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7

The Conversation

At the end of one millennium and the beginning of the next, the media world was divided between those who still shrugged and those who were panicking.

This thing had come from nowhere and now CEOs were demanding urgent primers on what the internet was and what could be done about it.

The big consultancy firms did good business flying around the world telling media companies how to get with the act. In January 1999 two McKinsey principals, John Hagel and Marc Singer, published a book about ‘the merging role of the Infomediary’. ‘The truth is that very few of today’s companies have what it takes to become an infomediary,’ they warned. ‘Most lack either the customer relationships that will be necessary to get started or the risk-taking culture that will be necessary to succeed.’¹

They foresaw a rapid period of alliance between internet-based and more traditional businesses – a marriage of speed-driven decision making and deep pockets. Success in future would depend on a business’s ability to capture information about customers and use this for commercial purposes. In the two years from early 1998 to February 2000 the internet sector earned over 1,000 per cent returns on its public equity.² By the end of 2000 those returns had completely disappeared, but for a while the world went a little bit mad.

Our problem was, if anything, the reverse. We were spending modest amounts on the website and – probably – going too slowly rather than too quickly. The current rate of spend was around £3.8 million on staff costs by 2000/1, rising to £5.6 million in 2002. The total expenditure over the first five years of digital experimentation was around £18 million. Ian Katz, having launched the original Guardian Unlimited website and assembled a team of brilliant mavericks, was needed back on the paper. For the next few years the web operation was in the hands of two formidably talented and visionary journalists, Simon Waldman and then Emily Bell.³

The business model was looking as though it would involve a combination of recruitment revenue; business-to-business advertising and sponsorship; the licensing or syndication of content; as well as traditional advertising. The forecast for annual revenues in two or three years’ time was £7.4 million. Peanuts compared with what we were taking in print – but then we were planning for a world in which print might itself be taking peanuts.

Advertising was actually healthy enough at this stage, but we had launched a stand-alone website, Workthing, designed to replace, and even grow, the classified print revenues. It was promoted as a ‘complete employment network’ aimed at younger junior or middle managers. Everything in recruitment was moving online: digital was quicker and more comprehensive: the internet had better reach and could save 80 to 90 per cent of costs. The market was going to be worth $7 billion by 2005, and we wanted a large chunk of it.

Consultants crawled all over the projections and estimated that by March 2005 we could be making anything between £8 and £30 million a year in profits – but only after sinking £30 million of losses to get it airborne. Sales in 2000/1 were, at £5 million, still modest – but the team had high hopes of building that to more than £60 million within a few years.

Reach before revenue.

We were in the green bubble all right. The newspaper division would go on losing money – but, as the other parts of the organisation were highly profitable, this level of investment felt manageable to the Scott Trust. Long term meant long term. We could be patient.

*

Our investment on the main Guardian website was still modest – a drop in the water compared to frenzied activity over at News International. Around mid-1999, according to a semi-authorised book⁴ about Murdoch’s business at this point by Wendy Goldman Rohm, he was convinced by his sons that he was ‘missing the internet boat’ and, within nine months, had allocated more than $2 billion in resources to online projects. ‘The market was going wild, there was money to be made and he decided to jump on the bandwagon.’

While on honeymoon in Tuscany with his second wife, Wendi, he and some executives (evidently joining the honeymoon) planned a new UK internet division, to be called News Network, according to Rohm. This would be the digital arm of News International, the UK newspaper division which published the Times, Sunday Times, News of the World and Sun.

But the bubble in internet ventures was about to burst in the summer of 2000 and – less than a year after announcing he’d ‘got it’ – Murdoch ordered a retreat. According to Rohm, in a Los Angeles bar in July 2000 his top internet gurus were told there was to be no more spending on internet businesses. A few months later News Corp formally announced it was folding all its online businesses that had operated under News Digital Media back into their respective company divisions.⁵

Murdoch was not alone in struggling to make quick returns on digital investments. Nearly everything was failing. In September 2000 everyone was trying to create women’s portals with names like Handbag, iCircle, Beme and uk.women.com. They all petered out. Emap, a trade magazine company, splashed out £50 million, only to announce a wave of site closures as they failed to work. Pearson were scaling back after lavishing more than £100 million in investment on the FT (£30 million on marketing alone). Trinity Mirror decided £10 million a year was more appropriate than the £42 million pre-bubble rate of spend. Associated had launched Charlotte Street, a ‘women’s portal’ in October 1999 and then relaunched it a year later, concentrating on 29-to 40-year-olds. It lasted another year before being quietly put out of its misery.

Success in this new world was proving even more uncertain and expensive than anyone had imagined.

*

What was a newspaper becoming? The old newspaper model could be sketched as a tablet of stone – something handed down from on high. Our talented Polish-born illustrator Andre Krauze once drew the old world of newspaper production as journalists throwing newspapers over a high wall at readers on the other side.

Newspapers encouraged letters from readers. Hundreds would arrive every day – a tiny number to be selected for publication by the letters editor. As with nearly everything in the old world, we were in control. Who gets a voice, who doesn’t? We chose.

But this new world in which we were now playing didn’t feel like a tablet of stone. It became fashionable to start using the term ‘a conversation’. It wasn’t really, but there was much more two-way traffic. An early idea was to set up talkboards where the readers could congregate virtually and chat. They are, of course, ubiquitous now but were then in their infancy: it took a while for us to get our heads around them. It began around 1999, with a version of what was then a football bulletin board, and grew rapidly.

We were – mostly – pleased to host them. They were very lightly moderated and the user interface was rudimentary. Occasionally the users would rebel if we changed something in a way not to their taste, and there would be periodic desertions: it was relatively easy for a number of disgruntled users to clone the site and take it elsewhere – an early reminder, if we needed one, that we were no longer in control.

Over time readers started their own threads on multiple issues a day – including media, film, books, international news. The best and worst of humanity was on display. At their most unpleasant they were scrappy, almost wild – with bullying, stalking, trolling and name-calling. Some of them were, in the words of one poster, ‘utterly batshit’. The Israel/Palestine discussions were good ones to steer clear of if looking for rational, calm discussion.

At their most obsessive they were a place where lonely pseudonymous souls would argue for days about the relative merits of tinned or dried chickpeas, or whether different flavoured crisps projected a range of sexual orientations. As one former contributor wrote: ‘They could give expert guidance on everything from the structure and formation of PCTs,⁶ to the best laptop to buy, via a debate about God and the true meaning of existence, interspersed with a spat about who would win in a fight, a caveman or an astronaut.’⁷

There was (to old newspaper eyes) a kind of anarchy in play, much to the despair of the occasional moderator who would vainly plead: ‘this is a board to discuss current affairs – there are countless chat sites on the web if you want to chat’. The moderators (or ‘mods’) would soon retire hurt. Yes, the Guardian had created this space, but it was, in the users’ eyes, ‘their’ space and they’d do what they liked with it. If they wanted to spend Christmas creating a Thread to Talk Like the King James Bible – where you had to write about boring everyday matters in the style of a sixteenth-century biblical scholar – that was their business. Rarely did any thread stay on topic for more than three posts.

And then there would be threads that endlessly warmed, sustained, amused, diverted, educated and enthralled. People met their partners there. Friendships were forged, relationships were incubated: several marriages and children followed. One couple live-posted the home birth of their baby. Another still remembers the support she received when receiving treatment for cancer. There was not one porn post.

One of the most popular shared activities was watching television in the virtual company of others. The talkboarders would chat away to each other throughout the first series of Big Brother – the C4 reality show, aired in 2000, which spied on ‘housemates’ marooned inside a custom-built home. There would always be a gaggle on hand to discuss anything David Attenborough was doing. One poster reflected later: ‘That couldn’t happen now as there isn’t a social media that really allows it (Twitter is too huge) and everyone is On Demand so not watching at the same time.’ We learned from the behaviour of the users. Live coverage of big television ‘events’ became a staple of later coverage on the main site.

The community of regular, active contributors was never huge – maybe only a few thousand. Over time their space became overtaken by larger experiments and the talkboards became a bit of a forgotten backwater, untended by moderators.⁸ Untended spaces tend to become unkempt, and some areas of the talkboards ended up almost feral.

But the users were, to some extent, pioneers: they formed their own basic grammar, or (what become known as) netiquette. There were symbols for (((hugs))) and ////Horror!\\\\ The Exclamation Marks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. Most talkboard users adopted the conventions that spontaneously developed: italics for quotes from earlier posts in the discussion, bold for emphasis, indented paragraphs for blockquotes. There was usually a form of self-correction, if not exactly self-policing.

Light moderation was not unusual on small technology blogs or Usenet discussion groups, but really rare on a national news brand. It was considered by many onlookers elsewhere in Fleet Street, not to mention within the building, as slightly crazy. A newspaper had so many layers of editing around everything. It was a huge philosophical leap for an organisation full of people dedicated to refining everything before it was allowed into the outside world to enable anybody to post anything.

Why allow it, anyway? It had nothing to do with journalism, did it? We had managed for 200 years to produce newspapers without giving much thought to whether readers wanted to meet each other or hold conversations. Weren’t we losing sight of our main function: to find stuff out and publish it? Anything else was a distraction.

That was always possible. But it seemed to me then – and still does now – that technology had to drive behaviour. If, for centuries, technology only allowed one-way communication then – of course – that’s what your journalism would look like. If it suddenly opened up two-or multiple-way communication then it was probably a mistake to carry on as though the world hadn’t changed.

Plenty of people disagreed, some quite vehemently. The argument went to the heart of how we regarded journalism in the coming century. Were readers a mob, best ignored while we got on with what we always did? Or were they part of what we did – part of our club? They were now beginning to connect in ever-growing numbers to the most mind-blowing network anyone in history could ever have imagined. Should a newspaper become part of that network, or would its chances of survival be greatest by remaining separate, and distinct, from it?

The talkboards were certainly ahead of their time. Someone later described them as ‘Web 2.0 social networking before Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman’. It was when Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard in September 2003 that he started playing around with ways of linking up communities of students – four years after the first stumbling efforts on the Guardian and elsewhere. Reddit – with an equally unsophisticated interface – started five years after the Guardian talkboards as ‘the front page of the internet’ and, with 250 million unique monthly users, was by 2017 the ninth-biggest website in the world. Mumsnet was launched by Ian Katz’s wife, Justine Roberts, around the same time as the Guardian talkboards and has 12 million unique monthly users today.

Was it an accident that the Guardian led the experimentation with reader participation in this way? It’s difficult to imagine a company more driven by the bottom line seeing the immediate point of creating these spaces. There was no obvious way of monetising them. In the absence of a proprietor our main relationships were horizontal – with the readers, and with sources. Guardian readers were, by and large, a bright crowd with much in common. Why not put them in touch with each other? We might discover the commercial value in time.

But meanwhile we were learning how people behaved in this new space. The driving principle found articulation in a new mantra: ‘Of the Web not just on the Web.’ It was a small thing to say, but a huge thing to imagine, let alone do. But it became a useful way of testing anything we proposed to do. ‘Is this really something that we would do if we were purely digital?’ became the key question.

*

The division (including the Observer losses) was due to lose £9 million in 2000/1. Circulation was still over 400,000 but all papers were beginning to pad out their figures by distributing ‘bulk’ copies either abroad, or in hotel chains, airlines and trains. Advertisers, it seemed, were none too fussy about whether a reader had parted with cash for a newspaper or whether the copy ‘sale’ had, in effect, been ‘subsidised’ by the publisher.

Headline numbers seemed fine. It was the dying light of the broad-brush world. Within a decade advertisers would want scrutiny of figures down to the level of individual users.

Buying circulation, through whatever marketing wizardry, was expensive but, if it kept the ABC figure up,⁹ it was generally considered worth it. In 2000 we were generously distributing copies of the Guardian to French hotels and on KLM. The Independent were price-cutting regionally and offering two-for-one cinema tickets and flights to Australia from £20. The Times had two-for-one flights and cut-price vouchers for the paper. If you were a Telegraph reader, you could benefit from short-break offers, receive a week of papers for £1.50 and collect a ‘free’ Mark Knopfler CD from the newsagent by presenting vouchers clipped from the newspaper (20 per cent off at Debenhams for Sunday readers).

The full price sales were not wonderfully healthy for anyone – 95 per cent of Guardians sold for full price. Over at the Indie it was 75 per cent, the Times 65 per cent, the Telegraph 59 per cent and the FT 39 per cent. A casual glance at the headline figures showed a barely perceptible annual decline across the broadsheet market of 0.66 per cent. The real figures were more alarming, but less visible. There was a cloud of nostalgic dismay when the Express, which had at its peak in the early 1960s sold 4 million copies a day,¹⁰ was passed on to Richard Desmond,¹¹ then the publisher of Asian Babes and other ‘adult’ titles.

Along with everyone else, we did from time to time consider whether we should be charging readers to pay for our journalism online. It would be five years before a major general newspaper – the New York Times – would make a determined stab at extracting money directly from online readers. Around the turn of the millennium virtually all newspapers held out little hope of persuading their users to part with cash. Almost everyone who had tried to charge had abandoned it. In the US there were only two newspapers – the Wall Street Journal and the Champaign News Gazette charging.¹² The NYT originally tried to charge $35 for readers outside the US, but abandoned that. Even the Financial Times, at that point, wasn’t convinced it could make people pay.¹³ Instead there was much talk of the ‘attention economy’.

We were with the consensus. We were a very small newspaper (still the ninth-biggest) in a very small pond: Britain. If we could break onto the world stage, the commercial managers figured, we might stand a chance of acquiring a big enough audience to attract significant advertisers. The market of English-speaking, college-educated potential readers was possibly 500 million. The BBC would, in time, reach 150 million of them.¹⁴ If the Guardian could get launched, even modestly, on that global ocean it could stand a chance of survival. Overseas expansion couldn’t work if you asked non-Brits to pay. But trying to move into the digital age with a tiny, mainly British, not notably wealthy readership did not strike anyone as a recipe for long-term survival.

Editorially, the paper was making waves. We’d just been named newspaper of the year four years running. We were breaking stories. We brought a £2 million fine down on the heads of Carlton TV (corporate affairs chief, one David Cameron) by proving they had faked key scenes in a documentary about drug running. We had devoted ten pages over five days to examining the science and commerce behind genetically modified food. We forced the resignation of two government ministers – Peter Mandelson and Geoffrey Robinson – over our revelations of the unusual mortgage agreement they’d entered into for buying the former a house. We had first-rate reporting from Kosovo, Libya and Iraq by veteran correspondents Jonathan Steele and Ian Black. We’d opened an archive and readers’ centre across the road for debates around our work – another extension of our journalism. And there was a little schoolroom where a class of kids a day came to put together a ‘newspaper’ of their own.

And then, on 11 September 2001, four passenger airliners were hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists and the world shook.