Media Matters Stephen Glover
The once-powerful broadsheet still makes a healthy profit but, with cuts in all the wrong places, its journalistic standards are slipping
Students of Murdoch Maclennan, chief executive of the Telegraph Media Group, have had a lot to contend with over the years. Since he took over in 2004, he has worked his way through six Daily Telegraph editors, and there have been repeated culls of journalists. Admittedly, there has been less blood on the floor than during the French Terror. On the other hand, Maclennan has lasted much longer than Robespierre as he practises the art of perpetual revolution. Despite repeated rumours that Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay would like to sell the Telegraph titles, he remains firmly in the saddle.
His latest unexpected move is the appointment of Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World, as a PR adviser to the Telegraph Media Group, on a reported salary of more than £200,000 a year. This is the same Andy Coulson who was sentenced to eighteen months in jail in 2014 at the Old Bailey for orchestrating phone-hacking while he was editor. The two men go back a long way: during the trial, Maclennan described his friend as a man of ‘integrity and honour’, a possibly misplaced judgement which nonetheless implies an enduring relationship. He later visited Coulson in prison.
In a way, Maclennan’s loyalty to someone who has fallen on hard times does him great credit. (David Cameron, who rashly employed Coulson as his communications chief after he had left the News of the World, has clung less closely to his former employee.) All the same, one marvels at the appointment. It seems to defeat the object of the exercise. The spin doctor becomes the story before the story is spun. Outsiders scratch their heads in disbelief. Insiders, including senior journalists and one or two executives, regard the embrace of Coulson as another self-inflicted wound.
Even if Maclennan had alighted on the Archangel Gabriel, it would be difficult to see the point of recruiting a PR adviser. Why does any newspaper need one? Its strengths and weaknesses are on public show every day of the week for readers to ascertain. In the case of the
Daily Telegraph, its strengths have somewhat diminished in recent years, and its weaknesses grown. For all that, the paper remains surprisingly good in the circumstances – much better than some of its journalistic critics maintain. But when there is no abiding editor, and no discernible long-term strategy, when costs are continually being cut and journalists sacked – well, it is impossible to maintain the highest standards.
Since the beginning of Maclennan’s reign, the number of Telegraph journalists has dropped from more than 500 to about 380. The latest cost-cutting measure is to get rid of most of the sub-editors in London, and outsource their work to a Press Association office in Yorkshire. Brilliant idea!
The question is why the Barclay brothers continue to allow Murdoch Maclennan to do more or less whatever he wants with their train set. After all, since 2004 the Daily Telegraph’s sales have roughly halved from just over 900,000 copies a day. Over the same period, the once much weaker Times has fared far better, and is expected soon to overhaul its old rival. Meanwhile, the ‘digital first’ strategy that was loudly promoted years ago by the Telegraph Media Group has hardly been a resounding success. Its online offering is number six in the pecking order in terms of the size of its audience, and even lags behind Independent online.
So why do the Barclays stick with Maclennan? The answer must be that, in difficult times for newspapers, he has maintained the profitability of the Telegraph Media Group extremely well, not least by cutting costs wherever he spies an inch of fat. In 2015 (the latest year for which figures have been declared), it made a pre-tax profit of £48 million, which makes it the second or third most profitable newspaper in Britain.
Yet I wonder how long it can go on. Nick Hugh, a former Yahoo! executive recently hired as the Telegraph’s chief operating officer, tells the Financial Times that he is ‘supremely optimistic about our future’. I wouldn’t be, and I can’t believe the Barclays really are.
Readers of Guardian Online may have noticed begging letters at the end of articles. Some will have read that the Guardian Media Group is in such a financial pickle that it is contemplating a return to the less expensive pastures of Manchester, from which it decamped to London in 1964. Many good people are pledging money to the newspaper.
But how many of them know that, for all its problems – losses of £69 million last year – the Guardian Media Group is sitting on a staggering cash pile of at least £750 million? The newspaper’s problem is not that it is poor but that it is feckless, and spends more than it should. It’s like an incorrigible playboy begging for money to pay for petrol for the Ferrari he insists on keeping.