Today the world, tomorrow the globe

Gerry McGuinness has come a long way from the collapse of Creation Group to the success of The Sunday World. Now he is about to take his chances against the big boys of British tabloid newspaper market. By Robert Mayes and Fintan O'Toole.

In April 1982 Gerry McGuinness, the man behind the Sunday World, announced that he had no intention of taking any more gambles with publishhing. He was then just about to sell his stake in the Sunday World to the Irish Independent group of which he beecame a director, and to establish himself within the relative safety of' a large publishing empire. Now, however, three and a half years after saying "If I want to stay in publishing I'll stay where I am ," Gerry McGuinness is spearheadding the launch of what looks certain to be the first new colour daily tabloid newspaper on the British market.

While free newspaper entrepreneur Eddie Shah and his plans for an all electronic national colour newspaper, due out in the spring of 1986, have been dominating the outlook for the British newspaper market, a new pubblishing combination with a distinctly Irish flavour has been furtively hatchhing plans to steal a march on Shah himself. The Irish Independent group, led in this venture by Gerry McGuinnness, and the successful British pubblishing company East Midlands Allied Press are presently finalising plans for their own assault on the British tabbloid market. Both parties have been keen to play down the story, insisting that a firm decision on the project has not yet been taken, but that decision is imminent and is expected to connfirm the launch of the new newspaper, with a working title of The Daily Globe, as early as next February.

Despite the secretive approach, deetails of the planned paper have emerged. A down-market colour tabloid, it will be aimed principally at housewives, with a heavy television orientation. The Independent group and EMAP plot a target circulation of just half a million, modest by British tabloid standards, with the standard issue being thirty-two pages, eight of them in colour. It will be priced competiitively with the other national tabloids.

The format is modelled on Gerry McGuinness's brainchild, The Sunday World, a fact that is borne out by the "dummy" issues believed to have been prepared by Sunday World editor Colin McClelland and following the World style closely. The "dummy" using the Daily Globe title, is said to have been market-tested in Britain to extremely favourable response. The EMAP/Independent plan envisages the Globe being marketed firstly in the Central TV area, before expanding it gradually into the Midlands and the South East. There is thought to be no immediate plan to make the paper fully national.

The initiative for The Daily Globe came from Gerry McGuinness through the Independent group. McGuinness and his fellow Independent group director and London editor of the Irish Independent Nicholas Leonard set up the British contacts early this year, and in March McGuinness met with EMAP Chief Executive Robin Miller for the first time. Since then Miller has headed the British end of the operation, backed by a small team of EMAP researchers.

Gerry McGuinness's attempt to reepeat his Sunday World success is understandable. The Sunday World not only earned him a reported £2.5 million plus substantial Independent group shareholdings, it also laid the ghost of one of the most controversial publishing ventures in recent years in Ireland, the ill-fated Creation Group.

The Daily Globe, when it is launched will also put McGuinness into direct competition with two men who had an indirect role in the collapse of Creation, Robert Maxwell of The Mirror and Rupert Murdoch of The Sun.

McGuinness started his publishing career in 1962 when he was twentyythree years old and working as house manager at the Carlton cinema in Dublin. He met Hugh McLaughlin who offered him a job as business manaager of Creation, with McGuinness buying 4.8% of the equity of the commpany. At that time Creation was operaating from the Creation Arcade in Grafton Street, Dublin, and its only publishing venture was a magazine called Creation, an attempt at an Irish Vogue.

Shortly after Gerry McGuinness joined Creation, the company began to publish Woman's Way, the weekly women's magazine. By the end of 1963 they were also publishing Busiiness And Finance with the involveement of Nicholas Leonard, now MeeGuinness's collaborator in the Daily Globe project. Both magazines were successful, but their success hid the extent to which Creation itself was undercapitalised. The company worked with an old printing works in Killmainham and ran largely on its cash flow. It was patently in need of an injection of cash.

In 1966 Hugh McLaughlin approaached Clive Carr whose family owned the News Of The World empire in Britain, which included dozens of magazine titles. An agreement was reached whereby Carr would become chairman of Creation and inject the capital to allow the company to esstablish a new printing works in Botaanic Road, DUblin, where Carr's magaazine titles would also be printed. On the very day the deal was signed, however, a certain Robert Maxwell, owner of the British Printing Corrporation and now, of course, propprietor of the Mirror group of newsspapers, made a takeover bid for The News Of The World. Carr, in order to fend off Maxwell, sold the company instead to Rupert Murdoch, the Ausstralian newspaper magnate who now owns The Sun and The Times in Britain. Murdoch had no interest in the Creation deal, leaving McGuinness, McLaughlin and Carr with a massive new printing works in Botanic Road and no British printing contract to keep it working. Creation was now even more glaringly undercapitalised than ever.

The company staggered on, even though it had little prospect of succcess with its massive new committments and by 1972 it was clearly living on borrowed time. In that year MeeGuinness and McLaughlin began to work on the idea of printing and pubblishing a popular Sunday newspaper. Strangely, though he was still a memmber of the board of the rickety Creation company, McGuinness worked on The Sunday World with Hugh McLaughlin as an independent venture. Between them they raised £70,000 and with McGuinness as managing director and McLaughlin as chairman they launched the paper in March 1973. Within a year its circulation had reached the 100,000 mark.

In the meantime, Creation, the company of which the two men were still leading directors was continuing to decline. By August 1975 Clive Carr was trying unsuccessfully to sell Creaation to Michael Smurfit, and the following month the company was wound up. Smurfit's then bought the Botanic Road plant, Woman's Way, Woman Choice and sixty per cent of Business And Finance. No social wellfare contributions had been paid for the employees for some months and it was only through the intervention of the liquidator that unemployment benefit was paid. Many of the Creaation employees believed wrongly that Creation owned the profitable Sunday World. The fact that McGuinness and McLaughlin emerged from the Creaation collapse as millionaires left a connsiderable amount of bad feeling. At the time that Hugh McLaughlin sold his stake in The Sunday World to Tony O'Reilly in 1978 for £1 million, the World was valued at £2 million; four years later the World was valued at £4 million, with Gerry McGuinness still in control of it.

Now, McGuinness and the Indepenndent group are set to do battle with Murdoch and Maxwell in the British market.

Although largely overshadowed by the machinations of Shah, Maxxwell and Murdoch (who plans to' launch a twenty-four hour London evening cum provincial morning paper next year), the EMAP/Independent partnership is potentially formidable. The Independent track record is well known and the company has been keen to expand and diversify its activities over the last ten years. Peterborough-based EMAP, meanwhile, is a highly regarded, thriving, thrusting newspaper and magazine publishing company, probably most noted for its highly successful youth magazines, Smash Hits and Just Seventeen. With money, high speed colour presses, a distribution system and seemingly the Midas touch, EMAP is a powerful partner. Its track record and standing is such that its association with any venture is guaranteed to merit respect in the British publishing industry.

But if, as seems certain, the paper does come to fruition, what are its prospects, and what effect, if any, is it likely to have on the so-called Daily Shah (the real title is likely to be Today) and Fleet Street?

Although the plan is to preempt the Shah launch, the idea appears not to be to beat him on to the market with a similar paper, but to be first in with a colour paper, a species immpossible to find or achieve in Victorian Fleet Street.

Indeed, if one compares the suppposed target audiences of the two papers, there seems to be little crosssover. The Independent's seemingly specialist title does not sit easily beside any of the present national tabloids, although its heavy emphasis on TV,' showbiz, gossip and pop, with limited coverage of serious news, must put it somewhere alongside The Sun and The Daily Star. Shah's paper, on the other hand, will certainly be more upmarket, sliding in alongside The Daily Mail and Daily Express.

The very fact that the two papers will not be in direct competition is likely to leave Fleet Street with an even bigger headache. Although the advent of two new tabloids in a marrket where sales have been gradually falling seems foolish superficially, the advantages enjoyed by the two are considerable. The bonus is not only the colour, but, as mentioned briefly before, the opportunities presented by starting from scratch outside Fleet Street.

The stranglehold of the Fleet Street print unions is legendary. Extremeely highly paid men operate Victorian equipment in drastically overmanned machine rooms. Never, it has been said, has so little been done by so many for so much. Their power to stop production has long brought proprietors with more money than sense to their knees. In the provinces, where the industry is light years ahead and ownership of papers is not a presstige plaything of the rich, the picture changes dramatically. The opportuniities are there to be taken.

The trump card being played by Shah, and quite possibly the Indepenndent, is new technology and direct input. Journalists can key stories on to VDU screens, the copy sub-edited on screen and sent direct to compuu. terised printing equipment, removing the need to have copy typeset beforeehand. Pages can even be made up on screen, completing the fully electroonic process.

The IndependentjEMAP partnerrship could well grasp the new technoology advantage. The technology, is, of course, greeted with considerable oppoosition nationally by the print unions who face the extinction of some areas of their work and a consequent threat to their livelihood. This opposition, as Shah has proved, can be overcome. He, audacious as ever, bypassed tradiitional print unions, the NGA and Sogat, and signed a no-strike, singleeunion deal with electricians' union the EETPU, whose men are actually better equipped to operate the new equipment.

EMAP will only say that new techhnology and direct inputting is "a possiibility" for their venture with the Irish Independent. The plan, however, enviisages that the paper will be virtually funded by cover price. With a modest circulation of 500,000 it would sugggest low production costs that may only be possible with new technology. While it could operate more cost effectively than Fleet Street even without this technology, it would seem foolish not to take advantage of the current situation, with or without the unions, who will anyway be comming under increasing pressure to forge an agreement on the implementation of new technology.

Fleet Street, however, cannot be expected to lie back and quietly die. The bullish Shah, and in a quieter way the IndependentjEMAP combination, will inevitably act as a catalyst. In the long run the new pretenders may acctually be the saviours of Fleet Street managements. To survive they must retaliate and even the intransigent print unions will naturally have to face that reality.

Already most of Fleet Street has plans to move printing to the dockklands, haven of cheaper rents and rates. Plans laid years ago have been given a fresh impetus by the Shah threat. In making the move the nationals also intend to rid themselves of Fleet Street's restrictive union practices and force an agreement on new technoology.

As a first step, Mirror Group pubblisher Robert Maxwell has already ordered colour printing presses for his new site. The union struggle may be bitter, but the existing nationals must now begin the fight back.

A more immediate problem for the IndependentjEMAP paper will be simply attracting the necessary readers, especially given the heavy reliance on cover price. The two companies do not expect to expand the overall market but instead snatch readers from existting titles. As always, it will ultimately be the quality of the product that counts. For all the advantages of proovincial printing and new technology, the general public cannot be expected to care where or how the paper is produced.

The use of colour will undoubtedly be an attraction. The downmarket approach, with heavy female bias and light editorial seems sensible. Women are prolific purchasers of reading material as magazine publishers will happily testify. Women present an extremely lucrative market and a well packaged daily paper with low overrheads and a realistic target circulation must have a sound chance of success.

It is reasonable to assume too, that other British provincial newspaper groups will follow the Irish IndepenndentjEMAP lead by producing more specialised, modest circulation titles cost effectively. Gerry McGuinness may be about to create the World all over again. If he succeeds, a new banddwagon will start to roll. •