‘The real owners are the readers’
IT’S PERFECTLY possible to run a big city local paper independently, surviving on local ads, without having to make big profits. Ask Eric Gordon. He’s done it for 27 years.
Substitute “website” for newspaper and the Camden New Journal (CNJ) in north London could be a model for any number of new enterprises. It grew from the ashes of a title jettisoned by a commercial publisher and has been successful enough not just to survive but to launch two more free titles in neighbouring areas.
The CNJ is a free that distributes 62,000 a week in the London Borough of Camden, stretching from the leafy heights of Hampstead, though gentrified streets and council estates to King’s Cross and the fringes of the West End.
It grew out of a two-year NUJ strike against the decision of a now-defunct company called Heart of England Newspapers to close the Camden Journal, a paid-for weekly selling only 7,500 a week. Eric Gordon was the editor.
The owners offered the title to the NUJ chapel for £1, but the offer was rejected: the journalists felt strongly that the paper could be successful and went on strike to force the company to reopen it.
The chapel fought heroically what was always a hopeless crusade, but the union backed the strike for two years. When it was eventually wound up Eric Gordon and one other colleague paid the £1 and bought the paper.
“I didn’t know the first thing about running a company,” he says, “so I called in Frank Branston, another journalist who had started his own paper. He advertised for ad sales staff.” That’s the important thing, says Eric Gordon: “You need a good sales staff, a good accountant and good managers.”
Frank Branston — who like Eric Gordon was an NUJ activist who had been on its national executive — made a big success of his own paper, Bedfordshire on Sunday.
The CNJ launched as a 35,000-circulation free in February 1982. The office was, and still is, its old strike HQ — a house in the heart of Camden Town. The office had been granted rent-free to the strikers by the Labour-controlled Camden Council, but the new paper paid rent.
This has not stopped the paper biting the hand that fed it; the CNJ’s reporting of the council was sufficiently critical to incur for a time a ban on its distribution at the town hall.
There was public money for start-ups in those days. The CNJ got a government-guaranteed £50,000 bank loan under the auspices of the then Co-operative Development Agency, which helped draw up a business plan; and £100,000 from the London Development Agency set up by Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council.
In four years the paper was able to pay back both loans, and, says Eric Gordon, “we’ve been profitable ever since. We’ve never had to borrow any more money. You can manage if you make a net margin of 10 per cent, to invest. We don’t have any shareholders to pay.”
To start with all the journalists paid themselves £100 a week, which had been the level of their NUJ strike pay. Salaries are now around the average for London weeklies — £20,000 for the eight reporters; £22-23,000 for the four subs — but Eric Gordon paid himself only £20,000; now — aged 77 — he lives mainly off his pension; yes, the CNJ has a company pension scheme.
ERIC GORDON describes himself as “a reluctant owner and benevolent dictator. I would never sack people. There have been people not pulling their weight. I encourage them to get other jobs and eventually they do.”
But he is now divesting himself of the ownership. “We are setting up a community trust,” he explains. “It will have outsiders, a lawyer, community and business people. Its function will be to ensure that the paper sticks to its principles.”
These principles are socialist, he says. “I don’t conceal the fact I’m a socialist. It comes out in my leaders, and we never had a problem with advertisers — they’re only interested in the circulation, they don’t worry about politics.”
The CNJ works hard to appeal to the whole community. It is packed with local news and it appeals to Camden’s upmarket readership with a weekly 16-page arts and reviews supplement. It has twice won “free newspaper of the year” in the regional press awards — and this year has two reporters shortlisted in the features section.
The paper is holding its own in the recession — so far. “This year it’s quite a struggle,” says Eric Gordon, “advertising is falling, but not seriously.”
The CNJ has a busy website but there is not much advertising. “If the ad revenue becomes too little then I would make it a smaller paid-for paper.”
Eric Gordon has had a couple of takeover approaches from the big groups; he won’t say which. “They would have paid £3 or 4 million and made me a director but I couldn’t do it.
“The people who really own it are the readers. The paper is produced for them.”