City Page Battle
THE PRESS By DONALD McLACHLAN I F you are a graduate with fair maths and fair
economics, with a normal competence in prose joined to an abnormal curiosity about money, willing to think and dress as the City thinks and dresses, then you might earn over £3,000 a year at thirty, and you will be in one of the growing points of the economy—financial journalism. The Times is searching for a dozen young men, I understand, who could fill its proposed business world section. Its rivals are stocking up against its depredations.
Let it not be deduced that a city editor's job is an easy one. On the contrary, it is one of the most difficult that Fleet Street offers. The competi- tion is intense: for news, contacts and the very valuable advertising that comes in the form of company meetings, share prospectuses and the modest puffs of merchant banks and hire- purchase finance companies. Criticism is watched for and resented even more keenly by boards than by publishers' offices. Errors of fact or shades of implication can bring the most hair-raising threats of libel action. (Business depending as it does so much on confidence, a hint of no-confi- dence in the pages of a serious newspaper is a grave matter.) Good city journalism can directly attract advertising in a way that is matched only by women's pages and travel sections. That is why The Times is making its special effort to build up a big daily City coverage (a dozen pages or more, if possible) in which the clients who have patron- ised the Sunday Times business section may be tempted to buy space. It is also out to capture some of the Daily Telegraph's job advertising which is said to be worth flO million a year.
One can see the city page battle being set. 'Like two proud armies' the Times newspapers are mobilising against the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times, with the Guardian as a volunteer reserve. The ranks on both sides are full of deserters. The city editor and business editor of The Times came from the Daily Tele- graph; young men trained on the Financial Times (the only office to run a proper stable for graduates) abound: the new editor of The Times is one of them. This is, in a way, civil war; and it must be quite difficult for bankers and brokers and their other sources to remember who comes from which newspaper. What are the prospects for The Times? _The answer depends on whether you believe or not that busy people will wish to read six days a week in an ordinary newspaper financial and business news on something like the scale that is pro- vided in the Financial Times. Anyone who wants to devote the first hour or so of his day to expert study of the markets and the general economic situation will read the Financial Times—often as his second paper—and is tempted all the More to do so by the fact that it gives him a good news summary, a dash of sport, and more than a dish of culture. Such people are not numerous; the circulation of the Financial Times (150,000) is good by specialist but negligible by daily news- paper standards. If The Times were to make a determined assault on this position, could it cap- ture as much as 25,000 of the 300,000 extra it needs? My guess is that Sir Gordon Newton's paper is too well established as an institution to suffer sorely from the Thomson challenge. He has already hit back with a new feature for ex- ecutives.
The real target must be the Daily Telegraph. The formula of its city page is all the essential news, rigorously sub-edited and easily got at, together with readable, but sober investment advice. No reporting 'in depth,' very little per- sonality flattery, either in word or picture, no readable irrelevancies. It is probably as much as the small investor and the mildly supertaxed bourgeois can take of a morning. He (and she) may be prepared to read more on a Sunday and may even read an investors' weekly; but on six weekdays enough is probably enough.
Mr Michael Berry's forces are, therefore, dug in on a narrow front while Lord Thomson's are preparing to attack on a wide front. If the one office sticks to its doctrine of the quick essential read, the other seems to be adopting the -Sunday Times belief in leisurely, -chatty and personal perambulation. The danger for each is cleat: the Telegraph- may be made to appear dull and scanty while The Times may be made to appear prolix and lacking in the authority tradition has vested in its city editor.
But the businessman has,! am told, more than the normal share of vanity. He likes reading about his fellows, their world and its jargon; he likes 'reporting in depth' because it may one day come around to him or his rivals. But how many such men are there? I imagine market research has given Mr Vice of The Times the answer. On the other hand, how many small investors are there, people on the way up in business but not at the top (The Times still yearns after the lop people), technical and administrative types, who want from a city page just enough to be well- informed, to avoid mistakes and sustain con- versation with the boss? Far more, I reckon; and that is one reason why the Telegraph's circulation is over four times that of The Times.
For years the Telegraph has held off the com- petition of the Express and Mail without giving its readers `show-biz'--the personal and admini- strative gossip of the entertainment world. The question for The Times is how much it will gain or lose by putting into its business section what I can only call 'biz-biz.'
I apologise to Mr Hugh Cudlipp for an erroi in my reference to the Daily Mirror on Januar} 20. I implied that its front page normally carrie, a picture either of a girl or a rich man. An analysis made of the front page for the month' of October, November, December 1966 shov., that this is not so. It also points out that picture, of girls not in the news were not carried: that is to say, `no picture was used just because it hap- pened to show a pretty girl.'
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