Good evening,
Welcome to the latest edition of Off The Fence, our regular newsletter/magazine-propaganda vehicle. People are always asking us when we’re going to ‘do’ a podcast. We had a think about it, and reckoned it would be more interesting to investigate podcasts: the biggest media money-spinner since reality TV. We have an insider scoop on the last days of Stig Abell’s tenure at the Times Literary Supplement and a dispatch from the Tory heartlands of Camberwell. Plus, an excerpt from London’s rudest people. Enter, Alan Yentob.
Stig it up your Arse.
For a while, the Times Literary Supplement was beginning to look like an unlikely success story. Much loved by its small group of subscribers, the TLS had been the English literary world’s donnish journal of record for over a hundred years when, four years ago, the young Stephen ‘Stig’ Abell was made editor-in-chief.
Abell was previously managing editor at The Sun, and notorious in liberal circles for greenlighting a Katie Hopkins column that included a sentence beginning, ‘Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches.’
For reasons that were interchangeably snobbish and principled, his appointment was met privately with bemusement and derision. Beyond the London Library periodicals desk though, a small buzz developed around the new editor. Abell was profiled in the New York Times as a hot young mover and shaker. He begged eight more pages for the paper from News UK’s moneymen, and set about commissioning topical, eye-catching long reads. Circulation burgeoned and a tote bag was issued.
In 2019, an expensive redesign was unveiled. The letters page made an admirably diplomatic attempt to publish both praise and censure, but the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Aiming for a slice of sans-serif, clear-frame-specs-cool that would put into contention with the (vastly more successful) London Review of Books, the paper ended up looking, frankly, really crap and out of touch – like a mock-hipster pop-up cafe designed for Heathrow’s Terminal 5.
And Terminal 5 was where we first raised an eyebrow about the Stig-approved TLS, when we saw a stack of hundreds being given away for free, in a newspaper bin on a departures walkway. Thousands of copies were handed out at literary festivals.
For magazines, publicly dispensed copies are a clever ploy: they are officially counted as having been read by a larger number of people than copies that go directly to subscribers, meaning that they magnify circulation numbers and therefore advertising sales. But they don’t bring in much money. The TLS never had a large subscriber base, relying predominantly on over the counter sales. This left them vulnerable to sales environments with diminished retail capabilities. (See: ‘virus’, corona.)
It would hard to overstate how widely loathed Abell was by the literary world, with whom he never mingled socially. ‘Stig Abell represents everything I despise about the contemporary book world’, said one TLS contributor.
Abell always gave the impression of a man who, blessed wit, had laboured hard to make himself into a producer of milky, thin intellectual porridge. He presented Front Row. His Twitter feed was, and remains, widely screenshotted and mocked. During his tenure, the paper was said to be inundated with letters protesting its perceived dumbing down. But beyond the grousing of jaded critics, there were rumblings of incompetence, as well as an increasingly autocratic editorial style, whereby information was withheld from senior editorial staff, and pieces were pulled without consultation at the last minute.
June saw two big changes. First came the departure of TLS stalwart and deputy editor Alan Jenkins, said to have left because he simply couldn’t bear what Abell was doing to the paper. Within weeks, Abell had left as well, to become executive editor of Wireless – News UK’s internet radio venture and the home of Times Radio.
A new editor, Martin Ivens, was appointed. Stig’s sudden departure meant the transition was chaotic. Ivens is said to have arrived without knowing that Jenkins, who he had expected to be his deputy editor, was already two weeks into retirement.
On July 28th, staff were sent a Zoom invitation with the attached memo: ‘please make every effort to attend this meeting’. On screen was Ivens, seemingly dressed for a funeral, managing editor Robert Potts and an HR employee.
A statement was read out. The TLS had to reverse a loss of £1 million within a year or it would face closure. The big picture would have to be faced. Loyal staff would have to go, and survivors could expect major salary cuts. It was Potts – now nicknamed ‘Pol’ Potts by his recent enemies – who was forced to wield the axe this month, when six members of staff were laid off, as was the paper’s in-house illustrator. The excised editorial staff include notable experts on the Middle East, France and also renowned philosopher Tim Crane. James Campbell, whose back-page column has more than once been the only readable thing in Abell’s paper, has also gone the way of all hacks.
It is at once entirely understandable and completely baffling that this should happen now. On the one hand, News Corp’s investor prospectus warns of falling profits as an unavoidable side-effect of the COVID-19 catastrophe. Everyone is cutting costs. Buzzfeed, 1843, Vice, The Guardian, The Outline – we have lost track of how many publications have laid-off key staff, downsized or simply folded since March. News UK, like these publications, will have seen multiple revenue streams collapse this year.
But on the other hand, we have it on good authority from multiple sources that the TLS has never made a single penny for News UK. Its losses, such as they were, have always been underwritten. Were the deficits left over from Abell’s tenure so extensive that they might put an end to 118 years of criticism and review? We’re told that the redesign, for all its ugliness, was dearly bought.
What happens to the TLS now is out of Ivens’ hands – like so much else, a good deal depends on the coronavirus crisis ending sooner rather than later. The laid-off staff will be casting about themselves for jobs: there’s not much appetite for literary journalists at this point in history. It goes without saying that this was an unspeakably nasty end to their distinguished tenures at the paper. Some had worked for the TLS for thirty years. They were fired over Zoom.
As for Abell, he is enjoying his tenure as News UK’s golden boy at Times Radio. We gather that he is keen on taking the staff there to one side, telling them paternally that if they get their heads down and put in the hours, the company will look after them.
‘Don’t Worry, I‘m Hourly’
Perhaps the principal reason why podcasts are so enticing, compared to, say, a print magazine, is that the costs are so low. You can do a podcast with a Sudotack USB microphone (costing £63.99 from Amazon), though you need about £1000 in gear to do a professional-sounding number. Which is entry-level stuff by anyone’s standards.
In order to get a handle on how things operate at the more rarefied end of the spectrum, we spoke to Nate Bethea, the producer of the acclaimed Trashfuture podcast. He told us that if you want something that approaches radio quality, it will cost around ‘£300-500 per episode’, to pay for someone who can edit and master the audio through a digital workstation (using Audition or Ableton or iZotope). Even at the top end of the scale, costs are still comparatively low. We hear that The Spectator pays a producer £2,000 for their fortnightly podcast.
And here’s the rub: with zero distribution costs and an illimitable audience, the profit potential is vast, especially when you’ve built up a global following. Advertising revenue is the key honeypot, as Nate relays, ‘you typically present them with 3-6 months of averaged downloads per episode and negotiate a rate per there’. Generally speaking, you can negotiate a rate of around £10-15 pounds per thousand listens.
And it’s big name sponsors too. Popular podcast The High Low’s first advertiser was River Island; they have since worked with Google. They receive so many inquiries that they use an agency to handle all the interest.
Independent podcasts like the iconic American political show Red Scare use the subscription models Patreon, where you pay a monthly sum to receive ad-free content. For ‘networked’ podcasts, using experienced broadcasters like Louis Theroux or Adam Buxton – then we hear that they can be talking about six-figure retainers.
And the cash flow doesn’t stop there. With a keen and willing audience only ever an email away, then you can top up the bank account with merchandising runs: t-shirts, hoodies etc.
So if you’re running a top-tier British podcast, broadcasting an episode a week? Then you’re looking at revenue of around £500,000 a year. Which is not bad for an hour’s work.
Yentob, Reloaded
This is from our main feature for Issue 3: London’s Rudest People. If you want to read the other entries, you can buy the magazine here.
A man who has led such a celebrity-adjacent existence as this garlanded TV commissioner has little time for little-people rules, as one bemused correspondent writes:
‘I was working as a support staff in the immediate wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack. In the interest of security, we were under the strictest instructions to ID every single person coming in. Everyone complied, apart from Alan Yentob. He waltzed up, and I requested to see some identification. He lifted his hand to my face and with his most I-am-above-you tone said, ‘I’m Alan Yentob,’ and continued strutting past. Gobsmacked, I didn’t stop him, I don’t think Alan Yentob realises he’s not that well-known and looks like 70% of men over the age of 50.’
Given the tyrannical impresario’s predilection for referring to his many celebrity friends by their first names only, it was courteous for him to have provided his own surname, too.
Camberwell: True Blue Heartland
Snug between Brixton and Peckham, thronged with art students and shorn of an Underground station, Camberwell is perhaps the archetypal South London neighbourhood: it is also a teeming nest of Tories.
It was a drizzling, miserable evening in February last year, and your correspondent was perusing the reduced to clear section of the Tesco Express on Southampton Way. Opting for a prawn sandwich and a bundle of Babyel, they made their way to the scanners, to be checked by the unmistakable bulk of the-then Foreign Secretary: Boris Johnson himself, stocking up on supplies.
Johnson’s tenure in Brunswick Park did become international news four months later, when police were called to the flat he shared with Carrie Symonds, after neighbours reported a domestic disturbance. Briefly, it seemed that Johnson’s leadership campaign could be derailed, that Britain might, just might, stay in the E.U. But then the Daily Mail doxxed those pesky neighbours and it was all swept under the carpet and well… we are where we are.
And Tories, it seems, are everywhere in SE5. Witness Nick Boles, the former Member for Grantham and Stamford, walking a (magnificent) dog down Camberwell Grove. Now the neighbourhood delights in the presence of lanky actor-turned-political party leader Laurence Fox scootering (literally: he has an electric scooter) up and down Grove Lane on the way to sup pints at the Crooked Well.
The Fence would like to know when this will stop. Visions float before us of Gavin Williamson supping a fruity pint of IPA at Stormbird, of Andrea Leadsom and Esther McVey rolling cigarettes on the benches outside the Hermit’s Cave. Will we see Nicholas Soames, Desmond Swayne and Penny Mordaunt all scooched up on the benches at Silk Road? Jacob Rees-Mogg, umbrella in hand, arguing with the solitary ticket machine at Denmark Hill station? We just want to take back control (of our neighbourhood).
Meanwhile, at The Fence
We have been adding the final touches to Issue 5, which will be with subscribers in a week. It features fiction from Booker Prize-nominated author Sophie Mackintosh, a bravura essay from Seamas O’Reilly and a bracing investigation into modern slavery.
If you are yet to subscribe, then you’re in for a treat: if you sign up now, you will receive Issue 4 this week and Issue 5 the week after. Two pieces of post in a week? From a quarterly magazine? Yes, you heard it right. Subscribe here.
All the best,
TF
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