Gallows humour at Press launch

Media entrepreneur Chris Bullivant may have branded regional publisher Trinity Mirror as 'barmy' at the champagne launch of his new Birmingham Press title last Friday - but not all the partygoers were quite as gung-ho.

As our mole at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens event revealed, some of the Press team are already resorting to gallows humour. Here's his special report.

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From Our Own Correspondent

The editor of Chris Bullivant's newly launched paper in Birmingham has revealed the true scarcity of his resources.

Speaking at the launch of The Birmingham Press on Friday at the city’s Botanical Gardens, Tony Lennox told a group of guests how he was hoping his “single laptop doesn’t blow up."

After one or two giggly media types laughed this off, Lennox insisted: “I’m not joking, the entire newspaper – content, pictures, design templates and all – is on a single laptop in my kitchen.

“I keep on waking in a sweat that the bloody thing’s crashed or that someone’s nicked it. If they did there’d be no edition next week.”

One IT-style boffin advised Lennox to acquire an external mini disc-drive as a back-up, which appeared to leave the veteran print hack confused.

“My lads will sort something out, they’ve got a portable CD player for their band,” Lennox assured his audience.

Earlier, Lennox came face-to-face with former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves, who had given the Press “six months” to survive.

In typical Lennox fashion, he slapped Reeves on the shoulder and corrected him: “I’d be happy with six weeks, mate!”

Meanwhile, Lennox’s many new freelance writers – most former Post and Mail journalists and many made redundant in the last 18 months – started to tell all and sundry how pleased they were to be back in print.

Until one or two started to compare linage rates, that is...

One stalwart old hack commented they didn’t really mind that it was a pittance, it “was just chuffing to see my byline again”.

This brought a snort from former Post business editor and ex-John Bright Street columnist John Duckers, now penning his Duckers and Diving column for the Press.

Well known for putting his foot in it, Duckers commented loudly: “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m being paid quite well for my contributions, better than the Post used to pay for my column.”

Several new Press freelancers were seen heading in the direction of formidable NUJ northern organiser Chris Morley (yes, Chris too was supping the bubbles at the launch of Bullivant’s ‘no office, no staff’ newspaper).

Finally, the 150-odd guests at the party heard Bullivant himself, adorned in a three-piece grey pinstriped suit, attempt a triumphant launch speech.

There were many scratched heads as Bullivant meandered on a long description of him and his wife’s hobby of collecting old silver in France.

But he saved the day when everyone realised he was referring to precious trophies like newspapers, and to the skills of the Lennox couple who’d managed to put week one together (Tony’s wife Marsya handled the property copy).

Bullivant, thumbs in his waistcoat, ended with: “You can’t hope for a launch edition to be 100%, but I think it’s already in the 90s and will only get better.”

One cynic was heard to mutter: “Yeah, the 1990s!”, before calling for more Pomagne.

Former Birmingham Mail editor Steve Dyson will be reviewing the Press, alongside Trinity Mirror rival Birmingham Post Lite, on his HTFP blog tomorrow.

A culture clash in Wolverhampton?

One of the great things about having a story comments facility on your website is that it enables users to amplify what you have already written, and perhaps introduce fresh angles and context to a story.

So it was with our report on HoldtheFrontPage about the shock departure of Steve Brown from his new-ish job as chief executive of the Claverley Group, publishers of Wolverhampton's Express and Star.

Details were very sketchy. The company restricted itself to a one-line comment, while Steve himself is, quite understandably, keeping his own counsel about the reasons behind his departure.

It has been left to our story commenters to shed light on what appears to have been something of a clash of cultures between the very traditional, family-run Claverley Group and the much more corporate background from which former Trinity Mirror regional MD Steve had hailed.

One commenter using the pseudonym Molly New (think Wolves football ground) called Steve's departure "a victory for common sense," adding: "Although on-the-face-of-it not a 'bad-bloke', Mr Brown was a very 'bad-fit' with the E and S."

Others, though, clearly feel that was no bad thing, and that a degree of modernisation was required at a paper that lost 7.6pc of its circulation last year according to the most recent ABC figures.

Whatever the truth of the situation, it is clear that staff at the Claverley titles appear much more divided about Steve than his former employees at Trinity, as evidenced by this remarkable thread of comments last April.

On that occasion as well as this, HTFP provided those employees with a voice they would not otherwise have had. I know I'm biased, but in my view it's one of the very best things about the site.

Will others follow where Trinity Mirror has led?

A certain amount flak will inevitably be flying in the direction of Trinity Mirror over its decision to take the Birmingham Post weekly. Indeed the NUJ's Chris Morley, who seems to reserve his most colourful invective for matters affecting Trinity Mirror Midlands, has already described it as "the corporate equivalent of self-harm."

But although the move will win the company few friends among journalists, some might applaud Trinity for having bitten the bullet over reducing the frequency of a loss-making title while most other publishers have merely talked about it.

Since the start of the downturn in the autumn of 2008, there have been numerous wild predictions about the industry's future, with claims that up to 650 local titles would close and many regional dailies would become weeklies.

So far, though, only two regional publishers have actually gone down that route - GMG Regional Media by taking the Reading Evening Post twice-weekly, and Trinity Mirror with yesterday's decision.

With a circulation down to 12,076 according to the most recent ABC figures, the Post was always a likely candidate for change of frequency.

Now the deed has finally been done, the big question in the industry will be whether this will prove to be a one-off - or alternatively, whether other publishers will now follow where Trinity and GMG have led.

Speculation mounts over Birmingham dailies

Speculation is mounting in the blogosphere over the future of the Trinity Mirror owned titles in Birmingham.

Nearly two months ago, the company launched a wide-ranging consultation over the future of the Birmingham Post and Mail.

Options under consideration included turning the Post into a weekly title and printing the Mail overnight. It is believed this would save around £1m a year on van runs.

Trinity Mirror is saying nothing officially as yet, but two Birmingham-based blogs are claiming that an announcement on the proposed moves is imminent.

Philip Parkin, operations director of the Birmingham Press Club, writes on his blog that "the coming week promises to be a significant one for The Birmingham Post."

"My spies tell me that this is the week that the announcement about the newspaper’s future is due to be made, with the switch to weekly happening sometime in late November," he says.

Another Birmingham blogger calling himself The Stirrer goes further, saying the announcement will be made today.

"Expect fireworks from newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror in the next 24 hours, with confirmation that the Birmingham Post is going weekly – possibly as early as November 5," he wrote yesterday, claiming staff have already been told that "major changes" on both titles are imminent.

3.30pm UPDATE: It's now official. The Birmingham Post is to go weekly, the Mail is to go to overnight printing, and both their editors have decided to leave. All the details over at HoldtheFrontPage.

Quiet birthday for Newcastle training course

In a similar sort of vein to the previous post, the journalism foundation course run in Newcastle by the Press Association recently turned 40, but there were no birthday celebrations for the renowned training centre.

Sadly for its many distinguished alumni, PA decided against holding a party due to the current economic climate.

The training scheme has been responsible for launching the careers of such regional press luminaries as the Herald's Donald Martin, Adrian Faber from the Express and Star and Brian Aitken of The Journal, in whose newsroom the students are now based.

Other notable graduates include BBC political commentator Andrew Marr, The Sun's newly-appointed political editor Tom Newton Dunn, Radio 4 presenter James Naughtie and Financial Times editor Lionel Barber.

The centre was originally the brainchild of John Gay Davis who became editorial director of Thomson Regional Newspapers, the then owners of Newcastle's Evening Chronicle and Journal, in 1969. He set up two operations, one in Cardiff and the surviving Newcastle operation.

Trinity Mirror later bought the course when they acquired the two Newcastle papers in 1995 before Press Association took over the reins in 2006.

Express & Star group gets 'fantastic manager'

When former North-East and Midlands MD Steve Brown left Trinity Mirror in a company restructure earlier this year, the response from his former employees in Newcastle and Birmingham was startling.

The NUJ chapel in Newcastle passed a vote of no confidence in the company's management over Steve's departure - despite the fact that he had previously overseen a round of job cuts at the North-East centre - while HoldtheFrontPage was deluged with comments in support of the former boss.

One Newcastle insider who called himself 'Angry Journo' wrote: "Steve Brown is without argument head and shoulders above all of them in terms of his passion, respect, strategic vision, performance delivery and intellect. Someone is going to get a fantastic manager soon. Good luck Steve."

He was right. Today it was announced that Steve is to take over as chief executive of the Claverley Group, parent company of the Wolverhampton Express & Star.

The joys of Twitter

As well as being one of the best observers of the national political scene either inside or outside the Lobby - check out his blog Outside the Bubble - David Higgerson is an enthusiastic Twitterer in his role as Trinity Mirror's head of multimedia.

Many journalists already follow his Twitter feed - but we thought this "tweet" during a recent train journey between Birmingham and Manchester deserved a slightly wider audience.

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."

Cards on the table time for would-be merger kings

So, what to make of the government's Digital Britain report published yesterday, and in particular its recommendations about whether the current newspaper merger regime should be relaxed?

Well, at first glance, the government appears to have managed the considerable feat of pleasing both Trinity Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey, who had argued for relaxation of the rules in order to allow greater industry consolidation, and NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear, who had argued precisely the opposite.

Mr Dear sees the government's refusal to change the existing law as evidence that it is not going to allow what he calls "media plurality" to be undermined.

But Ms Bailey on the other hand says that legislation is not really the issue, and that the decision to allow communications watchdog Ofcom a bigger role in assessing merger proposals is a "step in the right direction."

So who's right in their interpretation? Well, as our main report on HTFP yesterday may have indicated, we're going with Bailey on this one.

Like many government reports - and as an ex-lobby hack I've read a fair few in my time - this is one where you really have to read the small print rather than simply reading the headline.

By ruling out a change in the law, the government is not saying no to further regional press consolidation, it is merely saying that the existing merger regime is sufficiently flexible to deal with any such proposals.

The clue was in the paragraph that read "there may be some lessons that could be learned from a detailed inquiry into a specific merger or transaction involving the local and regional press." This seemed to me to be tantamount to an invitation to publishers to bring forward a specific proposal which could then be used as a test-case.

There has been intense speculation, mainly in Sunday newspapers, that the big regional press publishers are set to engage in a round of asset-swapping to enable them to achieve greater geographical consolidation.

Without going into details, some of the scenarios that have been outlined seem literally incredible to me, but stranger things have happened.

I think what the government is effectively saying to the regional press in this report is: bring forward your merger proposals, and we'll show you that we're quite capable of dealing with them in a way that recognises present-day market realities.

In other words, the ball is now firmly in the industry's court.

Web-first or print-first?

Welcome to The Journalism Hub...and what better subject to kick-off with than the good old print vs online debate.

It is fair to say opinion within the industry on the question of whether newspapers should "give away" their content online for free rather than "force" people to buy the print edition to find out what's happening locally has moved pretty much full circle over the past decade.

I recall being at a gathering a few years back at which one regional newspaper editor declared that stories would be uploaded to the web "over [his] dead body." It got the biggest cheer of the day.

Nowadays, though, websites are seen effectively as editions of the paper, with most breaking news going straight online - although it remains the case that no-one has yet found a surefire way of making money from it.

The debate was highlighted this week in a blog post by Birmingham Mail editor Steve Dyson on his his decision to go print-first with an exclusive letter from footballer Gareth Barry explaining his reasons for leaving Aston Villa for Manchester City.

Steve revealed that his decision to delay uploading the letter to the paper's website for half a day had generated an extra 4,000 in sales and, confident that this would provoke the kind of debate we love to see on the site, we made it our top story on HoldtheFrontPage today.

For me, one of the great things about HTFP is the fact that it is, increasingly, the forum for discussion about issues facing the industry, and our readers did not disappoint with some fairly trenchant views expressed.

One poster calling themselves 'Edna' wrote: "You mean to say that giving something away for nothing stops people from paying for it...? Astonishing. If only journalists had been saying this for years, I'm sure editors and MDs would have listened."

Steve Dyson, though, had the last laugh on this occasion. As he revealed in a follow-up post on his blog today, he not only got a 4,000 + sales lift from the move, he also got an extra 30,000 web hits - the best of both worlds!

For me, the lesson from that is surely that print vs online is a false opposition. The truth is both have a vital part to play in the future of our industry.