'Bouquets and brickbats', The Guardian

Monday, May 16, 2005

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Press Gazette is 40, but celebrations will be marred by its imminent sale and fierce criticism of the Press Awards, which it oversees. James Silver reports.

Press Gazette, journalism's trade newspaper, turns 40 this year, but for now the celebrations are very much on hold. Not only is the title being sold by publishers Quantum Business Media - negotiations with potential buyers are "ongoing" and an announcement about a new owner is expected "soon" - but the prestigious and lucrative British Press Awards, which Press Gazette oversees, are due for a major overhaul after this year's event was branded "a disgrace" and "a carnival of hate". Changes will include a full "Oscars-style" audit of the voting procedure to offset allegations of result-fixing and "corruption", in addition to the axing of a number of categories and - possibly - of acceptance speeches.

The awards ceremony itself, held annually at the Hilton hotel on Park Lane and attended by around 900 often bibulous hacks, has for some years been providing columnists with rich pickings about heckling, punch-ups and blood-spattered shirts.

At this year's bash in March, Sir Bob Geldof, who had been brought along at the last minute by the Sun, launched into a tirade against rival titles, which provoked a predictably robust response from the floor and a stand-off between Mirror editor Richard Wallace and the motormouth Band Aid star. Sunday Times columnist Jeremy Clarkson used his acceptance speech to take a pop at the former Mirror editor, Piers Morgan, describing him as "an arsehole". The News of the World's elevation to newspaper of the year, for its scoop about David Beckham's extra-marital love life, prompted a number of senior industry voices to call for the awards to be scrapped or radically overhauled and for an end to rewarding cheque-book journalism.

Somewhat wearily, Press Gazette's likeable editor, Ian Reeves, claims that much of the coverage is exaggerated. "The descriptions of the event are not recognised by many of the people who go," he says. "Fleet Street is a great place for myth-making." So reports of boorish behaviour are overblown? "Journalists aren't librarians," he says with a shrug. "But I know several people who witnessed the scuffle between Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan last year, and they say it was something and nothing. It suited the pair of them to big it up and play on it. The feedback I get from many of the people who come is very good."

Following this year's excesses, 11 national newspaper editors withdrew support for the event, issuing a joint statement saying that the awards brought "little credit to the industry or to the newspapers who win them. Following the Press Awards ceremony ... discussions are now going on about what should happen in the future."

Reeves admits that he was stung that the statement was not sent to Press Gazette and he was obliged to read it on MediaGuardian.co.uk. "I first got wind of it when I was phoned and directed to look at the Media Guardian website," he recalls. "I was disappointed, to be honest, by the way it did emerge. I felt a more useful approach would have been not to talk about it all in such a public way. It then does become a huge talking point and the public nature makes it more difficult to deal with subsequently."

However Reeves concedes that the editors have a point and has set about trying to win back their confidence. "I've been to see most of the editors who signed that statement and will have spoken to them all by June," he says. "Then I will sit down with the chairman of the judges, Donald Trelford, and we will come up with a working document. Certainly, I agree that the evening is too long - 28 categories are too many. Some awards will disappear altogether. Another area is acceptance speeches, which we've only allowed relatively recently. And that's been abused."

So what about the allegations that the awards are fixed? Reeves bristles: "That's absolutely ludicrous. The bit that makes me most angry are the ill-informed pieces about the judging process. I've sat in on the panels and 'horse-trading' is impossible." He rounds on the Independent's press commentator, Stephen Glover, who described the awards as "corrupt", and compared the ceremony unfavourably with a similar event for the hardcore porn industry. "Stephen Glover's piece was appalling and wildly wrong," declares Reeves. "He admits he wasn't even there."

Indeed, so incensed was one awards judge - Robin Morgan, editor of the Sunday Times Magazine - that he carpeted Glover in an unsolicited article for Press Gazette. "We can forgive him his pompous, elitist naivety, but I can't stomach his dilettante attitude to his craft," he wrote. "Where was the evidence to support his charge of corruption? It isn't the Press Awards process that brings us into disrepute, it's the elitist claptrap of has-beens like Glover who, like those superannuated armchair generals occupying our screens during times of war, pretend to know what they are talking about and are invariably out of date, out of the loop and out to grass."

However, the allegations of a "stitch-up" have prompted Reeves to make the voting system more transparent in future. "One of the things I will do next year is to have the process audited," he says. "The Oscars pay a firm of auditors to actually audit the process and sit in on the voting to make sure the system is all above board before signing it off."

Some heavyweight figures have called for the awards to be replaced by a version of America's Pulitzers. Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers has stayed away from the event itself for a few years, describing the behaviour of some attendees as "feral and infantile". Now he adds: "I took a deep dislike to the event a few years ago. I told Ian Reeves last year that I found it terrible, low-grade and vulgar, and he said we'd better do something about that. But lo and behold the latest one came along and it was twice as bad."

What changes to the format will he suggest when he meets Reeves in the next few weeks? "I would certainly be wholeheartedly in favour [of a version of the Pulitzers] but it would be very difficult to organise and the question is, where do you find the body around which it could coalesce? Comparing the FT and the News of the World is apples and oranges. I think it would be reasonable for any self-respecting press awards to put a ban on cheque-book journalism. Nothing in which a cheque has been paid to a source should qualify. But that's extremely difficult to get agreement on."

The public row over the awards - which are a big revenue-generator for the title - could not have come at a worse time for Press Gazette. Quantum Business Media is being sold piecemeal by ABN Amro Capital, the venture capitalist that currently owns it. Business-magazine publishers Haymarket (which last week finalised the acquisition of another Quantum title, Media Week), Reed Business Information, Incisive Media and CMPi are understood to have been ruled out as buyers of Press Gazette, although talks are said to be continuing with other groups. At one stage it was thought that a buyer would not be found, but there has apparently been a "late surge of interest".

Quantum's chief executive, Neil Thackray, says guardedly that nothing should be read into the fact that Press Gazette, which has a circulation of less than 10,000 but a growing number of subscriptions, is the group's only title to remain unsold to date. "There's no particular mystery, something has to be the last man standing, as it were," he says. "There has been a significant level of interest in Press Gazette and I hope to be able to complete the sale reasonably soon."

For the doom-mongers who say the magazine may not survive, he has this message: "We've struggled through the past 40 years, and I think there's every chance we'll make another 40."

(The Guardian, May 16th 2005)

Posted by James Silver - On Monday, May 16, 2005

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