Beware the intelligent media amateur

13 June 2008


BBC News

Here we have four intelligent media amateurs: Janet Street Porter, Peter Jay, Andrew Neil and Andreas Whittam Smith.

These four highly-regarded media people show how failure is often due to simple amateurism.

The professional publisher
Experienced publishers succeed through drawing together a community of three elements: audience, advertisers and the product.

A publisher builds and maintains market share by giving equal attention to all three while keeping within a pre-determined budget.

The spreadsheet
The budget is represented by ‘the spreadsheet’, which is the omnipotent influence in any business enterprise, to which all personnel must adhere. Unless the spreadsheet is accepted and followed by all, the company is in danger of failing in its primary purpose – to provide a service and make a profit.

A company will struggle and die if it fails in any of those fundamental areas. This, then, is a story of how not to run a media company.

Editors, politicians and publishers
Business, finance and economics writers are journalists. They talk about, but rarely have any positive experience of running a business. They operate in a separate but parallel world. But given the opportunity, they will often try to sound like an expert and can sometimes pull it off. Like politicians, they can be put in charge of huge resources without any relevant experience.

Politicians and journalists are bedfellows and thus share similar characteristics, as I will demonstrate.

Famous amateurs (1) Andreas Whittam Smith
The Independent newspaper struggles because, way back in 1986, the editor and launch team failed to see the importance of classified advertising. The Guardian and The Times bagged it all. Classified advertising may be an obvious revenue opportunity to us marketer (take a look at Google to see how much money there is in classified), but The Independent was run by its editorial team and they just couldn’t see it.

The man in control, editor Andreas Whittam Smith, was advised by his business writers. Launching with a healthy circulation of over 400,000 in 1989, it soon developed financial problems and Whittam Smith left in 1994.

Famous amateurs (2) Peter Jay
Peter Jay is a famous example of how an intelligent amateur can sell a media idea to unsuspecting backers. Jay was an editor who wrote on economics and business for The Times. In those days, Jay’s ability to baffle readers and listeners was impressive. Now, of course, most of us are wise to the syndrome and have learned to say:

‘If I don’t understand it, I won’t invest.’

Warren Buffet taught us that bit of wisdom during the dotcom bubble that burst in 2000.

However, the mess we are writing about here was back in 1983 when we were still ignorant. TV-am was launched with Peter Jay as the founding chairman, with a ‘mission to explain’, a concept supported by his impressive intellectual grasp. But viewers weren’t impressed with the programming and watched BBC instead. TV-am floundered and the managers were overthrown in a coup in 1984.

Famous amateurs (3) Andrew Neil
Andrew Neil was the editor of The Sunday Times and The Economist, and he enters our league of amateur publishers at third place.

As Peter Jay with TV-am, Andrew Neil was chosen to launch the TV channel Sky as founding chairman in 1988. And like TV-am, Sky struggled financially for years. A merger with its main competitor BSB injected healthier advertising contracts and equipment, but the new station, renamed BSkyB, did not make a profit for ten years. Like TV-am, managers were removed and the owner’s persistence paid off. Sky is now one of the most profitable television companies in Europe.

Andrew Neil moved on to run newspapers.

The European was launched by Robert Maxwell in 1990. The Barclay brothers bought it in 1992 and invested $110 million in the title with Andrew Neil as editor until it folded in 1999. Since 2005 Neil has presided over another folly, The Business, launched in 1996. It struggled until February 2008, losing around £3m a year. It has now closed and morphed into Spectator Business, a new magazine with a largely free circulation of 42,000.

For Neil, this is a fortunate move, as it is difficult to measure editorial success when you are not relying on people to buy your magazine. Spectator Business will be measured by advertisement revenue, sold by a separate, largely autonomous Ad Sales department. If and when things go wrong, they will be blamed.

Unlike Peter Jay, Andrew Neil is a riveting presenter and journalist, a formidable interrogator of any politician that comes his way. Unfortunately those impressive investigatory skills do not transfer well to other areas.

If Andrew Neil, for example, constantly inerogates and interferes with the marketing team or any other specialist department then strife, ridicule and high staff turnover will result.

“I was always smart enough to listen to people who knew what they were doing.”
Quincy Jones on his first movie score on collaborating with Michel LeGrande

The best approach any publisher can have is an open mind, to delegate to the experts – especially when faced with colleagues with more expertise and experience.

Andrew Neil’s writing and broadcasting skills are shamefully underused as he whiles away his time playing publisher and businessman.

Famous amateurs (4) Janet Street-Porter
Janet Street-Porter is an award-winning editor, presenter and producer.

Street-Porter was chosen to launch the new TV station L!VE TV, operated by Mirror Group Newspapers on cable television from 1995 to 1999. The station was headed by Kelvin MacKenzie, ex-editor of the Sun newspaper, with Janet Street-Porter as Managing Director.

With two grand editors running the show, disaster beckoned. After repeated clashes with MacKenzie over content, Street-Porter left after only five months.

Amateurs usually soldier on until terminated by worried patrons, but MacKenzie left voluntarily and by 1999 the channel was showing soft porn. In 2006, the name was changed to Babeworld to reflect the channel’s gradual change of focus towards ’adult material‘.

Media direction, influence and control
TV stations and other mass media are able to influence huge audiences and so they, in turn, are monitored and influenced by governments.

In the UK, the government secretly set up the Information Research Department to circulate propaganda against people and movements considered to be ‘anti-British’. Material was distributed via ‘friendly’ editors and correspondents within the press and the BBC.

There are other ‘information’ departments within government. The Central Office of Information publicises favourable aspects of British life. Downing Street gives distorted press briefings on behalf of the Prime Minister of the day. All three departments are engaged in editorial direction: influencing and controlling the media.

The Government of the day will attempt to influence TV channels by threatening, for example, to reform, reduce or remove the BBC’s ‘licence’ tax income. The BBC governors (all amateurs mostly appointed by the Government), terrified they will not receive honors and recognition, seek to influence the BBC directors (all professionals) who are responsible for programming.

Politicians and media
Politicians and media folk are bitchy bedfellows – there is no trust, simply one-sided attempts to influence and control, which is why the media constantly snipes back.

There is another reason why the relationship fails. As with any unsatisfactory marriage, both parties are missing a vital ingredient to a successful liaison. In this case it’s financial acumen: it’s quite a strain on family life if you are going broke and cannot understand a spreadsheet.

Politicians and editors are alike: they both seek to engage and build an audience, a politician for power and an editor for influence. A minister’s skills are political and social; an editor’s are creative; both are able communicators. But with a few notable exceptions (Michael Heseltine is one who manages to straddle the political and publishing role), most politicians and editors have no commercial skills. In fact, most hold the world of business in disdain, which is why there are so few real business people or programmes on TV or radio.

To put either an editor or a politician in charge of a big-spending department can only work if rigorous commercial management prevents overspending and wastefulness.

Put an editor in charge and a pattern emerges: economic failure, argument and bankruptcy. TV companies, like governments, are too big to liquidate however, so survival of those involved is usually assured. A saviour is found and the people concerned reinvent themselves.

As for the politicians who, with no appropriate experience whatsoever, find themselves running massive government departments, their mission, rather than fight for more funds, advocate for the government and launch initiatives, should be ‘to simplify’, which brings us to Alfred Harmsworth and the world of successful publishing.

Lessons from 1896 on how to simplify news
Alfred Harmsworth launched his new paper, the Daily Mail, with the concept: ‘The Busy Man’s Daily Newspaper’. His ideas were groundbreaking over here in the UK, but the concept for the Daily Mail was borrowed from the USA.

Harmsworth engaged all classes of reader, from generals to foot soldiers, from ladies to housemaids. He did this in various ways. His instruction to editors and writers was ‘to simplify’. Sounds easy, but many otherwise intelligent people find it impossible to do.

Alfred Harmsworth was the first UK newspaper publisher to introduce women’s pages because he recognised he couldn’t afford to ignore half the buying public. He supported the suffragette movement for the same reason.

He also paid for readers’ stories because he knew editors are often isolated from their market, relying on a personally selected, closed collection of writers for editorial content.

That editorial isolation is changing as the media discovers it is often easier and cheaper to gather reports from people actually experiencing what they are writing about.

Thus we have the huge popularity of Blogs and other first-hand reporting.

One day, we may even have people from the world of business editing and writing the newspaper business sections.