The Future of 'The Times'
THE PRESS
By DONALD McLACHLAN
SHALL we, before very long, be 'getting The Times for 4d? That is the question which has been lost sight of amid all the gossip, searching of company registers, personal tipping, and television interviewing that has been the aftermath of the Haley-Hamilton deal announced last Friday. (The Times junior staff call it the Thomson take-over.) What interests me is the estimate that in the quality market a very profit- able Sunday paper can sustain a loss-making daily and make it pay. I thought I saw in Sir William Haley's cheerful and confident eye on Tuesday the kind of calculation which Mr Michael Berry made—and still makes—that the very profitable Daily Telegraph can sustain to the point of break- through the five-year-old Sunday Telegraph (which, by the way, has fought off a concerted attack from its rivals' less expensive Churchilliana and maintained in each week of September a rise of 40,000 copies, with extracts from Randolph's Life of Winston).
I expected to find that the experts of Gray's Inn Road and Blackfriars (henceforth to be known as Grayfriars) had already worked out in detail the economies to be made by sharing services and staff between the two Times. I know a good deal about the snags in such plans and I was looking forward to showing off a little in the office where I started newspaper life under Dawson. But no; 'we are thinking only in terms of expansion, not of economies,' said Sir William. A bigger paper, more news coverage, deeper digging. I could see that he was very taken with the ideas of the Editor-in-Chief, Mr Denis Hamilton, to whom he gives way in order to become chairman of Times Newspapers Ltd.
What are in fact The Times's prospects of expansion? The new look, now five months old, brought more new circulation than had been hoped—over 30,000 copies—and it was well held during •August when all papers' charts show the holiday dip. The daily sales are now around 285,000. But the same rise again is needed to reach the 310,000 at which higher advertisement rates would be acceptable by those who have to pay them; and then at least another 100,000 after that to show a profit.
Now a paper that is increasing its readers with- out at the same time increasing its advertising revenue is increasing its production costs and therefore its losses. So it would not surprise me to learn that The Times's extra 30,000 copies had cost something like £10 a year each. If that is so, then the cost of maintaining this rate would be in the region of £300,000 a year and before advertis- ing rates could be raised a further £200,000 a year loss might be incurred. Half a million pounds might therefore be the price of the new look on top of heavy editorial expenses incurred in making the changes over two years.
I should think it unlikely that the new firm would be content with a slow start to a gradual rise. What they need is a break-through first, and that surely points to a lower price.
Is it to be down to 5d with the Guardian? Or down to 4d with the Daily Telegraph and, of course, the Express and Mail? That really would have the most far-reaching effects in Fleet Street, and it is this possibility—and only this one—that really causes concern at the Telegraph office, which has as managing director an old Thomson man. It was H. M. Stephen who conceived the ingenious idea of attacking the Observer and Sunday Times in the flank by starting the colour Weekend Telegraph in the daily and not in the Sunday paper, so winning a large slice of the advertising revenue on which Mr David Astor had counted. The stratagem worked so well that in the first six months of this year the advertising revenue of the Observer Colour Magazine was under half that of the Weekend Telegraph, which in turn was only £200,000 behind that of the Sunday Times Magazine.
The last time in living memory that The Times made a great leap forward was when Northcliffe lowered the price to Id in 1914. Circulation quickly rose from 47,000 to an average of 145,000; and on the day war broke out it soared to 278,000. When the Daily Telegraph went down to Id in 1928 (at about 90,000) the result was in 1931 250,000 a day, in 1938 700,000 and by 1950 over a million.
I am, admittedly, leaping ahead. Nothing can be decided, not even the names of the two new editors, until the press panel of the Monopolies Commission have blessed or censured what Sir William Haley called 'A Natural Marriage.' They may, indeed, pose awkward ques- tions about the papers and accounts now reaching them. Is it right, they might ask, that the Observer should have to negotiate the price of its printing at Grayfriars with a company that has a majority interest in its main rival, the Sunday Times? No one would suggest for a moment that Mr Gavin Astor would be a party to making life more difficult for Mr David Astor; but business is business and the monopoly sleuths are entitled to assume the worst. They might also ask what might be the effects on the Guardian, excellent though its latest results have been.
In the Telegraph's view, the first to suffer from the impact of Mr Hamilton on Sir William's paper will be the Guardian and the Daily Mail, which has been in serious difficulties since it raised its price to 4d. The Fleet Street managers, who see a lot of each other at NPA meetings with unions, make confidential admissions to one another about gains and losses (for no one really wants tu kill anyone). It is agreed that the news- on-the-front-page Times has gained about 7.000 copies from the Daily Telegraph (last month 1,338,947), 12,000 from the Mail (2,381,223) and 5,000-6.000 from the Guardian.
may be wrong with this guess. But I would ask laymen to do a simple sum in arithmetic to illustrate the argument in favour of a price charade. 11 185,000 twopences a day were lost by rethLing The Times to 4d but 100,000 new readers were gained at that price would there be a net gain or loss in revenue? There are many other factors to reckon with—the high price of the splendid paper it uses, the labour and other costs of such a break-through—the possibility that the extra 100,000 readers don't exist----but the calculation is tempting now that there is money to play with.
Especially striking is the emphasis that Printing House Square is laying on The Times being a newspaper. Haley has grasped, what other editors have not, that a paper of record is tolerable to the general reader and his wife only if there is plenty for him besides the specialities, the essential ser- vices. This is where the Telegraph scores with its human-interest home news and women's pages. and it is obvious from the changing content of The 1 imes's recent issues that it is the old four- penny rival with its particular middle-class appeal that ;s to be challenged. Other things being equal —and Sunday paper experience apart—I do not see how the sixpenny can compete against the fourpenny without coming down at least to 5d, and making drastic changes in appearance and writing. After all, the advertising revenue of The Times cannot be much over £3 million a year against the Daily Telegraph's £14.5 million.
'A natural marriage'
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