Now that the excitement over this newspaper’s passing a birthday has probably started to evaporate a little, might a regular, loyal, reader over the past half-century put in his two-penn’orth?
My background – my entire working life – was spent on mass circulation newspapers, from a weekly that sold 12,500 to a population of 35,000, to an evening paper selling more than 250,000 in the city of Leeds, and on to a national daily with 14.2 million readers and ‘the world’s biggest daily sale’.
I never worked for the News of the World, now closed because of its sordid behaviour, but at one time it sold more than seven million.
The economics were interesting, and important. The Daily Mirror, for example, counted on circulation for two-thirds of its income, and advertising for the rest. For some less popular newspapers, that ratio was reversed, but they were all nevertheless viable.
Staffing was huge – about 880 journalists in the Mirror group when I took charge of them – and expense was no object. Discipline was, for want of a better word, flexible: reporters could (and many did) get drunk, or disappear for a few days; but if they got their “facts” wrong in a story, they were fired.
At one time the Mirror had an editor who had never written a story, a motoring correspondent who was banned from driving, a gardening correspondent with no garden, a slimming editor who was a stone overweight, a travel editor who was banned by British Airways, and at least one feature writer who hadn’t written anything except his expenses for five years.
Not for nothing do the survivors of my generation look back on ‘the good old days’.
But, even in those days – I am writing of the 1980s – the gravy train was heading for the buffers.
Circulations started to dwindle, as readers began to turn away from the printed page. And this was long before the internet started to carry immediately available instant news.
The Queen Mother’s favourite newspaper, The Sporting Life, cost so much to produce that it would have been more profitable if newsagents had given every customer who asked for it a pound, and told him to go away.
Fast forward to today, and we find that everybody with a screen or a phone can get instant news, of a sort, either as it happens (from witnesses) or as it is announced (by government or the police).
The Daily Mirror circulation is currently hovering around 440,000, down from five million; the Sunday Mirror (peaked at six million) sells around a third of a million.
Do people still need newspapers at all?
Newspapers are the first pages of history. They need to be right. In that matter, nothing has changed since my day
I believe that we do; I read this one every morning – but nowadays I read it online, if only because it arrives earlier than the print version. And my subscription offers it by headline or page by page.
Although I may have read ‘news’ from other internet outlets last night, I await its confirmation ‘in print’ this morning… (Times of Malta also updates the news during the day).
I prefer, in other words, to get my news from professional journalists who – while always working against the clock – at least have the opportunity to think ‘is this right’, to question authority further and read what they have written before pressing ‘send’.
Newspapers are the first pages of history. They need to be right. In that matter, nothing has changed since my day.
But I dread to think what the business plan of a newspaper looks like today.
Subscriptions are nowadays paramount if newspapers like this one are to survive.
The Daily Mail – one of the last newspapers selling more than a million – now relies on advertising from its daily freesheet, Metro (at 1.4 million the biggest circulation in the UK) and its internet platform (24 million readers per month).
I confess that I shudder, every time I read this newspaper’s pleas for donations. Independent and investigative journalism costs money. Sure it does.
Tell me about it: I have been there, done that. But now, “Every donation, big or small, will help us continue to hold the powerful to account and deliver Malta’s most credible news,” it says on Malta’s most frequently read website.
Back in the UK, The Guardian (127,000) has a similar appeal, while claiming to make a profit in printing, although apparently nearly two-thirds of its readership is now abroad.
In recent years, this newspaper has been the virtual (and only) opposition of Maltese government.
Even more recently it has, on a daily basis, “held the powerful to account”, to an extent where we are no longer shocked by the ‘incredible news’ of unacceptable behaviour of either politicians or officials, and which it clearly needs to continue doing.
So we must support Times of Malta as a great national institution. About that there can be no argument.
I have but one gripe: the newspaper is involving its readers less than it used to. Readers’ letters are restricted to half a page.
On a good day, four short letters, with no facility to comment online.
If I were asked to advise this newspaper (as I once was, years ago), it would be that if it wants support from its readers it needs to involve them more, not less, and should restore the Letters ‘page’ to its former glory.
Beyond that, I wish this old lady a belated happy birthday, good luck and Godspeed.
Revel Barker is former UK journalist and also the author of ‘The Last Pub In Fleet Street - A Reporter’s Notebook’.