their most obsessive they were a place where lonely pseudonymous souls would argue for days about the relative merits of tinned or dried chickpeas, or whether different flavoured crisps projected a range of sexual orientations. As one former contributor wrote: ‘They could give expert guidance on everything from the structure and formation of PCTs,6 to the best laptop to buy, via a debate about God and the true meaning of existence, interspersed with a spat about who would win in a fight, a caveman or an astronaut.’7
There was (to old newspaper eyes) a kind of anarchy in play, much to the despair of the occasional moderator who would vainly plead: ‘this is a board to discuss current affairs – there are countless chat sites on the web if you want to chat’. The moderators (or ‘mods’) would soon retire hurt. Yes, the Guardian had created this space, but it was, in the users’ eyes, ‘their’ space and they’d do what they liked with it. If they wanted to spend Christmas creating a Thread to Talk Like the King James Bible – where you had to write about boring everyday matters in the style of a sixteenth-century biblical scholar – that was their business. Rarely did any thread stay on topic for more than three posts.
And then there would be threads that endlessly warmed, sustained, amused, diverted, educated and enthralled. People met their partners there. Friendships were forged, relationships were incubated: several marriages and children followed. One couple live-posted the home birth of their baby. Another still remembers the support she received when receiving treatment for cancer. There was not one porn post.
One of the most popular shared activities was watching television in the virtual company of others. The talkboarders would chat away to each other throughout the first series of Big Brother – the C4 reality show, aired in 2000, which spied on ‘housemates’ marooned inside a custom-built home. There would always be a gaggle on hand to discuss anything David Attenborough was doing. One poster reflected later: ‘That couldn’t happen now as there isn’t a social media that really allows it (Twitter is too huge) and everyone is On Demand so not watching at the same time.’ We learned from the behaviour of the users. Live coverage of big television ‘events’ became a staple of later coverage on the main site.
The community of regular, active contributors was never huge – maybe only a few thousand. Over time their space became overtaken by larger experiments and the talkboards became a bit of a forgotten backwater, untended by moderators.8 Untended spaces tend to become unkempt, and some areas of the talkboards ended up almost feral.
But the users were, to some extent, pioneers: they formed their own basic grammar, or (what become known as) netiquette. There were symbols for (((hugs))) and ////Horror!\\\\ The Exclamation Marks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. Most talkboard users adopted the conventions that spontaneously developed: italics for quotes from earlier posts in the discussion, bold for emphasis, indented paragraphs for blockquotes. There was usually a form of self-correction, if not exactly self-policing.
Light moderation was not unusual on small technology blogs or Usenet discussion groups, but really rare on a national news brand. It was considered by many onlookers elsewhere in Fleet Street, not to mention within the building, as slightly crazy. A newspaper had so many layers of editing around everything. It was a huge philosophical leap for an organisation full of people dedicated to refining everything before it was allowed into the outside world to enable anybody to post anything.
Why allow it, anyway? It had nothing to do with journalism, did it? We had managed for 200 years to produce newspapers without giving much thought to whether readers wanted to meet each other or hold conversations. Weren’t we losing sight of our main function: to find stuff out and publish it? Anything else was a distraction.
That was always possible. But it seemed to me then – and still does now – that technology had to drive behaviour. If, for centuries, technology only allowed one-way communication then – of course – that’s what your journalism would look like. If it suddenly opened up two-or multiple-way communication then it was probably a mistake to carry on as though the world hadn’t changed.
Plenty of people disagreed, some quite vehemently. The argument went to the heart of how we regarded journalism in the coming century. Were readers a mob, best ignored while we got on with what we always did? Or were they part of what we did – part of our club? They were now beginning to connect in ever-growing numbers to the most mind-blowing network anyone in history could ever have imagined. Should a newspaper become part of that network, or would its chances of survival be greatest by remaining separate, and distinct, from it?
The talkboards were certainly ahead of their time. Someone later described them as ‘Web 2.0 social networking before Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman’. It was when Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard in September 2003 that he started playing around with ways of linking up communities of students – four years after the first stumbling efforts on the Guardian and elsewhere. Reddit – with an equally unsophisticated interface – started five years after the Guardian talkboards as ‘the front page of the internet’ and, with 250 million unique monthly users, was by 2017 the ninth-biggest website in the world. Mumsnet was launched by Ian Katz’s wife, Justine Roberts, around the same time as the Guardian talkboards and has 12 million unique monthly users today.
Was it an accident that the Guardian led the experimentation with reader participation in this way? It’s difficult to imagine a company more driven by the bottom line seeing the immediate point of creating these spaces. There was no obvious way of monetising them. In the absence of a proprietor our main relationships were horizontal – with the readers, and with sources. Guardian readers were, by and large, a bright crowd with much in common. Why not put them in touch with each other? We might discover the commercial value in time.
But meanwhile we were learning how people behaved in this new space. The driving principle found articulation in a new mantra: ‘Of the Web not just on the Web.’ It was a small thing to say, but a huge thing to imagine, let alone do. But it became a useful way of testing anything we proposed to do. ‘Is this really something that we would do if we were purely digital?’ became the key question.
*
The division (including the Observer losses) was due to lose £9 million in 2000/1. Circulation was still over 400,000 but all papers were beginning to pad out their figures by distributing ‘bulk’ copies either abroad, or in hotel chains, airlines and trains. Advertisers, it seemed, were none too fussy about whether a reader had parted with cash for a newspaper or whether the copy ‘sale’ had, in effect, been ‘subsidised’ by the publisher.
Headline numbers seemed fine. It was the dying light of the broad-brush world. Within a decade advertisers would want scrutiny of figures down to the level of individual users.
Buying circulation, through whatever marketing wizardry, was expensive but, if it kept the ABC figure up,9 it was generally considered worth it. In 2000 we were generously distributing copies of the Guardian to French hotels and on KLM. The Independent were price-cutting regionally and offering two-for-one cinema tickets and flights to Australia from £20. The Times had two-for-one flights and cut-price vouchers for the paper. If you were a Telegraph reader, you could benefit from short-break offers, receive a week of papers for £1.50 and collect a ‘free’ Mark Knopfler CD from the newsagent by presenting vouchers clipped from the newspaper (20 per cent off at Debenhams for Sunday readers).
The full price sales were not wonderfully healthy for anyone – 95 per cent of Guardians sold for full price. Over at the Indie it was 75 per cent, the Times 65 per cent, the Telegraph 59 per cent and the FT 39 per cent. A casual glance at the headline figures showed a barely perceptible annual decline across the broadsheet market of 0.66 per
