The Daily Telegraph Has Been Proven Yet Again – People Will Read Print In Growing Numbers If There’s A Good Story

Philip M. Stone May 13, 2009

All those publishers out there trying to figure out how to reclaim lost print readership should pay very close attention to what has been happening to the UKs ‘Daily Telegraph’ for the past few days with its exclusives on the shenanigans by practically every Member of Parliament (MP) in claiming expenses. Every day circulation is said to be up by more than 10% and every day there are still new revelations.

It points out yet again that people around the world have not forgotten about newspapers but rather newspapers have forgotten their obligation to their readers. To get back those people who used to read print but have given it up for whatever reason print has to deliver a product that packages news and information in such a way that the reader needs and wants to read it in print even if the information is available digitally. 

In The Telegraph’s case, the number of unique visitors to its web site certainly has risen on this continuing story, but it is the print newspaper that is really getting all the credit with some 100,000 additional newspapers sold each day -- not bad for a newspaper whose circulation before stood at 817,000. Each day it has pages and pages of what each MP has claimed over the past four years and no one is really talking about the web site.

The story has caused uproar in the UK – you actually had the Prime Minister at a personal appearance starting with an apology for what he and every Member of Parliament of all parties had been doing on their expenses. And he got a big applause for that.

Tuesday night a member of Brown’s cabinet while admitting no wrong-doing held up a personal check to the television camera and said she was sending the £13,332 (€15,000, $20,000) immediately to the Inland Revenue (IRS) for capital gains tax on a second home that the taxpayers had subsidized. She said she really didn’t owe it but …

And then later in the evening Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a BBC interview said an independent panel would look over every single expense claim made by MPs over the past four years and could demand repayments and that disciplinary action could also be taken – as everyone knows who ever watched Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister it’s all in the great British political tradition of organizing an independent commission that will take ages to come up with its report by which time the public has moved on!

But Brown still did not list any changes in expense requirements for his Labor Party even though the Conservative-leaning Telegraph for several days has been nailing his party. On Tuesday the newspaper  started on the main opposition Conservative Party and immediately its leader, David Cameron, came out with a list of new rules for Conservative member expenses and he ordered repayments to the taxpayer where warranted, and the Liberal Democrats, who are the subject in Wednesday’s newspaper, came out with their own new rules Tuesday night.

Meanwhile TV has been out daily getting man/woman-on-the street interviews and practically every one heard used words like “disgusting”. 

And because The Telegraph has this story to itself – it is said that someone in the Parliamentary office that handles expenses made a CD disk of all claims over the past four years and had been shopping that around the media but only The Telegraph bought it (the paper is not admitting it actually did pay for the information), but whatever the cost it has by far more than made up the amount with added circulation, higher advertising rates, and great publicity (practically all media crediting The Telegraph continually every day with its new revelations). The promotional value of that cannot be underplayed.

It’s obviously a story that had stirred the country – as one broadcaster said it has shaken the UK’s democratic roots to the very core – the Prime Minister and the leaders of all other parties have had to come clean – and all because of revelations by a newspaper.

President Obama at the White House Correspondents banquet last Saturday made a point of how important newspapers were within a democracy, and if anyone needed proof of that then The Telegraph has led the way. It should garner every award going!

But the point to all of this is that print is not dead. When it has a really good story the readers will come. Telegraph editors and no doubt editors at other newspapers are probably racking their brains on what can be done as an encore.

But to provide the encore you have to have the newsroom – and journalists in it – to put out that core product, and yet it is in the newsroom that so many publications continue to cut back.

The fact is we are not interested in reading press releases in our newspapers – even slightly rewritten ones, banish them to the Internet – what we are really interested in is real journalism – stories that journalists have to go out and find, not those delivered on their doorstep, stories that make a difference to our life, that can help us make decisions about the people who represent us, help us to decide on how we spend/invest our money, keep an eye out on government – in other words not printing what officialdom wants newspapers to print but rather the information they try and hide from newspapers.

But all of that takes leather pounding the beat – it’s not cheap but that’s what readers want, and do it well enough and people will to pay for the privilege.

The Telegraph may have had to invest (buy) the information it got on the Parliamentarians, but obviously it is information that the people wanted. In every community there is information that people want to know but governments aren’t willing to tell, and it is the job of newspapers to ferret out that information. But it won’t happen with decimated newsrooms.

So Mr. and Mrs. Publisher, time to not only decide what news gets sold on digital platforms, but also time to see what it takes journalistically to turn a newsroom from a cost center to a profit center continually producing stories that brings more people back to reading newspapers. 

It’s not really rocket science.