News is the first casualty
It’s given the best coverage of journalism — and of the NUJ — for more than 40 years, but now the weekly Press Gazette has folded under the weight of its losses, to be replaced by a monthly magazine and a surviving website. JON SLATTERY says it’s a tragedy for the trade
THE GOOD NEWS is that the print version of Press Gazette has narrowly survived being canned altogether. The decision by owner Wilmington to make it a monthly was a last-minute rethink by the board after a decision to go online only.
The bad news is that when you look along the news agent’s shelves you will see weekly journals for the advertising, marketing, broadcasting and PR industries, but none covering journalism. It is also bad news for the editorial staff on the magazine, which is being cut from seven to three.
Over the years Press Gazette has suffered a series of disruptive changes of ownership, with no fewer than seven owners in its 43 years. But one of the current staff told me: “The latest debacle really has been bad even by PG standards.” It seems that Wilmington was not prepared to tolerate the losses suffered by Press Gazette and wanted instant action.
The biggest saving would have been achieved by going online only, but it was realised that if Press Gazette did not exist as a publication it would lose its life support machine — the lucrative British Press Awards it organises.
In fairness, staff point out that Wilmington did rescue the magazine after it went down under the ownership of Piers Morgan and Matthew Freud at the end of 2006, and have lost a considerable sum on the magazine.
PG’s commercial demise was bought about by the collapse of job advertising, after the four biggest regional newspaper groups, Northcliffe, Newsquest, Johnston and Trinity, decided to advertise jobs only on their jointly owned Hold The Front Page website and the Media Guardian took over the national market. It is an unfortunate paradox that journalists, despite being seen as an influential group, are not a desirable target for advertisers.
The Press Gazette was never going to be very profitable, but the loss of advertising made the magazine increasingly dependent on money-spinning events, notably the British Press Awards; other events such as the regional press, magazine and student awards don’t make so much.
The first casualty of going monthly will be news, as the magazine will be feature and comment led. Yet news has been the biggest draw for readers. Whenever we got new owners they would conduct expensive readership surveys, which unsurprisingly showed that journalists liked news best.
There will be up-to-the minute news on the website, but while you can whack up the news releases and wire stories as soon as they come in, that is no substitute for the former team of specialist reporters covering national and regional newspapers, broadcasting, magazines and new media, building up their contacts and producing exclusives.
Media Guardian commentator Roy Greenslade said on his blog that his website was now “the major forum for debate about newspapers, and the site that breaks the big industry stories.” PG editor Dominic Ponsford took issue with this on his own blog. “Media Guardian is not, and cannot be, what Press Gazette tries to be — a champion, watchman, rallying point, community and critical friend devoted 100 per cent to serving the needs of journalists.”
Media Guardian will never be seen as independent by many journalists, notably those on the other papers who believe The Guardian has an inbuilt prejudice against the tabloids and note the scorn it pours on its immediate rivals, the Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Independent.
The very last weekly issue of the PG showed just how important its independence is, with the astonishing story by new media editor Martin Stabe about the Guardian’s use of paid-for search engine advertising. The Guardian had bought the Google search term “Madeleine McCann” to boost its ABCe figures, despite being critical of the tabloids’ saturation coverage of the story.
The Guardian admitted it was true but “an error on our behalf” and said it had been taken down. But the PG story looked at the murky role of paid-for search engine advertising across national press websites. I don’t believe The Guardian or another national paper could have presented that important story in such an evenhanded way.
Judging by some of the blog posts to Press Gazette, some subscribers are unhappy about paying £115 for 15 issues of the monthly. Like any staff threatened with redundancy, PG journalists have been looking for other jobs. Martin Stabe is already leaving for a new job. Who knows how long the few remaining will stay.
The plight faced by Press Gazette is probably no different to other publications suffering financial pressures, so why does it matter? It is because its independence makes it uniquely able to be a campaigning and unifying force for journalists, as it showed with its recent campaigns to save the Freedom of Information Act and to oppose the use of no-win-no-fee libel actions by unscrupulous lawyers.
What a shame that this unique voice for journalists is being muted to a monthly and a website, both dependent on the always volatile British Press Awards to survive.