Death of Press Gazette is a glimpse of the future

I was very sorry to hear of the Press Gazette’s closure. Guardian Unlimited - through MediaGuardian.co.uk - is/was clearly a rival, but I was one of the few (2,776 of us) who had a subscription, kept running for years. It was always a place for us to turn to get a reasonably fair view on things we - or the competition - had done, and keep up with the moves of friends and former colleagues. New management, of which more in a second, had failings that proved to be terminal for the magazine, but they did help make it more gutsy.

The final edition, last week, led on the Telegraph’s claim (derived from Hitwise stats!) that it had more UK users than GU or TimesOnline. It wasn’t a great story, but a fitting one to close the doors to, given the net’s importance to the industry.

But a few other things were also fitting, in a less comfortable way, for the industry as a whole. There are, alas, lessons to be learnt here.

First, the magazine’s website (110,000 uniques a month) was much more popular than the printed version where, I suspect, all the effort went (4,639 sales).

Roy Greenslade, in his excellent obit today, suggests the web was where a lot of the readers went, but it seems like the PG always had an internet-style problem, even before the web existed. Readers - journalists - were used to getting it for free, as it turned up in newsrooms on a Thursday or Friday, and would then be passed around. Why pay when you could get it for nothing? Sound a familiar problem?

Second, classifieds went south - not because of Craigslist, but because regional newspapers (miffed, it’s said, at a hike in ad rates a few years ago) clubbed together to back holdthefrontpage.co.uk. When PG’s other cash cow - the UK Press Awards - were boycotted, the magazine was scrabbling around.

But, again as pointed out by Roy, even the revenues from that annual bunfight wouldn’t have necessarily helped. PG’s final, terminal problem was that new management took over PG and, instead of abandoning the high costs of traditional publication made them even higher, layering on new costs and moving to posh new offices (so the paper could “return” to Fleet Street, long since abandoned by its audience). [Update: someone who should know says the new offices, at £100k a year, were actually less posh than their previous ones. Blimey]. And look at the management costs: an MD on £133k, a finance director on £82k.

At a time when online publishing has found a very low-cost, high impact model of publication, PG went old school and bulked up. Had it embraced the new model - looking to Nick Denton, Rafat Ali or Ashley Norris rather than to the glory days of print - it might have survived.

Best wishes to its staff, not least the excellent Martin Stabe, who blogs over here.