Lebedev is not really the story. Murdoch is.

Page eleven of the Murdoch-owned London Paper today gives us a clue to how he — and therefore his senior staff — are thinking.

In a full page victory memo from the London Paper’s editor it says, in so many words, that:

1. The London Paper has killed the Standard as a serious paper
2. Murdoch’s strategy forced Rothermere to sell
3. The Standard lost the plot
4. The Standard will henceforth be a minor, eccentric player on the London stage
5. The London Paper is projecting fat profits in the future
6. London Lite has lost its raison d’etre (to defend the Standard)

Murdoch is thrilled by the turn of events. With his son-in-law watching over the development of The Standard in the next few years it is unlikely to become too troublesome. I would not be surprised if it is sharing office space and printing facilities at Wapping in three years and three days from now (once contractual guarantees with Associated have expired).

Next move from the Australian fox? To decapitate Metro. Do not be surprised to see the London Paper produce a morning edition and bid for the valuable tube distribution rights in London when they come up later this year.

Perhaps it is a bit childish to think like this, but in macho competitive terms this story is game, set and match to Murdoch.

For Associated it looks dangerously like a tipping point — the year when they started losing. It used to be part of the DNA of Associated to win. Without that ferocity, the company starts to look rather sad, like a non-violent lion.

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Protection.

You are safer in Moscow if you own something in London.

And The Standard is much cheaper than a football team.

As for what he should do now that he has acquired it - see earlier post

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The Lebedev affair gets more and more fascinating. (For example: another of his journalists was shot in Moscow today, though it looks like she got caught in the crossfire of a gangland hit — so this event probably says something about Moscow but nothing about Lebedev).

The Lebedev affair has had loads of coverage over the weekend. But I do not think anyone has looked at it hard enough from the Murdochian point of view.

1. Rupert Murdoch believes that only two profitable national newspaper companies will be left standing in the UK in ten years time - his own News International and Associated Newspapers. Other papers will still exist, such as The Guardian, but — as ever — they will not be profitable.
2. He is determined that his company will be the biggest and is constantly waging war, either trench war or outright war, on Associated.
3. Thus: The Times has steadily eaten into the profits of The Mail; The Sunday Times does battle with The Mail on Sunday;  The Sun and the News of the World are virtually unchallenged.
4. The two thorns in his flesh are Metro which leeches advertising revenue from The Times and London Lite which blocks any potential profitability for The London Paper.
5. The biggest single key to Metro’s success is its exclusive contract with the London Underground which is up for renewal this year. Murdoch needs either to win this off Metro or push the price up so high that Metro becomes unprofitable. His best option is to make The London Paper a 24 hour operation and attempt to put a free morning edition on the tube.
6. However for The London Paper to be truly profitable there must be no London Lite.
7. The key to London Lite’s ability to survive has been The Standard. With the Standard newsroom in full flow it was not hard to produce London Lite very cheaply.
8. So he spotted the chink in Associated’s armour. With losses at £18m a year the Standard might be prised away. With his son in law Matthew Freud helping to direct the Lebedev campaign, one assumes Murdoch would have known about the plan to buy The Standard. But it would be absolutely vital for him to stay absolutely out of the picture otherwise it would never get sold.
9. Once time has gone by and the contractual restraints that Lebedev will probably have to sign have expired, one might imagine the Lebedev/Freud Standard would move closer to the Murdoch camp, at any rate enough to stop assisting London Lite.
10. London Lite then becomes another drain on the Associated resources. It has to be closed down. If Murdoch can force Metro into making losses - another victory.
11. The Murdoch family then owns the Sun, News of the World, Times, Sunday Times and The London Paper (which by then is profitable and gives away one million copies a day - including a morning edition on the tube).
12. The Rothermere family owns the Mail, Mail on Sunday and possibly a struggling Metro (or possibly not).

Or is this all too Grand Master-ish?

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Several thoughtful and influential people in the local newspaper business are thinking about the following model. It has great potential.

1. Establish a voluntary correspondent in every postcode/village that you want to serve. Give then a business card and agree to pay them a small retainer.
2. Set them up with a blog to which they must post daily, strictly only local and relevant news and views, text, audio and video (no thoughts about Middle East policy). Geotag and subject tag it all.
3. Create one single national website for local news.
4. Let it be completely personalised by the user (many of us have more than one village or locality we would like to keep up with) and as algorithmically intelligent as, say, Amazon
5. Give each voluntary correspondent a good quality A4 colour printer. Pay for the paper and ink.
6. Have small teams of editors in regional HQs who know a bit about their area
7. Produce branded, weekly, free, double sided, single sheet A4 weekly mini-newspapers (like the old FT Digest) for each postcode area
8. Distribute door to door via Royal Mail (if affordable) or volunteers if no.

In print, advertising would be both hyperlocal and national — i.e. networks of demographically targeted postcodes.

On the web, advertising would be 100% user targeted.

Anyone could do this. I do not see necessarily that it will be one of the major established players that does it first.

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Three talking points after a day of turmoil in British newspapers. (My answers in brackets).

1. Is this the emergence of Jonathan Rothermere as new sort of leader at DMGT? Has he decided to take the controls from his senior team and drive the clattering train himself? (yes)
2. Will a sale to Mr Lebedev ignite the ire of the British public and political classes? (no - we are used to foreigners owning papers: Thomson, Beaverbrook, Murdoch, Black and not all of them are saints)
3. Will the sale of the Standard give welcome financial breathing space to the rest of Associated? (yes)

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What a coup! When you remember the fuss that the Rothermere papers made about the sale of The Daily Express to Richard Desmond it is a trifle surprising that the family would sell a once-loved family heirloom to you, an ex-KGB agent about whom we in this country know very little, despite the excellent public relations campaign.

It does strongly signal that the love of newspapers has died at Associated. Running papers takes endless flair, courage, risk, originality and a passionate belief in the medium. Once the belief has gone you may as well take the money and run.

Which leaves the field to you.

Unlike many I do not believe you have bought a turkey. The Standard is a great paper. Its recognition in London is huge. London is probably the world’s greatest city. Whatever its current losses, you can make a success of it and create a profitable and valuable title again in time.

Once you have appointed Geordie Greig as editor, here are some ideas:

1. Keep it upmarket - even more upmarket than it currently is. The business columnists are brilliant but why not ask the FT to provide your afternoon news. They’d jump at it. And then you have the City wrapped up.
2. Target Time Out which has lost its point, is ridiculously expensive and dull and still makes money with its London edition. Recruit young Londoners as volunteers to help you do this.
3. Produce Standard-branded two-page hyperlocal weekly news sheets distributed door to door in London’s outer districts written by citizen correspondents filing to local websites.
4. Let users personalise everything on your main website - now relatively cheap and easy to do
5. Launch a social network for Londoners
6. Get the circulation back up to 500,000 so that you are competing for advertising with all the quality morning papers in London.
7. Do this by going free - but very carefully, so that the paper is reaching ABC1 readers and keeping up its advertising profile. There are intelligent ways of doing this…almost like a controlled circulation model.

What’s all this? A naked pitch for you to retain Shakeup Media?

Of course. But also a disinterested desire to see a title that I used to work on and love dearly, thrive and prosper and prove to all the doubters that London can easily support a quality paper of its own.

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We are skiers with fresh snow, surfers with high surf, blackbirds in the rain (they know the worms will come). 2009 is a good year for people that like change. It is the year of change. Shakeup Media, as the name implies, is a change business.

Too complicated (and arguably foolish) to try now and predict what the changes in media will be like. We will write about broad outlines in the following few weeks and keep monitoring stuff continually throughout the year.

Two background points: it is very, very hard and painful being a major media company right now and if we get excited about change we also want strenuously to avoid being callous or unsympathetic about their difficulties … and the friends who are caught managing the squeeze.

Second, change is happening in every field not just media. Media talks about itself all the time so you will hear more about media change. But the real story is much bigger: China, globalisation, water but all these pale beside the exponential surge in humanity’s interconnectedness and understanding.

Some intentions here at Shakeup Media:

• better, more participatory, conversation, thinking, blogging and twittering
• starting something in media that we can be really proud of, something good
• looking for opportunities to take over an existing business where we can manage it to be … as above
• helping our clients grasp the opportunities of change, despite the pressures of recession

We continue of course with our main job, redesigning newspapers, websites, magazines (and doing it as journalists, editors, writers - as well as designers).

However, we have access to far-sighted, imaginative investors so we are interested in hearing about ideas and opportunities. Quality is the key.

Happy New Year

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In 2008 we were busy with the following

• a redesign and rethink of The Daily Monitor, the independent national paper of Uganda
• a redesign of the FT weekend edition, which reported at the end of the year a 33% readership increase
• a redesign of the website for Curtis Bown, the country’s oldest and most distinguished literary agency
• a redesign of all the websites for the Nation Media Group, Kenya’s biggest and most important media company
• the launch of Blatherskite, an online diary column still in its early days
• the management of Horoscopes, an amazingly successful online astrology site (no thanks to us: readers love the astrologer Christeen Skinner)
• The Manual, a hand-written, hand-printed newspaper (we only produced one edition…..so far)
• the expansion of The Drawbridge, a beautiful, small circulation newspaper of ideas that needs to grow
• writing a book with Stephen Green about the future of humanity, nearly half done now
• moving offices from W1 to an airier, lighter space in Farringdon
• and a couple of start-ups that we are not permitted to talk about

The media world shifted considerably during the year.  At the beginning there were many media whales and a massive number of barnacles (such as us) clinging on. At the end there were big fish and small fish so things had equalled up a little. Also some of the big fish were sick and some of the small ones were startlingly vigorous.

Please have a look now at the post “Looking Forward”

Happy New Year to you all.

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Two zesty pieces of writing about media this week from America - both buzzing with flashy, larky intelligence that makes English journalism feel too much like mashed potato.First an elegant contribution to the “print is dead” discussion in the New York Times Magazine. It is by Virginia Heffernan, 39-year-old former “young-editor-to-watch” (Columbia Journalism Review), fact-checker at the New Yorker, editor at Slate, Harper’s, Talk and now, I think, online video critic for the New York Times Magazine.

Second a sizzling attack on the “feckless zombies” who run Big Media, posted on The Daily Beast by its editor and founder Tina Brown, former editor of Talk, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Tatler.

What Ms Heffernan says is that traditional media types are great at self-delusion. First they pretend that content is king and that others will take care of the delivery. When that doesn’t work they pretend that traditional (”classic”) forms will survive thanks to digital extensions (i.e. the video game will support the Bond movie). When that doesn’t work (why not just have the video game and not the movie?) they overwhelmingly fail to realise that the stuff everyone is reading on Twitter and so forth is radically different from the stuff they are producing for Random House or Vogue or CNN. She says the DNA of the way a magazine feature is written is deeply and irreversibly connected to the fact that it is for a magazine. It is nothing like the way you would write a piece for The Huffington Post. So traditional media people must either a) focus on what they do best and defend their dwindling audiences and die or b) loosen up! and develop some mental flexibility in order to make the best of the brave new world.

What Ms Brown says is that we are back in eighteenth century London where the old patrons of the arts were withdrawing from the scene and the middle classes had not yet started buying books and newspapers and buying theatre tickets in sufficient quantities to provide a living for those being dumped by their patrons. She’s happy enough because of course those middle classes came good. Very good. And she sees the same happening on the web sometime soon. Meanwhile her vitriol is directed at the drones who oversee and torment the people in media companies (like some that I encountered at IFRA I suppose). “There are floors of these creatures in any behemoth media company, buzzing about each day thwarting new ideas or, worse, having “transformative” ideas of their own when what is usually required is to revive, with a bit of steadfast conviction, the originating creative purpose of the enterprise”.

My advice is to take both these thoughts very seriously as we march towards the end of 2008, the last of twenty years when journalists have known relative plenty, settled lives and predictable careers. Mental flexibility, yes. And getting back to the original creative purpose of the enterprise, yes.

But in one important way both Brown and Heffernan are very probably wrong: they both seem to think that the future is exclusively on the web. This is now such a widespread prediction it is like the belief that Canute thought he was more powerful than the sea or that the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich i.e. it is easier to agree than disagree.

However it is far more likely that the web will leap forward in more pervasive and exciting ways than we can currently perceive and that the same will be true of old media such as movies, radio, magazines and newspapers. There will be huge shifts between them of course. There may be more people using the internet and fewer people reading newspapers. But it is madly improbable that the older genres will be wiped out by the new.

Why?

1. The idea that a new technology abolishes a previous role is much too simplistic. In the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else. The Pharaoh told Hermes that his new invention, writing, would kill off memory. In fact writing gave people more to remember. Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame says that the alphabet will kill images, the printing press will kill the cathedral (ceci tuera cela), but both the cathedral and the image have flourished mightily since Gutenberg. The photograph was meant to kill painting but Daguerre made Impressionism possible. After the invention of Daguerre, painters no longer felt obliged to serve as mere craftsmen charged with reproducing reality. Nor did photography only encourage abstract painting. There is a whole tradition in modern painting that could not exist without the photographic model (e.g. Hopper).
2. Precisely because the DNA of the web is profoundly different from the DNA of print or film or radio it will not replace those things. If it were the same (cassette tape/CD for instance) one might predict a swap. But it is becoming clear that it is not the same at all. Indeed as the web develops it is getting more distinctly and uniquely itself.
3. There is so much more to do with print. (Movable type has only been around since 1439!) Take newspapers. They have not fundamentally changed for over fifty years. They have gently evolved in every way, especially design and printing but have never been subject to a truly radical reinvention. Thanks to the web this will now happen and newspapers will be better. Just one example: no need any longer for long pages of share prices and TV listings, or of classified ads and news roundups. Newspapers can concentrate on the great yawning appetite of our age - the quest for meaning.

Between Heffernan’s sclerotic journalists and Brown’s zombie managers we are not getting things right. We can only dimly see the outlines of the way the web will work and it will not be the way we think. And, scared, we have turned our backs on print without seeing the potential that remains.

It will all come right in the end but we are taking the long way round.

Parting thought from a T shirt company: These T-shirts are made on the shamble and by imperfect people. Expect smudges.

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In the gloom before the storm it is tempting to be nothing but depressed. There are many reasons to be sad or sorry. Each friend who receives a call for an appointment with the HR director is another reason. But there are also reasons to be cheerful. Here are five mutually reinforcing points, unscientifically presented.

One

Why we should be cheerful: There’s a growing public demand for serious journalism.

What’s happening: There are signs, real signs, that people are getting more demandingly curious about the world. More people want to understand; fewer people want to be titillated. We need meaning, not just information. This might be because when things go wrong, you look for wisdom. But it might also be a reaction against the past 20 years during which we fell in love with the technologies that undid our capacities to think. In the West we became a trivial culture, preoccupied with the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. Many people became addicted to being constantly amused; and if they were not, they sulked.

Evidence?  Intellectually, not only the uncanny truth of some of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World but also some of Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death.  The essay Overload in the November 2008 issue of the Columbia Review of Journalism. Empirically, the success of The Economist, The Week, The Spectator and Alain de Botton’s  School of Life. Also, the galloping sales of non-fiction books that in some way or other “explain the world”.

.

Two

Why we should be cheerful: In the next three years media owners will start to support “good” journalism. They’ll have to.

What’s happening:  Media owners are at different stages but they are all going to have to take the following four steps 1) Stare mortality in the face. This is happening everywhere from Wasilla to Lugansk and from Porsanger to Brownsville. 2) Realise the future’s with the web - whatever platform you use now 3) Work out that the only journalism that will flourish on the web will be networked 4) Discover that networked journalism has to be better journalism because a post-modern, post-industrial, multi-faith, neoEnlightenment world demands it. Journalism that remains even a little bit out of touch, cumbersome, prejudiced or inaccurate won’t survive and a business that can’t take these four steps is heading for the turn-off to Valhalla.

Evidence? Intellectually, Charlie Beckett’s book SuperMedia which is the text for networked journalism. The more you peruse it, the more it emerges as a very good book indeed. Empirically, which would you put your money on: Huffington Post or the LA Times?

Three

Why we should be cheerful: It’s an open field. Anyone can be the next Joseph Pulitzer.

What’s happening: In the next few years being a big media company is going to be beyond grim. Costs are going up. The most important source of revenue, advertising, is going down - probably by 25%. The only way to survive is cuts. Shrinking not only hurts, it disfigures. Shrunk businesses are tomorrow’s dead businesses. Meanwhile: the media business models that work are a) cheap to start and b) baffling to mainstream media. If you have been working in TV or newspapers for 20 years and got to the top, you have not had time to pay attention to the new media ecology. It is a great time to be young, to be daring, to be unafraid of failure.

Evidence: A site such as Glam - already huge and based on (relatively) little funding.

Four

Why we should be cheerful: Attractive populism is a real possibility

What’s happening: Populism is good for journalism. It connects journalism to large audiences. It is good for society; it keeps powerful people honest. It balances the pervasive curse of elitism. What interests the public is, in the end, in the public interest. We must learn to love our Daily Mails. But, historically, populism has been so damned ugly, mean, spiteful and nasty. Now, however, there’s a sign that a new populism might catch fire in the West that’s highly attractive: the populism of hope, of reason, of tolerance and of confidence in human ingenuity. Behind this lies a massive cultural shift to a post-materialist sensibility in which values replace stuff and happiness is only tenuously linked to wealth. Did anyone else notice Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair writing this month: “The media business is about the glory of stuff-stuff to buy, stuff to envy, stuff to dream about. But for the first time in modern media memory, stuff is now the enemy. The consumer is in retreat from consumerism.”? What a  manifesto for a new Beaverbrook.

Evidence: Barack Obama

Five

Why we should be cheerful: Print has a great future.

What’s happening: It’s just a matter of getting it right. This doesn’t contradict the four steps mentioned above. When I say the future’s with the web and journalism will be networked, I don’t preclude that journalism being published in print. The best newspapers of the next 10 years will create powerful online networks and use them to help create the words and pictures that they put into print. Print is not just a technology to be replaced by a newer one. Print is a genre with a soul of its own. But to survive, it must change. There’s no future for 126 page papers filled with a mix of heavy, light, UK, foreign, business, arts and sporting news. Papers will have to focus ruthlessly on what they do best and leave the rest to others. What they do best is to edit. (Some use the word “curate”). It boils down to this: taking a huge heap of confusing stories and reducing them to a package with meaning.  Distilling, synthesising, explaining, designing - that is what papers must focus on. They will have to do it with fewer pages and far smaller staffs. But when they do it right they will usher in another golden age of print. Of course printing machinery may evolve to the point where we have digital paper or e-paper. In my view that still counts as print.

Evidence: “Unlike the doom-and-gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights,” - Rupert Murdoch last week.

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