Montgomerie under attack for cost cutting

The other day a very senior and successful Fleet Street figure told me that in 15 years there will only be two national newspapers: The Sun and the Daily Mail. All the rest will disappear under a burden of debt, after years of making losses.

writes Stephen Glover in the Indy this morning

He doesn't say who the successful figure was.It wasn't David Montgomerie who called the traditional newspaper model

"bankrupt, unviable, finished.

and who Stephen describes as having

assembled a newspaper empire in the good times which is now disintegrating in the bad. He really only has one weapon, which is cost-cutting, which he applies again and again.

and whom he says lacks vision

The point is that many struggling newspapers employ round after round of salami slicing in which cuts are applied across the board. There is no time, or inclination, to sit down and think: what do our core readers value most of all, and what might they be prepared to do without? Everything is cut evenly, so that the paper ends up as a pale, weaker version of its former sense. There is an alternative – to ring-fence, even to improve, what the paper does best, while conceding that it cannot necessarily do everything.