Press
Four days a week
Bill Grundy
I feel that if I have to write another word about the crisis in Fleet Street, I'll scream and so will You. I propose not to, therefore; at least not for a week or so. Except for a passing reference to it now. The strike that went away so mysteriously the other day showed once again just how precarious the lives of some of our national dailies are. For example, the Express, which rumour keeps on saying will fold anyway by the end of the summer, suddenly last week began to give off noises remarkably similar to a death rattle. There is no doubt that if the strike had continued for any length of time the rattle wouldn't, since the rattler would have died Pretty quickly.
In the circumstances, therefore, It is remarkable to find somebody who is thinking of bringing another paper into being. That the man must obviously be mad is the immediate and understandable reaction to the information, and to learn that he once worked for this Journal does nothing to dispel the
Impression. He is Peter Paterson, whose resignation from the assistant editorship of the New Statesman has just been announced. He is a smallish fellow, with a moustache so turned-down as to make Zapata look like an Anglo-Saxon, is highly experienced in the ways of the world, having been a well respected industrial and political correspondent, and written a number of successful books on his subject, in good company, and shows few signs of being a lunatic apart from his ideas that this is the time to launch a new paper.
But when his ideas ace examined he sounds not quite so mad after all. The formula is simple. Find out what are the major effects of existing newspaper operations and construct something that avoids them. It requires cool thought, the capacity to ignore tradition, a large amount of originality and about £400,000. Paterson has the first three but not the last. In its place he has high hopes.
A quick look at a few of his ideas soon dispels the suggestion that he is a suitable case for the funny farm. Which day of the week sells fewest papers? Saturday, with nobody commuting to work. So don't print on Saturdays. On which day of the week do you most feel you never want to seeanother newspaper? Monday, when the Sundays are still undigested. So don't print on Mon
day. That leaves you with a fourday a week paper, Tuesday to Friday inclusive, and what's wrong with that? Just because nobody has done it before, mustn't it ever be tried?
Where is there a surplus of printing capacity? Around London. What sort of presses? Offsetlitho. When are they mainly used? During the day. So print somewhere in the London area at night, on offset-litho. What is the highest newspaper production cost after newsprint and labour? Distribution, so aim at serving only the London area, which also removes the boring and expensive chore of having to produce early editions with headlines based on train timetables.
Paterson has thought about content, too. One of the commonest criticisms flung at the press generally is that it is still living in the pre-television era. Who wants to pay at least 5p for the doubtful satisfaction of reading at breakfast about something you actually saw happening on the telly the night before?
Paterson's idea is therefore to produce a paper with news pared down to the bone, but with a lot of analysis and background, which is something the more intelligent papers are now supplying their readers with. It sounds and probably would read more like a magazine than the sort of paper we're accustomed to, but there may not be much wrong in that.
Paterson isn't thinking in terms of a large circulation. At a cost of 10p, selling between 150,000 and 170,000 a day, he reckons he could survive without any advertising revenue at all. In view of the shaky nature of the industry as it stands today, with four-fifths of the revenue coming from ads, and therefore heavily susceptible to the cuts in advertising budgets which automatically occur when business stops booming, that is no bad thing. It isn't impossible either. Le Canard Enchaine has done without ads for year.
If the economics of the venture turn out to be not so potty after all, and assuming the money would be forthcoming from some angel or other, who would buy the paper? Any fool with enough cash can arrange for the printing of any number of copies of a newspaper; the problem is to sell them after you've printed them, as quite a few souls in the industry know to their anguish. Given the format as suggesied the answer would seem to be, that element of the population who are never out of the thoughts of the circulation managers — the young and intelligent, with 40p a week to spare. They're the sort who could do with a paper that spared them columns of advertising over the adventures of Arthur the TV cat and similar stories.
It all sounds plausible, and it certainly sounds an improvement on some of the guff that litters the neWstands today but . . . this is a time when newspapers are closing, not opening, there's a world shortage of newsprint, and when you can get the stuff it's getting dearer by the minute. Inflation means all costs are rocketing. And as television coverage spreads, total newspaper sales decline (whether or not the two phenomena are directly related is by the way).
Paterson's answer to all this is to say that that's just the point. Today's newspapers are at risk precisely because they are top heavy; too much admin, too many staff, too old-fashioned, too much of the inflexibility that comes with hardening of the arteries and the onset of geriatric arthritis. He may well be right, somebody may check his sums and find that there's nothing wrong with the arithmetic so he may get the money. He may get the paper off the ground. And it may survive. For Mr Paterson's sake, I hope so. But I don't think I'm beirtg destructively pessimistic when I say I doubt it. Nevertheless. I am so much for the idea that in case I am wrong and it works, I will give Mr Paterson a question to throw at me. It comes from St Matthew, xiv, 31 and our religious correspondent can doubtless tell him that it goes:"0 thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" To which I can only reply that a long study of the newspaper industry gets you that way.
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