is a paradigm of Britain's industrial future, or non-future. He must bear in mind the need to overcome union resistance to new investment in fram- ing his Mark II, III and IV Bills. He should also study the current FT dispute, which in essence revolves round flagrant breach of contract by the unions. Trade union ability to break contracts they have freely signed, without any financial or legal penalty, lies at the heart of Fleet Street's malaise, and indeed of the sickness of British industry as a whole. Sooner or later, and preferably sooner, Tebbit must devise statutory means to make the unions, like everyone else in the country, stick to their bond — or face ruin.
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