The Press
No more cleft sticks
Paul Johnson
The fear among some journalists that the bingo war may mean a reduction in the professional quality of newspapers obviously has some justification. The Money these bingo promotions cost has to come from somewhere, and while Fleet Street groups are making handsome profits at the moment, the itch of managements to make editorial savings has never been stronger. Bingo, however, is only one factor. A much more important drain on Fleet Street's resources is the ever-inflating wages bill. With some compositors earning between £30,000 and £40,000 a year, with mere journalists averaging £17,000 to £18,000 for a four-day week (or a 'nine-day fortnight'), and with Old Spanish Customs flourishing as vigorously as ever, the effect of monopoly trade unionism on finances must lead to cuts in editorial spending. The obvious and easiest place to save is in foreign coverage. Fleet Street is not the Only part of the media to suffer in this respect. TV has its own Spanish Customs, notably the astronomic escalation of over- time on overseas assignments and the obligation under union contracts to fly all film-crews first class. Compared to the expansive 1950s and 1960s, TV companies now rarely send TV teams abroad to film. They hire local crews if the unions will let them or, more usually, avoid foreign stor- ies, concentrating instead on rubbishy 'in- vestigative journalism' at home. For Fleet Street, however, the change has been more fundamental and tragic, for national newspapers — even the populars — once prided themselves on their net- works of overseas correspondents, full- time staffers operating from permanent bureaus, plus legions of stringers. Many of the stringers remain but the staff corres- pondents are going. At a guess I would say that the number maintained by Fleet Street has declined by 75 per cent in the last generation. American papers have also economised, but organisations like the New York Times, Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal still run networks of between 30 and 40 staff men. No British paper can match these figures.
Until recently Fleet Street was still reasonably well-represented in the United States but the strength of the dollar has now brought a rash of rather desperate economies. From this weekend, the Daily Mirror, which has no Washington staff correspondent, will shut down its two-man New York office. A similar plan to close the Daily Express New York bureau has been cancelled, for the time being, but it is shutting down in Washington. So is the Daily Mail, which is transferring its Washington correspondent to New York. The Observer is curtailing its New York coverage, while the Times has long since shut its own independent bureau and moved alongside the Sun-News of the World offices in the New York Post build- ing, also owned by Rupert Murdoch. The Telegraph and the Financial Times both maintain substantial New York offices, but the overall number of Fleet Street journal- ists in New York will drop sharply. According to Jeffrey Blyth, writing in UK Press Gazette, the Germans and Italians, even the Swiss and Dutch, now have more New York correspondents than we.
The strong dollar has made New York office rents, high even by US standards, seem insupportable. Secretarial costs are onerous too. Blyth estimates that the overhead costs of a New York staff corres- pondent are at least £150,000 a year, and that does not include his or her salary. Robert Maxwell, in announcing the closure of the Mirror bureau, said it would save his group £500,000 a year. He justified the move as follows: 'In this age of technology where instant transmission is possible and aircraft fly the Atlantic in a few hours, you can get a journalist to Texas from London in the same time as you can from New York. I see no way our coverage of American affairs will suffer . .
There is some truth in that. The Atlantic is no longer much of a time barrier. I think nothing of catching a plane to New York or Washington, giving a lecture there the same evening, and flying back the follow- ing evening. If an editor in London wakes up, hears a six o'clock news-bulletin, de- cides he wants a reporter in New York or Washington for an interview or an instant story, he can pick up his phone and get his man to Heathrow in time to catch one of the many planes leaving about nine am (paying by credit-card). The plane gets to its destination in the early afternoon (US time), and with a bit of hustle, and thanks to telex and STD, the story can be in the paper's final editorial next morning, with the reporter back at his desk the following day. Needless to say, this does not produce classic journalism but it will do in an emergency. In covering, say, an American election year, a paper can send a star commentator to cover the big February primaries, again in July-August for the two conventions, and finally in October to report the campaign. These four trips are of course expensive but much less so than keeping a staff man there the whole time.
It is true, of course, that this visiting- fireman type of coverage really only works in the United States, and in any case is more suitable for the big political events than for the background stories of new trends and coming developments which form, or ought to form, an essential ele- ment in the work of a staff correspondent. But I have often thought that this kind of thing is better done by a local stringer (not necessarily British) who has spent his life in the place, knows the people and speaks the language, than by a staffer on, say, a three-year assignment, who moves mainly in the capital city's expatriate colony and probably lives in a luxury hotel. In any case, this type of journalist is now an endangered species, too expensive to pre- serve. In 20 years' time, I suspect, Fleet Street papers will simply employ overseas stringers, plus a London-based jet-setter covering the world.
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