Killers of the golden geese
It’s called ‘brand vandalism’. ALEX KLAUSHOFER is annoyed at the way publishers are ruining their own businesses
YES, YES we all know: falling advertising revenues and the rise of the internet are the reason why quality media are failing fast.
But there’s another story, which is the lust for ever-greater riches on the part of the proprietors of even profitable outlets. A symptom of a compulsive form of short-term thinking, brand vandalism had been quietly eating away at the fabric of the media long before the recession, causing bosses to hack away at the core of their operations, cutting jobs, budgets and shifting coverage onto narrower, sillier and cheaper ground.
The giant agency Thomson Reuters, which is trying to impose editorial redundancies, a pay freeze and a shift away from general news, reported profits of $793 million for the second quarter of 2009.
The recession has exacerbated this trend, causing media owners to panic, disinvest and basically sabotage their own product, fulfilling their own prophecy of outlets that are no longer viable or command the respect of their readers.
Behind closed doors the corporate rush to embrace new technologies and initiatives involves plenty of meetings and big talk — that is, staff time and resources — which is often done with so little thought about the editorial or practical implications that the brainwaves that emerge are doomed to fail.
Coupled with this are the growth of cheap short-term and casualised staffing and the use of interns. The Guardian has just laid off a swathe of its most senior writers in a bid to cut costs, at the same time advertising for “graduate writers” on a salary of £10,428 to cover developments in the public sector — a complex patch that requires years of expertise.
Those of us who care about quality journalism could be forgiven for concluding that the guardians of the media can no longer be trusted with the job.
To talk about replacements for the current discredited business model, the NUJ London Freelance Branch is to hosting a conference on potential alternatives on January 16 next year, at the NUJ head office, open to all. The event will explore new ideas for making the web pay, funding investigative reporting and hyper-local start-ups. There’ll be workshops where like-minded souls can thrash out their own ideas.