politely angry letters explaining that they knew about the internet, thank you, but had no wish to use it. What they wanted was a proper newspaper. Which they were happy to pay for.
*
A small last-days-of-Fleet Street vignette . . .
On 9 March 2003 I give the after-dinner speech at the Thirty Club – a members-only gathering of big commercial cheeses in the advertising and media worlds. There are a hundred or so guests at Claridge’s hotel in London, all black tie and gowns. I wish I was better at the mix of badinage and homily that the best after-dinner speakers manage. As I stand to speak I’m very conscious of the contingent from News International across the table. Les Hinton, the amiable if faintly menacing executive chairman of Murdoch’s newspapers, is sitting right opposite me, flanked by Rebekah Brooks, editor of the Sun, and Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World.
I’m talking about trust – and the truly abysmal ratings for newspapers. Depending on the poll and the year, we were lucky if 13 to 18 per cent of the population trusted newspapers. I try to avoid catching my colleagues’ eyes as I add that the red-tops sold most, but were trusted least.
I liken British journalists to fans of the London football club Millwall – official chant: No one likes us, we don’t care. I know what Andy and Rebekah are thinking: We’re in for a pious sermon from someone who can barely make a profit and whose sales are embarrassingly small. I can hear the ritual jibe from Piers Morgan, editor of the Mirror, every time he sees me: ‘I sell more copies in Cornwall than you do in the entire country.’
I waffle on more about trust; how we’d lost it; how to earn it back; why it would matter so much more in the digital world. It is worthy stuff.
Afterwards the three Murdoch colleagues are very friendly. They suggest we go on to a club. We end up drinking in the Soho House till the early hours. The champagne’s on them. The speech is not mentioned. The evening is fun. Rebekah and Andy are good company. Les is full of seen-it-all bonhomie. Deep down, we’re all hacks together.
Cut to 11 years later: Coulson was in jail, Hinton had resigned and Brooks had suffered the ordeal of a nerve-shredding trial at the Old Bailey – all because of reporting in the Guardian. That night in the Soho House feels like a lost world of Fleet Street innocence. A funny word – ‘innocence’ – to use about Fleet Street. But we were certainly all innocent of what was to come – in virtually every way possible.
9
Format Wars
‘Simplify, then exaggerate’ was the advice to young journalists from the former editor of the Economist, Geoffrey Crowther.1 All good journalism has, to some extent, to simplify difficult material. But, in most countries, you will find one or more newspapers that do not shy away from complexity. Complexity, more than anything, was what distinguished a broadsheet paper.
The term referred to the physical size of the newspaper. But the shape mattered less than the mindset behind it. ‘Broadsheet’ was a style of journalism that – as well as relishing complexity – endeavoured to separate news from comment; was sober in tone; operated to a high, if unwritten, ethical code; took policy and politics seriously; responded to ‘high’ culture as well as popular entertainment; was independent – of party, government, advertising or ownership; and was considered to speak with authority on a broad range of serious issues.
What ‘authority’ did it have?
Any authority derived from what it covered, and who got to cover it. At the end of the twentieth century it was still assumed that any broadsheet would have full-time specialists with considerable knowledge of such areas as defence, education, religion, politics, social policy, science, home affairs, law, diplomacy, economics, industry, technology, culture, business, finance, industry, the environment, sport, crime, health and so on. All those areas would be staffed by one correspondent – and in some cases several.
The specialists who covered these areas were, at their best, knowledgeable, experienced – and trusted. They often knew their patches better than the ministers they were writing about, having, in many cases, covered the turf for much longer than here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians. Alan Travis, for instance, had been assiduously covering Home Affairs – police, prisons, immigration, justice, etc. – since 1992. During that time he saw 11 home secretaries, eight justice ministers, eight lord chancellors and countless prison ministers come and go.
Science coverage was, as good as any, an illustration of the broadsheet mindset. Around the turn of the century it was hard not to feel an immense sense of excitement at what was soon to be possible, and soon to be discovered – from microscope technology; gene sequencing tools; image sensors on telescopes; ways to tag cells in living organisms; superconducting magnet technology; computing power and tools for handling massive datasets. The Human Genome Project had laid the foundations for a genuine understanding of how humans work on the molecular scale. The Large Hadron Collider was under construction at CERN. We were seeing for the first time the afterglow of the big bang, that relic radiation from the birth of the universe, imprinted on the sky. All this was on the cards at the start of the twenty-first century: we knew it was coming.
There was an awful lot to tell people about.
But it was complex. It is not easy for a humanities graduate to sit down with an academic paper on astrophysics, neurophysiology or oceanography and to spot the news value, let alone render the contents accurately and accessibly into English that an average reader would comprehend.
At one point we had a team of at least six covering science and the environment. Between them their qualifications included PhDs in chemical engineering, evolutionary genetics, biomaterials and earth sciences; and a BSc in physics. They understood what they were writing about. They could talk on trusted terms with the best scientists who, in return, felt safe with them writing reliably about their work.
They were not idle. In the age of print-alone it was just about imaginable for one person to keep up with the news across all science and deliver three or four pieces a week. But the new beast had to be fed constantly, seven days a week. Science articles were well-read and appreciated.2
How did they see the role of the broadsheet over at the Telegraph, then being edited by Charles Moore, a libertarian Conservative Old Etonian who subsequently wrote a three-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher?
He and I did not see eye to eye on many political and social issues – and, from time to time, our two papers would snipe at each other. But at the heart of what we did there was a similar idea of what a serious newspaper’s job was in this age of peak broadsheet.
I recently asked him to describe it from his end of the telescope.
Well, I suppose, because there was no alternative edited source of serious information other than the BBC, we considered ourselves to have a duty to tell the readers everything that was important that had happened in the country and, to a lesser extent, in the world the day before – and, indeed, more broadly.
I took it to mean, for example, reporting parliament, and law reports. So this would mean that quite a lot of things would go in that you were perfectly well aware might be quite boring, but you still thought you should put them in – and that you would be failing if you didn’t.
If there was a White Paper on reform of Higher Education or something, you had to do a story on it. It meant employing specialist correspondents, of whom we had a great many, and who have disappeared to a remarkable degree
