The Fleet Street Crisis

Headline of the Week In the Calgary Alta. Herald NEWFOUNDLAND DEBT CAUSED BY POVERTY

Though Britain's 122 daily newspapers enjoy the world's highest per-capita circulation, and will pull in a record $560 million in advertising this year, pessimism shrouded much of Fleet Street this week like an out-of-season pea-souper. Reasons: sapped by soaring costs and plummeting readership, Britain's fourth and fifth biggest dailies, the Labor-owned Daily Herald (circ. 1,653,997) and the Independent-Liberal News Chronicle (1,441,438), were desperately discussing a marriage of convenience; three smaller newspapers had already gone under in the past seven months. Nor were dailies alone in their troubles. London's earnest left-wing Sunday Reynolds' News (516,445) was being kept alive by Labor-Cooperative Movement subsidies; Britain's biggest weekly magazine, Picture Post, which had a peak circulation of 1,750,000 in 1939, last month died of journalistic arteriosclerosis.

"The Fleet Street Crisis," as it came to be called, spread across the front pages of the newspapers, called forth lead editorials in the prestigious (and prosperous) London Times and Manchester Guardian, and stirred a five-hour House of Commons debate in which the press was alternately consoled for its economic ills and cuffed for its sensationalism.

The precise cause of the "crisis" was elusive; its depth and seriousness were matters of debate. Francis Williams, Fleet Street's most astute observer, even went so far as to say: "This is not a crisis of one industry. What is involved is the whole position of the press as a social force in Britain: a major threat to principles that are as vital to the process of democracy as is the freedom of Parliament, the independence of the judiciary and the right of association."

What was mainly involved was the return of normal peacetime competition to the industry after 18 years of newsprint rationing. Until last December, when the government finally allowed newspapers to run as many pages as they wished, the biggest and strongest dailies could not give advertisers all the space they needed, thus, in effect, subsidizing smaller and weaker papers that had space to spare. With the end of newsprint restrictions. British admen, like their Madison Avenue cousins, began to concentrate their ads in dailies that give them either mass circulation, such as the Daily Express (circ. 4,042,334), or class circulation, e.g., the Daily Telegraph (1.075,565). Commercial TV had also lured advertisers from the smaller-circulation dailies.

Less successful papers have thus been quick to feel the pinch of production costs, long fattened by featherbedding mechanical unions and skyrocketing newsprint prices, which at $146 a ton (v. $134 in New York) are six times the prewar level. Aggrieved by the Laborite Herald's woes, one Labor M.P. even charged in the Commons' debate that the "giants have been deliberately inflating costs because they know that [they] will squeeze out their weaker brethren," while a Tory went so far as to propose beefing up ailing papers with government-paid newsprint subsidies.

What few Fleet Streeters pointed out was that Britain's weakest papers are for the most part the worst. The industry is basically healthy, with 611 newspaper buyers per 1,000 population, v. only 340 in the U.S. In both countries a decline in the overall number of newspapers seems economically inevitable without necessarily being socially iniquitous. Whether the trend can be slowed, as the Economist observed last week, "depends largely upon the quality of editorial inspiration and business management now available in Fleet Street."

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