As the legend goes, if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London the kingdom will fall.
Nine of the birds can be found living in the precincts of the castle their wings clipped against a sudden dash for freedom.
Landmarks come and go. Just ask shipbuilders of the Clyde, the South Wales miners and East Midlands hand loom weavers. What looks permanent can fall.
In the Black Country, an unexpected landmark has fallen. The Express & Star newspaper has left its 1.75 acre city centre Queen Street offices in Wolverhampton and moved remaining staff into smaller quarters in the nearby Mander centre.
Once, the Express & Star building dominated the city centre. The largest regional paper outside London the paper’s illuminated logo proudly displayed on the cityscape and on the Castle Street walkway that connected the sprawling site. You could peer through the windows and see the press halls power through the print run. It was a majestic sight.
In its pomp, the Express & Star sold more than 200,000 copies a day.
Its editor sent a reporter to Afghanistan when the Russians invaded in 1979. One surprised foreign correspondent in Kabul greeted him with the words “Express & Star? They’ll be sending Exchange and Mart next.”
But the Star was a collosus. It sent a reporter and photographer when the British Army went into Basra in 2003. A young Boris Johnson was sent on work experience to Queen Street as a favour between the family who owned it and Johnson’s father. . He failed to measure up sent back with a recommendation that he’d never make a reporter.
Until a few years ago, it sent a reporter to every council meeting.
Today the title sells barely 13,000 and has been sold by the family-run Midland News Association to the ailing National World chain.
The sad thing is the Express & Star had a chance and it blew it. It was an early internet pioneer but a senior executive dismissed the rise of the web as ‘a fad like CB Radio.’
Even sadder were the friends who still worked in the Queen Street head office sharing sombre last thoughts on Facebook as the last shift there came to an end. I know some of them. They are good people.
‘This is shit’
For me the sale of the building was mixed feelings. I worked in a district office so I only ever went to Queen Street to be bollocked. It’s newsroom ran through a culture of fear. A colleague who started in a district office remembered sending a story electronically and having it returned from a news editor with the words: ‘This is shit.’
After careful review he re-sent the story.
‘Still shit,’ came the anonymous reply followed by a more personal dressing down over the internal phone.
This sink or swim approach created two career paths. The first path saw people exit journalism with dreams shattered.
The second path created effective reporters who could dictate a front page lead in nine minutes from court, council or roadside car crash. No, sorry, not a car crash but a collision between vehicles. This legally neutral terms was used to avoid apportioning blame. Even writing the words makes me fear the inernal phone ringing.
As I think back, my finest hour there was also my darkest hour. The Lee Hughes trial at Coventry Crown Court saw me and a colleague file rolling copy for six days. Rolling copy? Dictating a fresh story practically every half hour for First edition, Staffs, Town, Dudley, Sandwell and finally the City edition.
‘Miss anything and you are dead,’ was the inspiring message passed down the chain of command.
Today, those editions have gone. There is one edition whose deadline is the day before with the paper printed somewhere in the North West.
For me, the sale of the Express & Star building is more than the sale of a building. It is the Berlin Wall falling. It is the symbolic end of that particular kind of journalism where every council meeting was covered, every court checked and the working man enjoyed his paper in his armchair at the end of a working day.
The end and also the beginning
The end of Queen Street makes me feel sad. But not half as sad as seeing the Express & Star district office I worked in close a few years back.
Black Lake in West Bromwich was the Express & Star print works. It built in the 1970s with 40-foot high print towers that would shake the building. The editorial office was open plan. When I first worked there there were 12 Express & Star reporters and three photographers. We would run through brick walls for Ken the chief reporter and Dave his deputy. It is the best office I ever worked in and ever will work in.
The enemy? The enemy was always the editor in Queen Street not the rival Evening Mail.
The future of news may be email
Reach plc’s head Jim Mullen this month spoke of there being maybe five years of profitability left in print newspapers.
What the future of local journalism may look like could be found in Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool. According to this model, the future isn’t print its daily emails and a paid for bonus email funded by subscribers.
You can sign up for The Mill that covers Manchester here for free, The Post for Liverpool here, The Tribune for Sheffield here. There’s free news and a paid for element. Expect longer form posts with a handful of stories covered rather than everything the Express & Star used to do.
At the minute there are low thousands of paid subscribers. The danger is that local news becomes a minority pastime. But hey, at least its there.
One skill that’s transferrable
Those who worked on newspapers have one powerful skill in their back pocket that I’m convinced will be an asset in a future landscape scorched by the internet and AI.
The ability to tell a story is just as important today as it was when the presses rolled in Queen Street. Who, what, where, when, why and how, Kipling’s six good men who taught him all he knew, are even more powerful today than they were.
Someone who can come up with human stories with a human face is a powerful asset to have. That’s not any kind of sop to my former newsroom colleagues that’s a fact.
On it’s own that’s worth a front page lead and picking up a tray of cakes for the office from Firkins as I come back from court.
Picture: Rcsprinter123 used under a creative commons licence.
