> WORD FROM THE WISE
There’s been much media debate about the move from print to online. Grainne Rothery talks to Guardian News & Media’s Tim Brooks about managing the transition and where he sees the future
With the seismic shift from print to online and the ongo- ing search to find viable new revenue models, there has probably never been a more interesting time to be involved in the newspaper business. ‘Interesting’ may be considered euphemistic by some of the people most closely impacted, but for Tim Brooks, managing direc- tor of Guardian News & Media, the change is most cer- tainly a positive thing and something that brings new and exciting opportunities. “It’s quite understandable that there are people in
journalism who are fearful about the future,” he says. “They see regional newspapers shrinking and in some cases closing. They read about American newspapers going bankrupt. They look at the inexorable onward march of digital businesses like Google, which actually have no content, no journalism, and some people are oppressed and worried about that. “At the same time, within the same workforces, with- in the same teams, you’ve got people who are thinking, ‘Actually this is brilliant. Back in the day when we were print-only my article might have been read by a few thousand people and now it’s maybe being read by hundreds of thousands of people’. That’s an extraordi- nary liberating and empowering feeling for a journalist.” And Brooks knows plenty about how it feels to be a
journalist. A Cambridge graduate, he initially worked as a business journalist before co-founding and initially editing Media Week magazine. He later launched a pub- lishing business in Australia and worked in senior man- agement roles in Emap. He joined Guardian Media Group in 2006 from IPC, where he was managing direc- tor of the men’s lifestyle and music division.
18 Marketing Age Volume 4 Issue 4 2010
Since then he has been involved in leading the transi- tion online and the various changes brought about by our increasingly digital world. The shift online is very clearly evident in The Guardian’s own figures. While the daily newspaper had a circulation of 276,428 in October 2010, down more than 11pc in 12 months, and the Observer had a circulation of 313,466 (down 14.57pc), the online figures are much more robust with an audi- ence of around two million people each day, making it one of the most visited English-language papers online. The fact that Guardian Media Group is owned by the
Scott Trust has allowed it to take a strategic approach to change, says Brooks. “The Trust’s sole purpose is to ensure that The Guardian continues in perpetuity as an independent news organisation,” he says. “We’re not subject to shareholder pressure or takeover, for exam- ple. This has always allowed us to take a long view. “And we’ve been blessed in the long view with our
editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, who has been editor for 16 going on 17 years. He’s been in control of our edito- rial mission from before the inception of web publishing and has seen it through from its early beginnings and our first stumbling steps through to where we are today. “A lot of businesses in media invested heavily during the dotcom boom in 1999/2000 and then that bubble burst and a lot of those companies retrenched very rap- idly, laid off their digital people and went back to square one. The Guardian didn’t do that. It persisted with its investment because we believed that long-term the market would shift to digital, even if short-term it was very, very difficult and bumpy at that point. It was that persistence at that point that enabled us to build a real-
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