Fortress Wapping is no more. At least, it will be no more soon, as News International seeks to sell off the site which once it had earmarked for a now-shelved campus development.
It’s a move that seems like a rather poignant reflection of the state of print. Once upon a time, Wapping was something people fought over; it was the epicentre of the journalists’ and printworkers’ dispute of 1986, when sales of newspapers in Britain had reached their peak. Now, it’s being closed down, with barely a struggle. “A readjustment of a property portfolio,” says the statement, but it’s hard not to think it’s symbolic of more than that.
The News International brand has been poisoned by the phonehacking saga, which still echoed on yesterday, with more statements to parliament and more accusations. It’s not going away any time soon, with more arrests continuing. You can’t stop something from being news, once it’s news; Rupert Murdoch probably knows that best of all.
While James Murdoch is feeling the heat, the aura of invincibility has gone from his father – an aura which was created at around the time when he decided to smash the unions and move to Wapping in the first place. Perhaps the departure from that site could represent the closing of a circle; perhaps it is just a cold business decision in difficult trading times — the one-off revenues from the sale of prime land should be handsome, although you have to wonder how much greater they would have been in a property boom rather than a slump. Whatever the reason, Fortress Murdoch, Fortress Wapping, which once seemed impregnable is now being abandoned.
It’s not just a change of site though. The Wapping announcement coincides with the shedding of more than 100 journalists’ jobs. Those of us who’ve been through the business of being booted out ourselves will recognise the language: consultation; challenging economic conditions; reassessment; an extremely testing time; great confidence for the future; yadda yadda yadda. We’ve heard it all before, and we know what it means.
As ever with these announcements, I take no pleasure in seeing a bunch of journalists being kicked out after a lifetime in their chosen profession — even if they did end up working for Murdoch. It’s a stark reminder of the state of the industry — when I started working a big regional daily in 2004, there were nearly 200 journalists working there; now there are 60. When you see even the likes of News International shedding jobs, using that ominous language about ‘going forward’ that we redundant types remember so well from Powerpoint presentations and friendly memos back at our old workplaces, you know that something is wrong. This could be more than just a little local difficulty.
There’s something else: it’s been nearly nine weeks since the News of the World printed its last-ever ‘souvenir’ edition (available now on Ebay for £5m) but the Sun hasn’t started printing on a Sunday yet. It may be just around the corner; it may be some distance away. But it is going to happen — isn’t it? And if there’s even the slightest possible chance that it isn’t, what does that mean for the future of the industry?
The old certainties are gone: Fortress Wapping is no more; the Murdoch aura has disappeared. In their place are new certainties: journalists are going to lose their jobs. Ink is declining. And it’s hard to see a time when that is going to change.
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