Not waving, drowning
What a tragic capitulation by Trinity Mirror, throwing in the towel and abandoning Birmingham in a desperate bid to cut costs and stave off Sly Bailey’s imminent demise.
Ms Bailey, chief executive of unholy Trinity Mirror, the poor man’s media conglomerate, has had her chances. She’s blown them. Now she and her henchmen are disembowelling the Birmingham Post & Mail, and the Coventry Telegraph as well.
Their plan will not work. The decline in revenue and market share will continue.
The current crop of editors should hang their heads in shame.
They claim to be enthusiastic about their new “central multi-media operation”. It uses all the right buzz-words of the digital age. It makes the pretence that there is a future for the stable of titles which once dominated the regional media.
The truth is sadly different. The apologists now trying to explain away the catastrophic sales declines and advertising collapse behind the latest round of 65 journalists’ jobs lost at the Post & Mail really should know nobody takes them seriously any more.
They lost their way, they lost their readership and they lost their credibility a long time ago. Their papers are a shadow of their former selves. They contain next to nothing worth reading.
The Post has, for months now, been a PR person’s delight. Those wide open spaces of newsprint have been filled with the guff of press releases masquerading as news or even comment and analysis.
This week’s editor claims blogs will somehow compensate for the disappearance of real news. Well, that’s why his paper doesn’t have any readers any more.
Oh and he thinks that he will attract younger readers because he's got a web-site. Talk about whistling in the dark of cyberspace...
The internet is Ok for some things. The most popular bits are about the local football teams. That’s fine. But it won’t make the difference between prosperity and limping from crisis to crisis as the company pares to the bone and then eats into the bone itself.
How, for instance, does it really think it can retain advertising revenue by flogging logos and click-throughs on the internet?
A company like Trinity Mirror might pretend to itself it is realigning the business for the 21st century. It might try to spin the line that it is no more than “a big start-up business”.
That is what Lord Simpson said of GEC-Marconi during the few months it took him to turn one of Britain's richest companies into a basket-case.
The truth is different. Trinity Mirror's infrastructure is still geared towards the production of newsprint every day of the week. It is staffed to do that and it has to sell the advertising to support that activity.
A web-based “multi-media” business is different. It starts small and keen. It may grow big and lumbering but that takes years. Trinity Mirror is not fit to start fighting that war unless it abandons proper, printed, let’s-read-it-on-the-bus newspapers altogether.
It can’t do that. To do so would see its share price disappear through the floor never to return. Any tin-pot rival with a web-site could compete just as effectively and much more efficiently.
The editors who think centralised reporting, newspaper design and feature writing do not represent the abandonment of their titles are kidding themselves. Or, to be fair, they may be toeing the party line because they, like their staff, want more than anything else to hang onto their jobs.
Earlier this year The Birmingham Post celebrated its 150th anniversary. It was a bogus because even as they were popping the champagne, they knew how flat the fizz was.
The truth is that there is nothing there worth fighting for any longer. No reputation worth trying to maintain. No hope for the future of The Post or, for that matter, of its sister papers.
The Evening Mail has been scandalously neglected. No wonder nobody reads it any more – there’s nothing much left worth bothering with.
The slow, painful death of these newspapers has been a tragic-comic display which passes all understanding.
As a Post & Mail hack confided in me last night: "They say this is the future but it seems like the end."
See also: Who wants yesterday's papers.
Ms Bailey, chief executive of unholy Trinity Mirror, the poor man’s media conglomerate, has had her chances. She’s blown them. Now she and her henchmen are disembowelling the Birmingham Post & Mail, and the Coventry Telegraph as well.
Their plan will not work. The decline in revenue and market share will continue.
The current crop of editors should hang their heads in shame.
They claim to be enthusiastic about their new “central multi-media operation”. It uses all the right buzz-words of the digital age. It makes the pretence that there is a future for the stable of titles which once dominated the regional media.
The truth is sadly different. The apologists now trying to explain away the catastrophic sales declines and advertising collapse behind the latest round of 65 journalists’ jobs lost at the Post & Mail really should know nobody takes them seriously any more.
They lost their way, they lost their readership and they lost their credibility a long time ago. Their papers are a shadow of their former selves. They contain next to nothing worth reading.
The Post has, for months now, been a PR person’s delight. Those wide open spaces of newsprint have been filled with the guff of press releases masquerading as news or even comment and analysis.
This week’s editor claims blogs will somehow compensate for the disappearance of real news. Well, that’s why his paper doesn’t have any readers any more.
Oh and he thinks that he will attract younger readers because he's got a web-site. Talk about whistling in the dark of cyberspace...
The internet is Ok for some things. The most popular bits are about the local football teams. That’s fine. But it won’t make the difference between prosperity and limping from crisis to crisis as the company pares to the bone and then eats into the bone itself.
How, for instance, does it really think it can retain advertising revenue by flogging logos and click-throughs on the internet?
A company like Trinity Mirror might pretend to itself it is realigning the business for the 21st century. It might try to spin the line that it is no more than “a big start-up business”.
That is what Lord Simpson said of GEC-Marconi during the few months it took him to turn one of Britain's richest companies into a basket-case.
The truth is different. Trinity Mirror's infrastructure is still geared towards the production of newsprint every day of the week. It is staffed to do that and it has to sell the advertising to support that activity.
A web-based “multi-media” business is different. It starts small and keen. It may grow big and lumbering but that takes years. Trinity Mirror is not fit to start fighting that war unless it abandons proper, printed, let’s-read-it-on-the-bus newspapers altogether.
It can’t do that. To do so would see its share price disappear through the floor never to return. Any tin-pot rival with a web-site could compete just as effectively and much more efficiently.
The editors who think centralised reporting, newspaper design and feature writing do not represent the abandonment of their titles are kidding themselves. Or, to be fair, they may be toeing the party line because they, like their staff, want more than anything else to hang onto their jobs.
Earlier this year The Birmingham Post celebrated its 150th anniversary. It was a bogus because even as they were popping the champagne, they knew how flat the fizz was.
The truth is that there is nothing there worth fighting for any longer. No reputation worth trying to maintain. No hope for the future of The Post or, for that matter, of its sister papers.
The Evening Mail has been scandalously neglected. No wonder nobody reads it any more – there’s nothing much left worth bothering with.
The slow, painful death of these newspapers has been a tragic-comic display which passes all understanding.
As a Post & Mail hack confided in me last night: "They say this is the future but it seems like the end."
See also: Who wants yesterday's papers.
posted by nigel hastilow at 3:32 PM
19 Comments:
"As for the Mercury, it’s always had a difficult market to compete in but its recent efforts have been tawdry and sad."
Great insight into the media there Nigel. That would be the Sunday Mercury which has repeatedly out-performed its more illustrious "sister" papers and has posted some of the strongest sales figures in the country.
That's before we even consider the Newspaper Society's Newspaper of the Year award 2008 and the multi-award winning team of reporters who have consistently scooped their rivals on a string of major stories.
As for tawdry and sad that sounds more like a description of your political career.
Interesting to see how short a memory you have Mr Hastilow - the Butcher of Birmingham
I hate what you've written here, though, I sadly agree with most of it. It's just horrible seeing it - but if only they'd listen to some of this.
Content is king - if the content was good, I'd buy it on a loo-roll. Unfortunately - time after time, there's just nothing in there. Empty stories, filler stories - hell, this is a major area of the country, with plenty of arts, sport, business and communities - yet, often you'll get yesterday's national news, or the dreaded professional services press release and photo thang.
I'm sick to the back teeth of hearing about these papers playing with the latest digital toys - poor content is poor content no matter where you put it.
You have post journalists harping on about how do journalists fit in the new digital world - hello peoples - do your job, be a journalist - that is what we want, no matter where the content ends up - I need and want someone to research, summarise and make sense of whats going on for me please.
For years and years it has been time for that dreaded phrase - "back to basics" - journalists doing what they should - getting good stories.
Please, I want great content - not toys.
With morale at the Post, Mail, Mercury and Telegraph probably at an all-time low, I think your blog berrating the titles is nothing but a disgrace. With reporters working long hours for papers they believe passionately in, it's a real kick in the teeth to be told all we are doing is re-writing press releases and producing "nothing worth reading". And all this coming from an ex-journo. You really should be ashamed of yourself.
Surprised by the "butcher of Birmingham" comment as I do not recall making a single member of staff redundant during my time as editor.
My dear old dad used to read the Birmingham Post back in the sixties and I began reading it in the nineties when a certain Nigel Hastilow was the editor.
What a good morning newspaper it was, especially as quite a large number of my EU-sceptic letters used to be published too - what a privilege that was. Sadly, when Nigel left the paper went into decline and I gave up reading it.
It seems to me the only way the Birmingham Post (often referred to as the Boringham Post) can be saved is to put Nigel Hastilow back in the editors chair –it’s that or goodbye to the Birmingham Post.
Amusing how journalists and newspapers are the first to point the finger and disparage the efforts of others, then fall to pieces when their own failings take the shape of P45s.
I worked on the Post for several years, most of which was under Hastilow's editorship. In that time I watched as one talented colleague after another left never to be replaced, while those of us who remained were expected to work longer and longer hours, churning out stories like battery hens, without any recongition for our efforts in our pay packets, and never a word of appreciation from the editor himself.
It was the second worst job I've ever had. The worst, ironically, was for another Trinity Mirror title - but that's another story.
If Hastilow cared so much for the Post he could have done more to stop its decline while at the helm.
To point the finger at others now is disingenuous, and unseemly schadenfreude.
Look on the bright side everyone; if Steve Dyson has less time to spend on Mail ... it can only improve.
God help the good old Mercury tho, which serves, or has served, its readers far better than the Post, Mail or Telegraph in recent years. Those readers are now being treated with contempt, just like the Mail's have for the past three years.
How they will take to Dyson's failed formula of watered down press releases, three-day old news, campaigns no-one cares about (60 people is a 'Big Debate' in a city of one million is it??)and patronising right-on features is fairly predictable.
You never know, maybe they will lap up more supplements about green issues, coriander seed planting and challenges facing Friends of the Earth.
I'm sure they talk of little else over a pint at the Frog and Ferret...
In reality Mercury readers - who of course are Mail target readers Monday to Saturday - will simply stop buying it.
For someone who never tires of playing the 'dewy-eyed Brummie' card, it's strange that Dyson clearly hasn't got a clue what real Brummie readers want.
That's not a matter of opinion - just have a glimpse at those ABC figures and weep.
The Mail is now unquestionably poor, probably the worst evening paper in the country of its size - certainly the worst performing in recent years.
I can think of no other paper which has lost such a high percentage of its sales in such a short period of time.
Whatever Dyson's selling, people aren't buying it - in print, online or at staff meetings.
Given the backdrop to this week's events, better men would have accepted responsibilty and fallen on their sword.
Dyson won't - or can't.
After this debacle, who'd have him?
The Mercury? A great performing paper if you want to read about paedophiles, really really awful lifestyle features that defy banality, what's happening on Big Brother and the latest rantings from the Taxpayer's Alliance. Sadly, like most, it gets bought for one single reason: the football coverage. Take that out and you'd have absolutely nothing worth reading. Whatsoever.
And as for their 'awards', those in the know realise that the local ones don't actually have much competition, a bit like the Americans at the 1984 Olympics.
I worked on the Post under Nigel and while he may have run the paper like a minor public school, in his defence he had a feel for the Midlands and what made his readership tick.
God knows we were under-staffed and under-resourced then, but it was a good regional paper with stories that set the news agenda and which the nationals and TV regularly picked up.
The rot set in when Trinity Mirror took over. It soon became clear that the Birmingham titles, along with other profitable regional titles such as Liverpool and Newcastle, were a cash cow to be milked to prop up the national titles of The Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People and help the company share price.
It has been a history of cuts, cuts and more cuts. Closure of district offices, failure to replace staff, cutbacks in pagination - the list is endless.
Reporters chained to their desks rehashing press releases and agency copy, regularly working unpaid overtime just to get a paper out.
The proof of this is in the products you see on sale today - bland, lifeless ad rags, in the main.
The only stories that stand out are the ones a writer has actually had a chance to work on. Speaks volumes doesn't it?
They also sold our city centre offices to make a fast buck and rather than pay to keep us in town, with the identity and prestige that should come with being big city papers, we are having to uproot to Fort Dunlop at the side of the M6 - a site that is next to impossible to get to without driving but where there's no car parking for all the staff. Madness. Can you imagine the London Evening Standard re-locating to an industrial estate somewhere near Heathrow? I think not.
Sly Bailey and her ilk deserve shooting for what they have done to us in Birmingham and the industry in general. They might print newspapers but they don't know a bloody thing about them or the people who produce them.
Dear "The Truth"
The truth is clearly that you are an utter moron.
Your blinkered view of the Sunday Mercury is clearly informed by nothing more than your own fevered imagination. Performance is rated in circulation and readership - not what stuck-up, preening, self-important clowns like you deem to be news. In both circulation and readership the paper has continued to vastly out-perform its two sister titles.
As for the seemingly confusing issue of rewarding journalistic excellence I couldn't agree more about the Midland Press Awards. However, as you will note from the earlier post these are the NATIONAL Newspaper Society awards, comprising some 200 local titles.
If you know nothing about journalism, why are you wasting everybody's time commenting on this blog, which raises some very valid points about the destruction of a once great business.
Drillbit Dave: Your dig at journalists is pathetic. Of course we are the first to scrutize, that is what we DO. Moron.
Dyson's mob are waving their fists in the air about the closure of Post Offices today.
The irony is like a drop of brandy down my throat, it really is.
Does modernisation and moving with the times only apply to the newspaper industry?
By the way Beth, run along love, there's some press statements and council minutes needing writing up.
It looks like cowardly Dyson is now blocking IP addresses Nige. After one critical post last week, I can't seem to get the following on his site. Wonder why?
__________________
STILL going Steve? Ferchristssakes stop digging man. Ever heard of empty vessels?
The proof of the paper is in the reading and I note from the latest abcs that the Mail is now, incredibly for a city of Birmingham's size, selling LESS than the evening papers in Telford and Leicester and less than HALF its neighbours in Wolverhampton. And that's before these cutbacks. For a bloke who likes to claim credit for the sun coming up each morning, you're pretty quiet about that one. Any thoughts Steve? Maybe the advertising revenue wouldn't have dropped so badly if circulation wasn't so disastrous. I wouldn't mind betting that for all Dyson's talk of the internet that those papers also get more traffic through the web too.
This is what happens when editors disappear so far up their own backsides they lose any connection with the readers - what part of BIRMINGHAM do you live in again Steve??
So for Dyson to claim credit for sticking around to see through a disaster he's been largely responsible for is PR spin extraordinaire from an oaf who can't stop using those cringeworthy corporate terms like "brand" (newspaper) and "resources" (people!).
I also note he's not talking about another job in newspapers when he brags - with typical insensitivity - about 'a pay-off and a PR job'.
Now there's a surprise.
I used to have the Birmingham Post on a regular order and also used to write the (very)odd letter to it. After Nigel left, it just wasn't the same. I cancelled my order.
It is the CONTENTS of the paper that makes people buy them and without sales everyone loses their jobs.
Yes, who would take a pay-off and a PR job when you can work for minimum wage, rewrite council press releases and bow down to dickheads who clearly spend all day shovelling lard into their mouths (Stevie D)?
One only has to look at some of the dullards occupying the senior positions at The Post these days to realize that Nigel is absolutely spot on in his analysis.
The piece also explains why Duckers decided to move on. Say what you like about John, he cared passionately about The Post and I can perfectly understand him deciding that enough is enough.
I, too, served under Nigel's editorship. At times, he could be a prat, I think he would admit that himself, but he backed his journalists to the hilt and always wanted the best for The Birmingham Post. Lesser editors than him would have kow-towed to the men in suits at every turn.
Like him, I agree that the demise of The Post can be laid firmly at the door of Trinity Mirror Group. When they took over, the atmosphere in the newsroom changed, as The Birmingham Post & Mail became just one entity among many.
I sense Nigel knew what lay in store when Trinity Mirror took over and it probably hastened his decision to pursue his political ambitions. The Post was a poorer place to be after his departure.
All the best Nigel.
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