Column November 4th. We need better managers

We were in Amsterdam last week (thus, lazily, no column) at the main annual gathering of IFRA, an acronym that according to the organisers “no longer means anything”.

It used to be the event for newspaper publishers to meet and talk about printing. It is now trying to turn itself, with only partial success, into the event for publishers to meet and talk about everything from software to websites (as well as print).

So it was a good place to take the temperature of the patient that is the newspaper industry and to talk to the people that run it. Here were the commercial bosses from newspaper companies in all the major economies of the world.

I had some meetings arranged in advance with outstanding people that I respect and admire. However out on the floor of the conference what a dismal experience it was. If it had been a parade ground these were emphatically not the Marines. Dad’s Army perhaps.

With the benefit of a few days’ reflection I would put it more temperately. There were, as I say, some very interesting and vital voices there. But to convey the raw emotion that I felt on Day Two of IFRA, I find my notebook contains the following:

“What a gathering of jobbernowls! Seldom have I tuned into a more lifeless, jargon-filled, half-baked, self-pitying, poorly-digested, left-over rice pudding of thoughts about the state of journalism. If we want to know why our business is in such a state we must surely start with this: the management is not up to scratch”.

I have a friend who is on the board of a top international business school. “Journalism attracts some top young intellects,” she says. “It is still seen as a really exciting and respected role. Publishing is not. People who get jobs in publishing are people who were not smart enough for retailing, advertising or insurance.” I don’t agree with her but, apparently, plenty of her peers do.

It seemed that nearly all of the 10,000 people there were in a deep funk about print. The recession, falling currencies, newsprint prices, advertising downturns, free papers, aging readers and the incursions of the web were all cited as reasons. Hall 10 (I think it was) where the big print companies had their stalls was either referred to as the Dinosaur Park or the Natural History Museum.

I was shocked by the pessimism. Maybe Roy Greenslade is right. His arguments about the inevitable death of print are always lucid and powerfully put and his is a voice to be taken extremely seriously. In an excellent blog today about the BBC and the regions he rams it home:

“Old media - whether it be newspapers, magazines or straightforward radio and TV broadcasting - has accepted that it must move on to a new platform, the internet, if it is to survive.”

I have spent two years, so far, struggling to start a newspaper in the UK so I am under no illusions about how tough it is. I have not one trace of rose-tinting left on my old and battered spectacles.

However I have always believed that printed newspapers have lives still to live. I have always believed that there are new types of newspapers we haven’t imagined yet that will excite readers all over again.

Let me try and clarify the two contrasting views here. First there is the view that newspapers are a format. An oft-used metaphor is from the music industry. Anyone over 50 has seen the market move from vinyl to digital (and everything in between) in rapid order. As a society we still love music. We simply store it and play it in a different way. According to this view, newspapers are the vinyl of news. News will continue but papers won’t.

The second view is that newspapers are a genre. This view holds that there is something about newspapers that makes them a category of their own, with a distinctive form, content and technique that can’t be replaced - such as theatre or oil painting. These genres have not been replaced by possible substitutes such as film or photography. On the contrary they have been inspired by them to new directions. According to this view the internet will not replace newspapers but will enable a reinvention to take place inside newspapers, creating myriad new opportunities for journalism and for entrepreneurs.

Anyone who loves newspapers and has seen them function well will know what I mean when I talk about the sum of print, paper, type, words, pictures, history, opinion and character adding up to more than the parts. This is what makes a genre. By contrast there was nothing about a cassette tape of Leonard Cohen that made the listening experience any different to a CD of Leonard Cohen.

There are plenty of newspaper master classes to be had currently in Britain. (How to run a campaign - Daily Mail. How to design a page - Guardian). I would posit that there are hardly any to be had in the USA which might help explain why the industry is doing so badly there. It’s interesting that web evangelists such as Jeff Jarvis are becoming increasingly excited by the idea of editors - or “content DJs” as he suggested we might call them earlier this week.

In the aftermath of the financial collapse, people are looking for simple realities and hard truths. Real journalism, analysis, reportage and explanation can live better on the printed page than on the screen. Advertisers that want to share that authenticity also seem to prefer print. No stand-alone website has yet found a way to fund journalism.

All this requires more thought, I know.

But perhaps, if newspaper managements were as innovative and exciting as, say, Google’s - we wouldn’t be quite so glum.

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