Media commentator Ray Snoddy kicked off the Glasgow Society of Editors conference by comparing the assembled editors to lower league football club managers.
He said: “From the bottom of my heart I feel really sorry for all editors and for the impossible competitive pressures they face.
You are all the equivalent of Mansfield Town football managers, whatever you do the lads will let you down and the most you can hope for is a no score draw.”
Regarding what should be done to tackle the threat posed by new media to newspapers he said the answer was investment, rather than the cost cutting which has been seen at companies like Express Newspapers and Trinity Mirror in recent years.
He said: “The answer is more investment not less, more journalists not less and absolutely more money spent on training. In the world of amateur blogs all you have got is your accuracy, your trust and your brands and to think that cutting costs day after day is the way to improve any of those things is living in a cloud cuckoo land.”
He concluded: “It’s very exciting time to be an editor and a journalist…but only an idiot would say it’s the very best time to be a journalist.”
Speaking about the future of newspapers, Observer editor Roger Alton (pictured) said he believes that the disastrous newspaper circulation figures of recent years may have now hit a “plateau”. He said: “We’ve come across the media catastrophe ravine, I think we’ve come across and on the other side is a flatter plateau.”
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