#JON COBLYN WELLESSELY FREE#

I don’t think it has changed for the better.” You could spend weeks on a story sometimes. “It’s not just a British phenomenon, but it has meant there are less hard facts to go on. That is partly a function of economics, there simply aren’t as many journalists on the ground reporting, especially abroad. “In the sense that there is more comment now and less news. “What I feel is that the ratio of comment to news has changed,” he says. Too much work for not enough reward”, Connell explains).Īfter 20 years focused on analysing the output of the newspaper industry, he is well-placed to comment on the changing nature of the content culled from the Week’s stable of sources. Once Rusbridger became Guardian editor, and Connell launched the Week, the venture ended (“Too busy. “He was one of the first people I showed the initial dummy of the Week.” Rusbridger, he adds, is an old friend and the pair once ran Art For Sale, a mini-magazine that went out with the Guardian, and was accompanied by an exhibition, backed by Charles Saatchi and Michael Green. “I couldn’t really argue with that,” says Connell. Former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger called it “parasitical”, the same accusation he would level at 21st century media disruptor Twitter almost 15 years later, and a label that Michael Grade, the former ITV executive chairman, would apply to Google’s aggregation activities in news and video. When the Week launched its model of snatching and aggregating content from newspapers, without paying for it, riled the industry. We are serious about our adventure into digital.”

Our numbers tell a story of success - we just haven’t rushed it. We sell more copies than the New Statesman and Spectator combined. “The numbers would tell you we haven’t been too slow to change. “We had no need to race into it as the paper was doing so well,” notes Connell, though with an average reader age of 45, he concedes that “we obviously want to catch a new generation. There is still a demand for this, and newspapers.”ĭespite being late to the digital revolution, the Week now has 27,000 subscribers to its digital edition, making it one of the largest in the UK. But you just have to look at the BBC Radio 4 audience and see how devoted they are. “It was a very old-fashioned idea right at the beginning and it has remained so. “The secret of our success has been resisting fiddling,” Connell says.

#JON COBLYN WELLESSELY FREE#

It is a formula that has seen the Week notch up 33 consecutive increases in six-monthly circulation audits, and although about 20% of copies are distributed free the publisher says that subscription numbers also continue to rise. People increasingly want the task of filtering out the noise and being told what is relevant, what is interesting, what do I need to know, and that is what the Week does.” I think Google does some things wonderfully well but I think people want a filter, they want judgments made for them. Bloomberg and HuffPo have all helped us to draw on richer material for the magazine. Now if you want to be informed you don’t just follow the Guardian, Telegraph or Times. “There has been a proliferation of content which, rather than making our role less relevant, if anything makes us more relevant. “The conditions that existed in 1995 exist even more now,” he says. It wasn’t until as recently as 2011 that the decision was taken to make its content available to readers online for the first time.Ĭonnell, a newspaperman at heart who worked at the Sunday Times for most of the 1980s and left his role as deputy editor at the Sunday Telegraph in 1994 to found the Week, says that he sees it as a case of going back to the future. With media consumption habits shifting to digital, and newspaper and magazine sales in decline, “change or die” is the mantra across the industry. The rise of the internet has brought with it giants such as Google and Facebook and a new wave of digital news darlings including Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and Vice Media. The last 20 years, and in particular the last decade, have seen unprecedented change, not to mention a good dose of panic, in the publishing industry. On the face of it that does seem an odd comment.

Jon coblyn wellessely