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Guardian . . . Unlimited

Perpetuity is a very long time. If your job is to make consistent margins now, or keep the dividends healthy, you run your business accordingly. If your mandate is, in theory, to make your organisation future-proof for eternity you gaze at more distant horizons.

A habitual doodler, I got in the habit in the late nineties of drawing two lines which, it seemed to me, were a pretty unexceptional prediction of what would happen to our business, even if the drawing had no scale to suggest meaningful time or quantum.

One was a red downward line, inclining at about 45 degrees. That seemed, over the years, to be the inevitable fate of print: a story of gentle but persistent decline. Circulation, sales, readership, advertising, revenues – they would all diminish over the years. If we did nothing, the Guardian would one day cease to exist.

The other, blue, line went upwards – at about the same incline. That was digital growth: users, audience . . . and, maybe, even revenues.

It was impossible to draw anything more sophisticated at the time. There was no data, it was all hunch.

The two lines did cross, but in the intersection I would draw a big green bubble – a visual representation of the anticipated losses as we transitioned from one medium/technology to the other. I couldn’t see how it could be otherwise. We couldn’t bail out of print – that’s where all the revenues were – so we had to keep that (costly) show on the road. At the same time we would have to invest – perhaps heavily? – in digital. At some point the blue would begin to cannibalise the red line. We were only just keeping our heads above water as it was. So it was difficult to imagine how we weren’t entering a period of considerable losses. The question was: could we sustain the losses until (to mix metaphors) we were safely on the other bank of the river?

Next question: how to take a 175-year-old newspaper and reinvent it as something else? If that’s what we were trying to do. Some newspaper companies evidently regarded the internet as a different kind of distribution channel: we can squirt the thing down phone lines instead of trucking it to you. But what if the medium dictated the content? Then we would have to create something sufficiently ‘Guardian’ to be true to the name; but sufficiently different to be true to the medium.

The Guardian, like all newspapers, was currently a random bundle of information held together by the glue of appearing in the same printed package. On the face of it the cricket scores, the weather, the ballet review, the fashion advice and the parliamentary report had little in common – but they hung together as a coherent package. It seemed likely that, over time, someone would come and do each of those areas better than a general newspaper could do. And then what would happen? Would the physical brand of the Guardian be sufficient glue to hold it all together in a world of bits and bytes?

One thing that was plain by early 1997 was that the five-year strategy agreed by the Board and the Trust less than a year earlier was not remotely digital enough. We would need smart technologists to help us think about the problems and possibilities. But web developers might know nothing about the news – or even the Guardian, for that matter. There was some feeling that the PDU, while brilliantly innovative, had become something of a ‘state within a state’ – not attuned enough to the culture of a newspaper to take people with them. I decided we needed one of the best younger journalists on the paper to lead the reinvention of the Guardian. Ian Katz,¹ our 29-year-old New York correspondent, did not sound thrilled to be asked. I wanted him to give up one of the plum jobs in journalism to come back to London and start a website?

The role, as described, had very little appeal. ‘I thought it was a fucking bonkers idea,’ Katz was to observe to me later.

*

The London office Katz returned to may have been one where some key individuals appreciated the size of the revolution around the corner. But, in most other respects, it was woefully unready for digital. Some visiting academics did a case study of the Guardian in 1998 and discovered that ‘the Guardian gives the impression of being a newspaper on the brink of a sudden explosion in Internet use’ but that actually not more than one in ten journalists were actively using the world wide web.

The academics reported that the editor (‘a strong proponent’) would hold regular lunches to explain what was going on out there, ending each lunch by telling them ‘You are all bonkers if you are not using it. It ought to be an absolutely standard tool.’ But it was not clear it was yet having much effect.

The authors quoted former Times editor (and future Guardian columnist) Simon Jenkins, predicting that the effect of the internet would be both minimal and short-lived: ‘The Internet will strut an hour upon the stage, and then take its place in the ranks of the lesser media’ – including Ceefax, Prestel, touch screen and CD-ROM.

‘Jenkins sees red over the much-lauded two-way communication characteristics of the Internet . . . to those who claim “the advent of digital hypertext will liberate the reader from the tyranny of the writer” he retorts that this is the “freedom of the brain-dead”.’

Jenkins was not alone.

*

Katz, by now barely 30 and with almost no editing experience, set himself up over the road in the Ray Street loft and started to assemble a team. They had no idea who they were looking for, or how much to pay them. One of the first through the door was Robin Houston, a 21-year-old Etonian, Oxford-educated computer scientist who had spent just one year as a web programmer and was, according to Katz, ‘the cleverest human being that ever walked through the Guardian’s doors’. He had one bag of clothes, long hair and brightly painted fingernails.

Houston was originally hesitant about taking the job because he thought the Guardian was ‘too commercial’. Katz sent his recently hired business lead, Justin Walter, round to convince him that the Guardian was completely uncommercial and that we were destined to lose vast amounts of money. That did the trick and Houston, along with a ‘hippy guy called Danny’, built the first content management system. No one else understood how the system worked.

Katz – young, impatient, ambitious, contrarian, mischievous – also knew very little about the internet, but he had no intention of simply replicating what we did already in print. He wanted it to look, feel and behave differently from its text-and-paper parent. He settled on the – slightly – enfant terrible graphic designer Neville Brody,² who ignored the newspaper’s typography and gave the website a different identity – all bold modular blocks of colour, white space and sans serif fonts.

Not only did the emerging site look different: so, too, did the name. Katz settled on ‘Guardian Unlimited’³ – an umbrella for deeper wells of specific subjects. They focused on things they thought would be big on the web – news unlimited, film unlimited, cricket, football, politics, books and arts, along with work, jobs and skills. These channels later became known as ‘verticals’. At one point Katz drew it as a series of rectangles, at another as a spider – with the body as the news hub and the legs special subject nodes.

The little team over the road, all trainers and t-shirts, understood that a shirt-and-tie newspaper was a broad, shallow thing – with many subjects covered in not much depth because of constraints of space. A website was, literally, unlimited. You could go as deep as you liked into anything you chose. There would be a network of sites, rather than just one. And each site would have to be the best of its kind, because that was how the internet worked.

‘That level of ambition was, looking back, quite insane,’ reflected one of the core team in later life.

As we started spending on digital, we had to find other areas to cut. In 1995 we’d had a protracted debate about whether we could ever use colour pictures for news. Eamonn McCabe, picture editor since 1988, argued vehemently that colour was a distraction for the eye – that black and white was the proper medium for news. In 1998 we closed the darkroom. Pictures came in pixels now. And in colour.

The closure of the darkroom was to save money. But the production of the newspaper itself was Byzantine – and, with the introduction of more colour and (with more advertising) more pages, was about to get more complex.

To some of the older print journalists across the road – the ones paying attention, anyway, since most still didn’t have access to the internet in the newsroom – the digital operation was a distraction which would damage the reputation of the Guardian: stuff being thrown together at speed by so-called ‘web monkeys’ with no experience of real journalism. Noses were put out of joint by one of the Ray Street team visiting morning conference and uttering the phrase ‘dead-tree journalism’. To the older hands the ‘electronic operation’ didn’t have the authority or real depth of print.⁴

But ‘depth’ was relative. Within a short time the newcomers were posting (or linking to) verbatim chunks of the Hansard parliamentary record; or publishing Clinton’s entire State of the Union speech. This was journalism of record few broadsheet newspapers had attempted in years.

Ray Street was frontier living, an experimental sandbox (or, pejoratively – to the cynical older eyes in the main newspaper – ‘the sandpit’ or ‘playpen’). There were basic technological decisions to take – commonplace now, but not at all obvious then – such as making sure that every web page address, or URL, stayed the same. The aim was that everything should be permanent, addressable, discoverable. That meant it stayed where it was; that it could be linked to by other systems and was findable by search.

At the time everyone spoke the language of feeds: you fed your stuff to Yahoo or Drudge and, if you were lucky, they would like it and post a link. But the uniformity of URLs was even more essential when, within a couple of years, Google could find your journalism if it was in the right format. Suddenly a kind of consistency began to emerge about how everyone described their ‘content’ (as it was unavoidably becoming known) and made it available. Soon, the audience would be numbered in millions rather than thousands and even the sceptics began to wonder if there might, after all, be a business in it somewhere.

The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in the early hours of Sunday 31 August 1997 taught them an early lesson about demand – with numerous Guardian readers ringing up all day to ask where the coverage was. It was a good question. I’d woken to the news at 4 a.m. and had roused the obituaries editor and deputy editor, realising we had nothing at all pre-prepared. I was completely focused on the next day’s paper. My aim was to get a seasoned pro – Charles Nevin, a feature writer, was my first choice – and give him all day and 4,500 words to play with.

The Ray Street team managed to get something up and running by mid-morning, much of it agency copy, but with additional newspaper pieces as they became available. They also opened a talkboard for people to comment. By lunchtime there were hundreds of comments. The readers were teaching us: big news couldn’t wait until the following breakfast time. If the Guardian didn’t provide it, people would just look elsewhere.

The Guardian Unlimited site was finally up and running in July 1998 with six sites, which would grow by another dozen over the following 18 months. Within two weeks around 100,000 readers had registered for access – about a quarter of the number buying the physical product. But digital managing editor Simon Waldman later decided to remove registration: ‘because it was actually killing the site, it was one of the things that was pulling us down, just the extra load. Once we did that, obviously, things started to rocket. The idea that we’d one day be bigger than the electronic Telegraph was a pretty fanciful idea in 1999.’

Ian Mayes, in his weekly column, in early 1999, did his best to explain to readers the nature of the dramatic changes under way.

‘There will be an increasing number of occasions when Guardian scoops appear first on our electronic pages and we shall all learn to brag about it,’ he announced, sounding not entirely convinced.⁵

By October 1999 Mayes was reporting to readers on progress: there were now more than half a million registered users. Nearly 60 people were by then working on the website, of whom about 20 were journalists.⁶ We briefly experimented with producing a 24-page tabloid to be printed on A3 paper for distribution to luxury hotels around the world.

There were still companies who thought print, however delivered, was the future.

*

This new world of interconnectivity was baffling and uncomfortable in equal measure. The New York correspondent of any British newspaper would feel safe in buying the New York Times; creatively rewriting and adding to it; and then filing a version of it back to London. Then the penny dropped that, in this new world, their editors back in London could also read the New York Times; indeed, they’d read it five hours ahead of you. Moreover, American readers of your website wouldn’t tolerate warmed-up NYT copy a day late. You either filed original material on the day or you were irrelevant.

We were woefully ignorant of how those of our readers who were now online were consuming the news. We did gradually come to understand that the new world was one of information promiscuity: readers who had been loyal to one newspaper all their lives could now browse and graze to their hearts’ content.

In the summer of 1997 the Guardian editorial executives had descended on a country-house hotel for an annual awayday. Katz had presented on our progress so far and showed the NYT website, which at the time had an Associated Press (AP) wire on the front page. Research showed, to general dismay, that the AP feed was the most-read thing on the website. We were just learning the new buzz phrase ‘commodity news’ – news available to everyone and therefore not distinctive and (in commercial terms) not valuable. Yet here was the NYT letting their readers have access to the firehose – the source material, used by all papers, out of which many of our correspondents used to fashion their own work.

A (print) news editor stared at the slide in horror. ‘They’ve put their wires on the internet? People can see the wires on the internet?’

It was our sausage-factory moment.