More problems
Bill Grundy
My good friend and colleague, the Very Reverend Martin Sullivan, the Dean of St Paul's and occupant of the Spectator Chair of Religion, tells me that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Well, he should know. And so should 1, come to think. For everywhere I look in Fleet Street I see people doing their very best-intentioned thing, and only succeeding in cocking it all up.
There is the Sun, for example. Lovely ladies of all sorts of hues and in every state of undress peer at us from its pages. But what happens? We have stopped buying it at the Gadarene rate we used to do. At least we have if Mr Percy Robert's figures are to be believed. Mr Roberts is the chief executive of the Mirror newspaper group — and might therefore be a little prejudiced — but he wrote a sad, headshaking little letter a week or so ago for the UK Press Gazette, a magazine said to cater for the trade, a task at which it fails miSerably, and does it in a near-illiterate style into the bargain. His letter was, characteristically, headlined 'How exploiting missing Mirror saved Sun from big dipper', which is the sort of headline that makes you lose interest in the story before you've even started it.
Anyway, what Mr Roberts was saying was that the Sun had behaved in a fairly excremental way in selling for two weeks at less than the recognised trade terms when the Mirlor was having its Easter tussle with Sogat. He also said: "In the month of March, the Sun added 1,780,000 copies when the Daily Mirror had its industrial troubles. As a result, the March Sun figure showed a benefit per issue of 70,000 (without which, incidentally, the Sun would have shown the largest drop of any national newspaper compared with February I975.)" I like that word 'incidentally'. But really! The Sun setting? I don't believe it. (Well I do, but I'm just saying that so Mr Lamb won't write to me again). Yet another well-tried formula consigned to the dustbin. What will all those lovely ladies do now? Then have a look at the Evening News. No, on second thoughts, don't. It is awful. There was a time — it was during the run-up to the. October election, to be precise —. when I thought (and said so in this • column) that the newly-tabloid :• News was going to shake us all up. I was wrong. It is a bigger mess than ever, and the public seem to have spotted it, since they are buying it in fewer and fewer numbers. The re-vamp was done with the best of intentions and look where it has ended up. What an irony if the
News were to fold while the Stan
dard, for so long the back runner, survived. Not that there's much likelihood of the News going under, but Associated Newspapers are going to have a lot of very careful nursing to do if the infant is to go on living.
Jaded, weary, and ilkat ease, I was, however, just persuading myself that it was all the fault of my liver and things aren't as bad as all that, when I happened to pick up an American journal which appears to be called Time and is apparently quite famous, although its awful command of the English language has hitherto dis Lord Hartwell, he of the Tele-, • graphs, says that they lost about million last year, too. "Whether we can recoup this year depends on the rate of inflation. That seems to be the case for all Fleet Street." So let us all sit back and enjoy ourselves, :confident that if we don't think about it the problem will go away. The Financial Times seems to be: making a copper or two, but even there they are coming in a bit slower than they used to do, whidh makes me think it won't be long::: before the sun starts rising in the -west. According to Time, even the unions are beginning to wake up to : the situation, which suggests that the age of miracles is not yet past. Joe Wade, of the National Graphical Association, says he'll be happy if in ten years time he has . two thousand members in work instead of the present six thousand, . which makes me wonder what the other four thousand are doing round about now. And in case all this is worrying you, let me send you to sleep with a real king-sized headache. The latest estimates are that this year Fleet Street as a whole is going to lose £4 million. If I were a newspaper accountant I should be reaching for the bottle right now.
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