“You know the real problem with the P&J these days, don’t you?”, a man once asked me, wagging his finger as he leaned angrily across a large table in a Highland hotel’s conference suite.
“It just doesn’t burn properly anymore!”
Among history’s more leftfield reader feedback – if not quite up there with the plea not to move away from broadsheet format because the paper would be too small to pluck chickens on.
The combustibility concerns were raised at a public session a few years back for people to let senior editors know what they wanted from their daily paper.
I found the events very useful, a chance to have our eyes opened to unexpected changes in tastes as well as to find some reassurance that our instincts for our audience’s desires remained well honed.
They were one of a limited number of ways we had to do that then, beyond checking one key visible number: how many papers we were selling every day.
Getting to know our readers
Today, when it comes to online news, our industry is spoiled for such opportunities.
Media outlets are devising more and more innovative ways to slice and dice the data generated by online users to help inform their understanding of who wants to read what – and when.
We are in the early stages of that development ourselves and can already see the great promise in being able properly to harness all that information to shape our output.
I was reminded of the contrast as I started to digest what you have been telling me about the recent rise in the cost of the print edition of the P&J.
The stories in some of those letters and emails have made for very difficult reading.
Households with a loyalty to the P&J stretching back generations reluctantly deciding the time had come to cancel their papers. Individuals who first bought the P&J the last time we had a king saying they could no longer afford to keep reading it every day. The sort of lasting relationships with our community on which we have built a reputation over 275 years, abruptly ending.
We were braced for this of course.
In my view the P&J remains great value for money, whether in comparison with other similar titles across the UK or when you consider it is cheaper than most cups of coffee, which would go cold in the time it took to digest even a tiny fraction of the words and pictures we publish every day.
Honesty over price rise
But the cost-of-living crisis has everyone looking for ways to save – and our choice to be open and honest about the fact we were putting up the cover price to meet our own soaring costs rather than sacrifice quality thrust the paper firmly into that budgeting spotlight.
So I understand why a small number have earmarked it as a luxury they must do without.
Some correspondents set out in detail the calculations behind that decision – affording me again one of those invaluable chances to dip more than just a toe into the waters of reader opinion.
What it has revealed so far though is that those waters are as muddied as ever and so finding the right balance of content – in what is by its nature a one-size-must-fit-all product – remains a very tricky task.
If I retained a single clear message from those sessions with readers a while back, it was that they mostly agreed – regardless of gender, age or location – that they relished reading that content too.
One email distilled the dilemma nicely.
The “final straw”, the reader said, was our “excessive coverage of the Queen’s death and funeral”.
The same coverage that, for many who got in touch at the time, was the icing on the cake.
He agreed that he might still buy a copy on Wednesdays and Saturdays, for the Your Car and Your Life supplements.
Press and Journal readers have different opinions on content
Exactly the supplements others described as “of no interest” and an utter waste of paper that should be axed to allow a price reduction instead.
He would not though be heading to the newsagent on a Monday, he added, for fear of having to “endure” the football coverage – which is the only reason another reader says he is not abandoning us (albeit with the caveat that we give far too many column inches to his team’s bitter rivals..).
Another common theme was an apparent dislike for pages showcasing things like children’s artwork, photographs of pets or the Last Class series of primary school photos.
These though are features we do not rely on instinct to tell us are popular, we know so from sales numbers.
Perhaps most surprisingly divisive, the quantity of court cases on our pages.
Several gave that as a main reason for stopping buying the paper, beyond just the cost.
Yet we know there is a significant appetite for our work to make sure that justice is seen to be done, and by no means just among our online readership.
If I retained a single clear message from those sessions with readers a while back, it was that they mostly agreed – regardless of gender, age or location – that they relished reading that content too.
Well, that and the poor kindling quality of the P&J of course.
For what it’s worth I am reliably informed by a source with great experience in such matters that The Times is more effective for screwing up in the hearth.
What it and other papers will never do though is burn with the same desire we have to be the Voice of the North, a vocal champion for our region and all of its people.
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