a vast number of facts thrown in and very little analysis, and no comment. We had masses of foreign correspondents.
It was a fundamentally, much more deliberately, self-constrained framework in which our basic thing was to keep on telling people what we thought mattered and what had happened. Which is quite a simple aim to state and a difficult thing to achieve.
He was describing different priorities and obsessions, but an equal seriousness about doing justice to complex subjects. Some of our coverage might even be ‘boring’, but there was some sense of duty about covering things we felt important. This was sometimes mocked as ‘eat your peas’ journalism.
The mindset was fine. But the reality was difficult to sustain. Specialists and foreign correspondents were expensive, and, on some titles, the first to go when a finance director scrutinised the payroll. One business manager on another (then) broadsheet explained to me they had done research that showed that almost no one – barring the journalist’s friends and family – ever noticed the byline on a story. The broad inference he drew from this was that – with the exception of a few high-profile columnists – journalists were pretty interchangeable.
Printed newspapers were in a remorseless slide to eventual oblivion: that much seemed overwhelmingly probable. The pointers to the future were there in every developed country, with circulations of serious European papers falling at anything between 7 and 10 per cent a year. End-of-print obituaries were now routine. Redundancies were mounting – more than 2,000 press jobs lost in the US (4 per cent of the total workforce) between 2000 and 2004. Epitaphs for a dying idea of journalism were already in book form.
‘In the old model, monopoly made publishers wealthy and secure enough to indulge in personal pleasure, and some found pleasure in producing good journalism well beyond what was needed to keep the business functioning,’ wrote Philip Meyer, professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, in his 2004 book The Vanishing Newspaper. ‘These philosopher-kings of journalism cared about results beyond their own career spans. They wanted to protect the long-term wealth of both their businesses and the communities they served. They recognized that a community is defined by both economic and social forces, and that a good newspaper is a meeting place where those elements come together to form a public sphere.’
As ownership has shifted to investor-owned corporations, that long-term orientation is rare. If your expectation as an investor is based on an industry’s history of easy money, you feel justified in doing whatever it takes to keep the cash flowing.
A breakdown of our revenues in spring of 2003 showed a roughly equal three-way split between classified advertising (£75 million), print display advertising (£69 million) and copy sales (£75 million). If the pace of change stayed steady, we felt the transition might just be manageable. At the same time we felt a sense of management fatigue. The advent of the BlackBerry meant that we were all now available 18 hours a day, seven days a week. There were endless strategy meetings, position papers, budget spreadsheets and marketing plans. You could easily attend six hours of meetings a day to consider those . . . and then have to produce a newspaper and website on top.
At this point the Guardian itself was actually profitable to the tune of about £8 million, though that was more than off-written by a £13 million loss on the Observer. Guardian Unlimited was losing nearly £4 million – slightly outperforming the budgeted loss of £6 million. In all, the division was losing around £8 million – £6 million better than originally budgeted. These were considered by the Boards to be comfortable losses, given the £40 million-odd profits we were making elsewhere in the Guardian Media Group.3
Revenues were flat, but projected to start growing again – and at some point we had to spend a lot to improve the ageing presses on which we printed, probably building new towers to print more colour advertising and installing inserting machinery to handle the classified advertising sections that otherwise had to be hand-inserted by newsagents. We also faced having to move out of the network of offices we had in Clerkenwell, which were hopelessly unintegrated and quietly decaying.4
And then – in the last week of September 2003 – the Independent announced that, with immediate effect, the paper would be printed in two sizes, broadsheet and tabloid, ‘becoming the world’s first newspaper to give readers a choice’.
It seemed a minor development in the great scheme of things. Perhaps. But Fleet Street tilted a little on its axis.
*
The Independent had been born in the mid-1980s at the height of the furious struggle over computer-setting, which saw 13 months of pitched battles and picketing around the fortress Rupert Murdoch had secretly constructed at the newsroom and printing plant he had – astonishingly – built barely two miles east of Fleet Street on a brownfield site at Wapping. His aim in January 1986 was, in the words of one Sunday Times journalist, to move ‘from steam to microchip in a week’.
Three former Telegraph journalists, led by Andreas Whittam Smith, responded quickly to the new opportunities of printing with much lower production costs. They launched a new broadsheet paper, the Independent, in October 1986. The original founders mainly had the Telegraph in their sights, but the paper was soon damaging the Telegraph, Guardian and Times equally. It was instantly elegant, authoritative, well-written and fresh. The Guardian immediately felt staid, predictable and stale. By the late 1980s the Independent had overtaken the Times and had come within inches of eclipsing the Guardian.
There followed a ruthless Fleet Street fight – the last of the great newspaper battles.
As the Indie raided both its star staff and readers, the Guardian relaunched first with a modernist redesign; and then by funding a new Sunday title, the Correspondent, aimed at discouraging Whittam Smith from launching his own Sunday title. In the latter ambition it failed, but the distraction of launching a Sunday newspaper so early in its life is generally thought to have led to substantial managerial and financial torments for the new upstart.
The Murdoch price war had also had a devastating effect on the fledgling Independent. By 1995 the bulk of the shares were jointly owned by Mirror Group Newspapers and Tony O’Reilly, the owner of the Irish Independent newspapers. In a dozen years the daily and Sunday papers ran through 12 editors. The paper was struggling for cash, had started vigorous cost-cutting and had lost the sureness of tone it had enjoyed in its earlier years. The veteran former foreign editor Godfrey Hodgson wrote a piece in 1994 lamenting the plunge downmarket, trying ‘to second-guess the professionals in that Bermuda Triangle of British journalism, the “middle market” . . . The tragedy of the Independent is that it started as something special, something to which good people would give their best shot. Now it is – to use management-speak – just a product.’
In the autumn of 2002 the Independent – by now losing around £7 million a year – had found another editor, Simon Kelner,5 who said he had enjoyed a eureka moment while in a supermarket. He later described the moment, using the language of consumer products. ‘I was buying toothpaste, and I noticed that the paste comes in a tube, a pump thing, in various sizes – but they are the same quality product,’ he recalled. If newspapers were just consumer products, he thought, why couldn’t they do two sizes, but keep the content the same?
By the end of September 2003 – Kelner was producing the Independent in two sizes. Within two months the Times had followed suit with its own ‘compact’ version.
By the spring of 2004 both titles had jumped to being tabloid-only: the toothpaste analogy only worked so far.
The move presented the three
