Sentimentality alone cannot save the Observer

According to the Press Gazette today:

Former Europe minister Denis MacShane has written to one hundred senior MPs of all parties in a bid to safeguard the future of the Observer amid fears... the newspaper could be closed. MacShane, Labour MP for Rotherham and former president of the NUJ [in 1978], is urging colleagues to sign a letter addressed to the Scott Trust, which owns the Observer, urging it to keep the paper going.

I’m not sure what a letter signed by 101 MPs will actually do for the coffers of the loss-making Observer. Perhaps MacShane is unaware of the media revolution threatening to leave many newspapers behind in their traditional format. Or perhaps it's a PR stunt to curry favour with the media-savvy left, given MPs' rough ride in the media in recent months.

Certainly MacShane simply informing the Scott Trust that he and his colleagues would be sad to see the Observer go does little for the economic reality of the situation. I fear his letter-writing would be no more or less successful if he were to send his plea instead to every 21-year-old in the country asking them to buy a newspaper each day, because the internet isn’t all that.

MacShane told Press Gazette: "As a former NUJ president and an occasional contributor to the Observer I don't want it to disappear and another tranche of our best journalists scurrying to find work in PR or learning about Job Seekers Allowance.”

I don’t mean to knock anybody’s best intentions but the naivety of MacShane’s strategy does more than any balance sheet to illustrate the hopelessness of the Observer’s long-term situation.

Perhaps MacShane would be better deployed offering the Observer some advice on cost-cutting instead, given he was able to run an office - albeit in his home garage - for as little as £20,000 per year, according to recent revelations about MPs' expenses. Writing in The Telegraph at that time, MacShane admitted he and his colleagues - who he described as "a Dad's Army of fiddlers" - had "grievously let down the public and deserve...collective shame".

There is a rich irony here, for it was a great many MPs' signatures that breathed fresh life into one ailing newspaper, but sadly it was their signatures on receipts and expense claims rather than on any open letter, that proved so effective.

Comments

[Conrad Quilty-Harper]

Some interesting background: 132 MPs signed an early day motion in 1993 supporting the Observer's continuance as an independent newspaper.

http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=5941&SESSION=696

(not saying that this was the reason it did survive, but it can't have hurt!)