MURDOCH HOLDS THE HIGH GROUND
The press:
Paul Johnson on the balance
of advantage at Wapping
THE 'siege of Wapping', as Rupert Mur- doch's newspaper competitors call it, be- comes more absurd every week. In the first place it is not a siege, as the newspapers are getting out and are being distributed. For all practical purposes it has become a mere left-wing demo, and is as unlikely to achieve its object as any other such demo. The chief victims so far have been the nationalised railways, now running their newspaper trains, deprived of Murdoch's paper, at a huge loss, and the union members themselves. I suspect that when historians come to mention this episode they will link it to Arthur Scargill's miners' strike. A strike against the inevitable clo- sure of loss-making, old-fashioned pits, and a strike against inevitable introduction of new newspaper technology — there's no difference in principle. Foreigners used to shake their heads condescendingly about the coal strike and say, 'It could only happen in Britain.' They could say the same about the resistance to the Wapping technology, which most advanced coun- tries (and many Third World ones) have been using for years without much fuss. Scargill pushed his members into a strike, hoping to achieve by force what he had never seriously attempted to get by negotiation. As a result he split and im- poverished his union, inflicted appalling financial hardships on his members and landed some of them with criminal records. The print union leaders at least had a ballot but otherwise their strategy has been no more defensible. Sogat, like the NUM, is tied up in a legal mess and has lost control of its funds. Its members have forfeited their jobs, the majority for good. Some of !hem already face court cases, fines, poss- ibly worse. There is no realistic prospect of the strike succeeding. Quite the reverse: the longer it goes on, the more likely it is that Murdoch will win total victory. The print unions do not even have Scargill's bitter consolation that he had stopped two-thirds of the pits and was costing the country billions of pounds. The print work- ers leaders have not stopped anything except their members' wages. It is the exact Opposite of the Times-Sunday Times dispute with the NGA in the Thomson era. In that disastrous confrontation, most of the employees were paid, the NGA were rich and unworried, and the company, with no revenue at all coming in, slowly bled to death. Today it is the unions and the members who are bleeding. The clumsy strategy of their leaders has only succeeded in slashing the company's costs and in- creasing its profits.
Hence left-wingers in the media are now taking the line: Murdoch may have won the battle with the unions but look what's happening to his papers: the Times is dreadful and the Sunday Times is losing its best people. A smear campaign has been developed against the two editors con- cerned, Charles Wilson of the Times and Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times. Perso- nally I take off my hat to those two gentlemen. Wilson had the difficult task of succeeding a much loved and highly suc- cessful editor immediately before the most drastic change in editorial methods in the paper's history. He does things I do not like (and to which I will return) but in all the circumstances his performance in re- cent weeks has been magnificent, full of courage and professionalism in the best Street of Adventure tradition. Moreover, the kind of resources the new technology makes available is beginning to tell. The Times's coverage of last week's Budget, for instance, was the most extensive and thor- ough I can recall: totalling well over 1,500 column-inches. By comparison, the Daily Telegraph, with the same cover-price 'That's what 1 call conspicuous consump- (25p), had around 900 column-inches. This is just a foretaste. The economies achieved by the new technology, with the unwitting assistance of Brenda Dean and Co., will progressively allow the Times the editorial space needed to re-establish its position as the prime journal of record.
At the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil faced the additional problem of dealing with a touchy and inflated editorial staff. When he took over, the Sunday Times, once Britain's best newspaper, was in a state of low morale. In the convulsions that have followed, the staff changes and depar- tures have been high, and the Left has used this to throw mud at Neil. In fact it is evidence that he is doing the right things. When Rupert Murdoch took over the paper he found that it employed more editorial people than its two main rivals, the Sunday Telegraph and the Observer, put together. This was, in fact, the main cause of the low morale, for journalists with too little to do sit around the office plotting against the editor or proprietor or both. Under Neil there has been an almighty shake-out. The paper has lost some malcontents, some prima donnas and some fainthearts who cannot face the challenge of working with the new technol- ogy and changing from cosy, mediocre Fleet Street to 21st-century Wapping. There are some sad cases but on the whole the paper is much better off for the departures. Neil can now concentrate on building up a younger staff, for whom Fleet Street's old machinery, habits and union- ism are just history.
In doing this he holds the all-important card of space. What really appeals to clever young men and women is the opportunity to place a decent, by-lined spread in a national newspaper. They are far more likely to get the chance on a paper which can maximise its financial revenue and so editorial space. The old technology, and still more the union rules with which it was inextricably tangled, imposed intolerable restraints on newspaper expansion. Adding pages, or even a major change in layout, always involved long, difficult and expensive negotiations with the print un- ions. At Wapping editors and managers can simply go ahead and exercise their judgment. Last Sunday, for instance, the Sunday Times had an 80-page paper at 50p, against a 60-page Observer, also at 50p, and a 40-page Sunday Telegraph at 40p. Moreover, the Sunday Times is making a lot of money, whereas the Observer is losing it intermittently, and the Telegraph is a heavy loss-maker. The Sunday Times, with no old-style restraints on new machin- ery and editorial innovations, can print 80-page papers regularly and is heading for a 200-page paper with two colour maga- zines. You may say: people don't want so much. That is not the American experi- ence. Whichever way you look at it, Murdoch and his editors are on the high ground.
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