Before we were able to count the clicks, in the days of ink on paper, editors tended to operate on hunches. Who were their readers? Who might be lured into becoming a reader? Why did anyone buy their newspaper anyway?
Market research was usually rejected on the grounds that it was either too expensive (for publishers) or too unlikely to produce “sensible” results (the ones editors favoured).
Even when it was employed, the results tended to be open to wide interpretation, allowing editors to divine strategies based on what they intuited the research was telling them. Back to instinct again and a range of implausible theories about how to attract readers.
Here’s a tale that could be told by many editors and journalists down the years. This one is by Emma Hartley, sometimes of this parish, who worked on the Western Morning News (WMN) in Cornwall in the mid-1990s.
In her GlamourCave blog, she recalls her time as a cub reporter “mulling over” what her editor, Barrie Williams, called “westcountry-ness”.
She tells how Williams, based in WMN’s office in Plymouth, would arrive from time to time at the paper’s Cornish offices, in Truro or Bodmin, “to tell us about the direction the paper was supposed to be taking”.
On the basis of supposed market research - “much to the hysterical amusement of my older colleagues” - Williams came to believe that “the WMN’s fastest-growing group of readers were recent arrivals to Devon and Cornwall from elsewhere in the UK, usually cities”.
They were attracted not by the quality of life but “by the idea of the place: something a bit wild, full of myths and legends, fluffy little bits of celtic fringe, mystical bollocks about piskies, pirates, wreckers, smugglers, Tintagel, the beast of Bodmin and the witchcraft museum in Boscastle.
“The readers, it seemed, really liked the part of Cornwall that was essentially fictional”. Hartley continues:
“My gnarly male colleagues were uniformly unimpressed by this theory: Robert Jobson, David Green, Colin Gregory and Michael Taylor... thought it was ridiculous.
Between them they had about 120 years experience in Cornish journalism, they knew where the bodies were buried, and they thought Barrie would probably blow over.
However, I was young and keen, and Barrie had just given me a job. So I set about doing as I was bidden – looking for the kind of stories the editor had mentioned – and hit the trail of Daphne Du Maurier quite hard.
Other areas potentially of interest, I decided, included Poldark, a New Age conference in Polperro where David Icke sometimes spoke and Mayday in Padstow”.
Little came of the venture, it appears, except for Hartley forming an easy-going relationship with du Maurier’s son, Kits Browning, who lived, as his mother had done, in Fowey.
I sympathise with Williams. Trying to find a way of winning over new readers as sales were going down was virtually impossible. You might as well have tried magic.
In a period where circulations were drifting away - even before the internet took hold - doing something rather than nothing was understandable. After all, sales were too often the only scale on which editors were judged.
And, yes, editors who did try something different were lampooned behind their backs, by their staffs. (I’ve been on both sides of that situation).
Williams enjoyed a good career, spending 30 years as an editor. He edited the Nottingham Evening Post as well as the WMN before he retired in 2005. Two years later, his book, Ink in the Blood: memoirs of a regional newspaperman,was published.
I haven’t read it so I can’t tell you whether he writes about his “westcountry-ness” initiative. What I do know, as he probably discovered, is that one of the reasons for the decline of regional newspapers was geographical mobility. People who moved into new areas rarely bought local papers, daily or weekly.