the office we’d start comparing each day’s Independent with the mid-market tabloids. There was no question: Kelner knew how to produce a Mail-style front page dominated by a powerful picture or headline. When the Butler report into the uses of intelligence before the Iraq war appeared in July 2004, the Mail and Independent had strikingly similar front pages mocking his conclusion: ‘No one to Blame!’ in one paper, ‘Who was to Blame? – No one!’ in the other. When the Hutton report into the BBC’s alleged failings of reporting was published, the Independent’s front-page headline read simply ‘Whitewash?’ The Daily Mail’s read ‘Justice?’
Views first, news later.
More strikingly still, the paper started ignoring news stories which shouted to be splattered all over the front page. In September 2004 the world was captivated by Chechen rebels holding 1,000 people hostages in a school in Beslan – a siege that led to hundreds of children dying. Front-page news around the world. The Independent decided otherwise: it had commissioned the editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, to mark George W. Bush’s ‘four years of double standards’ by compiling ‘Bush by Numbers’. So, no report on Beslan for Independent readers – just a graphic showing Bush’s failings. Asked to defend the front page Simon shrugged and said a newspaper couldn’t compete with television.
The Times settled down into a more even-toned newspaper. But there were still moments for years to come when the front page would make you blink at what had happened to a particular style of journalism. To take one random example: in 2012, the European Court of Human Rights halted attempts by the British government to deport a radical Islamist cleric, Abu Qatada. The case was a complex one, involving deadlines arguably missed by the UK Home Office and ambiguities in the law and translations of it. The tabloid Times devoted its front page to a photo of 11 of the ECHR judges under the headline ‘Europe’s Court Jesters’.10
Now, the Times has excellent and pretty comprehensive legal coverage. It is probably the paper most senior lawyers and judges read. But this was pure Daily Mail – a foreshadow of that paper’s infamous ‘Enemies of the People’ front page in 2017, which used a similar device to put judges in the dock.
The more I watched such shifts in presentation – especially in the hands of Kelner – the more dangerous it seemed to me to allow the Guardian to be lured into competition with this new kind of journalistic animal. The Guardian had comprehensively seen off the Independent after a period in which the newcomer had appeared to pose a mortal risk. We had, so to speak, ‘won’ at being a serious, broadsheet newspaper. And now here was a very talented editor luring us into a different game: Okay, so you were better at news, but can you beat us at views?
This seemed like a seminal moment for newspapers: an ongoing concern for complexity, facts and nuance versus a drift towards impact, opinion and simplicity.
I thought back to the occasions when I had sat in on the Page One meeting of the New York Times under a succession of executive editors – Joseph Lelyveld, Howell Raines, Bill Keller. As many as 30 senior editors would meet solemnly every day at 4 p.m. around a table with lengthy summaries of the main stories of the day. With a concentration and high-mindedness which wouldn’t have been out of place in a cathedral, the editors would pitch their offerings to a figure as magisterial as a cardinal. The executive editor – fingers steepled at the head of the table – would consider the world as presented to him and make decisions about the relative importance of each story.
A senior executive called Allan M. Siegal would, as the room emptied, draw up the agreed front page with a pencil and ruler. Geometry and typography were the NYT’s way of imposing a hierarchy of order on the otherwise random torrent of information pouring across its newsroom desks every minute of the day. Wasn’t that needed more than ever in an age when the ocean of information threatened to engulf us all?
But doubt kept creeping in. What if not enough citizens/readers wanted to be informed? Or, rather, that there was a level of surface news-grazing which was just fine for most people? You could argue Kelner was right: news was all around – the radio headlines in the morning, a ten-minute scan of Metro on the way to work, text alerts for breaking headlines, the internet, numerous 24-hour news TV channels. That was, arguably, all most people wanted.
The competition was gnawing away on all sides. The dent that the give-away Metro made in all our circulations was particularly baffling. The free newspaper owned by the Daily Mail & General Trust – skimming the surface and with little original reporting – was reaching more than a million people.11 It seemed to have little overlap with a newspaper like the Guardian, but thousands of readers began substituting it on their morning commute.
‘How much more do I honestly need to read to be informed enough?’ these people might be asking. ‘It’s all very well to talk about the compact between citizen and legislator, but voting doesn’t seem to change much. And the real power in the modern world – and the real problems – lie way beyond my ability to do anything about them. Why do I need to know all this detail?’
The apathetic reader – if that’s what these people were – might not be apathetic about everything. They’d have their own passions, obsessions and causes. But it seemed just possible that the internet did passions, obsessions and causes better than newspapers. People could burrow deeply into their own subjects, engage with communities of other equally engaged people. And, as for the rest, well, maybe a ten-minute skim would do.
What, we debated over long sessions in 2003/4/5, should a news organisation do, faced with legions of apathetic readers? Give them what they want? If they don’t want difficult stuff, perhaps we shouldn’t give them difficult stuff. Or the (apocryphal?) BBC dictum: ‘Don’t give the public what they want. They deserve much better than that.’
Maybe we needed to be smarter in differentiating what print and digital could do? We argued it both ways: keep print for a comprehensive but shallow summary, with the depth to be found online? Or (as an equal number of colleagues wanted it) that print was the medium for depth, with the internet giving you constant, but shallow, updates.
Turn the volume up? Make the news seem more exciting, striking, pumped up? Try to shock and energise them out of their apathy?
Was there still some notion of duty that went with the privilege of mediating the news and the argument? Did we have any kind of responsibility to tell our readers things they might not think they wanted to know? Would it matter if all newspapers started turning up the volume . . . to shout, rather than talk? Would public debate be improved, or become impossible?
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