Press
Crying woe
Robert Ashley
A one-legged man I know told me, some years ago, that I could be the new Cassandra if I wanted. I have been trying ever since to work out what he meant. I am beginning to think that at last I have cracked it. Cassandra, I have just remembered, was a well-known Grecian bird — the Ariana Stassinopoulos of her day, if you like — who went around crying "woe, woe, woe",which is an extremely boring thing to do. It is also pointless, because like a similar boring boy who went round crying "wolf-wolf-wolf", people tend to take less and less notice of you as time goes by.
Which is a pity, because I think my cries of woe would be listened to since I am convinced there's something in them. 1 realise that all nutters think that too, but I am sure I'm not a nutter and I also realise that all nutters think that too, as well, if you see what I mean. My cries of woe, the nature of this column being what it is, are usually concerned with the national press, an organisation for which a famous Gracie Fields song might have been written. I refer of course to that noble ballad, 'He's dead but he won't lie down'.
Over the last few months I have been saying that the Street of Ink is up the creek, the paddle having been lost many miles back. I know this to be true, despite the fact that Mr Percy Roberts, chief executive of the Mirror group, to whom I was talking the other night, is as optimistic as old boots. The future to him is a broad safe path leading to those sunlit uplands we've been searching for, man and boy, this many a year. He may be right as far as the Mirror is concerned. He may even be right as far as the Sun is concerned, a paper he was engagingly keen to talk about. But he is surely wrong as far as the rest of Fleet Street is concerned. I have said it before, and I will say it again, even at the risk of boring myself, let alone you, that death and disaster is all I see. Come home, Cassandra, all is forgiven.
My thoughts on this subject are reinforced by something Mr John Dixey was saying the other day. You have never heard of Mr John Dixey? Don't worry. Nor had I. But Mr Dixey is .director of the Newspaper Publishers' Association, the bosses outfit, and what he has to say must be listened to, although one must, of course, be aware, while listening, that he might just conceivably be biased.
Mr Dixey was talking on the occasion of the NPA's offer of £6 a
week to Fleet Street workers — it is odd, isn't it, that the £6 a week maximum appears, quite effortlessly, to have become the E6 a week minimum? Mr Dixey appealed to the unions for a massive effort to keep existing newspapers alive, to accept manpower reductions and new technology, and end costly unofficial stoppages. He went on, in strains that readers of this column will be accustomed to, to say that ahead of us lie severe financial losses, losses derived from falls in circulation, from reduction in advertising revenue, and from ever-increasing costs, particularly of newsprint. Reporting him, the Daily Telegraph said that, in painting a gloomy picture, he remarked, "The palmy days are gone ... time is not on our side", to which the Telegraph added its own comment, "a message which is being increasingly accepted by print union leaders themselves."
Which is just about the only heart-warming thing in the whole set-up. A week or so ago I quoted Mr Joe Wade, the man I hope takes over at the NGA when the present general secretary, John Bonfield, retires, as saying that the print unions had to face up to the fact of over-manning, that they had to work out how to slim themselves down, and they would just have to co-operate with the new technology whether they liked it or not, because it was coming and nothing they could do would stop it.
Mr Wade will get in well with Mr Dixey, who unlike Woe-woe Cassandra, goes in for details rather than general jeremiads. He talked about the drop in circulation most papers have suffered, he talked about ad revenue taking a 'nosedive'; and he didn't just talk about these thinks, he gave figures to prove the truth of what he was saying. He pointed out that unofficial stoppages alone had, since August 1, resulted in the loss of 21/2 million copies, "and that excludes the Observer." He didn't point out — he merely hinted at it — that if you earn more than £8,500 a year you won't get anything extra under the present arrangement, a remark which may seem to be irrelevant until you remember just how many Fleet Street manual workers are on more than eight and a half grand. He gave examples of rising costs, particularly of newsprint — it has doubled in price in the last two years and since it makes up about a third of most newspaper budgets, that means a lot of headaches to the accountants — and told us the astounding fact that for every one per cent rise in the cost of that rather necessary material the national newspaper bill goes up by £11/2 million. Since the cost of the £6 rise would add another £8 million to the budget, there was every chance that by this time next year these two items alone would add
£10 million to costs. And then he went on to say, with a hard-headedness that took my breath away: "Total minimum extra costs to the industry in the next year could be £27 million."
Do you wonder why I cry "Woe"? Can you tell me the way to Carey Street? And you can't go on putting up the cover price — what you hand over the newsagent's counter. People won't take it any more.
There was a time, and it wasn't so long ago, that a penny on the price of your paper made a little, but temporary, dent in the circulation curve. Now it makes a big, and permanent, one. So you can't make money that way any more. • , What is the future therefore going to be like? Well, when you read what Mr Dixey said, when you listen to what the union leaders in the industry are saying, and when you remember that the Royal Commission on the Press has suddenly realised that the situation is so grave they've set up an emergency commission to report back by January at the latest, you will see that though I may lately have been wasting my sweetness on the desert air, I wasn't all that wrong.
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