That's enough Enders - Ed

I have blogged before about the American-born media analyst Claire Enders and her prediction that the next four years will see the loss of 650 of the UK's 1,300 local and regional newspapers.

My instinctive reaction to her pronouncements is that it must be very nice to be paid large amounts of money for spreading doom and gloom about other people's job prospects, but I'll try to let that rather uncharitable thought pass.

In her defence, Enders has been uncannily accurate in some of her previous predictions, such as forecasting the dotcom crash at the turn of the millennium, and that's probably why the business media seems to have accepted her analysis at face value.

But for all her undoubted intellect, she seems to deal more in sweeping generalisations and soundbites than in hard facts, her latest interview in yesterday's Guardian, in which she likened newspapers to fax machines and CD players, being no exception.

The facts are that 50 local newspapers have so far closed this year, almost all of them freesheets. If that rate continues for the next four years, we will see perhaps 200-300 close, although Enders clearly expects that rate of closure to accelerate.

As Dominic Ponsford points out on Press Gazette's blog, The Wire, it would be interesting to know whether she believes the closures will continue to come mainly from the free newspaper sector, or whether she thinks the 400 or so paid-for dailies and weeklies are under the same level of threat.

At times, Ms Enders' statements can gives the impression - intentionally or otherwise - that there is nothing the industry can do to avert the coming apocalypse, but even if that is the case, there is surely lots it can do to mitigate it.

What, for instance, does she think of the potential for saving titles through asset-swapping or further industry consolidation - or for that matter, through alternative ownership models as advocated by the NUJ and others?

In summary, I think it's time Ms Enders spelled out in much greater detail where she thinks the axe will fall, and by implication, which half of the industry she thinks still has a viable future in the digital world.

Failing that, she should consider taking the advice which Clement Attlee famously proffered to Harold Laski: "A period of silence on your part would be most welcome."

Good business sense

Difficult times at Trinity Mirror at the moment, with the announcement of nine newspaper closures and job losses yesterday, and accusations from the National Union of Journalists concerning the future of two of its traditional morning papers, the Birmingham Post and Liverpool Daily Post.

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade has published a lengthy post analysing the TM Midlands proposals. Not all journalists will agree with it but it provides a useful counterbalance to the NUJ point of view.

Meanwhile, a correspondent from TM-owned Media Wales emails HTFP to let us know that the company has (in his words) "hit such hard times it is renting out the 5th and 6th floor of its new offices in Cardiff."

We say: good on them. If it helps avoid any further journalist job losses, then renting out unused office space surely makes good business sense. Come to that, there are probably other newspaper publishers who ought to think about doing the same.

Is the NUJ guilty of scaremongering?

Sometimes the decision whether or not to publish a story on HoldtheFrontPage is not necessarily a straightforward one. One such instance was yesterday's press release from the National Union of Journalists claiming that publisher Trinity Mirror plans to axe eight weekly titles in the Midlands and turn the Birmingham Post into a weekly or bi-weekly publication.

If the story is true, a number of journalists' jobs will inevitably be lost, and there is an argument for saying that the NUJ should have kept quiet about this until the people affected had been informed in the usual way.

That said, once it had put out a public statement on the issue, not just to HTFP but to all our competitor media news sites, it became very hard for us to ignore the story.

It generated an interesting debate in the comments section. While most readers thought the NUJ was simply doing its job, a significant minority thought the union had acted irresponsibly, with one accusing it of having "put the fear of God up people."

Will 650 local newspapers really close by 2014?

Media analyst Claire Enders made a bit of splash at today's culture, media and sport committee hearing in the Commons by predicting that half the UK's 1,300 local papers would close over the next five years.

Ms Enders claimed that "many titles" were already losing money and were only being kept alive by the "good graces" of their publishers.

Although we at HTFP don't in any way underestimate the scale of the difficulties facing the regional press, I would certainly be interested to hear what evidence she has for this claim.

It hardly seems credible to me that regional publishers would keep loss-making titles going, and her comments don't really tally with recent half-yearly results showing most leading groups are still profitable, albeit at much lower margins than was once the case.