Reach for innovative thinking, 1992-style

Reach had some innovative thinking to share amidst cataloguing the departure of heavy hitter editors among 550 job losses revealing it is planning to launch its own ‘news wire’ as part of its plans to combine national and regional editorial teams across the UK and Ireland.

Editor-in-chief Lloyd Embley and Managing Director of Reach plc Regionals Alan Edmunds told staff the news wire will become “integral” to every Reach title and will “enable the sharing of our journalism across platforms and products”.

And commenting on the wider project to create one editorial team across Reach’s nationals, regionals, Embley and Edmunds said: “The aim of these changes is to protect our newsbrands for the long term and enable us to innovate and develop new products and services.”

Now, ex-cus-a-me for a little personal reflection, but this is exactly what the trailblazers at Thomson Regional Newspapers (TRN) did all the way back in the hazy days of 1992. Realising that there was a lot of duplication across the group, especially in entertainment and other feature areas like food, motoring and gardening, Thomson Online Feature Service (TOFS) was set up and I was installed as editor to make it work.

Glossing over the fact that there was no ‘online’ in 1992, TOFS was designed to provide a two-way syndication service with material coming in from the ‘subscribers’ and going out to them from a small core team based in the journalistic nirvana that is Watford, then headquarters of TRN and home to the great, good and sundry renegades, myself included.

First challenge was to win over the clientele which included big beast editors like Magnus Linklater, Ed Curran and Derek Tucker plus assembled MDs like Alan Scott, Bob Crane and Tony Hill. ‘Not invented here’ was the dismissive response from Watford when the papers - from the Aberdeen Press & Journal to the Newcastle Chronicle via The Scotsman and Belfast Telegraph - railed against this head office imposition.

But slowly and surely we made it happen. The people on the desk who had to make it work, including the aforementioned Alan Edmunds who was then news editor of the Western Mail, realised that they were getting quality, oven-ready copy and pictures for nothing. They could localise the submission or simply use as it came.

They key, and I’m sure Reach are all over this, was quality.

Our film reviews and TV interviews had to be better than PA and our motoring column superior to anything that came out of the syndicated services. It had to be error-free and on time – and largely it was.

Those mammoth TRN titles are now spread among the four winds of newspaper ownership, but it just goes to show that a good idea is always a good idea even 28 years and several newspaper lifetimes away.

This is part of 'Reasons to be cheerful' published in the August 2020 issue of PJ News