Society of Editors: It’s time for out-of-the box thinking

Raymond Snoddy‘s conference highlights: The Lord Chief Justice’s undying commitment to openness in Government freedom of information, newspaper-owned PR agencies, the thorny issue of charging for online content and thinking “out of the box” …

The star of this week’s Society of Editors conference at  Stansted was not an editor, a journalist or even a consultant.  It was a gentle, articulate, rather avuncular old gentleman who talked with great passion about the importance of newspapers to the operation of a democratic society.

Name a functioning democracy anywhere in the world, the keynote speaker asked his audience, which does not have a free press and an independent judiciary.

Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, pledged his undying commitment to openness in Government freedom of information and opposition to the misuse of “super injunctions” to prevent MPs knowing the contents of a question before the House of Commons.

But it was as an outsider to the media business that Lord Judge impressed even further with succinct analysis and advice for the ailing newspaper business.  The press, he said, was in a battle for “its very survival” and it was time for everyone involved to starting thinking “out of the box”.

But what did the Lord Chief Justice think of plans to use public money to boost regional journalism. He said he would much prefer it if publishers solved their own problems rather than having to rely on Government.

Soon after the top judge spoke it became clear that publishers and TV operators would probably have no option but to solve their own problems.  The Government had decided to postpone a decision on any “top-slicing” of the BBC licence fee until 2012. That was the only clearly identified source of funds to pay for contestable news franchises to provide competition for the BBC and that could have included newspaper groups.

As the Conservatives are against top-slicing for such a purpose – though not so obviously opposed to lopping 10 per cent off the licence fee – the news franchises are effectively dead in the water.

As to Lord Judge’s plea to think out of the box, there was the old problem of identifying exactly which thoughts and even what box.

One suggestion from Neil Benson, editorial director of Trinity Mirror’s regional newspapers, was that newspapers could set up their own PR agencies on an arms length basis to provide lucrative services for local companies.  After all, why let skilled journalists wander off into external PR agencies when the newspaper groups could make extra profits for themselves.

“Won’t work”, muttered a former senior ITN executive after listening to the plan. ITN once had a division making corporate videos. It had to be closed because the potential conflicts of interest proved too great. You can’t make a corporate video, say for Shell, one day and then slag the company off on the news bulletins the next.

It was also Benson who thought that the most likely source of new revenue from new platforms for newspapers was adding video to the mix.

There’s no money in video, best not to try to do it at all, retorted  Morgan Holt, a director of Huge Entertainment, which is part of the Engine Group. They can’t both be right.

Then on the thorny issue of charging for online content Francois Nel, director of the Journalism Leaders Programme at the University of Central Lancashire, declared that Rupert Murdoch was “the litmus test” on the issue.

It was “problematical” said Nel, diplomatically, whether Murdoch would be able to charge for general content as opposed to the specialist content provided by the Wall Street Journal.  Yet later at the conference The Times‘ editor James Harding announced that from the spring it would start charging for digital editions, probably on a pay-per-day basis and would also be confronting “those people who we think are the threat to the future of independent journalism”.

Then there was a battle royal between two consultants to the newspaper industry – between the pessimist Claire Enders, founder and chief executive of Enders Analysis, and the much more optimistic Jim Chisholm, joint principal of iMedia Advisory Services.

Enders the pessimist warned that around half of the UK’s 1,300 newspapers would go out of business in the next five years. As many as 21,000 media jobs would have been lost by the time the current crisis had bottomed out. The commercial outlook facing the media was a dire picture the print industry was “unable to master”.

In contrast, Chisholm argued that he expected the newspaper casualty figure in the UK to be more like 10 per cent and that the industry had a debt problem not a profit problem.  “Newspapers can decline a long, long way before they become unviable,” he said.

In fact, taking cost-cutting into account, Chisholm believes that profit margins for newspapers could rise from an average of around 10.5 per cent to as much as 27.5 per cent by 2014.  They can’t both be right.

Perhaps it’s time to invite Lord Judge back again to the Society of Editors conference next year to adjudicate on all the out-of-the box thinking.