dummy ready to go. Our marketing team had periodically looked at the question of formats and were convinced that Hodgson’s Bermuda triangle of the middle market was, indeed, the place to aim for.
The Daily Mail’s gravitational pull was immensely strong: what if a left-wing competitor to the Mail moved into the middle-ish market? The marketing team felt sure we could end up vastly boosting our circulation. There was heady talk of doubling our circulation – perhaps even selling three-quarters of a million. Simon Kelner’s equivalents at the Independent had doubtless been telling him the same.
The research kept coming in: broadsheets were masculine, old-fashioned and – especially on public transport – difficult to read and inconvenient to handle. They came from a different age. The editor of the Times, Robert Thompson, considered the length of arms required to handle a broadsheet and even pondered whether it wasn’t ‘an act of misogyny’ to publish one. The consensus was clear: if we didn’t move we were doomed. By December the Guardian’s circulation was 14,000 below forecasts – partly also due to the new free tabloid Metro. We dummied up another tabloid, to no great enthusiasm from the majority of those who saw it.
*
What’s in a size?
Compared with almost any other issue the British press was facing at the time, the dilemma of whether to print on a large or small sheet of paper was hardly in the top five, or even top ten. The word ‘tabloid’ was often taken to mean lurid, sensational, downmarket journalism, but there were serious European tabloid papers, which proved that small and serious could be done.
The decision about size was strangely frustrating, because it was so complicated, important and – possibly – pointless. The internet was surely a much bigger problem – or prize – than print. Changing formats was – on any long-term view – a distraction.
I knew Simon Kelner saw things differently because a couple of times a year we’d meet for a game of golf, and he’d gently rib me about what he saw as my obsession with digital. ‘Tell me when it starts making money and I’ll start taking it seriously.’ That wasn’t just a flippant aside on the fairways. Interviewed a couple of years later by the American Journalism Review,6 he confessed he had no idea how many people worked on his website. ‘My only job is to sell copies of my newspaper.’
He had a point, of course. He had two shareholders wanting – if not quick returns – at least smaller losses, and fast. Copies sold was money in. We needed money in, too – but the Scott Trust was there to preserve the Guardian in perpetuity. I was pretty sure that perpetuity wouldn’t feature a daily newspaper, of whatever format.
Meanwhile we had built up 13 million unique users a month on our website (the Times, by comparison, was at 4.7 million – itself 150 per cent up on the previous year) and were bringing in seven-figure sums in digital advertising. What a moment to have to take the foot off the online accelerator and go back to thinking full-time about print again.
Two things held us back from following suit to tabloid – one practical, one journalistic.
The practical objection – ironic now – was that in 2002/3 we still published a staggering number of classified advertising on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which brought in £74 million a year. We calculated that in order to print all those ads in tabloid format we would sometimes have to publish editions of up to 220 pages. Any gain from the smaller page size would be wiped out by the reader having to juggling a multi-section paper – sandwiches within sandwiches – which could fall apart in their hands.7
In short, producing a tabloid looked – for the Guardian in 2004 – pretty impossible.
But what if staying broadsheet was, as we kept being told, a shortcut to oblivion? We consulted the editorial staff – with a hundred or so colleagues convening to debate the issue. The meeting ended with a 60 to 40 per cent vote against going tabloid. But, even if we did stay broadsheet, we would still have to re-press within four years when our printing contract expired. For eight years – since our own print plant had been terminally damaged by the IRA in a 1996 Canary Wharf bomb blast – we had been printed in London on an ageing, mainly black-and-white press owned by Richard Desmond.
To make it more complicated I thought the Kelner ‘compact’ Independent was actually quite successful in its own terms. The paper, which had lost its identity as a broadsheet, had recovered some confidence and found a new voice as a tabloid. But it had come at a cost: it had sacrificed a consistency of tone for something more strident, politically unsubtle and obsessed with single issues.
Similarly, the Times had gained something in focus and sharpness. Story lengths were certainly down. There were some early slips of voice as the venerable sub-editors tried to mimic a tabloid style. The paper had become a tighter read; it had also lost something in elegance, consistency and tone. The paper’s former veteran Middle East correspondent, Christopher Walker, wrote in the British Journalism Review: ‘The move down from heavyweight to the welterweight division has arisen not only from the new emphasis on the trivial in the choice of stories, but also an aggravating habit by the home and foreign desks to demand that stories be tailored to suit the angle emerging from the morning and afternoon conferences.’8
This led to my second reservation: I didn’t think the Guardian would necessarily succeed in a war against the revitalised tabloid Independent, in particular. Nor did I want to change the paper in ways that would have been necessary to be in with a chance.
Simon Kelner was pioneering a profoundly different kind of journalism from the restrained, original broadsheet Independent – with its small Century headlines; its artful pictures; its seven or eight stories separated by horizontal Oxford rules. Broadsheet papers tended to sell on their long-established identity and judgement. Tabloid newspapers relied much more on day-to-day impact, at least in Britain, with most sales on the news stand rather than home delivery. A brilliant tabloid front-page image and headline – and Kelner produced many – would shift copies. But the reverse was also true: a page that mundanely relayed the news of the day in quiet headlines could not stand out. Charles Moore’s ‘boring but important’ stories would not fare well in tabloid.
Kelner realised this and produced ever more powerful single-issue front pages – often quite unrelated to the news of the day. They were distinctive and often shouty. They got the Independent talked about. They halted the slide in circulation, even if the figures never soared anywhere near the peaks our marketing teams had whispered. But this was a new form of journalism in the UK: a broadsheet in tabloid clothing.
Kelner was quite frank about what he was up to. His front pages, he confessed, were ‘an elision of marketing and journalism’. In other interviews, he went still further: he was moving from a newspaper to what he called ‘a viewspaper’.
Newspaper–viewspaper? Hold on a moment. Was Kelner not just changing shape and style – but also bailing out of the primacy of facts? It seemed so. ‘Why pay 70p for something you’ve heard on the radio?’ Kelner demanded in his 2006 AJR interview. ‘We’ve got to provide something of value.’ The AJR writer, Frances Stead Sellers, continued: ‘The added value he promises is attitude. Pages of it. Right from the word go – on A1.’9
At least the AJR noticed that something had changed. In the UK, there was a kind of collective shrug, as if ‘a viewspaper’ was simply a play on words, or a cool piece of rebranding, as opposed to a completely different concept of editorial endeavour. Throughout all this time I can’t remember a single discussion in the mainstream press, radio or television about whether the greater public
