Paper dragon breathes fire

Hot metal, hotter words: That was the past - what about the future?

IT WAS over a fortnight ago that the openDemocracy website published a feature article of mine, under its Our Kingdom section. I concluded that Trinity Mirror’s Welsh news output was being denuded to the detriment of readers and staff because the company has consistently valued shareholder profit over the public interest.

To put it mildly, the piece divided opinion. People were either extremely positive or completely rejected my findings. Of the latter, none more so that Alan Edmunds, Media Wales’ Editorial Director, whose response was carried on Roy Greenslade’s Guardian blog:

“We will be taking this up in very strong terms with Cardiff University to them that, in our view, this is another example from them of one-eyed, inadequately-researched hyperbole full of ill-informed statements, old chestnuts, tired cliches and 1970s rhetoric.

“It is almost identical in tone and line to an equally out-of-touch and quaint view published by the same research department a few years ago and shows an astonishing lack of understanding of how we have had to change and modernise to meet the fast-evolving demands of readers and advertisers.

“The easily repeated barb about the regurgitation of press releases, for example, is tiresome and insulting to the first class journalists and managers in the regional media.

“We are incredibly disappointed that, despite our attempt at trying to drag Cardiff’s researchers out of the dark ages and into the real world following their last report, they appear to have reverted to type.

“They could have written about the fact that Media Wales was the first regional centre in Britain to introduce an integrated multimedia newsroom for its online, morning, evening, Sunday and weekly titles more than two years ago, which has spawned a constant stream of visits to the centre from others throughout the industry.

“This major innovation in tough economic times, and the successful launch and development of WalesOnline, however, appears to have passed them by, despite the fact that a number of their graduates have gained valuable work experience in our newsroom, with a number winning permanent roles.

“It is such a shame that our excellent relationship with the teaching staff at the university’s journalism staff doesn’t seep through to their research colleagues, who appear to live in a vacuum.

“Far from being an expert view of how the media in Wales has or should have developed, this report betrays a total lack of understanding of the Welsh media marketplace and how it is developing.

“In my view it is not based on new insights into the circulation challenge that has faced the whole industry but on old prejudices.”

In response, I felt I had to publish this open letter to Mr Edmunds:

“I feel I should engage with the substantive criticisms you make of a recent feature I wrote for the openDemocracy website. Amongst your ad hominem attacks were a few points on which I hope we can open a more productive dialogue.

“I welcome your reference to Media Wales’ positive relationship with our teaching staff, to which I belong. But have to disagree with you about the quality of our research. The School is internationally recognised as a centre for cutting edge, inter-disciplinary research in its field.

“You describe my piece is an example of “one-eyed, inadequately researched hyperbole” based not on “new insights” but on “old prejudices”. I assure you the article is based around much solid research. In broad terms it draws on a wide (often critical) literature about the local and regional news media in the field of journalism studies. More specifically, it is informed by NUJ-funded research my colleague Professor Bob Franklin and I carried out into working conditions at Media Wales and the implementation of its multimedia strategy (which, as you know, was largely based on the collective and individual testimony of your own journalists, many of whom were surveyed and interviewed in depth). The figures relating to levels of staffing, circulation, profit, the pensions deficit, and company debt, on which I base much of my critique come from Trinity Mirror’s and Media Wales’ publicly available company accounts and have also been widely reported in the financial press.

“I was particularly troubled you thought my point about re-hashing press releases was untrue, and insulting to journalists at Media Wales. Sadly, my comment was rooted in fact. Much (not all, of course) of the news that gets published these days is re-hashed PR. How do I know this is the case at Cardiff? Because journalists there have told me (both in interviews and survey responses). The research mentioned above shows that 92% of survey respondents said the use of PR copy in the news had increased in the last decade. Many lamented this fact, and complained about the other devastating effects of repeated cuts, in interviews. The simple reason for this sad development is that staff are so overworked (84% of respondents said their workload had increased since they started out in the job). I take some personal solace in the fact that numerous current and former Media Wales journalists have written to me this week with messages of support and glum agreement. A big motivating factor in the work I do is the wish to support reporters, and my research has always received favourable comments from those working in newsrooms. To suggest my article is an attack on journalists is something of a smokescreen. Media Wales’ remaining editorial staff work very hard, often for little reward, and with an astonishing amount of good will. The reasons for poor quality journalism don’t lie with poor quality journalists, but with corporate strategies which makes such journalism the rational result of its operations.

“You also say that I could have chosen to write about the introduction of the new multimedia newsroom and the success of WalesOnline. These developments did not, as you suggest, “pass me by”. In fact they form the basis of much of my previous research into Trinity Mirror. If the move to multimedia online news had been managed well it could indeed have been used to drive positive changes. Instead the company took it as a chance to further cut staffing costs (central to Trinity Mirror’s 2006 strategic review on the future of the company was the “adoption of a new technology-led operating model across the group to accelerate growth and reduce costs”). More redundancies soon followed. Journalists we spoke with quite reasonably complained of increasing workloads, a lack of adequate time to produce multimedia web content, the fact they were inadequately trained to do new work such as video journalism, and the likelihood that this would result in the new content being of poor quality. The evidence suggests that the move online at Media Wales exacerbated, rather than mitigated, the problems I outline in my piece.

“You refer in your statement to the company’s attempts to drag Cardiff’s researchers “out of the dark ages” after our last report was published. In fact neither I nor my colleague received any direct communication from the Media Wales or Trinity Mirror. I’m glad we can at least discuss these issues more openly this time, and I’d be more than happy to debate these issues further in a public forum.

“I hope to have answered some of your criticisms, and hope that I trust that we can continue this exchange in a constructive way.”

Others clearly saw that my research was not an attack on journalists, but on the pressures under which they work. Guy Aitchison, editor of the OpenDemocracy website, wrote:

“Williams’ accusation is that Trinity has not put in place any kind of long-term strategy to manage the structural changes that are taking place, sacrificing the long-term viability of the papers and the wider public good to the short-term interests of shareholders. This strategy is known in the US as “‘squeezing the lemon’: extracting every last drop of profit from its titles, trading on historic reputations, and reaping high advertising yields while the going is good.”

He quotes Jeremy Dear, Secretary General of the National Union of Journalists, who called the last round of Trinity Mirror cuts, which will mean 200 less jobs at its Fleet Street title, “Neanderthal”, adding: “It’s disgraceful that against a background of making more than £70 million in profit last year and of paying millions in remuneration to a handful of Trinity Mirror execs, the company should now throw more than a quarter of its talented, hardworking workforce onto the scrap heap.”

Aitchison continues: “The cuts are defended as part of the transformation of the Trinity titles into light and agile multimedia businesses, but they surely go far beyond what’s reasonable. Indeed, it looks massively short-termist.”

Greenslade appears to share my fears for the industry. Arguing that this debate has brought “into the open a set of arguments that have bubbled away for years”, he adds: “It is no laughing matter for journalists, not simply because of the continuing threat to their jobs, but because of a genuine concern about the quality of journalism on offer to a public that, for a variety of reasons, appears unhappy with the current output.”

But perhaps the last word should go to Martin Shipton, chief reporter on the Western Mail and the NUJ’s Father of Chapel at Media Wales’ Cardiff centre. In a speech to mark World Press Freedom Day and given on April 9 in Cardiff this year, under the title New Threats to Press Freedom, Shipton lamented the “relentless slide into what I describe as ‘junk journalism’.” He added:

“Today, regrettably, a high proportion of material that gets into newspapers is content that has been provided by the public relations industry on behalf of clients who want to see their name in print. Very often this is in the form of spurious surveys conducted about some fatuous consumer topic that has been sponsored by a PR company’s client. Often they are not even bona fide opinion surveys that could withstand the slightest methodological scrutiny…

“…Some people are still carrying out robust academic research, however, and much that is relevant to my theme has been undertaken at the Journalism department of Cardiff University by people for whom I have the utmost respect. Professor Bob Franklin, Dr Andy Williams and others studied the impact on newsrooms of the changes that have occurred in recent years… In many cases, material supplied by PR agencies is appearing in newspapers virtually untouched, because the reporters have such a heavy workload to undertake.

“Because of that, they inevitably rely more and more on unchallenging material that is supplied to them free of charge by organisations with a vested commercial interest. All of this, of course, is driven by the cost cutting that has taken place in pursuit of higher profits. Most small newspaper companies have been swallowed up by the giants like Trinity Mirror… Each of these groups is primarily interested in maximising their profits. The only way they appear to be able to achieve this end is by slashing the number of people they employ and in the process damaging or even destroying the newspapers they own.”

Shipton went on to talk about how:

“Concern about the future of the newspaper industry in Wales and the UK as a whole had reached a point where the NUJ considered it appropriate to raise the matter formally both with the Welsh Assembly Government through the Heritage Minister Alun Ffred Jones and the sub-committee of the National Assembly which had been considering the outlook for the broadcasting industry in Wales. I outlined how we believe the crisis is such that there is not merely a threat to many hundreds of jobs, but to an essential element of Welsh democracy.”

Commenting on the closures of Celtic titles like the Neath and Port Talbot Guardians, Shipton said:

“It seemed especially odd in a year when we had undergone major change to an integrated newsroom, with journalists working across newspaper titles and with greater emphasis on web journalism, including videos. The temptation was to see the crisis affecting the company simply as a manifestation of the recession. Yet, although the difficulties had clearly been accelerated by the economic downturn, the conditions for the crisis affecting the newspaper industry had been in place for a long time. Declining circulations, unsustainably high profit expectations, falls in advertising revenues and uncertainty about how to secure sufficient volumes of future digital (web-based) revenue had combined to prompt grave concern.”

Quoting figures that contrasted job losses with profit, Shipton continued:

“So far as Media Wales was concerned, high profit levels had been maintained not by increasing revenue, but by shedding labour… I told the sub-committee that all the indications were that newspaper circulations would continue to decline. Management has been unable to reassure us about future advertising revenue from the website. Despite the widely perceived understanding within the industry that profit margins will fall, Trinity Mirror has been unable to provide a coherent narrative to investors about the future. Instead, the board relies on cost savings to maintain profit levels as high as possible.”

Pointing to Media Wales NUJ members determination to strike if there are further redundancies, Shipton adds:

“With every local newspaper that is shut, with every local office that is closed down, communities are the poorer. The pattern is for journalists to retrench to centralised newsrooms, inevitably more remote and less able to cover the events and stories that are of significance to local people. And readers are not stupid. They recognise the loss of a local flavour, the increasing blandness of the content, the result of churnalism dependent on commercial and other vested interests who want to push their products or their ideas – and they stop buying the papers in droves. Newspapers have been the victims of their owners’ greed for unsustainably high profits and a trivialisation process fuelled by cost cutting.

“The Western Mail could, of course, be better if we had more resources. But in comparison with many other papers produced these days, it’s not bad. And, let’s face it, it’s the best we’ve got in Wales and the only paper that tries to take a national view of our nation. Its survival as a daily paper is, however, under threat. There may be no immediate or announced plans to turn it into a weekly, but that, I’m very sorry to say, is the direction of travel. That’s what Trinity Mirror did to the Birmingham Post a few months ago – what had long been the morning paper in the UK’s second largest city. It would be foolish to assume that the Western Mail is immune to such market forces.”