unicornnews: esPResso media review 05.05.10

esPResso publisher Chris Cooke on major recent developments in the media.

Only Mirror supporting Gordon on Thursday: The Sun like to back winners in the General Election, which is why they’ve been getting so hot and bothered of late that a last minute rise in support for the Lib Dems could keep their man, David Cameron, out of power, or at least deprive him of the opportunity to form a majority government.

But, of course, it’s not only the Current Bun who have been laying into Brown and the newly popular Clegg in a bid to ensure the Tories win on Thursday – the Mail, Express and Telegraph are all fighting Cameron’s corner too. And, as of now, so are The Times and the Financial Times, who have both now come out in support of the blues in the big vote. The former is no suprise, but the latter is a particular blow for the Labour Party. The FT was one of the first of the previously Tory supporting papers to sign up to the New Labour initiative in the early 1990s.

With The Guardian, in another surprise move, formally coming out in favour of the resurgent Lib Dems, and with the Independent making much of the fact it plans to live by its name in the election, that leaves the Brown camp with only the always loyal-to-Labour Mirror on side.

Though even they are encouraging readers to vote Lib Dem in constituencies where doing so might keep the Tories out, meaning even Labour’s biggest supporters seem to think a hung parliament and resulting Lib-Lab pact is Brown’s only chance of staying in power.

If there is no clear winner on Friday, aside from taking Britain into an interesting place constitutionally, it will be equally interesting to see how the papers deal with such an eventuality. Will they push for a second General Election to win the Cam man a parliamentary majority, or accept that – in news terms if nothing else – a hung parliament could be rather fun?

Times braces itself for pay wall exodus: So, The Times will put up its previously reported paywall around its website next month. With everyone expecting a big drop off of users to occur almost immediately, it is perhaps not surprising that the broadsheet last week requested that its official web traffic figures, collated by the Audited Bureau of Circulation, no longer be made public.

Presumably that means Times management expect a dramatic fall in readers also. Still, Times bosses have made it clear they’d rather have a close relationship with a smaller audience of paying readers than speak to millions of freeloaders world wide. I still think this experiment will ultimately work for the Times (as I blogged here).

In sort of releated news, the legendary US music magazine Rolling Stone put a paywall around its feature content last month, so that users who want to access interviews from the title’s current print edition or its forty year plus archive will have to pay. It was a surprise development, and is one of the first big tests for the subscription model in the consumer magazine space. The independently owned magazine’s rivals in the magazine sector are sure to be watching the experiment closely.

New CEO arrives at ITV: So, after rather too long without any clear long-term leadership, ITV has both a Chairman and CEO in place.

Former Royal Mail chief Adam Crozier took over as boss of the flagging commercial telly giant last month, writing to his staff: “You don’t need me to tell you that ITV has been through some turbulent times recently with a combination of the economic recession and the changes occurring in our own industry putting us and our competitors under real pressure. It seems to me that the decisive action that you took last year has begun the process of helping get us fit to compete in a rapidly changing media world and for that everyone deserves a lot of credit”.

Despite that optimism, and other paragraphs bigging up current ITV telly shows, Crozier was clear that more change is still needed at the third channel broadcaster, telling his new employees: “We all know that we have some tough challenges ahead and some issues to face up to, but we really don’t need to be defensive about that – just recognise them, find a way to solve them and move on”.

ITV is doing better now than in recent years in both ratings and revenues, but some argue radical changes are still needed to futureproof the company, and some reckon Crozier has some radical ideas on his agenda.

Posted Wednesday May 5 2010 by Chris Cooke

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