Media Mayhem

About this programme by Peter Day

The great and much-maligned newspaperman Roy Thomson was a failed farmer, short-sighted, pretty much skint at 40, but eventually successful enough (papers, commercial television, tourism and North Sea Oil) to become Lord Thomson of Fleet and leave his son an empire which at the time of his death in 2006 made him the ninth wealthiest person in the world. (His son David is now chairman of Thomson Reuters, of which more below.)

It is a quite remarkable business story, but many British journalists of the 1960s and 70s would have denied Roy Thomson the title of "newspaperman" because he was so interested in the business of the press, not the words in it (now banally termed "content").

He would travel by public transport - the Underground - to New Printing House Square in Gray’s Inn Road in London. When he got into his office at the Times and the Sunday Times he would take out a ruler and (holding it close to his eyes) measure the advertising columnage in his papers.

Newspaper snobs thought that (vital) sort of consideration beneath them.

Establishment

Lord Thomson was also vilified for predicting that only two or three national newspapers would survive in the UK by the 1980s.

This was one place where his extraordinary canniness abandoned him. Few newspapers in Britain disappeared in the 20th century though some (such as the Sunday Correspondent) came and went. In fact the number of titles, improbably, grew.

Although they changed hands faster and faster, ownership of a newspaper endowed the proprietor with too much power for him or her to worry too deeply about the lack of profitability. Many outsiders (such as Roy Thomson from Canada) relished this.

But he also made money out of them by challenging the establishment. And being in the right place at the time: in Scotland when commercial television started (he got a franchise), when North Sea oil started (he got a stake) and in Britain when ordinary people developed a lust for foreign holidays (he started a huge package holiday firm). Newspapers were incidental.

Then in the 1990s newspaper production was unshackled from the tyranny of the print unions who dominated the old Fleet Street and British newspapers got a new lease of something like life.

And some papers managed to make money. Indeed the Sun and the News of the World became a great London cash powerhouse that at times seemed to be keeping the rest of the outsider Australian/American Rupert Murdoch’s international empire going.

But the press was always a dicey business proposition, hideously perishable and in thrall to the idea that size of circulation was the only thing that advertisers cared about, and they ruled the roost.

So the economics of newspapers was always a dubious one... a product given away almost free, with a circulation in need of constant inflation from hideously expensive stunts. In the 1930s they gave away encyclopaedias and insurance (and still do in countries such as Italy and Spain; now in Britain it’s giveaway DVDs of recent movies.)

And then the whole newspaper package is subsidised to the hilt by advertising. This was and is an unstable business model for a vital resource.

Venerable

But compared to that 20th-century instability, the new assault on the media is of quite different proportions. And from the threats to titles and closures breaking out all over the world this appears to be a threshold year.

Print and broadcasting is suddenly being put through a double mangle: the agony of recession which always hits advertising, but far more important the far bigger structural changes associated with the shift of eyeballs and advertising to the internet.

The Thomson Corporation foresaw this years ago. It got out of newspapers altogether and built a new empire around specialist electronic media and training.

As Thomson Reuters it now incorporates the venerable Reuters which itself had so brilliantly migrated from being a general international news agency service owned by its customers the newspapers in the 1970s to becoming a financial data goldmine in the 1980s.

But how do other media organisations manage to do migration now? It’s a hugely difficult proposition, which this programme tries to shed a little bit of light on.

Finding a new business model is not easy at all, but it matters because without the reporting done by vibrant papers and broadcasters, democracy itself is imperilled. Whatever the digital enthusiasts say.

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