Mayes was dealing with around 10,000 calls, emails and letters a year – leading to around 1,200 corrections, big and small. It’s not, I think, that we were any more error-prone than other papers. But if you win a reputation for openness, you’d better be ready to take it as seriously as your readers will.
Our journalism became better. If, as a journalist, you know there are a million sleuth-eyed editors out there waiting to leap on your tiniest mistake, it makes you more careful. It changes the tone of your writing. Our readers often know more than we do. That became a mantra of the new world, coined by the blogger and academic Dan Gillmor, in his 2004 book We the Media8 but it was already becoming evident in the late 1990s.
The act of creating a readers’ editor9 felt like a profound recognition of the changing nature of what we were engaged in. Journalism was not an infallible method guaranteed to result in something we would proclaim as The Truth – but a more flawed, tentative, iterative and interactive way of getting towards something truthful.
Admitting that felt both revolutionary and releasing.
6
Guardian . . . Unlimited
Perpetuity is a very long time. If your job is to make consistent margins now, or keep the dividends healthy, you run your business accordingly. If your mandate is, in theory, to make your organisation future-proof for eternity you gaze at more distant horizons.
A habitual doodler, I got in the habit in the late nineties of drawing two lines which, it seemed to me, were a pretty unexceptional prediction of what would happen to our business, even if the drawing had no scale to suggest meaningful time or quantum.
One was a red downward line, inclining at about 45 degrees. That seemed, over the years, to be the inevitable fate of print: a story of gentle but persistent decline. Circulation, sales, readership, advertising, revenues – they would all diminish over the years. If we did nothing, the Guardian would one day cease to exist.
The other, blue, line went upwards – at about the same incline. That was digital growth: users, audience . . . and, maybe, even revenues.
It was impossible to draw anything more sophisticated at the time. There was no data, it was all hunch.
The two lines did cross, but in the intersection I would draw a big green bubble – a visual representation of the anticipated losses as we transitioned from one medium/technology to the other. I couldn’t see how it could be otherwise. We couldn’t bail out of print – that’s where all the revenues were – so we had to keep that (costly) show on the road. At the same time we would have to invest – perhaps heavily? – in digital. At some point the blue would begin to cannibalise the red line. We were only just keeping our heads above water as it was. So it was difficult to imagine how we weren’t entering a period of considerable losses. The question was: could we sustain the losses until (to mix metaphors) we were safely on the other bank of the river?
Next question: how to take a 175-year-old newspaper and reinvent it as something else? If that’s what we were trying to do. Some newspaper companies evidently regarded the internet as a different kind of distribution channel: we can squirt the thing down phone lines instead of trucking it to you. But what if the medium dictated the content? Then we would have to create something sufficiently ‘Guardian’ to be true to the name; but sufficiently different to be true to the medium.
The Guardian, like all newspapers, was currently a random bundle of information held together by the glue of appearing in the same printed package. On the face of it the cricket scores, the weather, the ballet review, the fashion advice and the parliamentary report had little in common – but they hung together as a coherent package. It seemed likely that, over time, someone would come and do each of those areas better than a general newspaper could do. And then what would happen? Would the physical brand of the Guardian be sufficient glue to hold it all together in a world of bits and bytes?
One thing that was plain by early 1997 was that the five-year strategy agreed by the Board and the Trust less than a year earlier was not remotely digital enough. We would need smart technologists to help us think about the problems and possibilities. But web developers might know nothing about the news – or even the Guardian, for that matter. There was some feeling that the PDU, while brilliantly innovative, had become something of a ‘state within a state’ – not attuned enough to the culture of a newspaper to take people with them. I decided we needed one of the best younger journalists on the paper to lead the reinvention of the Guardian. Ian Katz,1 our 29-year-old New York correspondent, did not sound thrilled to be asked. I wanted him to give up one of the plum jobs in journalism to come back to London and start a website?
The role, as described, had very little appeal. ‘I thought it was a fucking bonkers idea,’ Katz was to observe to me later.
*
The London office Katz returned to may have been one where some key individuals appreciated the size of the revolution around the corner. But, in most other respects, it was woefully unready for digital. Some visiting academics did a case study of the Guardian in 1998 and discovered that ‘the Guardian gives the impression of being a newspaper on the brink of a sudden explosion in Internet use’ but that actually not more than one in ten journalists were actively using the world wide web.
The academics reported that the editor (‘a strong proponent’) would hold regular lunches to explain what was going on out there, ending each lunch by telling them ‘You are all bonkers if you are not using it. It ought to be an absolutely standard tool.’ But it was not clear it was yet having much effect.
The authors quoted former Times editor (and future Guardian columnist) Simon Jenkins, predicting that the effect of the internet would be both minimal and short-lived: ‘The Internet will strut an hour upon the stage, and then take its place in the ranks of the lesser media’ – including Ceefax, Prestel, touch screen and CD-ROM.
‘Jenkins sees red over the much-lauded two-way communication characteristics of the Internet . . . to those who claim “the advent of digital hypertext will liberate the reader from the tyranny of the writer” he retorts that this is the “freedom of the brain-dead”.’
Jenkins was not alone.
*
Katz, by now barely 30 and with almost no editing experience, set himself up over the road in the Ray Street loft and started to assemble a team. They had no idea who they were looking for, or how much to pay them. One of the first through the door was Robin Houston, a 21-year-old Etonian, Oxford-educated computer scientist who had spent just one year as a web programmer and was, according to Katz, ‘the cleverest human being that ever walked through the Guardian’s doors’. He had one bag of clothes, long hair and brightly painted fingernails.
Houston was originally hesitant about taking the job because he thought the Guardian was ‘too commercial’. Katz sent his recently hired business lead, Justin Walter, round to convince him that the Guardian was completely uncommercial and that we were destined to lose vast amounts of money. That did the trick and Houston, along with a ‘hippy guy called Danny’, built the first content management system. No one else understood how the system worked.
Katz – young, impatient, ambitious, contrarian, mischievous – also knew very little about the internet, but he had no intention of simply replicating what we did already in print. He wanted it to look, feel and behave differently from its text-and-paper parent. He settled on the –
