The future for British newspapers

As the Leveson inquiry continues and the fees Rupert Murdoch has paid out to lawyers run into the hundreds of millions, I wonder if it has occurred to him that the money would have been better spent establishing a crack team of investigative reporters working across all the News International titles - an A-Team of journalists if you like.

As I’ve said before, all the newspapers increased their circulations during the MPs expenses scandal. Clearly, there is a demand for proper stories - something most editors seem to have overlooked.  For example, the story about Virgin paying the police overtime to investigate fraud seems to have escaped major attention. Does this indicate Government plans to privatise parts of the police force? Twenty per cent of the Royal Bank of Scotland is still in private hands. Who owns the remaining shares? Were journalists monitoring Stock Market activity after the announcement was made about Hester’s bonus? And as the National Health Service is dismantled by stealth, how many of David Cameron’s cronies stand to benefit?

There’s a reason why newspaper circulation is falling and it doesn’t have anything to do with the internet. Newspaper proprietors should never have viewed the internet as a threat, but as an opportunity to focus on what newspapers do best - investigative stories.

When it comes to judging the public mood, editors in England have failed spectacularly. And newspaper managers have failed to ensure that they employ people who have their fingers on the nation’s pulse.

The British public deserves better.

Women in the British Press

A few days ago The Guardian’s Kira Cochrane wrote about the lack of women in the national press. Over the summer, she compared the number of bylines between male and female journalists. According to her research, out of all the newspapers, the Daily Mail managed to publish the highest number articles by women.

This brings me to the Leveson inquiry. With all the acres of coverage the inquiry has generated, not one journalist has questioned the editorial reasoning behind the phone hacking scandal. The whole sorry affair serves to illustrate the paucity of thinking at the most senior level of the British media.

If I was going to hack someone’s phone, why on earth would I bother with Elle Macpherson and Vanessa Feltz, for goodness sake? No, I’d hack the phones of pharmaceutical company bosses, politicians, hedge fund managers and city financiers. Look how many extra copies of newspapers were sold during the MPs expenses scandal. Does any newspaper editor really believe that any story involving Vanessa Feltz is going to generate that much interest? It certainly doesn’t justify the tens of thousands of pounds spent on private detectives and lawyers.

There are only two female editors of national newspapers in this country.  Yet there are any number of studies that show that women buy newspapers and magazines more often than men, and tend to be bigger consumers.  Would it really be too much of a stretch for media executives to make an effort to employ more women at senior levels in newspapers? Perhaps they might be more in tune with the readership and help increase circulation.