The journalists' trade mag Press Gazette closed last Friday to general lamentation within the industry, but my sources tell me that despite officially having been made redundant, its dedicated team of scribes are still at their desks and hard at work. Whatever can it mean?Update: Martin Stabe has the answer in the comments. Meanwhile, I can't beat this analysis of why the mag folded. It was basically cannibalised by its own website, which highlights a dilemma currently facing dead-tree publishers everywhere.
5 comments:
A shame if it has gone, but the writing has been on the wall of the dwindling jobs pages for a couple of years now.
Editorially it took too soft and self-congratulatory a line on the industry - too many press releases about evening papers overturning court gagging orders, not enough hard questions about newspapers' potentially terminal problems with recruitment, training, circulation, management and ownership. Rather like the wider industry, UKPG was narcissistic in the original sense, gazing adoringly at its own reflection unaware that it was actually withering away.
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Paul,
Your sources are misinformed. We were in the newsroom yesterday, but only to collect our things and our P45s.
UKPG no more - says it all really. Ends.
Paul,
take a look at the PG site this morning. Something is indeed afoot.
Meanwhile I hear that former editorial staff are furious for two reasons: the story posted last Friday night saying that the editorial team had been all made redundant has been taken down. Furthermore, the story giving all their individual contact details has also been removed from the site. This means that, having been all been axed without a pay-off, the staff can't even be contacted by readers (or even potential employers) who visit the site.
Some of the former team fear that Jabba the Hut lookalike sales manager Paul Beard - who is still being paid by the administrator - or Joe 90's little brother Simon Read, the utterly hapless managing director, may be involved in a new set-up, and so have airbrushed them from history already.
Censorship at the magazine that worked so hard to champion press freedom. If it wasn't so tragic, it'd be funny.
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