NEWS
By Don Gordon-Brown
Ten long years, eh? I’m a decade older, my knees are dodgy from carting bundles of Indies about. The paper’s bank balance is woeful. We owe our printers too much, and I ask myself the question regularly: why bother?
Probably the simplest answer is that I’ve done nothing else in a four-decade career in journalism that has made me prouder. I know The Indie is well liked – and has its detractors too.
And that it’s the only realistic print-media advertising option for many small and medium businesses in our circulation area. But if you can forgive me a little bit of navel-gazing as we reach this amazing milestone, I’m forced to ponder the possibility that, when it’s all said and done, we haven’t really achieved a lot that’s good over those 10 long and exhausting years.
The sad reality is that since a little band of well-known and respected Brisbane journalists and myself began The Independent in August 2001, our chosen patch is now not as well served by community newspapers as it was back in August 2001.
Or put another way, the competition that The Indie has provided over that time has not really done its job in making this paper – and its Quest competitors – serve both readers and advertisers just that little bit better.
Doubt my claim that readers and advertisers alike have poorer choices now then when we started? Here are the facts. The suburbs we decided to target back in 2001 – the Valley, New Farm, Newstead, Teneriffe and Bowen Hills among them – were at that stage serviced by Northern News. Our CBD competitor was another tabloid City News. Northern News from memory had the story of a new police station at Banyo as its front-page splash about the time we started.
If nothing else, we made Quest rediscover the inner-north, albeit for a short while.
A few short years after we began, Quest rebranded City News as a newsmagazine and boasted that an almost doubled circulation – from around 22,000 to 40,000 – would be delivered to readers by a brand-new method – directly into the letterboxes of a specifically targeted demography by none other than Australia Post itself! It was all marketing hype, of course, and not too many months went by before the whole marketing strategy was junked, in secret, for no other reason that to save money. Besides, it was never a marketing strategy executed with any conviction or enthusiasm. But that’s Quest for you. Cooking up slick spiels and slogans that sound great and wet the collective pants of pretty young things of both sexes in advertising agencies is all that matters.
Quest then axed Northern News and expanded City News by a further 10,000 to cover more or less our home-delivery footprint at that time. Imitation is the finest form of flattery, so they say.
Fast forward to September last year, when Quest axed the newsmagazine, returning City News to a basic tabloid on dull-looking newsprint stock. True to their form and their need for meaningless marketing buzzwords and gimmicks, they declared the new publication was brighter and bolder. You only had to look at the old and the new to know that was simply not true.
They cooked up the laughable notion of a two-speed newspaper, where busy readers could avoind reading it - and its advertisements! But never let the facts or logic get in the way of a good pitch ... and the pitch is everything, remember?
So 10 years down the track, The Indie’s main competitors have shrunk from two to just the one – City News, a publication that is shamelessly pitched at the young female city worker. It retains a circulation based largely on that failed marketing strategy of many years ago.
And yet it doubles as the home-delivery community paper as well, with about a fifth of its circulation going to a residential market almost the same as The Indie’s. But anyone who can put up their ad rates by 30 per cent since last September shows they are not in the least bit afraid of The Indie.
They could care less about the small to medium sized businesses that operate in our shared patch and who they have largely deserted. If those people want a quarter-page ad in City News, they can fork out the best part of $1400 for it, thank you very much! So what has The Indie really achieved over 10 years, if it hasn’t forced Quest to do the right thing by advertisers and readers.
Well, admittedly, we’ve had some fun along the way ... and we’ve fought some good campaigns. As the two front-pages (at top) early 2007 show, we took the then Beattie Government to task over and over again over the redhot porkies his awful government told us about the much delayed makeover for the Brunswick Street railway station, as it was back then.
It’s still head-shaking stuff to recall that Beattie could brazenly declare the final tenders had been awarded for the project – only to have to fess up that in reality the project was still in the early planning stages. Beattie trotted out a poor senior public servant to front the media and say how difficult the job was going to be and how much work still needed to be done on it.
We take an enormous amount of pride that when Beattie finally decided to come clean, he chose City News – a publication that belatedly joined the debate at the death – for one of his sickening “I’ve been a naughty boy, I need to be whipped and whipped really, really hard and I promise to do better” confessions that we were all quickly tiring of.
With covers like those above, we suspect that towards the end of his Premiership, Beattie didn’t like us one little bit. Well, all we at The Indie can say to Peter “I’ll never, ever take a government job” Beattie, the feeling was mutual.
We’re also very proud to have been probably the first city publication that questioned Beattie’s successor Anna Bligh’s plan for the North Bank project that would have extended a third way across our flood-prone river (below).
“But the people want us to do something there,” was the mantra she bleated along with her deputy Paul Lucas. But we sussed out community feeling about that issue long before the likes of The Courier-Mail stopped thinking about advertising revenue and reluctantly started to understand the strength of public resentment to the project.
Sure, our influence was certainly minor. But we took it up to the government early over the issue – and we can all be left to wonder what might have happened back in January if that scheme had been green-lighted and our riverbed had a whole heap of concrete pylons driven into it when our dams overflowed.
Have we paid a price for getting stuck into the Queensland Government over the past decade on such issues? We suspect so – and we’ll wear that with pride too. It’s true that state government departments, agencies and quangos have spent diddly squat with us over the past decade. Yet our arguments for having just a fair and reasonable share of the amounts that this government swings City News’s way week in and week out are compelling.
But the last time we wrote to Premier Bligh outlining those arguments and asking for a meeting with the right people to put our case once more for just a fair share of such government print-media advertising, we weren’t even given the courtesy of a reply. That was in late 2009. At least we know where Bligh stands.
But if putting out a loss-leading paper for 10 long years has shown anything, it’s that we at The Indie are extremely patient. If current polls prove correct early next year, we’re hopeful that the new LNP Government might actually want to spend taxpayers’ money wisely, instead of it being thrown lazily at Quest because that’s the way it’s always been done and it’s so much simpler allocatingadvertising budgets when you don’t have to think about it too much..
On other issues, we were proud last year to run a campaign with local councillor David Hinchliffe in a bid to clean up the Valley’s “grot spots”.
And over recent months, we have run an active campaign to try to get some recalcitrant Valley landowners to clean up their acts and make their buildings cleaner and safe – and with a look befitting the Valley heart. Can’t claim much success there to date, I’m afraid. Another ongoing campaign is this newspaper’s attempts to try to get our civic leaders to make amends for developer Mirvac’s decision to privatise a section of the Brisbane River so it could charge more for the units in their Pier South complex.
The “Give Us Back our River” campaign began in late 2008 and we can proudly boast a major victory in this campaign – we’re on pretty safe ground when we say that Mirvac Waterfront has not, and never will, advertise with us! What’s more, we’ll resurrect the campaign in earnest in our next issue on 14 September, so as they say in the trade “watch this spaced!”.
Finally, we’re proud of our slogan of “putting our local community first”. We’re proud to have won two Community Action Network awards for our work in the local community. And in each and every issue of The Independent, we proudly run free advertisements for worthy local organisations that could do with that publicity – and this milestone issue is no exception.
And I also want to place on record my heartfelt thanks to a small but very loyal band of advertisers who have stuck with us for so, so long and made it possible for us to hit the streets.
So, there you have it. Ten years on, and a heart-on-sleeve admission that I’m not at all sure we’ve really made any positive difference at all. Maybe we’ll do better in the next 10?
