To launch a new quality newspaper in today’s crowded and declining market is either brave or foolhardy. To finance such a project requires even more courage and is probably downright foolish.
As a journalist I welcome Stephen Glover’s project to create a new highbrow national tabloid - a sort of British Le Monde (it is even likely to be called the World) - for all those educated readers supposedly alienated by the alleged "dumbing down" o
f the established broadsheets. Anything that tries to raise journalistic standards and adds to reader choice deserves to be supported. But as an investor I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.
For a start, I’m not sure Glover is the man for the job. True, he has a reasonable journalistic pedigree: he used to write leaders for the Daily Telegraph and now pens readable (if sometimes unreliable) columns for the Daily Mail and Spectator. More important, he was one of the three founding members who presided over the successful launch of the Independent in 1986.
But Glover played very little part in running the Indy as a business. He has no financial experience and has never been a business executive, much less the boss. Filing thumbing-sucking pieces on the media from Oxford for the Speccie does not make you a media magnate. His vainglorious attempt as the first editor of the Independent on Sunday to take on the Sunday Times proved to be an ambition too far - and crashed on take-off.
To succeed with a new daily in the most competitive newspaper market in the world will require immense business acumen (including tough cost controls), huge editorial flair (readers want quality but they don’t want to be bored - and Le Monde is boring!), the marketing skills of a genius (so that the new publication can carve out a distinctive voice in a crowded market where smaller titles risk being drowned out by louder titles) - and far greater resources than the £15 million in launch capital Glover has not yet succeeded in raising from the City.
The founders of the World liken themselves to the low-cost airlines and reckon to replicate their success against established broadsheets in the way easyJet and Ryanair have given British Airways a bloody nose. Existing broadsheets have all manner of high costs inherent in their production, they argue, which are not easily shed and which the new paper will not have. True. But the analogy is not entirely convincing: it is not BA’s club class passengers that have deserted to cheaper airlines; it is the more downmarket (even tabloid-reading) passengers - not the sort likely to be attracted to the World. Moreover, there is not a single cost saving device that the World will deploy which has not already been tried; and I can report from first-hand experience that £15 million is peanuts for the scale of the task in hand. Since 1998 I have presided over the Business (formerly Sunday Business), a relentlessly upmarket business paper that eschews the parochialism, superficiality and unreliability of the Sunday business sections and offers serious in-depth analysis, substantial international business coverage and rigorous reporting.
The Business is highly regarded for the quality of its journalism by its upmarket readers at home and abroad, and its audited circulation is now more than 300,000. It has cost around £40 million over the past six years to get to where we are today; and, though profitability is at last a prospect, it is still a year away (at best, we could be breaking even by the final quarter of this year).
Moreover, we have cut costs to the bone (to a degree unimaginable in Fleet Street), we have the cost of publishing only once a week and we have had to move into continental Europe, because (as the Economist and the Financial Times discovered before us) Britain alone does not contain enough of the upmarket readers we are seeking.
Of course, the Business is more of a specialist publication than Glover is proposing. Even so, I have no doubt that his venture will require at least £50 million to see it through to profitability (if that fine day is ever reached) and more likely closer to £100 million. After all, the Independent launched with £18 million, which is closer to £40 million in today’s prices, and the market for quality newspapers is far tougher today than it was 18 years ago.
I calculate that Glover would run out of his £15 million before the end of the first year. His chances of survival would be better if he had an existing newspaper group as a partner and investor (I understand one might be waiting in the wings); and, of course, if the concept was proving robust, he should be able to refinance the venture. But I fear he is proceeding on a false premise.
Glover has written ad nauseam about the supposed dumbing down of Britain’s broadsheets, lamenting the trend and opining that there is a collection of disillusioned, discriminating readers big enough to support a British Le Monde, which would be uncompromising in its low-key projection of serious news, analysis and features.
There is no question that competitive pressures have forced British broadsheets to broaden their appeal: they now cover lighter matters, especially involving celebrities, which they would not have touched 20 or 30 years ago. But this broadening also reflects a less stratified society in which the old class divisions are blurred or extinct and in which many interests nowadays cross class boundaries.
It is also a response to the fact that the British Establishment is far broader and more eclectic than it once was, consisting not just of those at the top of politics, the civil service, law and church but the leaders of media, design, advertising, fashion and all the multifarious activities of the information age - which include far more women than ever before.
Yet, even as the broadsheets have broadened to accommodate changes in society, their more populist content has still plenty of room for the extensive coverage of politics, foreign affairs, science and the arts. Thirty years ago most daily quality papers were barely 16 pages.
Today they have ballooned to three or four times that size (much more on Saturdays), allowing scope to be simultaneously populist and serious.
Of course, like Glover, I have sometimes baulked at the space today’s broadsheets devote to triviality. The Daily Telegraph, until recently, seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with pictures of Liz Hurley and her ilk, for no great purpose; and it has proved impossible, even in the broadsheets, to escape the phenomenon of I’m a Celebrity ...
Yet when 17 million people watch the climax of this TV show something is happening in society on which the broadsheets should be commenting. My complaint is not that the broadsheets cover it but that the extent of their coverage and the manner in which they do it are often no different from the tabloids. Harry Evans once taught that broadsheets should cover popular matters in a serious way; it is a lesson they need to relearn. But to ignore popular culture would be a grave mistake, no matter how high-minded the publication - we do not want to regress to a stratified society in which high-court judges have to ask the equivalent of: "What/who are the Beatles?"
No doubt Glover and his team have plenty of opinion polls and focus group research which show a certain type of reader pining for a more serious newspaper. Broadcasters can produce reams of research showing TV viewers want more documentaries - though for some strange reason they don’t watch them when broadcast.
It is the same with newspapers. The Times has become more serious under editor Robert Thompson; but until he launched a tabloid edition, his reward was to see sales sink from almost 700,000 towards 600,000. The FT carries the most serious general news of any broadsheet: its British sales have recently been dropping dramatically.
I suspect we are now of an age in this country in which the more populist has to be alongside the more serious in any quality newspaper if it is to survive and prosper. After all, for all its worthy (and dull) quality, the finances of Le Monde are a mess, even though it faces nothing like the competition in France that a British equivalent would face here; and the New York Times can only take the high ground it does (with an appearance almost as dull as Le Monde’s) because it enjoys a monopoly in its heartland.
No British broadsheet enjoys that luxury, which is why they have to be more accessible and appealing. But maybe Glover and his team will prove me wrong. As a fan of Le Monde and the New York Times - and someone who has sometimes succumbed to the Glover dream of a British equivalent - nobody would be more pleased if he succeeded. But I don’t bet on my dreams.
The full article contains 1535 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
