We have a new managing director and in his first company interview he said if you don’t like change, newspapers are not for you.
This sounds like a cliché. But in the case of UK newspapers, it’s a probably the most profound thing you can say.
However, as we all know, change is nothing new. I first became a reporter in 1975 and within a couple of years the industry had gone through change that made it almost unrecognisable.
In those days we used battered old Olivetti typewriters and every story would have four carbon copies. The bigger the ‘scoop’, the blacker your hands.
Then came computers and the battered Olivettis and carbon paper went out of the window. But that in itself was not the most traumatic change. Instead it was trying to persuade grumpy old newsmen that this was progress.
In many cases it was futile and there was no option but to pension off the recalcitrant old guard.
Today, in England, the change is even more profound because newspaper sales are going off the cliff. And I, to my absolute astonishment, find myself not only at the forefront of change, but in our office leading it.
It is not a role I ever suspected would happen, even in my wildest dreams. In fact, I was involuntarily leading the quiet life. I’d already peaked professionally, as my highlight was editing the Zululand Observer during the intense period when South Africa transformed to a true democracy – the biggest change in most of our lifetimes. After that, reporting would be a bit dreary in Britain.
So I became a digital journalist as I thought that was the way of the future. I was soon disabused of that notion by editors who thought digital media was an irritant at best. I was never allowed to put stories up before the print version, which led to bizarre situations where rival websites would be using our newspapers’ copy before we did.
Then, virtually overnight, the digital revolution took hold. Someone somewhere discovered that far more people read news online than they did in print. Someone else realized that if you tapped into social media and used Google effectively, you quadrupled your audience. Someone somewhere else realized that with an online story you could embed videos, photo-galleries, ask for their instant comments and run polls.
Even so, our branch of the company was reluctant to get on board – hence the quiet life for me. My editor, a fine veteran of many print wars, had simply too much ink in her blood to let go.
A couple of weeks back, something changed her mind. A woman slipped under a moving bus outside our offices and the entire town centre came to a standstill. I went out and took a video and some shots on my cellphone while a reporter banged out a story.
Within minutes we got that online with the 30 second video – which just showed a bus surrounded by flashing police lights – and a six-picture photo-gallery. I then posted the story link on Twitter and Facebook, which was re-tweeted around town.
Within hours we had 40 000 people on our site – double the readership of our newspaper.
We needed a follow-up to keep the momentum going so I banged out a few lines that the injured woman had been taken to hospital. Not exactly earth-shattering news, as that’s what happens to people in accidents. Bang – another 5 000 hits, and because we hyper-linked back to the original story, readership went through the roof again.
So in effect, a standard news story with a 30 second amateurish video and a photo-galley of police cars surrounding a bus got double the audience that the entire newspaper gets in a week. Our editor had an epiphany.
It’s backfired on me, of course. The quite life is now history. I now run daily conferences through Instant Messaging; my emails are constantly clogged; and I have to monitor readership traffic spikes on an hourly basis. And no news editor ever says to me they’re ‘holding’ something for the newspaper.
And just as I thought I was ready to retire …
