The Brighton Argus has just celebrated its 135th birthday, which is an odd anniversary to mark and tends to imply that it won’t be around for its 150th.
I was working there on its 95th birthday and no-one thought it necessary to push the boat out then. This time, the paper’s publisher, Newsquest/Gannett, decided to host a lunch for 100 of the city’s “business elite” at the Grand Hotel.
One of the speakers was the editor, Mike Gilson, who had arrived at the Argus only six weeks before, having stepped down from the editorship of the Belfast Telegraph.
It was a tough gig to make a speech about a newspaper he hardly knows in a city where he hasn’t lived. Platitudes were inevitable. Even so, given my experience of witnessing the Argus’s long slide into obscurity under its current owners, I can’t let some of it pass without comment.
And my comments shouldn’t be seen as merely specific to the fate of the Argus. They have a resonance at not only other Newsquest titles, but for other publishers of regional and local papers too.
Gilson spoke of the Argus having covered the “triumphs and the tears, hopes and fears” of the communities it serves [that means the city of Brighton and Hove, its adjacent seaside towns and its broad Sussex hinterland - a massive area].
Tense is important here. Covered is past tense, and he is correct to have used it. He also waxed lyrical when speaking of...
“the decades of blood sweat and tears that journalists, advertising staff, circulation folk, paper boys and girls and all the myriad numbers of people have given to make sure that the news and views of our communities are covered; the triumphs and the tears, the hopes and fears and all the stages of life that we all go through”.
That’s past tense again. No-one who enjoyed the Argus in the 1960s and 70s - and before - would disagree. And Gilson was right to talk of it in historical terms:
“We cherish that history, are proud of it. It gives us that crucial hard won quality of trust, we are woven into the fabric of the place and we intend to stay there”.
Really? That may be the intention and is surely Gilson’s intention as he plans a reputed revamp. It lured him into hyperbole:
“The Argus brand is not a chain around our necks but a launch pad to take us to the next stage”.
Sadly, the Argus brand is so badly damaged it is unlikely to be a launch pad to anything of value. I agreed with Gilson’s next sentence, as would every journalist:
“Make no mistake, we need a daily journalistic presence lifting the rocks to find out what’s underneath, flagging up the unsung heroes and the successes and standing up for the underdog”.
But that was followed by:
“We live in a big important place and I pledge the Argus under my editorship will place itself at the centre of debate, campaigning for change where it’s needed and continuing to play its 135-year role in keeping our communities connected”.
Sorry to rain on Gilson’s parade, but I think “pledge” might be hopelessly idealistic. Let’s explore that with some statistics. The Argus’s average newsprint sale in the six months up to December 2014 was 13,648 copies a day. Its digital edition attracted a mere 339 readers.
Its online audience, according to the outgoing editor’s leaving statement in November 2014, then amounted to “just over 40,000 unique visitors” a day. It may have improved since, but it is noticeable that it was once Newsquest’s best-followed site and has since slipped down the publisher’s own rankings, now lagging behind the Echo titles further along the south coast.
It is impossible to know whether or not there is an overlap between the 40,000 online visitors and the print issue readers (probably numbering 40,000 on the usual formula of tripling individual sales). But, very generously, let’s imagine that across all platforms, the Argus is being read every day by some 80,000 people.
The population of the Argus’s Sussex circulation area is more than 500,000, of whom 270,000 live in the city of Brighton and Hove. So the “communities” the paper affects to serve appear to be living without it.
Look also at its relatively low Twitter following (40,000 again) and even lower Facebook following (8,000). Those figures compare poorly with similar ones for the upstart online start-up, launched in 2009, Brighton and Hove News, which boasts 30,000 followers on Twitter and 10,000 on Facebook.
Of course, there is still much to appreciate about the Argus, not least its fund-raising appeal that manages to raise £200,000 a year for charities, with several hundred people taking part in a variety of activities. That’s the bit of the brand that still does stamp itself on the city.
Another speaker, the paper’s managing director, Dawn Sweeney, is also correct in saying that the Argus is “the number one publisher of news and information across Brighton and Hove and the wider Sussex region”.
But its chances of maintaining that top slot are threatened by the continuing loss of story-getting and writing staff. Soon after Gilson arrived, two redundancies in the features department reduced the writing staff to one. Two photographers are going as well.
Inside sources tell me there are eight reporters plus three people on the news desk and five sports staff. No wonder there is so little to read in the paper.
Last year, staff were shocked by the redundancies of two key players: chief sub Julia Mans and web editor Jo Wadsworth. The latter had been responsible for innovative digital work, earning her a place on a list of influential UK online journalists for her work on the Argus website.
Wadsworth went on to join former Argus deputy editor (and onetime sub on the Times), Frank le Duc, to run Brighton and Hove News. Although they work part-time, in company with sports writer Tim Hodges, they manage to post an impressive list of articles each day.
It is not (yet) a threat to the Argus, but it does act as both a prompt and a warning. Unless a paper can ensure that its brand makes the transition from print to digital without being unduly damaged, it may not survive once it puts away the presses.
Gilson knows that, of course. But Newsquest will need to provide him with the resources if he is to fulfil his pledge. And those resources are called human beings.