Life after Death

I read during the week that the London Evening Standard has broken even financially. Both it’s circulation and readership has risen dramatically, all since it was acquired, at a cost of £1, by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, who promptly turned the title into a free newspaper. Of course all the pundits said it wouldn’t work. But he seems to have proved them wrong. I have mentioned a number of times in previous blogs that I believe newspapers owned by corporations somehow lose their voice. The Standard under the control of Associated Newspapers seemed not to lose it’s voice, but lost it’s way. Under it’s new owner it seems to have found it again. Perhaps at the same time it has discovered a better way to run a newspaper, maybe, as I have forecast before, The Standard is showing the way to all newspapers, evenings, dailies and weeklies to counter the inroads into their circulations by the new electronic media. Imagine a day when you can take a copy of any paper you like …for free! Circulations would rocket.

It isn’t the first time a London evening paper has been instrumental in changing the newpaper industry. In the mid to late eighteen nineties The Evening News, a London broadsheet newspaper owned by Lord Northcliffe and under the editorship of Kennedy Jones, became one of a leading grroup of newspapers that transformed the pattern of newspaper sales. This title, and others, aimed at reaching new, wider audiences than that traditionally served by The Times. The change in direction was highly succsessful and at a time when evening papers were not considered to be a good financial investment, The Evening News was making £25,000 a year. It acheived and maintained the largest sale in London over a long period until finally, in 1980 it merged with it’s rival The Evening Standard then owned by Beaverbrook, publishers of the Daily Express. The market for evening papers in London went into steady decline after that and The Evening Standard was later acquired by Associated Newspapers.

I began my careeer in Fleet Street in the Classified Advertisement Department of the Evening News in 1959. Newsprint, controlled since 1940, had been off rationing for only a couple of years and was still in short supply, restricting issue sizes. Commercial television was threatening to cream off large chunks of Newspaper advertisement revenue. The News was a broadsheet then, owned by Associated Newspapers who also published the Daily Mail. The offices of the Classified Department were in Tudor Street about a hundred yards from Northcliffe House wherein the rest of the paper’s personnel were housed, including the Display Advertisement Department. They enjoyed what was, compared to the Tudor Street offices, great luxury. The two advertisement departments were organised, run and staffed in totally different ways. To get a position on the display team you needed to be related to someone with a title, wear the right old school tie, or to have held a commission of some sort in one of the armed or civil services. Transfers from the classified area to the display were unheard of. Still if you knew someone in the classified department or the production side of the paper you stood a chance of getting an interview with the Classified Manager, whether you got the job or not depended on whether your face fitted. I came in by the latter route.

It was a completely different world to me. I had come from an area of industry where sales and marketing, (they didn’t use the latter word in those days), was taken very seriously. In that company every employeee had to undergo a fortnight’s training in the production, use and sales of the products. Then, allocated to a territory, salesmen would sell the same product in the same way using the same sales talks whether they were in Banff or Brighton, Land’s End or London, Cardiff or Cleethorpes. There was no other way to promotion than through a successful sales record. Ask anyone who worked for Caribonum Ltd! The systems worked and the company retained it’s brand leadership right up to the introduction of electronic copying. In the newsaper world at that time, selling hardly came into the equation, it was more a matter of being able to fit an advertiser into the paper. Issue sizes were still strictly controlled despite de-rationing, classified ads were just that, lines and lines of boring type. When we suggested that photos be allowed to illustrate such categories as motors, property and others we were considered to be thinking in an outlandish way. The change did eventually come with many others and was of course a great success.

There were two other evening papers then, The Evening Standard and The Star, both tabloids. The News had the biggest circulation by far, and the smallest was The Standard. Oddly enough the first to close was The Star; at the time it was selling three quarters of a million copies a day, but it merged with The Standard in 1960. I remember the shock of the announcement very clearly. Times were changing and the changes that follwed came rapidly one after another. The attitude and structure of the sales departments of newspapers imported new ideas and methods from the newly emerging practioners of the marketing ethic and suddenly cirulations increased to unprecedented levels.

Currently all titles are suffering serious falls in circulation, except of course that of The Evening Standard. So, I must end how I began. Times are a changing again, perhaps all titles can learn from the activities of Mr.Lebedev and his success with The Standard. Maybe if he acquires The Independent and makes that a free daily paper too it will cause a wave of new thinking to sweep through the industry and bring new thinking, new life and attitudes to what at the moment looks like an industry dying on it’s feet. Let’s hope so, newspapers are and always have been one of the cornerstones of free speech, to be without them is unthinkable.