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More Than a Business

It was a lovely time to be a local newspaper journalist. But after a couple of years I had – as my Cambridge colleagues knew I would – started to make my exit plans. I began using my days off doing reporting shifts at the London Evening Standard, where ancient typewriters were chained to dark green metal desks. I was turned down for a job there, and also by the Times. But my cuttings caught the eye of the news editor on the Guardian, Peter Cole. I bought a new suit and gave what Cole later described as the worst interview he could remember. But he was impressed by my scrapbook of stories and considered I had a modest facility with words. I feel I may have lied when asked about my shorthand speed.

There was another young reporter starting at the Guardian on my first day in July 1979 – fresh from the Mirror Group training scheme in the west country. His name was Nick Davies. He was extrovert; I was more introverted. He loved standing on doorsteps; I preferred polishing sentences. With his beaten leather jacket, he looked like a beatnik French philosopher. As has sometimes been remarked, I looked more like Harry Potter. We became lifelong friends . . . and got up to mischief.

The Guardian Nick and I joined had been around for 158 years.

The Manchester Guardian started life as a small start-up in 1821. Its intention was almost purely altruistic. Its founders had no ambition to reap huge profits from it. It was imagined as a piece of public service. Somehow – amazingly, mystifyingly, staggeringly – it remained a venture devoted to that public service of news more than a century and a half later. It existed to ask questions, to bear witness and to offer forthright (and anonymous) opinion.

There was no great business model for serious, awkward, enquiring journalism in 1821, any more than there was in 2015 when I left the paper, 194 years into its existence. But most of the time – buttressed by advertising and subsidy from other companies within family or trust ownership – the paper struggled through, with occasional crises along the way.

Its founder, John Edward Taylor, was a Manchester businessman and advocate of parliamentary reform who had been present at what became known as the Peterloo Massacre. On 16 August 1819, in St Peter’s Square, Manchester, a 60,000-strong unarmed crowd gathered to hear a speech by a great radical orator, Henry Hunt, who believed in some very dangerous things: equal rights, universal suffrage, parliamentary reform, an end to child labour and so forth.

Fearing that Hunt would stir the crowd to some form of insurrection, the city’s magistrates ordered in the yeomanry, who literally cut their way to the platform on which Hunt was speaking in order to arrest him. Numerous men, women and children were treated for fractures, sabre cuts and gunshot wounds. More than 400 people were injured and 11 were killed. It was all over in ten minutes. The story of the day led to a great poem, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, by Shelley (‘Rise like lions after slumber . . . Ye are many – they are few’).

The historian E.P. Thompson described the decision facing the authorities on that day in his 1963 book, The Making of the English Working Class: ‘Old Corruption faced the alternatives of meeting the reforms with repression or concession. But concession, in 1819, would have meant concession to a largely working-class reform movement: the middle-class reformers were not yet strong enough (as they were in 1832) to offer a more moderate line of advance. This is why Peterloo took place.’

The term ‘fake news’ had not yet been invented. But Taylor, standing on the edge of the carnage, knew what to expect. The official authorities would tell lies about the day. They would claim they were acting in self-defence; they had been attacked by the mob and had drawn their swords as a desperate last measure.

The one national reporter on the scene, the Times’s John Tyas, ended the day in captivity (or sanctuary) and was unable to file a story. Knowing this, Taylor wrote his own report and got it swiftly to London. It was printed in the Times on the morning of 18 August, two days later. The story marked, in the words of one writer, the ‘birth of the public reporter in English public life’.¹

By the following day’s edition Tyas was free to file his own eyewitness account and the Times went to town, filling more than two broadsheet pages.

In the volume of space devoted to the massacre you can feel the editor of the Times, Thomas Barnes, grappling with how anyone could establish the truth. Would people naturally trust the word of one reporter over that of the magistrates? Would readers be more convinced if there were multiple accounts broadly corroborating one version? In addition to its own reporting the paper went in for two techniques that became routine in the early twenty-first century – aggregation and crowdsourcing.

The aggregation took the form of excerpts from other local papers’ reports of the day. The crowdsourcing came from a petition and from numerous ‘private letters’ similar to Taylor’s. They painted a confusing picture, but the accumulation of evidence overwhelmingly demonstrated that the crowd had behaved peacefully and there was no possible justification for the violence meted out.

Taylor understood the importance of facts – and also predicted that the facts of the day would be contested, and litigated, for months, if not years. He wanted to place on record ‘facts, undeniable and decisive . . . truths which are impossible to gainsay’.

He was entirely right. The authorities pushed back hard, creating a set of ‘alternative facts’ around the events of the day: they claimed to have witnessed pikes dipped in blood and torrents of stones and bricks thrown at the troops. The speakers on the day were later arrested and jailed by the same magistrates who had ordered the violence. Thanks to Taylor’s quick response ‘within two days all England knew of the event’, says Thompson. ‘Within a week every detail of the massacre was being canvassed in ale-houses, chapels, workshops, private houses.’ And, thanks to the public reporting of the facts of the day, Thompson was able to write in 1963: ‘Never since Peterloo has authority dared to used equal force against a peaceful British crowd.’

Peterloo is as good an illustration as any as to why good journalism is necessary. Nearly 200 years later, in the early days of the Trump presidency, the Washington Post expressed the same motivating ideal with the slogan: ‘Democracy dies in darkness’. The New York Times, faced with an administration in 2017 that cared little for the distinction between facts and falsehoods, marketed itself with the words: ‘Truth is hard to find. But easier with 1,000+ journalists looking.’

Power needs witnesses. Witnesses need to be able to speak freely to an audience. The truth can only follow on from agreed facts. Facts can only be agreed if they can be openly articulated, tested . . . and contested. That process of statement and challenge helps something like the truth to emerge. From truth can come progress. In the absence of this daylight, bad things will almost certainly happen. The acts of bearing witness and establishing facts can lead to positive reform. By the start of the twenty-first century these might – in relatively enlightened democracies – seem unremarkable statements, but 200 years ago these were comparatively new propositions.

Taylor decided to found his own paper. The first edition of the Manchester Guardian hit the streets about 18 months later – initially a weekly paper printed on machinery that could turn out 150 copies an hour. Its third edition reported on the House of Commons debate on the Peterloo massacre, over nine-and-a-half columns.

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To compress a very long story into a very short narrative: the Taylor family married the Scott family. A young member of the latter tribe – C.P. Scott – became editor at the age of 25: by the time he died in 1932 he had not only edited the paper for 57 years, he also owned it. On the death, in rapid succession, of Scott and his son Edward, the family placed the paper into the care and ownership of the Scott Trust in 1936 to preserve and protect the Guardian ‘in perpetuity’.

The Scotts could have made themselves very wealthy by selling the Manchester Guardian to Lord Beaverbrook or any other number of suitors: instead they gave away their inheritance in order to sustain decent, serious, liberal journalism. They were not in it for the money. The Manchester Guardian was a public service.

Pause and reflect on that very unusual moment – described by Winston Churchill’s future lord chancellor, Gavin Simonds, as ‘very repugnant’ (‘you are trying to divest yourself of a property right’).² Sir William Hayley, later editor of the Times, said of John Scott’s decision to, in effect, give away the Guardian: ‘He could have been a rich man; he chose a Spartan existence. And when he made up his mind to divest himself of all beneficial interest in them he did so with as little display of emotion as if he had been solving an algebraical problem. Most men making so large a sacrifice would have exacted at least the price of an attitude.’³

On the paper’s 100th birthday in 1921 Scott – who’d been editing for nearly 50 years – wrote perhaps the most famous short essay on journalism, with its pithy aphorism: ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred.’⁴ He used the article to underscore his passionate belief that, while a newspaper was a business, it had little point unless it was more than a business. A newspaper could – then, as now – aim to be ‘something of a monopoly’. Many business people might relish that. Scott felt the opposite. The Guardian, he thought, should ‘shun its temptations’.

A newspaper has two sides to it. It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. It is, in its way, an instrument of government. It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces . . . It may make profit or power its first object, or it may conceive itself as fulfilling a higher and more exacting function. I think I may honestly say that, from the day of its foundation, there has not been much doubt as to which way the balance tipped so far as regards the conduct of the paper whose fine tradition I inherited and which I have had the honour to serve through all my working life. Had it not been so, personally I could not have served it.

It is more or less inconceivable to imagine these words, or anything like them, from the lips of any newspaper owner today.

Since the predominant purpose of the Guardian lay in its influence, reporting, commentary and educative mission, it was obvious (to Scott’s mind) that it had to be an editorially led venture. Scott wanted there to be a ‘unity’ between commercial and editorial – both driven by the same values. But he was absolutely clear that ‘it is a mistake to suppose that the business side of a paper should dominate’. He had seen experiments to that effect tried elsewhere, and ‘they have not met with success’.

Between its two sides there should be a happy marriage, and editor and business manager should march hand in hand, the first, be it well understood, just an inch or two in advance.

The paper under Scott grew in influence far beyond Manchester. It was never afraid to be unpopular. At the end of the nineteenth century it was virtually alone in the UK press in opposing the Boer War and was excoriated for exposing the existence of British concentration camps – a moment when its reporters needed police guards as they turned up for work. In 1956, again, it stood virtually alone in condemning Britain’s foolish adventure in Suez. It exposed labour conditions in apartheid South Africa and, under Peter Preston,⁵ sleaze in parliament.

In 1961 it had taken an immense commercial risk by taking on an extra 500 staff to make the move from being a Manchester paper to one based in Fleet Street. The move nearly capsized the paper – but, with hindsight, it was a bold and visionary decision.

Some rivals in Fleet Street thought it was also self-regarding, prissy and politically correct. There was doubtless something in that. The early twentieth-century Tory politician Lord Robert Cecil once described the Guardian as ‘righteousness made readable’. There was something in that, too. But the ethos of the paper was formed by its history and ownership. As we’ll see by the end of this book, the correlation between ownership, profit, purpose and the quality of national conversation is a complex one.

The BBC was, in some ways, close in spirit – a publicly funded organisation dedicated to providing serious and trustworthy news. Large swathes of Fleet Street, of course, loathed the BBC and did all in their power to undermine or destroy it. The Murdoch family regarded it as a semi-socialist entity that affronted their view of how the free market was best placed to deliver what they regarded as independent news.

They didn’t much like the Guardian, either.

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That was the paper Nick and I joined in 1979. The paper still had the feeling of a family newspaper. The generation in their late 50s or early 60s who were in charge had begun their careers in Manchester and seen the newspaper transition to being a London title. The Trust was then chaired by Richard Scott, a former Washington correspondent and grandson of C.P. Scott. Peter Preston, our editor, had been on the paper since 1963 and was four years into a 20-year spell as editor. His predecessor, Alistair Hetherington, had also done 20 years. People tended to spend their entire lives at the paper.

For much of its existence the paper teetered on the borderlines of profit or loss – supported, when it went severely into the red, by the profits of the Manchester Evening News. In terms of circulation it was ninth in the league of national newspapers. Gradually, in the early ’80s, the financial position of the Guardian improved. Preston was restless in modernising the paper and, in conjunction with the business managers, building up the classified advertising. By the late ’80s the paper had fat, extremely profitable print sections on Monday to Wednesday carrying hundreds of jobs in media, education and public service.⁶

Our day began around 10 a.m., by which time we were expected to have read most of the other papers. The paper’s first edition went to bed around 9 p.m. in the evening, though the flow of copy meant that, if you weren’t writing for the front page, they appreciated copy by about 6 p.m.

On most days you wrote one story, maximum two. So the day had a shape to it. Reporters were encouraged to be out of the office as much as possible. If you were in the newsroom there was time to read yourself in to the subject you’d been assigned, to make calls. A break for lunch. Some more calls. You might be writing a backgrounder – the context and analysis – in which case you’d start writing about 3 p.m. Otherwise you might have five or six hours on a story before you threaded your first sheet of carbon paper into the scuffed old typewriter.

Fleet Street, where most of the UK’s national papers were based, was both a community and a battleground. Before Murdoch’s great confrontation with the doomed print unions at his new plant at Wapping in 1986,⁷ most of the newspapers – nearly 20 of them, including Sunday editions, which mostly had separate staffs and editors – were gathered along or around Fleet Street, which runs from St Paul’s Cathedral and the Old Bailey in the east to the Royal Courts of Justice in the west.

To walk that half mile from Ludgate Circus to the High Court takes no longer than ten minutes. But – before Wapping – you would pass the glass, stone and marble-front edifices of the Express, the Telegraph, Reuters, Press Association. Down the eighteenth-century Bouverie Street – once home to William Hazlitt and Charles Dickens’ Daily News – lay the cathedral-sized press hall of the News of the World and the Sun, capable of thundering out 4 million copies in a night from presses weighing hundreds of tons, with print lorries and delivery trucks lined up along the narrow street to restock newsprint or race to the night trains.

The outliers on this map in the early ’80s were the Financial Times – a little to the east – and the Times and the Sunday Times, half a mile to the north. The Guardian, which only began to establish a significant London presence in the 1960s, shared printing facilities with the Times but its newsroom was in an unlovely ’70s converted light-engineering building in Farringdon Road, ten minutes’ walk from Fleet Street. It was always the slight outsider.

There was a demarcation between broadsheet, mid-market and red-tops in which supposed quality was in inverse proportion to proven popularity. Arguably the most serious broadsheet – the FT – sold the fewest: around 200,000 copies a day – followed in unpopularity by the Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph, which led the ‘serious papers’ with daily sales of around 1.5 million.

Then came the mid-markets – the Mail and the Express, each selling around 2 million copies – and finally the really popular red-tops, the Sun and the Mirror edging towards 4 million.⁸

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My career took a traditional enough path. A few years reporting; four years writing a daily diary column; a stint as a feature writer – home and abroad. In 1986 I left the Guardian to be the Observer’s television critic – then a plum chair that had been occupied by Clive James and Julian Barnes. But I discovered I didn’t have the right temperament to sit at home watching video-tapes all day, and it was a relief when I was approached to be the Washington correspondent of a new paper to be launched by Robert Maxwell.⁹

The London Daily News was a brief adventure: Maxwell ran out of patience within six months of starting it and closed it even more suddenly than he had opened it. But I was in the US long enough to develop a life-long respect for American journalism’s methods, seriousness and traditions. If Fleet Street sometimes felt like a knowing game, American newspapers were soberly earnest. Back in the UK, I rejoined the Guardian and was diverted towards a route of editing – launching the paper’s Saturday magazine followed by a daily tabloid features section (named G2) and moving to be deputy editor in 1993.

I had developed a love of gadgets. During my stint as diary writer in the mid-’80s I had bought a battery-powered Tandy 100 computer, which displayed a few lines of text. On assignment in Australia I learned how to unscrew a hotel phone and, with crocodile clips, squirt copy back to London using packet-switching technology in the middle of the night.

It felt like landing a man on the moon. I had no idea what was to come.