MEDIA STUDIES
Three new titles are coming, but not all their owners will be as pleased as Punch
STEPHEN GLOVER
Hope springs eternal, in journalism as in all things. The history of recent newspa- per launches is not such as would inspire an actuary with any confidence. Nonetheless, two new business titles, Sunday Business and the London Financial News, will go on sale next month. Mohamed Al Fayed plans to re-launch Punch magazine in the autumn, and has had a team of journalists working on a planned Sunday newspaper. The Harrods boss is hoping to become a big cheese in publishing.
Which, if any, of these titles will succeed? Judging by recent experience, there are three main hurdles which a new publication has to clear. In the first place, it must find a market. There is no point in launching a wonderful newspaper if no one wants to read it. If there is a market, the new title will have to be put together with journalis- tic flair. And, if that is achieved, it must have considerable financial resources when things go wrong, as they assuredly will.
Over the last 15 years only one news- paper launch succeeded on all three counts — the Mail on Sunday. Even so, it faltered at the beginning and had to be rescued at great expense to its owner, Associated Newspapers. The Independent initially got everything right but had insufficient capital to go undamaged through the recession, and so its management buckled under pres- sure. News on Sunday never found a market. Nor did the Sunday Correspondent, though it was a perfectly decent newspaper. Tens of millions of pounds were thrown at Today but it failed because it wasn't good enough.
Sunday Business, which will be launched at the end of March, is the most ambitious of the new titles. It needs to sell 150,000 Copies to break even. Tom Rubython, the engaging entrepreneur who dreamt up the idea, believes there are many businessman who would like to read much more about business and finance on a Sunday than they can at the moment. He has produced a six- section paper• which, to judge by a recent dummy, is well-designed and handsome. It is less impressive if you inspect it more closely and read some of the articles. I was naturally interested to see the restaurant review in the dummy because it appeared under my byline and photograph. The odd thing was that not a single word of this tosh had been written by me, yet I read myself describing a fictitious fracas with a head waiter and complaining about food I had not eaten. This was a piece of journalistic invention on the part of Mr Rubython, done because I had intimated that I might be his restau- rant reviewer, which I now think I would rather not be. My impression is that he wrote very large parts of the dummy in his own extraordinary style. There seems to be a general sense of unreality about the pro- ject. He disdains the values of Fleet Street, and so nearly all the 50-odd journalists whom he has hired come from trade papers. They will have their work cut out filling six sections: the Sunday Times employs about half as many staff journalists on its single business supplement — but then Mr Rubython does not think much of them. His venture is not over generously funded, and a proposed stock-market list- ing to raise more capital has been post- poned. Mr Rubython, who radiates the kind of optimism that is certainly one vital ingredient of a successful launch, says he has enough cash for the time being.
The London Financial News, which will appear next Monday and weekly thereafter, is a more modest venture. Partly on account of a high cover price of £2, it needs to sell only some 10,000 copies in order to break even. The paper is the idea of Clive Wolman, a former City editor of the Mail on Sunday, who has persuaded a former friend from Oxford, now a publishing multimillionaire, to put up over half the money. The thinking is that there are many professionals in the City who want a publi- cation with more specialist information, as well as more chitchat about new jobs, peo- ples' salaries and so forth, than is supplied by the Financial Times. I am not qualified to judge whether such a market exists, any more than I can offer an opinion as to whether Mr Rubython's much larger mar- ket is there. Both men have done a lot of research of their 'target audiences' of the sort which ends with a surprisingly large proportion of respondents promising to buy the newspaper on the day. They don't always show up.
One man who hasn't done any research is 7 should never have let you move in with me.' Mohamed Al Fayed, the new proprietor of Punch, which has lain dormant for nearly four years. He bought the title not, I sus- pect, because he expects ever to make a fortune out of it but because he wants to create something good while having a bit of fun. Peter McKay, the Evening Standard's effervescent columnist, has been engaged as editor on the kind of salary normally offered to editors of successful newspapers, and the famous Punch table, along with various effigies of Mr Punch and hundreds of bound copies of the magazine, have been reassembled in commodious offices oppo- site Harrods, The idea is not to recreate a self-consciously funny magazine like the old Punch but rather something much clos- er to the New Yorker, with well-written and properly researched long pieces.
Mr Al Fayed's ambitions do not stop with Punch. He has recruited Stewart Steven, until recently editor of the Evening Stan- dard, as the chairman of his publishing company, dignified as Liberty Publishing. Mr Steven is a man of firm integrity, and he has found in Mr Al Fayed, a man denied citizenship by the British Government, and generally looked down on by the Establish- ment, someone who excites his legendary sympathy for the underdog. He is unenthu- siastic about Mr Al Fayed's project to launch a Sunday tabloid in competition with the Mail in Sunday, a paper he edited for ten years, and I am told he has killed off the idea. Mr Steven will instead be looking around for newspapers and magazines to buy — other great names which have fallen on hard times.
So which of these three titles will clear the hurdles? Naturally I hope that they all do. Alas, it is a tough old world. If Mr Rubython's market exists, I wonder how well his paper will exploit it. I have doubts too about the deepness of his pockets. Mr Wolman's ambitions seem relatively mod- est, and he has recruited some excellent journalists. Were things to go wrong with his paper, though not so wrong that it was past saving, his millionaire friend from Oxford would be able to help. As for Mr Al Fayed, he has lots of money and is attract- ing good people. If he is not hoping for quick returns, his publishing empire may well thrive. For the moment, at least, he is in the grip of that old, romantic idea which lives on after every unsuccessful launch and crashed dream have been forgotten. To be a proprietor is a grand thing.
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