Eric Pickles - the Local Govt minister - has today confirmed plans for councils and other public sector organisations to put all civil service job advertising online in a standard format.
This will have huge implications for The Guardian, as they make a lot of money from public sector recruitment advertising.
The UK newspaper industry is already in a parlous state - the Times’ paywall experiment seems to be failing (even the pre-payment phase requiring free registration led to a drop in traffic of 60%) - and the Guardian was already operating at a loss of £250,000 per day last year.
This move by the Tories can been seen as a fairly blunt attack on a critical newspaper, which isn’t to say it’s not a justified approach, but I think there will be some very worried Guardian execs at the moment.
I don’t see it as an attack on the Guardian. If the same job of advertising can be achieved cheaper elsewhere, then the Govt has an obligation to do so and not waste taxpayers money. The Guardian will just have to alter theior business model, and if they are not feasible anymore, then them’s the breaks.
Realistically, a lot of public sector recruitment has been frozen for something like the last year and a half to two years, certainly for recruitment from outside companies - the only reason why any public sector organisation would be advertising in the Guardian anyway. Where posts aren’t frozen, you’re looking at people within the organisation being redeployed when there redundancies in their own departments, so no need for the Guardian.
If the Guardian was vastly affected by this, the cracks would be showing already.
I read the Guardian jobs online quite a lot with ‘mental health’ and ‘london’ as my search keywords, leading me to primarily public sector roles, and there are noticeably fewer jobs in the last two years than there were say 3 or 4 years ago.
It’s not particularly an attack on the Guardian - they’re just a target of opportunity - as education jobs, for instance, get advertised in the Times Literary Supplement, and local council jobs get advertised in local papers.
No, it’s not doomed. The Guardian has an interesting ownership structure. Above the Guardian Media Group sits the Scott Trust, the primary objective of which is “to secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity”.
The Trust has extensive media interests besides the Guardian and Observer newspapers. These include radio, the Auto Trader and other classifieds, and property. The Trust uses funds from its profit-making businesses to keep the Guardian running.
In the short-term no, the Grauniad (as it’s affectionately known over here) isn’t doomed, and will probably last longer than several other newspapers.
In the medium-to-long-term, yes, it is doomed in its current form because all newspapers are. The idea of disseminating information and entertainment by chopping down trees, making newsprint, running vast web-offset presses, slicing the results into readable shapes, then sending hundreds of trucks out to distribute them across an entire country every day is already looking absurd, and will look more so as time goes by. But it may be able to survive in online form. No-one has yet figured out how to make this work, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work. Nobody watching the Wright Brothers at Kittyhawk would have had much of a clue how you could make money out of powered flying machines.
Yep, The Guardian is pretty well immune to the vagaries of the market because of CP Snow’s unusual trust deed. In fact, it already loses fortunes but hey . .
Perhaps as significantly is how Mr Murdoch’s little scheme works out, the paywall that went up this week on The Times content. Interesting times . . . . as it were.