THE PRESS
Paper money
DENNIS HACKETT
When Mr Rupert Murdoch said he did not believe price increases were "a panacea for all ills" and that he would hold his price "as long as practicable," I near as dammit believed him. "As long as practicable," I thought, would be about September. In fact, he announced that the Sun was going up by ip almost as soon as I'd quoted him, which reminded me of that childish belief that people in Australia really do walk upside down or at least suggested that from down under Fleet Street did not seem quite as healthy to him as it had done at eye-level.
The Express had, of course, already boldly gone up alone and now, within the last ° month, eight national papers have increased their price. Business plans will now be taken from their morbid folders and refurbished to make the end of the year look not quite as bleak as it had done when they were first assembled. Management Monopoly will begin again. In particular at the Mirror, where they must be allowing themselves a chortle and thinking that old Ned Kelly perhaps isn't such a bad chap after all, things will look very much brighter from the revenue point of view — about 63m in a full year in fact.
Rupert's own piggy bank will correspondingly rattle with an extra £1.5m and News International and IPC still have the Sundays to increase too. Well whether Mr Murdoch felt himself a bit short of the ready stuff worldwide or just thought he could do with a bit more, a lot of managing directors in the popular field will be thinking less unkindly of him and in commercial television too they'll be rubbing their hands with some glee. For in May this year (according to Media Expenditure Analysis Ltd) the Mirror, Sun, Mail and Express between them spent 6541,100 on television exhorting the public to buy their wares and, following a price increase, all traditional circulation managers (and all circulation managers are very traditional) will be saying: "Go on. Let's do it again." Of course, this heavy spending by the popular dailies really began when the Sun launched. It might be instructive for all concerned to look back at IPC's mass women's weeklies who used to spend Elm a year competing with each other and still failed to stop the decline in total sale.
And this is the time of year when they have to contend with the Audit Bureau of Circulation figures too. Of the populars only the Sun and the Mail will show an increase, which makes Mr Don Ryder's report to his shareholders look even more incomprehensible than annual reports usually do. He says that "the Daily Mirror is now steadily regaining readership, happily without debasing its editorial policy." Well, I'll let the second half go as a bad judgement, but the first half seems insupportable.
But now, as they say in those German Jokes, for the good news. Though the Mirror is down the Sun, whose estimated figure is said to be about 2,080,000 isn't as high as I thought it might be and from now on I should think it's going to have a tougher time. While you never know what beautiful tunes may yet come from an old fiddle, a lot of its success seems to me to have come not so much from its virtues as the Mirror vices. The Sun is two years old in November and can't expect promotion to do what the paper should be doing for itself. It needs guts and less of an obsession with sex. Probably it would have achieved a lot of its success had it spent less and just provided an alternative to the Mirror, which was getting derisive about its roots.
Not that the Mirror has rediscovered itself to any great extent but it is the devil many people know and its staple fare, though allowed to get a bit seamy lately, hasn't been quite as titillating and maybe they will be sufficiently heartened by the ip to get down to being a newspaper.
Which brings me quite naturally to a paper which continues to be a good newspaper and is properly getting the credit for it : The Guardian. It is now 9,000 short of the Times having gained for the third time in 18 months, whereas the latter has fallen for the third time. I think the probable reason for this contrast in performance is that the Guardian is unpompous, well-written and incisively presented, whereas though people may listen when the Times talks, when it's finished talking, they say, "Now what brought all that on?"
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