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5

Shedding power

The legal entanglements sometimes felt like a full-time job on their own, on top of editing. Trying to engineer a digital future for the Guardian felt like a third job. There were somehow always more urgent issues – including printing; international circulation; and the Guardian’s sister Sunday paper, the Observer, which continued to drain away cash at an alarming rate.

The Observer had the most wonderful, romantic history – a paper of principle, humanity and cultural distinction. But, commercially, the paper was struggling to an extent that would exhaust vast amounts of editorial, management and commercial time for the best part of the next decade. The paper had had two editors between 1948 and 1993. Within five years of buying the Sunday title, we were on our fourth.

We struggled to bring the two titles together under one roof and with a broadly common culture. The paper was proudly independent – perhaps even defined by a wish to be seen as quite distinct from the Guardian. That was understandable, but the economics of purchasing the paper had been predicated on a large degree of co-operation, if not integration. Without some degree of collaboration it was difficult to see how the Scott Trust coffers – intended to be just about sufficient as rainy day money for the Guardian – weren’t going to be siphoned away by the newly acquired sister paper.

If it was this difficult to integrate even two newspapers, how much more difficult would it be to graft on an entirely different medium?

By March 1996 ideas we’d hatched in the summer of 1995 were already out of date. That was a harbinger of the future. No plans in the new world lasted very long.

It was now apparent that we couldn’t get away with publishing selective parts of the Guardian online. Other newspapers had shot that fox by pushing out everything. We were learning about the connectedness of the web – and the IT team tentatively suggested that we might use some ‘offsite links’ to other versions of the same story to save ourselves the need to write our own version of everything. This later became the mantra of the City University of New York (CUNY) digital guru Jeff Jarvis – ‘Do what you do best, and link to the rest.’¹

We began to grapple with numerous basic questions about the new waters into which we were gingerly dipping our toes.

Important question: should we charge?

The Times and the Telegraph were both free online. A March 1996 memo from Bill Thompson, a developer who had joined the Guardian from Pipex, ruled it out:

I do not believe the UK internet community would pay to read an online edition of a UK newspaper. They may pay to look at an archive, but I would not support any attempt to make the Guardian a subscription service online . . . It would take us down a dangerous path.

In fact, I believe that the real value from an online edition will come from the increased contact it brings with our readers: online newspapers can track their readership in a way that print products never can, and the online reader can be a valuable commodity in their own right, even if they pay nothing for the privilege.

Thompson was prescient about how the overall digital economy would work – at least for players with infinitely larger scale and vastly more sophisticated technology.

What time of day should we publish?

The electronic Telegraph was published at 8 a.m. each day – mainly because of its print production methods. The Times, more automated, was available as soon as the presses started rolling. The Guardian started making some copy available from first edition through to the early hours. It would, we were advised, be fraught with difficulties to publish stories at the same time they were ready for the press.

Why were we doing it anyway?

Thompson saw the dangers of cannibalisation; that readers would stop buying the paper if they could read it for free online. It could be seen as a form of marketing. His memo seemed ambivalent as to whether we should venture into this new world at all:

The Guardian excels in presenting information in an attractive easy to use and easy to navigate form. It is called a ‘broadsheet newspaper’. If we try to put the newspaper on-line (as the Times has done) then we will just end up using a new medium to do badly what an old medium does well. The key question is whether to make the Guardian a website, with all that entails in terms of production, links, structure, navigational aids etc. In summer 1995 we decided that we would not do this.

But was that still right a year later? By now we had the innovation team – PDU – still in the basement of one building in Farringdon Road, and another team in a Victorian loft building across the way in Ray Street. We were, at the margins, beginning to pick up some interesting fringe figures who knew something about computers, if not journalism. But none of this was yet pulling together into a coherent picture of what a digital Guardian might look like.

*

An 89-page business plan drawn up in October 1996 made it plain where the priorities lay: print.

We wanted to keep growing the Guardian circulation – aiming a modest increase to 415,000 by March 2000 – which would make us the ninth-biggest paper in the UK – with the Observer aiming for 560,000 with the aid of additional sections. A modest investment of £200,000 a year in digital was dwarfed by an additional £6 million cash injection into the Observer, spread over three years.

As for ‘on-line services’ (we were still hyphenating it) we did want ‘a leading-edge presence’ (whatever that meant), but essentially we thought we had to be there because we had to be there. By being there we would learn and innovate and – surely? – there were bound to be commercial opportunities along the road. It wasn’t clear what.

We decided we might usefully take broadcasting, rather than print, as a model – emulating its ‘immediacy, movement searchability and layering’.

If this sounded as if we were a bit at sea, we were. We hadn’t published much digitally to this point. We had taken half a dozen meaty issues – including parliamentary sleaze, and a feature on how we had continued to publish on the night our printing presses had been blown up by the IRA – and turned them into special reports.

It is a tribute to our commercial colleagues that they managed to pull in the thick end of half a million pounds to build these websites. Other companies’ marketing directors were presumably like ours – anxious about the youth market and keen for their brands to feel ‘cool’. In corporate Britain in 1996, there was nothing much cooler than the internet, even if not many people had it, knew where to find it or understood what to do with it.

*

I found the sheer power of an editor frightening – but temptingly enjoyable. I hope I had just about enough self-awareness early on for the unease to trump the heady, head-turning possibilities of gripping the megaphone. Prime ministers, generals, spies, archbishops, princesses, ambassadors, bankers, film directors, presidents, rabbis, oligarchs and business leaders would come to lunch at the drop of an invitation. There was often deference in their voices. They wanted to be liked by newspapers.

Over the years I watched many fellow editors at close quarters. Several of them visibly enjoyed the deference. Among the ranks of editors some were reserved, shy, almost scholarly. Some were humane, sane and straightforward. Some were brash, extrovert, larger than life. A very few were fully fledged bullies – self-important, thin-skinned, mean-eyed and aggressive individuals. These characteristics didn’t necessarily bar them from being very capable editors.

There was nothing in the job description of an editor that said they had to be well-rounded, compassionate and lovable. Some of the ‘best’ editors were none of the above. Some pounded through long days (it was rumoured) on a cocktail of alcohol, adrenalin or cocaine. Some had (to me) quite strange ideas about class, race, immigration, gender, politics or sex, which dominated their worldview. Some editors kept these opinions, beliefs or prejudices to themselves. Others let rip with them in their newspapers.

Here’s the paradox: sometimes the most demotic figures produced ‘brilliant’ newspapers of raucous energy and flair. They were regarded as ‘great’ editors, in touch with popular opinion, their finger on the pulse. They could write the killer headline, crop a picture and lay out a page like no one else. They were true ‘professionals’.

There was little to stop them behaving like unfettered autocrats: within their newsrooms they enjoyed absolute power, sometimes verging on the despotic. In some cases, their internal control was mirrored by an apparent craving for external dominance.

James Graham’s 2017 play about the birth of the Murdoch Sun, titled Ink,² portrays one such (real-life) character in its editor, Larry Lamb³ – so ruthlessly driven that even the ‘Murdoch’ character is visibly alarmed by the monster he has unleashed on the world.

Lamb’s successor, Kelvin MacKenzie,⁴ was even more over the top, with a gift for sugaring lethal aggression with a quite winning seaside humour.

MacKenzie pushed the sales of the Sun to well over 4 million with a mix of bonk journalism and populist politics. The more odium he attracted from the despised bien pensant Establishment (as he saw them), the more he felt encouraged to be increasingly outrageous in exposing homosexuals, adulterers, hypocrites . . . and anyone else qualifying for the category of general scumbag.

Complaining readers were treated with contempt. According to the authors Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie in their book about the Sun, ‘He would pick up their letters and say: “What a wank. What a complete fucking wank,” spitting the words out and holding their letter at arm’s length between finger and thumb as though it were made of some particularly repellent substance.’⁵

But no one put a check on MacKenzie, even when his notoriously offensive front-page ‘The Truth’ headline about the supposed behaviour of fans at the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989 was shown to be a travesty – and led to an entire city, Liverpool, boycotting the paper in perpetuity.

In 2004 – 15 years later – the Sun admitted the treatment of this story had been ‘the most terrible mistake in our history’. That did not stop MacKenzie’s return to the paper as a columnist in 2006; or being hired as an opinion writer by the Daily Mail in 2011; or by the Telegraph in 2013; or returning to the Sun in 2014. He was eventually sacked by the Sun in April 2017 after comparing a mixed-race footballer with a ‘dim-witted’ gorilla. It was all good fun until it wasn’t.

Today, MacKenzie’s 13-year dominance at the paper seems an era of considerable bigotry, cruelty and prejudice rather than wit, brio and much-envied (and imitated) professionalism. There are editors, then and now, whose behaviour would – in any other context – seem borderline unhinged. They appear, to an outsider, worryingly aggressive and obsessive. They seem to derive pleasure from threatening, humiliating, harassing or intimidating their targets.

A newspaper is probably the last institution or organisation in the democratic world where such people would be allowed to operate with quite so little scrutiny or redress. Anyone who tried to run a government, school, public company, hospital, charity or prison in such a monocratic way would not survive in the modern age. And they would be savaged by the press.

I also knew that no newspaper could be edited by committee. In the end someone has to call the shots and take responsibility for the multiple decisions, small and large, involved in daily editing. One editor of the Daily Mail, Mike Randall, once counted 200 decisions he took in a single day. If you got 50 per cent right, he reckoned, you were doing well.⁶

*

The absence of a controlling owner meant we could run the Guardian in a slightly different way from some papers. Each day began with a morning conference open to anyone on the staff. In the old Farringdon Road office, it was held around two long narrow tables in the editor’s office – perhaps 30 or 40 people sitting or standing. When we moved to our new offices at Kings Place, near Kings Cross in North London, we created a room that was, at least theoretically, less hierarchical: a horseshoe of low yellow sofas with a further row of stools at the back. In this room would assemble a group of journalists, tech developers and some visitors from the commercial departments every morning at about 10 a.m. If it was a quiet news day we might expect 30 or so. On big news days, or with an invited guest, we could host anything up to 100.⁷

A former Daily Mail journalist, attending his first morning conference, muttered to a colleague in the newsroom that it was like Start the Week – a Monday morning BBC radio discussion programme. All talk and no instructions. In a way, he was right: it was difficult, in conventional financial or efficiency terms, to justify 50 to 60 employees stopping work to gather together each morning for anything between 25 and 50 minutes. No stories were written during this period, no content generated.

But something else happened at these daily gatherings. Ideas emerged and were kicked around. Commissioning editors would pounce on contributors and ask them to write the thing they’d just voiced. The editorial line of the paper was heavily influenced, and sometimes changed, by the arguments we had. The youngest member of staff would be in the same room as the oldest: they would be part of a common discussion around news. By a form of accretion and osmosis an idea of the Guardian was jointly nourished, shared, handed down and crafted day by day.

It led to a very strong culture. You might love the Guardian or despise it, but it had a definite sense of what it believed in and what its journalism was. It could sometimes feel an intimidating meeting – even for (or especially for) the editor. The culture was intended to be one of challenge: if we’d made a wrong decision, or slipped up factually or tonally, someone would speak up and demand an answer. But challenge was different from blame: it was not a meeting for dressing downs or bollockings. If someone had made an error the previous day we’d have a post-mortem or unpleasant conversation outside the room. We’d encourage people to want to contribute to this forum, not make them fear disapproval or denunciation.

There was a downside to this. It could, and sometimes did, lead to a form of group-think. However herbivorous the culture we tried to nurture, I was conscious of some members of staff who felt awkward about expressing views outside a (we hoped, fairly broad) consensus. But, more often, there would be a good discussion on two or three of the main issues of the day. We encouraged specialists (or outside visitors) to come in and discuss breaking stories. Leader writers could gauge the temperature of the paper before penning an editorial. And, from time to time, there would be the opposite of consensus: individuals, factions or groups would come and demand we change our line on Russia, bombing in Bosnia; intervention in Syria; Israel, blood sports or the Labour leadership.

The point was this: that the Guardian was not one editor’s plaything or megaphone. It emerged from a common conversation – and was open to internal challenge when editorial staff felt uneasy about aspects of our journalism or culture.

*

Within two years – slightly uncomfortable at the power I had acquired as editor – I gave some away. I wanted to make correction a natural part of the journalistic process, not a bitterly contested post-publication battleground designed to be as difficult as possible.

We created a new role on the Guardian: a readers’ editor. He/she would be the first port of call for anyone wanting to complain about anything we did or wrote. The readers’ editor would have daily space in the paper – off-limits to the editor – to correct or clarify anything and would also have a weekly column to raise broader issues of concern. It was written into the job description that the editor could not interfere. And the readers’ editor was given the security that he/she could not be removed by the editor, only by the Scott Trust.

On most papers editors had sat in judgement on themselves. They commissioned pieces, edited and published them – and then were supposed neutrally to assess whether their coverage had, in fact, been truthful, fair and accurate. An editor might ask a colleague – usually a managing editor – to handle a complaint, but he/she was in charge from beginning to end. It was an autocracy. That mattered even more in an age when some journalism was moving away from mere reportage and observation to something closer to advocacy or, in some cases, outright pursuit.

Allowing even a few inches of your own newspaper to be beyond your direct command meant that your own judgements, actions, ethical standards and editorial decisions could be held up to scrutiny beyond your control. That, over time, was bound to change your journalism. Sunlight is the best disinfectant: that was the journalist-as-hero story we told about what we do. So why wouldn’t a bit of sunlight be good for us, too?

The first readers’ editor was Ian Mayes, a former arts and obituaries editor then in his late 50s. We felt the first person in the role needed to have been a journalist – and one who would command instant respect from a newsroom which otherwise might be somewhat resistant to having their work publicly critiqued or rebutted. There were tensions and some resentment, but Ian’s experience, fairness and flashes of humour eventually won most people round.

One or two of his early corrections convinced staff and readers alike that he had a light touch about the fallibility of journalists:

In our interview with Sir Jack Hayward, the chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers, page 20, Sport, yesterday, we mistakenly attributed to him the following comment: ‘Our team was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.’ Sir Jack had just declined the offer of a hot drink. What he actually said was: ‘Our tea was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.’ Profuse apologies.

In an article about the adverse health effects of certain kinds of clothing, pages 8 and 9, G2, August 5, we omitted a decimal point when quoting a doctor on the optimum temperature of testicles. They should be 2.2 degrees Celsius below core body temperature, not 22 degrees lower.

But in his columns he was capable of asking tough questions about our editorial decisions – often prompted by readers who had been unsettled by something we had done. Why had we used a shocking picture which included a corpse? Were we careful enough in our language around mental health or disability? Why so much bad language in the Guardian? Were we balanced in our views of the Kosovo conflict? Why were Guardian journalists so innumerate? Were we right to link to controversial websites?

In most cases Mayes didn’t come down on one side or another. He would often take readers’ concerns to the journalist involved and question them – sometimes doggedly – about their reasoning. We learned more about our readers through these interactions; and we hoped that Mayes’s writings, candidly explaining the workings of a newsroom, helped readers better understand our thinking and processes.

It was, I felt, good for us to be challenged in this way. Mayes was invaluable in helping devise systems for the ‘proper’ way to correct the record. A world in which – to coin a phrase – you were ‘never wrong for long’ posed the question of whether you went in for what Mayes termed ‘invisible mending’. Some news organisations would quietly amend whatever it was that they had published in error, no questions asked. Mayes felt differently: the act of publication was something on the record. If you wished to correct the record the correction should be visible.

We were some years off the advent of social media, in which any error was likely to be pounced on in a thousand hostile tweets. But we had some inkling that the iron grip of centralised control that a newspaper represented was not going to last.

I found liberation in having created this new role. There were few things editors can enjoy less than the furious early morning phone call or email from the irate subject of their journalism. Either the complainant is wrong – in which case there is time wasted in heated self-justification; or they’re right, wholly or partially. Immediately you’re into remorseful calculations about saving face. If readers knew we honestly and rapidly – even immediately – owned up to our mistakes they should, in theory, trust us more. That was the David Broder theory, and I bought it. Readers certainly made full use of the readers’ editor’s existence. Within five years 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.