Don't hold the back page

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 15:50:23 GMT

Penalty of extra time for newsagents

Since I became a newsagent, my love for the beautiful game has somewhat wained and the relationship I have with it drifted more towards a love/hate thingummyjig, solely due to the affect it has on the smooth running of my newspaper delivery business and the newspaper publishers and wholesalers allowing it to have such an impact on the newspaper delivery supply chain schedule.

As time has progressed football, the reporting of football and the availability of differing types of media for the general public to watch it on has changed dramatically. The football leagues have been restructured with the introduction of the Premier league, Champions league and Europa League etc etc. Mega-bucks TV rights contracts have been fought over and signed and the winning TV companies, for example, Sky, then go on to dictate somewhat the kick off times for matches they are going to televise, to fit in with their own or compete against their competitors schedules. Newspaper publishers have no say in this process and that in my opinion is the crux of the problem.

In the good old heydays of newspaper distribution, outlined above, the standard evening football kick off time was 7.30pm and newspaper publishers had to have printed the newspapers and have them loaded on to the newspaper trains ready for departure, irrespective of whether the football results were in or not, if the publishers missed the train (which they made sure they didn't)- tough, their sales figures for that day would drop as newsagents in the provinces would have no copies of that particular newspaper too sell. Did the general public stop buying newspapers because they didn't contain the football results / reports - NO!!

Let us compare the newspaper distribution supply chain of old as above, with the one we have today (they call it progress you know!), evening football kick off times now are generally 8pm as dictated by the Tv companies, newspapers are now sent from the publisher to the wholesaler by the slower paced, in comparison, road transport. Publishers now hold back printing of the newspapers and delay the departure time to the wholesaler so the football results and reports can be included in the first edition. Alongside this, the general public can now watch live football matches up to 7 days a week, most weeks, with every kick, goal, foul and controversial refereeing decision poured over and analysed by the pundits. In my opinion, If anyone is interested in football generally, a particular team or a particular match, they would either have attended the match, watched it live on TV, listened to the ongoing reports from the studio reporter if the match wasn't being shown live or get the result and watch the reports during the sports feature on a 24 hour Tv news channel. So if the football following general publics' newspaper of choice didn't contain the previous nights football results (which they already know) or football reports (which they have already seen and heard) but they were in the following days paper, would they stop buying it, I don't think so!. Would the general public cancel their newspaper delivery if they continually arrived late and not available to be read at breakfast time - YES!!

So in a nutshell the mid to latter part of the week, we had to endure the usual systemic newspaper delivery delays in to us of 30 - 45 mins due to Champions league and Europa League matches having being played the previous evenings, fortunately we do maintain our staffing at a level to give us a bit of flexibility to minimise the impact on our own newspaper delivery schedules. And so to the end of another week and the joys of Saturday - arrrrrrgh as covered in our previous Newspaper Delivery Tales post - The first edition - read all about it

Happy reading - until next time.

*Newspaper train photograph courtesy of The Railway Magazine

The first edition - read all about it

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 10:16:07 GMT

A warm welcome to Newspaper Delivery Tales, a blog about the trials and tribulations of a local Durham based newspaper delivery business, as well as news and comment on local issues and events in Durham City and its surrounding areas.

Hi, I'm Geoff, owner, proprietor, head chef and bottle washer of Durham City Newstore, my aim is to give you an insight into the daily challenges we face, of ensuring we keep to our promise, to deliver newspapers and magazines to our loyal customer base in time for breakfast.

The day starts at approximately 4.20am, I label this period of the day Nocturnia, it is like a post-apocalyptic time when the majority of mankind are still hibernating in their beds and the only survivors are Durham City Newstore's delivery team, possibly the milkman and the local Durham wildlife (drunk students included).

First job is to bundle up the previous day left over newspapers, ready for return to the wholesaler, who in our case is Smiths News, based on Team Valley in Gateshead. The scheduled arrival time of the days newspapers to us is 4.30am, however this a very rare event and you wouldn't believe how excited and happy I get when I see the van with our newspapers onboard pull up on time (sad I know but hey ho, I am a newsagent).

With the newspapers and magazines unloaded and unpacked, the newspaper delivery rounds are sorted in to delivery order, using the computer generated delivery round sheets, ready for the drivers to hit the road, which we hope to achieve by 5.15am weekdays and 5.45am weekends. Our team of drivers are continually rotated between each of the newspaper delivery rounds to ensure everyone is up to speed no matter where they are delivering newspapers on any particular day.

I mentioned earlier the later departure time of 5.45 at weekends, this is due to the fact the weekend newspapers and their respective supplements arrive separately, meaning the supplements have to be inserted into their matching newspaper, before the newspapers can be sorted in to delivery order, this can take up to an hour to achieve some weeks, dependant on the thickness and how many individual supplements there are to insert.

NEWSPAPER DELIVERY TALES

Don't hold the back page

Penalty of extra time for newsagents

The first edition - read all about it