It’s groundhog day at Northcliffe Media. Steve Auckland, the new managing director, laid out his priorities today in an interview with The Guardian: Reducing the number of days on which some loss-making titles publish. The possibility of newspaper closures. Increased autonomy (“I’m trying to do away with the corporate stuff and getting the editors and [...]
Associated & Northcliffe Media, the consumer arm of Daily Mail & General Trust, is preparing to launch a competitor to US-based discount voucher site Groupon. According to a source familiar with the project, DMGT is currently working on final builds of its “daily deals” platform. DMGT is expected to acquire what’s described as “a very [...]
What does it tell you when the chief executive and chief financial officer leave a company at the same time? John Fry of Johnston Press insists that he wasn’t shoved out. There’s no reason to believe he was. Fry, 53, will be spending more time with his family and his “very large garden” from March [...]
What’s not to like about DMGT’s final results for the year to October? A few things. Although the overall numbers suggest a welcome improvement, classified ad markets remain broken, online and in print. After the steep declines of 2008-2009, this recovery still feels very weak. In addition, digital strategy isn’t delivering much joy. Revenues at [...]
It was the condescension that jumped off the page. When Newsquest, the second-largest local newspaper publisher in Britain, wrote to its employees in early August announcing the closure of its final salary pension scheme, the justifications were vague and the FAQs superficial. The cost of running Newsquest’s pension scheme, employees were told, had become “extremely [...]
It’s the job of a banker to measure risk, and then place a price upon it. Where risk increases, bankers ratchet up interest rates. If you’re a big risk, money becomes expensive. The problems start when you look at this process from the perspective of the real economy. From this angle, bankers start to resemble [...]
Last summer, I wrote a piece for the print edition of Press Gazette outlining the scale of the carnage that would be caused by two successive years of 20% declines in ad revenues during 2008 and 2009. At the time, regional newspaper groups were already delivering year-on-year declines of 20%. The nationals, I reckoned, would [...]
A funny thing happened on the way to The Great Transition. In 2006, Johnston Press, the regional chain that publishes the Yorkshire Post and The Scotsman, started to worry about revenue declines in places like Portsmouth. The bosses at Johnston Press became convinced that they were witnessing the first signs of a recession. In a [...]