FORUM - New Journal editor Eric Gordon reflects on a week that saw two newspapers suddenly cease publication

I LAMENT the death knell that rang for two newspapers on Thursday – one for the terminally diagnosed News of the World, the other for Camden Gazette, whose print version was killed off – however temporarily – without any notice to readers.

As a journalist who has believed for years that Murdoch has poisoned the well of British media and culture, I should be overjoyed at his main money-making machine, the News of the World, being closed down.

But it is sad to think what the News of the World could have been like under different proprietorship.

That applies, of course, to Murdoch’s other daily – The Sun.

In fact, when the Labour newspaper, the Daily Herald, was replaced by The Sun in the mid-60s, the newspaper had a gritty tabloid style not all that different to that of the Daily Mirror. But the shutters were pulled down when Murdoch bought it in 1969.

But what about the apparent death of the other paper, Camden Gazette? At the end it was in many ways a typical local weekly, largely fashioned around the values of the modern national tabloid.

You might ask what’s so sad about its demise. But it had a meritorious long history going back to the 19th century, although it had undergone several transformations since then – both in content, design and style.

Before its present owner, Archant, which also owns the Ham and High and other north and east London weeklies, bought it in 2003, it had sailed under the venerable title of the St Pancras Chronicle since at least the 1950s, if not before then. As the “Chron” it had a devout working-class readership, mainly in Camden Town and Kentish Town, but as the old readers died younger ones didn’t replace them.

Where’s the common link between the News of the World and Camden Gazette? Both are privately owned, both epitomise the changing style of ownership of newspapers since the Second World War.

Before the war, regional newspapers were owned by relatively small, one-off companies or run by families. In fact, the Ham and High was run for much of the last century by a family firm until the 1960s or so when it was taken over by a relatively small group. That was before Archant, one of Britain’s largest regional press giants, acquired it in 1998.

In the old days, there were more national dailies than today, all competing with each other.

In recent decades the pool of owners has shrunk – both among national daily proprietors as well as in the regional press.

Of the 2,000 weekly and evening titles in the UK, four to five national companies, one a US subsidiary, control more than 90 per cent.

To such proprietors, newspapers are regarded as simply a product, hardly different to any other retail product. If their newspapers cannot produce a substantial net return – more than 30 per cent before the present economic crash – they are simply closed down – just as items are removed from the shelves of supermarkets once they become a market loser.

But newspapers are not the same as soap powder, toothpaste, TV, cars or iPhones.

At first, they evolved around the 18th century to inform and entertain. Later, they became indispensable to democracy as a watchdog on government.

Their role in society cannot simply be measured in terms of profit-and-loss as if they were mere merchandise. And with them grows a kind of umbilical cord connecting them to readers.

In all the deluge of press stories and TV newscasts and interviews on the closure of the News of the World, have you noticed no one talks about the readers – and their loss?

Hate the paper or love it, the fact remains there were more than two million people who bought the News of the World every Sunday and nobody talked to them about the future of the paper. Many had been buying it for decades and their grandparents and great-grandparents before them. The same goes for the Camden Gazette.

You see, for most owners readers do not count. That is why they are the missing piece in the jigsaw tale of Murdoch and the News  of the World.

Whenever a crisis engulfs a media company, the CEOs and senior management simply delete the readers from their minds with the click of a computer key. No longer are they thinking and feeling human beings but, in the minds of media chiefs, simply “collateral damage”.  

On a national daily or TV channel, the reader or viewer is a distant spot at the far end of the galaxy.

But on a local weekly things are different. The staff become acquainted with hundreds, if not thousands, of readers.   How many readers would know offhand where the offices of a national daily are? Our offices are a little landmark in the borough.

Every week, hundreds will visit the office – to place an advertisement or ask reporters to follow up a story or tackle bureaucracy or errant private companies.

Our readers are our neighbours.  

I know that what I am about to say may sound like pure Utopian fantasising, but I believe readers do count, their feelings, their opinions, and that they should not be treated like feudal serfs by the media aristocracy of today.

I would even go further and say that the real owners of a newspaper should be the readers. We do not want government-owned newspapers. That can only lead to the suppres­sion of uncomfortable news and a suffocating dictatorship.

But new forms of ownerships need to be constructed.  

Events over decades have shown that, where newspapers are privately owned, the proprietors wield too strong an influence – whether it be a local paper or a national one.  

Other non-private forms of newspaper ownership need to be found. This may sound like a suggestion too far. But with blogging, Twitter and Facebook being used more and more, the need for experiments in ownership will become more apparent.

Experiments could be made in the creation, say, of new cooperatively-owned newspaper and online companies.  

To help the growth of new media, government subsidies could be given but, note, subsidies not Whitehall ownership.

Two newspapers are leading the way.

Way out front is the weekly West Highland Free Press. A fine Scottish campaigning weekly set up in the 1970s, it was turned into a kind of employee-owned paper more than two years ago on the lines of the John Lewis mutual ownership. Overseeing it is a trust which ensures it cannot be sold off to another newspaper, and that it will remain as it is.

The Camden New Journal is different, too.

We were set up by two journalists in 1982 and are run in such a way that the staff as a whole play a significant, determinant part in the life of the paper as well as its sister publications, West End Extra and the Islington Tribune.

Where the West Highland Free Press has gone, we may follow.

All this is a different kind of ownership. Readers should not be seen as people you can slough off when the balance sheets become uncertain.

Can things change?

Something has to give. The Murdoch crisis and the crisis facing the regional press highlight the crisis of ownership.  The conventional political parties, by their nature, are unwilling to debate this question. Only the readers can, only the public, the ones who matter after all.

Published: 14 July 2011
by ERIC GORDON