Press
Even the 'FT'
Robert Ashley
The isle is full of noises, but one noise I never expected to hear came the other day from Bracken House. I know that time, like an ever-flowing stream, bears all its sons away. I also know they fly forgotten as a dream flies at the opening of the day. But I hadn't realised that those lines applied to the Financial Times as well as to the rest of us poor mortals. Is there anything more permanent, I used to think, than the Pink 'Un? Its splendidly confident colour, its superb design, its excellent arts (and racing) columns, its extensive foreign coverage, its knowledge of the City. All these surely must make it last forever, a rock of ages on a world of sand?
But not so. For what did I hear coming from those august portals the other day? Cries of help, that's what. Cries •for help from the Financial Times? God bless my soul, whatever next? Well, I don't know whatever next, but I do know that now. Because, unthinkable though it may be, the Financial Times is in dire straits. The projected loss for next year is El% million, unless costs are cut, staffs are reduced, and computer setting is introduced. The Financial Times making a loss! Talk about physician heal thyself. There are many reasons for the catastrophe. Some of them are common to all newspapers, of course overmanning, very high wages, newsprint that costs four times what it did a few years ago. But one very important reason is that the Financial Times relies, in the opinion of this poor scribe, far too much on advertising revenue. A paper like the Daily Mirror gets three-quarters of its income from sales, and only one quarter from advertising revenue. Not so the FT. Their ad revenue provides 80 per cent of their total income. And what happens when there's a slump? Advertising budgets get cut, that's what, and any paper as dependent on ads as the FT is clearly going to feel the draught when the wind starts blowing.
The posh papers tend to depend on ads as for a far higher proportion of their income than the popular papers, of course, but to let the figure get as high as the FT has done is just plain silly. Of course company reports have to be printed and chairmen's statements (along with a flattering little picture of the chairman himself) and of course the FT has got fat out of company (and chairmen's) vanity. But 80 per cent is an absurdly high and dangerously high figure.
And now the day of reckoning has come. The FT has always had a high level of staffing. That is one of the reasons it was such a very good, specialist newspaper. There were always enough people around to make sure that any story was properly researched and carefully written. And those people were well paid. Very well paid. The story in Fleet Street has been that its journalists were the best paid in the business, and why not indeed, considering the importance of their work? But the print unions were equally well paid. I remember the envious glint in the eye of a Daily Telegraph writer when he heard that FT compositors get £10,000 a year. A lot of people say they have yet to meet a ten-thousand-a-year comp. Well, they should have been watching the BBC television programme, The Editors, the other night. The editor of the FT was asked if it was true that his comps got so much. Mr Fisher thought for a moment and then said "I'm not going to say that they don't", and then changed the subject very quickly.
Well, bully for the comps, say I, but isn't ten-thousand-a-year a bit much for their job, which the Economist Intelligence Unit's report on the press, way back in 1966, described as requiring no more than one year's training to master?
The comps' high wages are symptomatic of the way newspapers have queered their own pitch throughout the years. Eager to grab any staff, if only to stop other papers getting them, and unwilling to resist any demands by the print unions, in case they should lose production — newspapers are totally unlike any other product: lose an edition and it is lost for ever — wages have always been higher than in any other industry in the land. Which is all very well when times are good, but it is no use at all when times are bad.
And when high wages are coupled with high levels of manning the best guesstimates suggest that at least one third of the industry's staff could be dispensed with without any noticeable effect on production then you really are up the creek, and a paddle nowhere in sight.
Which is why the FT is going to go over to computer setting, whether the National Graphical Association likes it or not. The techniques are there. They have been for years, and in America the revolution is practically complete (as it is in this country away from Fleet Street). The whole mechanics of the national newspaper industry would have been understandable by William Caxton, since they have barely changed since his day. The Linotype machine, remember, was in use in New York in 1886 and hasn't altered one bit since then, give or take a modification or two.
The changes have got to come. They will be expensive — maybe too expensive just yet for an industry which iStl't exactly overburdened with cash at the moment. And they will mean a lot of men will lose their jobs, which isn't exactly pleasant for anybody, particularly the chaps concerned. But redundancy can be handled humanely — the Daily Mirror method, in which no more recruiting is going to take place until levels are down to what the management thinks right, ensures that nobody gets the boot until retirement age, when they also get a pension handsome enough for them "to retire in comfort and dignity”. It is a model for the rest of the industry, and pretty soon they are all going to have to do the same. But "hOw -long, 0 Lord, how' long?
Previous page
