The press
Bingo!
Paul Johnson
It is going to be a tough winter in Fleet Street, with bingo and colour magazines, rather than editors, in control. In August the Sun racked up a sale of 4,160,000, and it looks as though its free bingo idea has put on the astonishing figure of 600,000 extra copies. On 6 September the News of the World launched its SunDay colour magazine, to link it to its daily stable companion, only 50 per cent of whose readers buy the News of the World. From Sunday the link will be strengthened by an additional free bingo game, with a weekly prize of £30,000, played with Sun bingo cards (the Sun's own bingo games are already worth £30,000). The Mirror Group found from a test run in its Scottish Mirror-type Papers, the Sunday Mail and the Daily Record, that 7-day-a-week newspaper bingo is a highly successful formula. This Sunday it, too, is beginning what it terms its 'Big Three, seven-day bingo spectacular', in Which readers can win £30,000 playing weekday bingo in the Mirror, £10,000 in the Sunday Mirror and £10,000 in the Sunday Pictorial.
Thus Rupert Murdoch seems to have obliged the Mirror Group to tag along in the wake of his bingo chariot, just as earlier he forced them to increase the sex-quotient. Of course free bingo is enormously expensive. Last Monday the Mirror went up to 14p, which gives the Fleet Street populars a triple-grade price pattern: Star and Sun at 12p, Mirror at 14p and Mail and Express at 15p (the Telegraph is 18p and The Times and Guardian 20p). I suspect that the Sun Will hold that 2p price differential over the Mirror for some time, not least because, as News International's managing director, Bruce Matthews, said of Murdoch recently: `He puts circulation ahead of profitability'.
That was also the consideration behind the launching of the News of the World's colour magazine. Five years ago, the NoW had a one million circulation lead over its nearest rival, the Sunday Mirror. This summer it was down to 300,000, with a sale barely topping the four-million mark. For the first issue of SunDay, a fortnight ago, the No W printed 4,600,000 copies, and it claims that it sold over 4.5 million of them. With the help of the bingo campaign, the idea is to steady the sale around this 4.5 million figure. That looks optimistic, and much will depend on how long the NoW can hang on to its 22p cover price, the same as the Sunday Mirror's. The Sunday Express was also at 22p when it launched its colour magazine in April, but three weeks later it went up to 25p, the same as the Sunday Telegraph (this week the Observer joins the Sunday Times at 35p).
Of course, the longer the NoW keeps to the 22p price, the more likely it is that the Mirror Group, once again, will have to trail behind Murdoch and launch their own Sunday mag. SunDay has had a much more enthusiastic reception than the Sunday Express Magazine, and is generally rated ingenious. Its editor, Peter Jackson, comes from TV Times, and he has given the paper a cunning daily-diary layout and gone hard for the television tie-ins which seem to be the only way of selling any printed material these days. The Mirror Group has contingency plans for a colour magazine launch next spring, but is reluctant to shoulder the costs and risks involved, and still haunted by memories of the flop of its earlier Daily Mirror magazine. But with big bingo prizes, a smart magazine and the same price, the No W now has a formidable edge over its rivals, and the pressures for the Mirror Group to fall into line will increase week by week. That, in turn, will make it inevitable that the projected Associated Newspaper's Sunday companion for the Mail will also have a magazine, making a grand total of seven every Sunday.
Bearing in mind that the Radio Times and the TV Times are in much the same game, the quality of colour magazine journalism, already poor, will be under pressure as the competition for advertising becomes fiercer. Giving away magazines is a very costly business. The NoW is spending £1,750,000 on advertising its magazine just in the first month of the launch. It needs to generate £20 million in advertising over 12 months to justify itself. In its first issue it had 291/2 pages of ads, out of a total of 64. The figure was down to 253/4 last week, and the target it must eventually hit is 32 in a 64-page issue. If possible, the publishers of free colour magazines like to keep the advertising ratio well above the 50 per cent mark. Last Sunday the Observer ran 581/2 pages of advertising in an issue of 84, the Sunday Times 52 out of 88, the Sunday Telegraph 47 out of 72 and the Sunday Express 261/2 out of 48. In all five magazines there were only two articles I found of much interest. By and large, mail-order bargains provide considerably more compelling material than editorial copy. You may ask: why do proprietors pour money into bingo and colour magazines instead of improving the quality of their basic product? The answer, as always, is the unions. The NUJ has now made it prohibitively expensive for the populars to run the kind of foreign news service for which the Express and the Mail were once famous. It's more cost-effective to spend cash on promotion schemes, which can be dropped or boosted at will, than to commit yourself to the punitive legal and financial obligations of hiring journalists.
As for colour' magazines the machinery already exists to produce integrated colour newspapers. They could handle most of the colour advertising at present syphoned off into old-fashioned magazines, printed weeks in advance at quite different plants. But there is no chance whatever of the unions allowing such progressive gadgets into Fleet Street, which is already several phases behind in print technology. Even expanding existing processes involves months of often fruitless negotiations. The Sun, for instance, has a £4 million plant in Glasgow standing idle. It cannot print by facsimile there, creating 250 jobs, because the print unions insist that the whole paper be re-set in Glasgow first. As a result, every days it transports to Glasgow by aircraft 250,000 copies printed in the south. Madness; but that is the way British unions operate. It's cheaper, and much less wearing on managerial nerves, to give people free bingo than better papers.
Previous page
