Guardian – at least according to tradition dating back to the mid-’70s – the Scott Trust made the decision after balloting the staff, a process that involved manifestos, pub hustings and even (by some candidates) a little frowned-on campaigning.
I supposed I should run for the job. My mission statement said I wanted to boost investigative reporting and get serious about digital. It was, I fear, a bit Utopian. I doubt much of it impressed the would-be electorate. British journalists are programmed to scepticism about idealistic statements concerning their trade. Nevertheless, I won the popular vote and was confirmed by the Scott Trust after an interview in which I failed to impress at least one Trustee with my sketchy knowledge of European politics. We all went off for a drink in the pub round the back of the office. A month later I was editing.
‘Fleet Street’, as the UK press was collectively called, was having a torrid time, not least because the biggest beast in the jungle, Rupert Murdoch, had launched a prolonged price war that was playing havoc with the economics of publishing. His pockets were so deep he could afford to slash the price of the Times almost indefinitely – especially if it forced others out of business.
Reach before revenue – as it wasn’t known then.
The newest kid on the block, the Independent, was suffering the most. To their eyes, Murdoch was behaving in a predatory way. We calculated the Independent titles were losing around £42 million (nearly £80 million in today’s money). Murdoch’s Times, by contrast, had seen its sales rocket 80 per cent by cutting its cover prices to below what it cost to print and distribute. The circulation gains had come at a cost – about £38 million in lost sales revenue. But Murdoch’s TV business, BSkyB, was making booming profits and the Sun continued to throw off huge amounts of cash. He could be patient.
The Telegraph had been hit hard – losing £45 million in circulation revenues through cutting the cover price by 18 pence. The end of the price war left it slowly clawing back lost momentum, but it was still £23 million adrift of where it had been the previous year. Murdoch – as so often – had done something bold and aggressive. Good for him, not so good for the rest of us. Everyone was tightening their belts in different ways. The Independent effectively gave up on Scotland. The Guardian saved a million a year in newsprint costs by shaving half an inch off the width of the paper.
The Guardian, by not getting into the price war, had ‘saved’ around £37 million it would otherwise have lost. But its circulation had been dented by about 10,000 readers a day. Moreover, the average age of the Guardian reader was 43 – something that pre-occupied us rather a lot. We were in danger of having a readership too old for the job advertisements we carried.
Though the Guardian itself was profitable, the newspaper division was losing nearly £12 million (north of £21 million today). The losses were mainly due to the sister Sunday title, the Observer, which the Scott Trust had purchased as a defensive move (against the Independent) in 1993. The Sunday title had a distinguished history, but was haemorrhaging cash: £11 million losses.
Everything we had seen in America had to be put on hold for a while. The commercial side of the business never stopped reminding us that only 3 per cent of households owned a PC and a modem.
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But the digital germ was there. My love of gadgets had not extended to understanding how computers actually worked, so I commissioned a colleague to write a report telling me, in language I could understand, how our computers measured up against what the future would demand. The Atex system we had installed in 1987 gave everyone a dumb terminal on their desk – little more than a basic word processor. It couldn’t connect to the internet, though there was a rudimentary internal messaging system. There was no word count or spellchecker and storage space was limited. It could not be used with floppy disks or CD-ROMs. Within eight years of purchase it was already a dinosaur.
There was one internet connection in the newsroom, though most reporters were unaware of it. It was rumoured that downstairs a bloke called Paul in IT had a Mac connected to the internet through a dial-up modem. Otherwise we were sealed off from the outside world.
Some of these journalist geeks began to invent Heath Robinson solutions to make the inadequate kit in Farringdon Road to do the things we wanted in order to produce a technology website online. Tom Standage – he later became deputy editor of the Economist, but then was a freelance tech writer – wrote some scripts to take articles out of Atex and format them into HTML so they could be moved onto the modest Mac web server – our first content management system, if you like. If too many people wanted to read this tech system at once the system crashed. So Standage and the site’s editor, Azeem Azhar, would take it in turns sitting in the server room in the basement of the building rebooting the machines by hand – unplugging them and physically moving the internet cables from one machine to another.
What would the future look like? We imagined personalised editions, even if we had not the faintest clue how to produce them. We guessed that readers might print off copies of the Guardian in their homes – and even toyed with the idea of buying every reader a printer. There were glimmers of financial hope. Our readers were spending £56 million a year buying the Guardian but we retained none of it: the money went on paper and distribution. In the back of our minds we ran calculations about how the economics of newspapers would change if we could save ourselves the £56 million a year ‘old world’ cost.
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It would be nice to claim that I had seen the future and would urgently toil night and day to make it happen. But an editor’s life isn’t like that, as I was discovering. For one thing, we were never out of court.
The English defamation law in the late 1990s had not developed from its eighteenth-century roots in seditious libel as much as one might imagine. Britain had no first amendment enshrining the importance, never mind the supremacy, of free speech. If someone rich or powerful sued you, a) the onus was on you to prove the facts and b) you had to be prepared to risk very large sums of money – often, millions of pounds – in the defence of your reporting. As a country we paid lip service to Milton, Hazlitt, Wilkes, Junius, Delane, Barnes, C.P. Scott and others who – over three centuries – had helped the press gain its comparative freedom. But, in reiterating the importance of a free press, people usually manage to insinuate a qualifier. As in, ‘I stand second to none in my belief in the Freedom of the Press, but . . .’
Libel confrontations were a spectator sport. They ended up as pitched gladiatorial battles in the gothic revival splendour of the Royal Courts of Justice at one end of Fleet Street. Each side would be represented by ranks of lawyers. The press benches would be packed. These were fights to the reputational death.
I knew little about media law at the time beyond what I had studied at Harlow Technical College as a cub reporter. In 1995 the Guardian did not employ a single in-house lawyer: complaints were handled by a retired foreign editor, and farmed out to external solicitors if they became unwieldy.
So serious investigative journalism in London – the so-called ‘libel capital of the world’ – was never easy. For an editor, these confrontations took up vast amounts of time and nervous energy. I inherited what was to turn into a marathon case over allegations that Neil Hamilton, the MP for Tatton, together with another MP, Tim Smith, had accepted cash from the owner of Harrods department store, Mohamed Al-Fayed, in return for asking questions in the House of Commons. Smith didn’t contest the charges and eventually left politics. Hamilton claimed it was all lies and – together with a prominent political lobbyist, Ian Greer – launched a protracted libel suit against the paper.
There was an obstacle: parliamentary privilege prevented MPs from suing.
