THE PRESS
People's Prager
DENNIS HACKETT
Reading the News of the World on Sunday I had the distinct impression that not only was all human life there, but a bit of The People too. Now these two papers have a heavy duplication of readership: 53 per cent of The People readership also read the News of the World. It follows then that each is delighted to demonstrate to the relevant percentage that it has a bit of an edge, which they would remember should they ever consider doing what a lot of people are doing now that prices are going up at a bound and not down at a strike, i.e.. cut one of their. papers.
And The People, being no. 2 by over one million copies, has to try that much harder. On Sunday, The People had, by dint of undoubted hard work, at which it frequently excels, tracked down Mrs Jana Prager whose husband had currently been sent down for twelve years for spying and whose sex life had been well and truly aired all week but needed, in the British tradition, a refurbishing on Sunday morning.
Mrs Prager told The People that she was a spy too, which left them in no doubt about what to put on their front page the following morning. True she was to deny it on the BBC that evening but Sunday morning is . . . . well it's different, isn't it? Of course, her denial doesn't mean that she didn't say it to The People's William Dorran, who has been labouring in these fields long enough not to be easily fooled. But whether she was or she wasn't The People were away with it. And there's a Part Two to come.
The Sunday Mirror did their best (56 per cent of their readers read the News of the World and 52 per cent The People) with "Intimate Confessions of the Spy Case Wife" but if you read it with care you realised that they got all of it before Nicholas Prager was sentenced. But the News of the World? Where were they? Well they had "A priest and a Mother Superior in Love," which, I would have thought, was enough of a headline to persuade them to let The People have its front page day, but no, "Jana," they shrieked, "the spy's wife who drove men wild."
They were a bit incredulous, even bitter about the "drove men wild" bit. They managed to rake up a picture of Jana (with both feet amputated and half an arm missing, obviously not showing her at her best). Her hair, they said, was "a mess:" her figure "frankly lumpy." But undeterred and still puzzled they traced her to Vienna where they found she was also " dumpy " but obviously not talkative. They did manage to find a representative who is said to have denied that she was involved in espionage (take that People) and who also said she didn't want to prejudice her husband's appeal (and that). I suppose the 53 per cent of News of the World readers who also read The People were duly impressed by this and that the 55 per cent of The People readers who also read the News of the World were cast into a state of confusion, which is percentagewise equivalent to the state of confusion you might be in now. But maybe these two percentages are, for the most part, the same people who read the Sunday Mirror as well and that they turned from Jana, to the priest and the mother superior and from there to more Jana in the Sunday Mirror and that paper's nun and priest story too.
It's all a big Jana (say it, please, Yana) anyway; but that's the Sunday paper business and last Sunday The People had a scoop, for which it didn't pay a fortune, and beat the News of the World.
Apart from these convolutions, on the daily front in Fleet Street there are signs now that the spring spending is going to add to people's domestic budgets before the summer is out. The Daily Express, which has obviously done well enough out of the Sketch closure to have the courage of its condition, reached for some money last week and went up to 3p — which is 7.2 old pence and fancy that. Mr Rupert Murdoch, who has also done well and better than anyone over the distance, told his shareholders that " we " (meaning he) does not believe price rises are "a panacea for all our ills" and said he would hold his price "as long as practicable."
At the Mirror, which is still the most profitable of them all but which has depen dent relatives who make the Civil List look like chickenfeed, they will be quite upset about this. They can't go up till he goes up. And IPC need the money. My guess is that Mr Murdoch's "as long as practicable" will be September. All of which will be a late relief for Mr Don Ryder at Reed who has recently given his opinion (formulated no doubt during personal early morning research among the workers) that popular papers are too cheap.
Mind you, newspaper prices have risen by 100 per cent in the last decade and the price index for consumer products as a whole by only 50 per cent. And on top of them the major causes of the newspaper industry's problems are : decreasing circulations, decreasing advertising revenue, rising wages, rising material costs. It seems the public don't think they're getting value for money. Now where's that going to leave Fleet Street?
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