The death of a Monarch: What happened next at one local publisher
Ian Carter, editorial director at Iliffe Media, looks back on a week which won’t be forgotten by journalists in the UK. For his team, the death of the Queen involved journalists working across print, online, TV and radio…
I was in goal when the call finally came, getting peppered by shots from some of the under-12s footballers I try to coach to Sunday league glory.
It was a scene indicative of what must have been happening across the country on the evening of September 8.
Like every other publisher we had known for hours that a statement would be coming from Buckingham Palace and what that statement was likely to be, and we had prepared so far as we could.
But until it did, life — both personal and professional — had to continue as normal.
When the news finally did break, it was accompanied by the crashing realisation of just how much we do across Iliffe Media, and just how much we would need to change.
We’re one of the country’s only genuine multimedia publishers, running radio stations and a local TV channel alongside our websites and newspapers.
That’s what we always say in our job ads, but never have the challenges and opportunities arising from such a mixed portfolio been so apparent as they were that evening.
First thought — the kmfm playlist. You don’t want to be banging out Nicki Minaji’s Super Freaky Girl as the country begins a period of national mourning.
Our radio set up is pretty slick, the team had been preparing for this eventuality for a while, and we immediately slipped into ‘obit mode’.
That saw our song selections toned down dramatically, with Harry Styles replaced with Coldplay ballads and other more respectful output and the frequency of our news bulletins increased to every 15 minutes.
A trickier decision was the ad breaks. We love our customers but you no more want to be broadcasting commercials for sheds, cars or — heaven forbid — funeral directors than you want to be playing upbeat Top 40 tunes. Off they went, initially for an agreed period of 48 hours.
There was an additional, significant challenge — we had been preparing to relaunch our breakfast show on September 12, complete with a new co-host.
The best radio presenters sound natural, upbeat and engaging — but a lot of prep work goes in ahead of introducing them to the audience. It was immediately obvious that unveiling new on-air talent at such a sombre time would be unthinkable.
The decision was taken to postpone for at least a fortnight, and the carefully prepared interviews scheduled to appear in print and online were pulled.
Our TV output faced similar challenges and took literally the same route as kmfm, simulcasting our radio output with a still image of the late monarch instead of its planned schedule.
If radio was slick then print was, well, a bit less so. Times like this always bring home to me what a gloriously ridiculous way of distributing news this is in the year 2022.
For one thing, our Friday titles had already been printed and were in the process of being loaded into vans when the Palace announcement came.
Again, swift decisions were needed — starting with the Lynn News, which has Sandringham on its patch and where our pre-prepared supplement turned out to be maybe, possibly, a tiny bit less pre-prepared than we had thought.
Production editor Lisa Daniels and designer David Hobday performed a small miracle to finish off the final few pages, reconfigure the running order, liaise with page planners and our printers and hit a revised and ridiculously challenging deadline.
Thoughts had been simultaneously turning to our other Friday titles, which had long been finished. Re-printing them with the latest news would be stressful, expensive — but undeniably the right thing to do.
Even in the air of chaos and confusion, we knew these were the papers that would be looked at in decades to come and we had to do the right thing and do it well.
The Bury Free Press, Stamford Mercury, Grantham Journal el al — front and inside pages dumped, redesigned and re-printed.
As for digital, our content was slick, professional and immediate, from John O’Groats down to Dover.
Our challenge wasn’t the stories; it was something that I haven’t seen discussed publicly but feels only appropriate to raise on an industry website.
From the moment the Queen’s death was announced, we saw an immediate and significant decline in our digital audience.
Love or hate the BBC, it does the big occasions very well, from the FA Cup to general elections, and I suspect our readers gravitated to the national broadcaster as they always do.
Did it matter commercially? Not a jot — we had turned off all adverts as we had with our radio output.
Editorially? Maybe more so, and it left us with some difficult decisions. We needed to ensure the tone of our homepage was pitch-perfect — our readers would never forgive us if it wasn’t — but we also had to produce stories they would engage with.
Our obituary and tributes may have been getting smaller than expected audiences, but those stories focused on how the sad news affected our readers directly still hit home.
With the trend continuing the following day, we slowly began re-introducing more non-Royal content to rebuild audience.
Lessons to be learned from the experience?
One is that at times of historic news, people will still turn to print in their millions — we are expecting significant circulation uplifts for our reprinted titles.
But as I saw former Northern Echo editor, and now Daily Express executive, Karl Holbrook tweeting, we need to educate readers that newspapers can’t survive on once-a-generation stories.
As for digital, we have huge audiences — but let’s not forget what they value about us. Local, relevant, engaging stories they can’t find elsewhere. Food for thought when the temptation so often is to write once, publish on multiple sites.
And finally it showed that journalists across the industry can always be relied upon to swing into action when needed. I have seen so much fantastic content produced across the country and we should all be proud.
- In 2022, Behind Local News aims to celebrate local journalism in all its forms through our 365 Acts of Local Journalism Project. Lets us know what you think should be included. You can email us here or contact us via Twitter on BehindLocalNews or on Facebook here.
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