A local newspaper publisher facing a staff exodus and a strike ballot over low pay has announced it is considering a bid for the Daily Telegraph.
National World, which owns regional titles including the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, told the stock market it was a “possible participant” in the bidding for Telegraph Media Group.
The company said owning the Telegraph would fit with its policy of making acquisitions and then “implementing its new operating model”. This approach includes using artificial intelligence to automate the process of creating newspapers and reduce the need for human involvement.
National World’s ambitious announcement was made just an hour after the National Union of Journalists said it would ballot reporters at the company on strike action over low pay and poor career progression. One recently departed National World reporter described being “absolutely horrified” by an internal culture of “relentless cost-cutting, axing of staff and gutting of titles”. Another said her former colleagues were “profoundly disillusioned”, and that the company’s business model involved “getting lots of young journalists to churn out massive volumes of stories” to attract online traffic.
The union said National World was losing staff, with at least 45 journalists having left the company since June at titles including the Blackpool Gazette, Edinburgh Evening News, Lancashire Post, Portsmouth News, Sheffield Star, Shields Gazette, Sunderland Echo and Yorkshire Evening Post.
Exactly how National World, which is dealing with declining revenues at its titles, would finance a bid for the Telegraph is not clear. The company was founded by the former Mirror executive David Montgomery and bought the assets of the former Johnston Press empire for the knockdown price of £10m at the end of 2020. Johnston Press paid hundreds of millions of pounds for a large number of regional newspaper titles in the mid-2000s, including paying the Telegraph’s owners, the Barclay brothers, £160m for the Scotsman in 2005, only to collapse under the weight of debt as the advertising market slumped.
The Telegraph was put up for sale after banks seized control of it – and its sister title, the Spectator – from the Barclay family. A formal sale process is expected to start later this year, amid speculation the titles could be worth more than £500m. Telegraph Media Group recently reported healthy financial results, although its stated aim of achieving 1m subscriptions by the end of the year has been boosted by aggressive package deals and the purchase of an unrelated magazine group.
Other potential bidders for the Telegraph include the Daily Mail’s parent company and rich individuals who may want a trophy asset giving them influence within the Conservative party.
A spokesperson for National World’s union members said staff had recently taken a vote of no confidence in Montgomery, saying he was increasingly acting as a hands-on editor: “The number of staff who’ve chosen to leave National World in recent weeks is a direct reflection of how little faith is left in a management whose only strategy appears to be ‘more for less’.”
