Press
Facing the truth
Robert Ashley
Having a great deal of respect for Lord Hartwell, and an even greater respect for his formidable wife, Lady Pamela, who has never yet invited me to one of her famous parties, I am sorry to see the Telegraphs, Daily, Sunday and Weekly, in such dire financial trouble. The Daily Telegraph, as and my distinguished predecessor have never tired of saying, is quite the best buy in Fleet Street. It is the one newspaper any journalist would choose if he were marooned on Roy Plomley's unspeakable desert island and allowed only one luxury. There are more stories per square inch in the Telegraph than there are per square mile in a lot of other rags. But it is in trouble. Or to be more precise, the company as a whole is in trouble. The Daily continues to make a profit — a very small one, to be honest, but still a profit. The Sunday Telegraph and the Weekly magazine continue to lose a packet, although, in the interests of truth, the point should be made that it is only this year that the magazine has gone into the red again — it actually made money in 1973 and 1974.
But it all adds up to the situation where Lord Hartwell's company has to face up to something the rest of us learnt to live with years ago — a large overdraft at the bank. Last year it lost over half a million and the forecast for the present financial year, even after a lot of pruning, is that they'll lose just under half a million. Circulation is falling. Six years' hard slog raised the Daily Telegraph's circulation from 1,350,000 to 1,450,000; three-quarters of that gain has been lost in the last twelve months. Advertising revenue has fallen 12 per cent compared with the same period last year: the Sunday has fared worse, with a drop of more than 14 per cent. Labour costs have rocketed, of course, and still show no signs of slowing down, and although the company has reduced the amount of newsprint it uses from 92,000 tonnes last year to 86,000 tonnes this year, the cost of the stuff has gone up from £7.5 million to more than £15 million. The way ahead therefore looks remarkably like the dusty road to death.
Which explains why the Telegraph has announced that there have got to be staff cuts if the papers are to survive. And the cuts they have asked for are massive. Out of 1,600 production staff, the papers want more than 600 to retire gracefully from the scene. This is the sort of thing that used to make union chiefs laugh uproarously and indulge in sharp-edged remarks about blackmail and I'd just like to see them try. But not any more. Union chiefs are every bit as worried as managements. They know that a paper that closes because it has been unable to bear the weight of 35 per cent overmanning — a fairly typical figure — means that from the date of closure there is 100 per cent undermanning, since there aren't any jobs at all any more. They realise therefore that though it is their duty to protect the jobs of their members, this can no longer mean protecting the jobs of all their members. The elderly, the sick, the halt, and the lame, will all have to go, so that the others can remain at ,work. The retirement will have to be properly reimbursed, of course, but go they must if newspapers are to survive.
It is an interesting point that, at the very moment the Telegraph was sending the bad news from Ghent to Aix, a union official was talking the sort of turkey the industry has been gasping to hear for years. The sensible fellow in question is Mr Joe Wade, the assistant general secretary of the
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SPectator September 20, 1975 !
i National Graphical Association, the compositors' union, who is Widely expected to take over when general secretary John Bonfield retires next year at sixty-one (Bonfield is retiring early because of ill-health. His retirement will be regretted since he has long been looked on as one of the wiser heads in the mad, mad world of the print unions). Joe Wade, who has the gort of intelligence that will make turn a worthy successor to John Bonfield, was quoted last week as saYing that there was not much time left if the closure of one or more papers and large-scale redundancies were to be avoided (my italics). He said, very explicitly, "It is manifest that there is no way in which we can avoid grasping the nettle of over-manning in NPA newspapers". NPA stands, of course, for the Newspaper Publishers Association, and that means fleet Street and Fleet Street only. In other words, Mr Wade was admitting, with rare courage, that there is overmanning in the Street Of Disaster. He went on: "It would be a brave man who would attempt to assess the amount of over-manning in Fleet Street, but it would be a foolish one who denied it existed". first brave man who comes to mind is Mr Wade for admitting What has hitherto been strenuously denied, at least by the unions. The second brave man is me, because I am here to tell you that the Mirror group is 40 per cent overmanned: no wild guess, that, but the figure given to me by Mr Percy Roberts himself. And he should know, since he is the chief executive of the group. Overmanning on the Telegraph is 40 per cent;no wild guess, that, either: it is the figure the board had in mind when it talked about staff reductions. So there are two assessments to be going on With. I'll give yOu some more when I've talked to the managements concerned.
But there are two other points about Mr Wade's statement. The first is that his union is the least overmanned of the print unions. The NGA is the least of management's headaches. Natsopa and Sogat are far worse offenders. The technological revolution which is SO long a-coming will hit NGA Members first. Computer setting, and its associated marvels, will mean fewer jobs for NGA members, While hardly affecting Natsopa and Sogat members. Yet there is Mr Wade taking the lead in offering talks with the managements to get staffing levels right. At a time when the outlook for Fleet Street is uniformly gloomy, Mr Wade has introduced a little ray of sunshine. If all union leaders were as sensible as he is — and if all managements Were, too — then the future would be assured. And on the day that happens, you will be relieved to hear, I will start writing about some Other subject.
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