Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 26 July 2002
This paper has made dicing with death something of a way of life. It has rarely if ever made a profit in the conventional sense, relying for most of its 65 years on fund-raising and subventions from rich benefactors and trade unions to compensate for trading losses. And it has come perilously close to closure at least six times.
Two of these close encounters with the grim reaper were in my time on the staff. In 1988, the board decided to cease publication the next week unless a large sum of money was raised at once. So we ran a front page bare apart from the words “DON’T LET THIS BE THE LAST ISSUE OF TRIBUNE” and launched an emergency appeal – which rescued the paper by raising nearly £40,000 from readers and the unions.
Even that was not enough to keep the wolf from the door for long, however. Within three years, we were so short of money that we had to reduce pagination from 12 to eight tabloid pages a week for several months – and even this would have been unsustainable had we not managed to slash our typesetting costs by introducing desktop publishing.
So I had a feeling of deja vu all over again when I read in last week’s leader that Tribune was again running out of money, and that the board had decided to seek a buyer or launch another emergency appeal.
Of course, some would say that Tribune’s repeated crises show that its allegiance to the Labour Party, its policy prescriptions or even its democratic socialism are irrelevant or outmoded. Others would go further, as the political journalist Julia Langdon does in the current British Journalism Review, arguing that there is little space in today’s media world for political weeklies and that the days of even the New Statesman and the Spectator are numbered.
In my gloomier moments, I admit, I am at least tempted by such views. The massive expansion of the comment, features and reviews sections of the national press – to say nothing of the impact of the internet – has put immense pressure on the weeklies to find niches of their own. (This is a particular problem for Tribune and the Statesman because of the extent to which the Guardian and in recent months the Mirror have encroached on their territory.) I also often despair of the way parts of the Tribune left hang on to political nostrums that should by now be languishing in the dustbin of history – anti-Europeanism, scepticism about constitutional reform, nostalgia for Soviet communism and so on.
But at heart I remain convinced not only that the reinvigoration of egalitarian democratic socialism inside the Labour Party is the best hope we have – but also that there is room for well-written, well-edited political weeklies in Britain, particularly on the left. There is plenty the Guardian and Mirror don’t do that can and should be done, and plenty they do badly that can and should be done better. The Observer has dumbed down its political coverage and the Independent titles have lost the plot. The Morning Star’s Stalinism is risible and the Trot papers are moronic. Add the declining standard of politics and current affairs broadcasting, the patchiness of foreign coverage everywhere except the Financial Times and the Economist, and the failure of most reviews sections to notice most politics and history books – and the space for Tribune and the Statesman is very much there to be taken.
That the Statesman, with Geoffrey Robinson’s millions behind it, has failed to carve out a niche cannot be put down to lack of cash. But Tribune can justifiably claim that its current difficulties are the consequence of chronic under-investment. To make money in publishing, you need to spend money, on promoting your publication and on improving editorial quality. This in turn increases circulation, which in turn increases revenue both directly, through newsagent sales and subscriptions, and indirectly, by making your publication more attractive to advertisers. If you get it right – and OK, it’s a big “if” – you end up with a virtuous circle of growth and financial security.
Tribune, however, has never had the money to mount substantial promotion campaigns or to maintain more than the bare minimum level of editorial staffing. For several years, its operating margins have been so tight that the smallest downturn in advertising revenue pushes it into danger – which is what has happened in the past year, just as it happened in 1986-87 and 1990-91.
As before, the sums required to plug the gap are not huge, though they are large enough to necessitate urgent action. And, as before, just plugging the gap won’t be enough to secure Tribune’s long-term future. To have a chance of escaping the cycle of dependency and crisis, it needs an injection of investment large enough for a sustained push for growth. Of course, even that is not a sufficient condition for success – but it is a necessary one. Anyone out there prepared to gamble a quarter of a million quid?
