Until last week, this had been the scene at la Maison de la Presse since my return to France. The main newspaper distributor went broke and for nearly two months, this - plus a blockade by affected employees - prevented most national French newspapers and magazines, and all international titles, reaching already struggling vendors in a large area of southern France. We are now seeing the French publications back on sale but no sign yet of the usual selection of foreign ones. As if the printed press did not have enough problems on its plate ...
The probable death of newspapers was first seriously mooted as television entered more and more people’s lives in the 1950s. It didn’t happen.
The Daily Express - "a bloody awful newspaper full of lies, scandal and imagination" according to the Duke of Edinburgh in 1962 - was still selling four millions copies a day until shortly before my own career in print journalism began in 1967.
Fifty-three years after I joined the Northern, then Evening, Despatch as a cub reporter in its branch office in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, the printed press has still not quite run its course.
It even survived The Economist’s solemn 2006 repeat of earlier warnings that the days of newspapers were numbered.
The reports of newspapers’ collective demise were, like those recording Mark Twain’s passing, much exaggerated. He lived for 13 years after hearing of rumours of his death while visiting London in 1897. But their sharp decline is very real and there seems not the remotest chance that it is going to be reversed.
Although the UK still has a profusion of national daily and Sunday newspapers, all are ailing to one extent or another. Some, and I think of The Guardian and The Observer and - though its outlook on life appals - the Daily Mail, are vibrant and deserve to be bought and read. Others should arguably be put out of their misery. Circulations are dismally low as this reasonably up-to-date (Jan 2020) table from the Audit Bureau of Circulations shows:
| Metro | 1,419,614 |
| The Sun | 1,206,595 |
| Daily Mail | 1,134,184 |
| Evening Standard | 787,447 |
| Daily Mirror | 441,934 |
| The Times | 359,960 |
| Daily Express | 289,679 |
| Daily Star | 274,808 |
| i | 215,932 |
| Financial Times | 155,009 |
| The Guardian | 126,879 |
| Daily Record | 103,222 |
| City A.M. | 85,738 |
(*NB: Metro, the Evening Standard and City A.M. are free. The Telegraph has dropped out of the ABC but most recent figures 317,817 for the daily, 248,288 for the Sunday. I will not remind those now of the daily's circulation when I worked there and nor will I argue that the alarming slump is necessarily a case of cause and effect)
If the nationals are faring badly, the provincial press is in a woeful state.
My friend and mentor Mike Amos, an award-winning colossus of regional journalism but cast aside after more than half a century on the Northern Echo (55 years in total with North of England Newspaper having started, as I did, on the Echo's long-defunct sister paper, the Despatch), says in his newly published memoirs that Echo sales have fallen to below 20,000.
I've seen a figure of 25,000 so that may for all I know be more accurate. But still lamentable. When the great Harold Evans edited the paper for five years in the 1960s, he took the circulation from 99,000 to 114,000. I recall a time at the start of my own career when the Echo could claim to sell more copies in the village of Croft, near Darlington, than there were households.
Around the world, the picture is pretty much the same. The sad truth is very few people want to buy newspapers any more. Colleagues at one overseas English language newspaper for which I still write say the online site is all that matters now. People don’t even want the print edition cluttering their homes if given away free.
The growth of the internet allows people to obtain news and other editorial content in other ways. Paywalls get in the way but a remarkable amount remains free to view, though pop-up advertisements can make for a gruelling experience. I hate to think how many people, especially the young, cannot be bothered even with the effort online reading demands and simply make do with whatever they see or hear on TV and radio. How they cope with Sky's endlessly grating interludes of world weather/Covid-19 snippets and Dermot Murnaghan podcast plugs baffles me.
Having shrugged off so many previous attempts to dismiss newspapers as finished, I finally saw the writing on the wall about five years ago.
My French brother-in-law, like me an avid reader of papers you hold in your hands, said he had just cancelled his subscription to Le Figaro, an arrangement he'd previously lauded because it was his newspaper of choice (he's politically rather to my right) and it was easy to suspend delivery during holidays and other absences. Now, he said, he could get what he wanted online (Le Figaro has a forbidding paywall so I assume he is still paying) and could always keep up his reading habits with the excellent Sunday newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, and the local Ouest France (I say local but its combined editions throughout western France make it the country's biggest selling daily) and even more local Le Maine Libre.
I have no answer because there is none, beyond the obvious need for publishers to continue to seek customers for online content and hope that this enables decent journalism to continue.
As for me, journalism and in particular newspaper journalism has been my professional life and it is not one I would wish to change.
Newspapers - the Despatch and Echo, the Harrow Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The National in Abu Dhabi and a host of others to which I have contributed or still contribute as a freelance - have given me a great career, enormous job satisfaction and lots of fun. Missing from that list was the Press Association (now PA Media), the national news agency owned principally by newspaper publishers, where I worked for my first four years in Fleet Street. Long ago, I had a recurring nightmare about returning to the Harrow Observer but there have never been bad dreams about my time at PA.
I worry about people somehow managing to enter the trade now or needing to earn a living from it for the foreseeable future. That future looks bleaker than Mark Twain's life expectancy in 1897 and while some publications will hang on for some years to come, the slow death will, if anything, gather pace.
Closures will continue, jobs will go and while Hacked Off may find good reasons to celebrate, democracy will be fortunate to avoid damaging consequences.
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