In the gasping last few years of its strange life, Press Gazette resembled an operatic heroine, repeatedly coming back to life to give one last aria. “The fat lady has sung”, is how one insider put it to me today, after owner Wilmington finally announced the closure of the magazine and the mothballing of its website. I worked at PG for two years and the news doesn’t come as a huge surprise to me – the title’s recent history is the story of an unwanted, unprofitable bible for an industry itself in turmoil. This is why…
— Editorial lost out to events: In late 2006, just one week after I accepted a reporter job at PG, then based on expensive Fleet Street, the magazine went out of business. I’d tasted print media collapse before I’d even started the job. Press Gazette Ltd, the company founded by Piers Morgan and PR man Matthew Freud to buy the mag from Quantum a year earlier, entered administration and made its entire staff redundant. Morgan later called it one of the worst investments he ever made.
Wilmington stepped in to buy the smoking remains at a knock-down price – a reduced staff was asked to come back and the weekly magazine continued. It was the sixth owner in 18 years but, at the same time, Wilmington was reducing its exposure to a badly-performing print market by selling its other trade magazines. The majority of Wilmington’s profits were to come from events and legal training. It never really wanted a magazine, to employ journalists, to finance their expensive news operations or to explore ways of making money online – it wanted the British Press Awards, a foothold in the job ads market and a credible brand to sustain both.
— Latest model didn’t work: When a strategic review last summer left the title with just three full-time editorial staff (including editor Dominic Ponsford) and three commercial, the company’s waning commitment to the operation was clear. Management actually decided to shut the magazine altogether, announcing the change to a bemused newsroom. After being persuaded otherwise by a management consultant, Press Gazette instead reformed as a monthly, feature-led, A4 magazine, leaving breaking news to a new website complete with a number of new blogs. The online audience increased, PG gained credibility and relevance that had persisted until Monday’s closure announcement.
The eye-watering £115-a-year price tag didn’t actually deter many readers — more subscribers were gained than lost, according to Ponsford — but the title was losing significant amounts of money even with a small staff. I understand the Wilmington board gave PG a two-year deadline to reach profitability, which it has just failed.
— Awkward adjustment to online: The increasingly lonely writers may have transitioned to online rather well – but the same couldn’t be said of Wilmington’s other parts. At a time when we were charged with explaining and reporting the rise of online video journalism, we were told we couldn’t watch or listen to streaming media on our machines. “It compromises my bandwidth,” one joyless IT worker told me.
I overheard an in-house ad salesman tell a potential online advertising client that we were “number two on Google” – but offering no further explanation. No mention of metrics, audience, anything. I think he meant for the search term “journalism”, which isn’t a great sell.
— Failed to profit from web: Pressgazette.co.uk is attracting a healthy audience – more than 120,000 unique users a month. But Wilmington Business Information MD Les Kelly told me on Monday “it’s not getting the support it needs from advertisers”. That’s because the magazine has never thought seriously about how to make money online. The £115 annual magazine subscription was the last attempt to squeeze revenue from a dying print brand, but the website’s much-improved, varied and competitive news coverage went un-monetised.
Sure, there were online ads, but not many. To only launch a recruitment classifieds site in 2007 was acting well after the horse had bolted, ran down the street and won the 3.40 at Chepstow. Instead, the commercial focus remained on the dead-tree edition. There, on deadline with a space to fill, one sales manager got the team to ring literally every national newspaper editor: “Hi can I get Mr Rusbridger please… ?”
— News media are in upheaval: For 30 years after its launch, PG had a monopoly on media news; ten pages or more of jobs were common well into the 1990s. But then came MediaGuardian.co.uk, industry-owned holdthefrontpage.co.uk and others; the monopoly was broken. Fast forward to 2008/9 and the most severe downturn print media have ever seen – there was no escaping this turmoil for a business based on print. Covering that very industry, Press Gazette knew it only too well.
So this is only partly the fault of PG and Wilmington. As we have seen with many B2B mags during the recession, they are only as healthy as their trade – we covered 1,000 publishing redundancies before Q109 had even ended. The irony now is that there will be one less place to find out how the industry will whether the storm…
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