Express, which had at its peak in the early 1960s sold 4 million copies a day,10 was passed on to Richard Desmond,11 then the publisher of Asian Babes and other ‘adult’ titles.
Along with everyone else, we did from time to time consider whether we should be charging readers to pay for our journalism online. It would be five years before a major general newspaper – the New York Times – would make a determined stab at extracting money directly from online readers. Around the turn of the millennium virtually all newspapers held out little hope of persuading their users to part with cash. Almost everyone who had tried to charge had abandoned it. In the US there were only two newspapers – the Wall Street Journal and the Champaign News Gazette charging.12 The NYT originally tried to charge $35 for readers outside the US, but abandoned that. Even the Financial Times, at that point, wasn’t convinced it could make people pay.13 Instead there was much talk of the ‘attention economy’.
We were with the consensus. We were a very small newspaper (still the ninth-biggest) in a very small pond: Britain. If we could break onto the world stage, the commercial managers figured, we might stand a chance of acquiring a big enough audience to attract significant advertisers. The market of English-speaking, college-educated potential readers was possibly 500 million. The BBC would, in time, reach 150 million of them.14 If the Guardian could get launched, even modestly, on that global ocean it could stand a chance of survival. Overseas expansion couldn’t work if you asked non-Brits to pay. But trying to move into the digital age with a tiny, mainly British, not notably wealthy readership did not strike anyone as a recipe for long-term survival.
Editorially, the paper was making waves. We’d just been named newspaper of the year four years running. We were breaking stories. We brought a £2 million fine down on the heads of Carlton TV (corporate affairs chief, one David Cameron) by proving they had faked key scenes in a documentary about drug running. We had devoted ten pages over five days to examining the science and commerce behind genetically modified food. We forced the resignation of two government ministers – Peter Mandelson and Geoffrey Robinson – over our revelations of the unusual mortgage agreement they’d entered into for buying the former a house. We had first-rate reporting from Kosovo, Libya and Iraq by veteran correspondents Jonathan Steele and Ian Black. We’d opened an archive and readers’ centre across the road for debates around our work – another extension of our journalism. And there was a little schoolroom where a class of kids a day came to put together a ‘newspaper’ of their own.
And then, on 11 September 2001, four passenger airliners were hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists and the world shook.
8
Global
It was quite possibly the biggest news story of all time – watched in real time by maybe a third of the world’s population. Even as the raw, horrific drama played out on the screen, billions of people began calculating the appalling geo-political consequences. Sites all over the globe – including the BBC – fell over as the world tried to follow every heart-stopping moment. The internet couldn’t cope.
It was an object lesson in how news knew no national boundaries. Many of those coming to the Guardian site that day were American, unable to find news from domestic sources with less robust technology. Some of them went onto the talkboards to update the rest of the planet with what they knew. The same was happening through thousands of weblogs. Those days in Manhattan were captured not only by newsrooms but also in a multitude of disparate voices able to speak to virtually all humanity.
We’d recently refurbished our servers to allow a million page impressions in a day. On 9/11 we served two and a half million. At one point there were 146 page impressions a second. The Guardian – with anxious tech developers sitting up all night – didn’t go dark.
Something about the Guardian audience changed dramatically in the period immediately following 9/11. Page views for September were 42 million (up from 29 million), October 51 million. A decade later the comparable figures would be more than 400 million. The realisation dawned that these new readers might be here to stay. Was it that hundreds of thousands of Americans had suddenly woken up to the fact that their own security was irrevocably bound up with things happening halfway across the globe? Was there something about the less objective style of British journalism that caught hold? Were there not enough liberal non-consensus voices back home? Whatever it was, we had to get serious about finding out – and to get better at, well, everything.
Guardian Unlimited relaunched at the end of 2001 with a big marketing push – just as advertising growth went into reverse after the political shocks of 9/11 and its aftermath. Break-even was pushed back again. But we were now the market leader in the UK, tabloid or broadsheet. Carolyn McCall, the managing director, was completely clear with the staff about her appetite for patient planning: ‘We have always seen this as a long-term investment and a fundamental part of where we see our brands and our business in the future – not a get-rich-quick scheme.’
That was just as well because it was plain the future was about to get expensive. It had cost £3.5 million to junk the old dumb terminals and get the newsroom onto terminals which could actually see the internet, but it was clear we’d need to spend much, much more to create a modern content management system that could take an early-twentieth-century process of editing and make it reasonably fit for at least the first decade of the twenty-first century.
New people with new skills started appearing on the commercial and tech development floors. The word ‘monetise’ was in the air. They called journalism ‘content’. ‘How are we going to monetise the content?’ they asked. Or, sometimes, ‘How can we monetise the reader?’
When would we see the end of print? It was the most often-asked question and it was impossible to answer. My stock response was that it was completely out of our control. People would keep inventing ever-cleverer, ever-faster, ever-lighter devices. We couldn’t stop that from happening, even if we wanted to. At some point, I assumed, the old Victorian production chain of newsprint – light manufacturing; lorries driving through the night; wholesalers and newsagents taking their cut; and (if you were lucky) news delivery boys on their bikes before school – would no longer work economically. I had no idea when that would be, but the prudent course was to be ready for it.
Many colleagues were binary – understandably suspicious. If you loved digital then you must hate print, right? What was wrong with print? It still paid our wages – unlike digital pipe dreams. It had serendipity and portability – and generated cash. What was not to like?
I would patiently explain that I loved print. I had spent my life in print. I still thought of myself as a writing journalist who liked words. But I was also overwhelmed by the possibilities of the emerging digital world. Loving one didn’t mean hating the other. In the end the choice would be out of our hands.
No one, to paraphrase William Goldman,1 knew anything.
*
Even before 9/11 the pain of disruption was being felt throughout the industry. ‘2001’ said a forlorn internal note by a senior commercial director, ‘was the most miserable year for newspaper publishers in living memory.’ A hike in the price of newsprint had been the last straw. Each week there were rumours that national titles would have to close. Every newspaper responded by raising the cover price; slashing marketing; cutting headcount; dumping internet investment; freezing wages and abandoning product development.
This was a familiar pattern in the American newspaper market – the so-called death spiral. Circulation decline led to advertising decline. Managements cut back editorial employees to stem declining margins while, at the same time, asking them to work harder and adding new digital
