GXpress editor Peter Coleman revisits the UK publisher to which he sold a string of community titles 25 years ago, to discover the keys to their survival in a challenging marketplace
With ‘rationalisation’ all around, keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs is a fair challenge. And one all too familiar to most newspaper publishers.
In the UK prior to the World Publishing Expo, I took the opportunity to see how one publishing business I had known well a quarter-of-a century ago was managing to survive in a difficult market.
Before catching a flight from the UK to Australia in 1987, I sold my family’s two small weekly newspapers to the Kent Messenger Group, then one of two main privately owned groups then fighting for dominance in the English county of Kent.
Still family-owned, it has Geraldine Allinson – to whose father, Edwin Boorman, I sold our cluster of Sheerness and Faversham titles – as it chairman. Her father died earlier this year, but not before she had “cut her teeth” in the industry in a variety of external roles, and within the company from 1993.
The Sheerness Times-Guardian – to which my own parents had come, and managed to acquire in the early 1950s – was only one of a portfolio of titles added to the KM Group over the years. It had been established in 1858, in a former dockyard town which has begun to make England’s depressed northeast look well off. Based on the island of Sheppey, in the Thames estuary, the business founded on an 8000-circulation paid-sale weekly, grew when mother and I modestly bought the neighbouring Faversham News.
Happily, the KM Group was busy at the time... marching on to woo and win the much-larger Canterbury and Ashford papers. When I was ready, and wanted to emigrate, it added our own.
Neither of us had grown without opposition or strong competition. Our immediate rival was also a family-owned business, well known as a pioneer of offset printing and photocomposition under Newspaper Society technical committee chairman Graham Parrett, whose trailblazing innovations led to a two-year union dispute. And in Canterbury, a former KM ad rep established a fast-growing freesheet (and then paid-sale) empire, before selling out for £20 million... and losing half the proceeds in a messy divorce.
The deal included our immediate competitor, and put most of the county’s remaining newspapers in corporate hands, notably those of the Daily Mail’s Northcliffe division. Last year, Northcliffe closed two titles after a deal to sell seven to Kent Messenger was thwarted by Britain’s Office of Fair Trading, although the associated Ofcom office had warned of the need to keep existing publishing businesses healthy.
One of the casualties was our former Sittingbourne neighbour and rival, the East Kent Gazette; the other (the 53,000-circulation Medway News) what had been one of the region’s strongest weekly newspaper businesses. A further title, the Thanet Times, closed last month, and the future of the remainder is unclear.
Northcliffe retains a strong title to the south, and UK major Archant is also active in the area, but the KMG powers on, active by acquisition or product launch, in every town in Kent, and to some extent gaining by default what the UK government prevented it from buying.
In Sittingbourne, where the EKG sold 8000 copies with another 6000 on free pick-up, the KM Group has resurrected the News Extra title we had created in the 1970s to plug a gap in our own market offering. It already holds the once-disputed Medway towns, where an FM radio station is one of the jewels in the crown.
Its afternoon daily Evening Post, created just in time to cover the first moon landing in 1969 – the year after I had returned to my family’s business after school and training on a daily newspaper in the south of England, following my father’s sudden death – has gone, a casualty of changing readership habits.
Nor does the Kent Messenger print its own newspapers, outsourcing production to giant Trinity Mirror in 2009. Somewhat predictably, the redundant Goss Visa press, extended with a succession of customised colour towers, proved near-impossible to sell in an over-supplied market.
Today, the KMG’s network of news and classified websites are among the most-visited in the country, and help position it to power the group into the future.
David Butler, who I interviewed for the technology story below, believes part of the success is due to the passionate family interest.
“It’s one of the joys and strengths of the KMG is that it’s family owned,” says Butler, who joined in 2010 from what he calls the ‘dark side’ of Northcliffe after its rationalisation and subsequent staff cuts. He worked in IT roles in Tunbridge Wells and Plymouth before becoming development manager for the inhouse Sentinel system, and then deputy group IT manager, a job which took him on a variety of challenging assignments with DMGT titles in Eastern Europe, Aberdeen, Nottingham and again at Kent Regional Newspapers (the merged Adscene Kent and Parrett & Neves newspapers).
“Independent publishers are more flexible, and I think will be better able to survive.”
A large dial in his Larkfield office used to tell then managing director Edwin Boorman when the press was working, and thus earning money from contract print clients. With the last big contract job lured away, the press has now gone, and Boorman’s family is redeveloping the former print site as housing.
The dial – and the steam-engine style brass plate which named its Urbanite predecessor the ‘Roy Boorman press’ – are doubtless in the museum collection, and the Kent Messenger Group is back to what it was all about: publishing.
Despite the substantial real estate investments, large chunks of a once capital-intensive business have been moved off balance sheet. The company is, for example, the first full user of DTI’s cloud-based editorial, advertising and circulation systems in Europe, a decision which lifts it from the traditional investment cycle.
Butler thinks the decision to outsource printing – to Trinity Mirror in Watford – prepared the company for “the tough psychological shift” of inhouse systems: “They were halfway there when they made the decision to outsource printing,” he says.
While there was a need to prepare for the titles it expected to acquire from Northcliffe titles, Butler says an upgrade was overdue. A 1998 Media Systems Adora/Forum order system was old, offline and partially upgraded to some Sun equipment, “making it expensive to run”. DTI production and editorial hadn’t been upgraded since 2000, with “power and expertise very expensive,” Butler says.
“I was tasked to look at cloud options – we wanted remote working and to break away from the cycle of spend, write off over five years and spend again. From having it on the balance sheet, to a more P&L-based model.”
The company’s comprehensive web – the KentOnline news portal plus jobs, homes and motors comprise the country’s fastest-growing regional newspaper website, claiming 450,000 unique browsers – had been upgraded using Immediacy (now Alterian) content management with its user friendly Windows-style interface and a Microsoft .NET platform. Like the DTI software, it uses GlobalSwitch’s data centre platform.
“We wanted to refocus on running the core business,” says Butler, “and cloud is the way to do it. We get away from the whole big department, and leave that to the experts.”
The point of risk, he says, shifts from the computer room to communications: “Resilient solutions may not always be cost-effective.” But there’s flexibility – a problem with a Virgin line was ‘worked around’ by sending everyone home so they could log in from there! You have the gauge the value of how you upgrade comms,” he says.
With two main offices – in Strood in the Medway Towns where the KMFM radio stations are also based, and outside the old oyster town of Whitstable, near Canterbury – the links are based on a Citrix platform with 100 megabit at Whitstable and the same at Global Switch. A total of seven offices are on a MPLS network with “nothing more than 20 megabits between them”. Email uses Google Apps, and telephony is cloud-based with Britannia
“We’re getting there,” says Butler. “At Larkfield we had eight racks of file servers, now it’s one, although some servers are virtualized. We’re able to refocus the IT department on users rather than the apps, and training, and the IT team is down from 15 to eight including me. We don’t have the wait for upgrades or configuration, and we don’t have to have software experts.”
The DTI systems went live in May as part of the changes: “We’ve achieved in a year what many take years to do,” Butler says.
Print, digital and radio comprise a unique sales proposition for KMG, with the focus on being customer-orientated: “We’re neither print or digital-first, there are no embargoes, and the website is updated two or three times a day,” Butler says.
With the FM stations and print stable of seven paid-for weeklies and seven frees, it’s a comfortable mix, with scope for development. Tablet and smartphone products are planned, and video a growth area, with a decision taken to migrate to an increasingly channelised YouTube for its superior search performance. A studio in Strood has professional equipment, and reporters are supplied with iPhones for pictures and video. “It’s cost effective and the quality is amazingly good,” Butler says.
It is he says, still a challenging environment, but one which looks brighter from where he stands now… with a flexible, family-owned business which has taken the strategic decisions to position itself for the industry’s future.
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