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9

Format Wars

‘Simplify, then exaggerate’ was the advice to young journalists from the former editor of the Economist, Geoffrey Crowther.¹ All good journalism has, to some extent, to simplify difficult material. But, in most countries, you will find one or more newspapers that do not shy away from complexity. Complexity, more than anything, was what distinguished a broadsheet paper.

The term referred to the physical size of the newspaper. But the shape mattered less than the mindset behind it. ‘Broadsheet’ was a style of journalism that – as well as relishing complexity – endeavoured to separate news from comment; was sober in tone; operated to a high, if unwritten, ethical code; took policy and politics seriously; responded to ‘high’ culture as well as popular entertainment; was independent – of party, government, advertising or ownership; and was considered to speak with authority on a broad range of serious issues.

What ‘authority’ did it have?

Any authority derived from what it covered, and who got to cover it. At the end of the twentieth century it was still assumed that any broadsheet would have full-time specialists with considerable knowledge of such areas as defence, education, religion, politics, social policy, science, home affairs, law, diplomacy, economics, industry, technology, culture, business, finance, industry, the environment, sport, crime, health and so on. All those areas would be staffed by one correspondent – and in some cases several.

The specialists who covered these areas were, at their best, knowledgeable, experienced – and trusted. They often knew their patches better than the ministers they were writing about, having, in many cases, covered the turf for much longer than here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians. Alan Travis, for instance, had been assiduously covering Home Affairs – police, prisons, immigration, justice, etc. – since 1992. During that time he saw 11 home secretaries, eight justice ministers, eight lord chancellors and countless prison ministers come and go.

Science coverage was, as good as any, an illustration of the broadsheet mindset. Around the turn of the century it was hard not to feel an immense sense of excitement at what was soon to be possible, and soon to be discovered – from microscope technology; gene sequencing tools; image sensors on telescopes; ways to tag cells in living organisms; superconducting magnet technology; computing power and tools for handling massive datasets. The Human Genome Project had laid the foundations for a genuine understanding of how humans work on the molecular scale. The Large Hadron Collider was under construction at CERN. We were seeing for the first time the afterglow of the big bang, that relic radiation from the birth of the universe, imprinted on the sky. All this was on the cards at the start of the twenty-first century: we knew it was coming.

There was an awful lot to tell people about.

But it was complex. It is not easy for a humanities graduate to sit down with an academic paper on astrophysics, neurophysiology or oceanography and to spot the news value, let alone render the contents accurately and accessibly into English that an average reader would comprehend.

At one point we had a team of at least six covering science and the environment. Between them their qualifications included PhDs in chemical engineering, evolutionary genetics, biomaterials and earth sciences; and a BSc in physics. They understood what they were writing about. They could talk on trusted terms with the best scientists who, in return, felt safe with them writing reliably about their work.

They were not idle. In the age of print-alone it was just about imaginable for one person to keep up with the news across all science and deliver three or four pieces a week. But the new beast had to be fed constantly, seven days a week. Science articles were well-read and appreciated.²

How did they see the role of the broadsheet over at the Telegraph, then being edited by Charles Moore, a libertarian Conservative Old Etonian who subsequently wrote a three-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher?

He and I did not see eye to eye on many political and social issues – and, from time to time, our two papers would snipe at each other. But at the heart of what we did there was a similar idea of what a serious newspaper’s job was in this age of peak broadsheet.

I recently asked him to describe it from his end of the telescope.

Well, I suppose, because there was no alternative edited source of serious information other than the BBC, we considered ourselves to have a duty to tell the readers everything that was important that had happened in the country and, to a lesser extent, in the world the day before – and, indeed, more broadly.

I took it to mean, for example, reporting parliament, and law reports. So this would mean that quite a lot of things would go in that you were perfectly well aware might be quite boring, but you still thought you should put them in – and that you would be failing if you didn’t.

If there was a White Paper on reform of Higher Education or something, you had to do a story on it. It meant employing specialist correspondents, of whom we had a great many, and who have disappeared to a remarkable degree now. The paper I inherited had this very strict way of doing news with a huge number of small stories, 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 remaining broadsheet papers (the Guardian, FT and Telegraph) with a dilemma. It was rumoured the Telegraph had its own tabloid dummy ready to go. Our marketing team had periodically looked at the question of formats and were convinced that Hodgson’s Bermuda triangle of the middle market was, indeed, the place to aim for.

The Daily Mail’s gravitational pull was immensely strong: what if a left-wing competitor to the Mail moved into the middle-ish market? The marketing team felt sure we could end up vastly boosting our circulation. There was heady talk of doubling our circulation – perhaps even selling three-quarters of a million. Simon Kelner’s equivalents at the Independent had doubtless been telling him the same.

The research kept coming in: broadsheets were masculine, old-fashioned and – especially on public transport – difficult to read and inconvenient to handle. They came from a different age. The editor of the Times, Robert Thompson, considered the length of arms required to handle a broadsheet and even pondered whether it wasn’t ‘an act of misogyny’ to publish one. The consensus was clear: if we didn’t move we were doomed. By December the Guardian’s circulation was 14,000 below forecasts – partly also due to the new free tabloid Metro. We dummied up another tabloid, to no great enthusiasm from the majority of those who saw it.

*

What’s in a size?

Compared with almost any other issue the British press was facing at the time, the dilemma of whether to print on a large or small sheet of paper was hardly in the top five, or even top ten. The word ‘tabloid’ was often taken to mean lurid, sensational, downmarket journalism, but there were serious European tabloid papers, which proved that small and serious could be done.

The decision about size was strangely frustrating, because it was so complicated, important and – possibly – pointless. The internet was surely a much bigger problem – or prize – than print. Changing formats was – on any long-term view – a distraction.

I knew Simon Kelner saw things differently because a couple of times a year we’d meet for a game of golf, and he’d gently rib me about what he saw as my obsession with digital. ‘Tell me when it starts making money and I’ll start taking it seriously.’ That wasn’t just a flippant aside on the fairways. Interviewed a couple of years later by the American Journalism Review,⁶ he confessed he had no idea how many people worked on his website. ‘My only job is to sell copies of my newspaper.’

He had a point, of course. He had two shareholders wanting – if not quick returns – at least smaller losses, and fast. Copies sold was money in. We needed money in, too – but the Scott Trust was there to preserve the Guardian in perpetuity. I was pretty sure that perpetuity wouldn’t feature a daily newspaper, of whatever format.

Meanwhile we had built up 13 million unique users a month on our website (the Times, by comparison, was at 4.7 million – itself 150 per cent up on the previous year) and were bringing in seven-figure sums in digital advertising. What a moment to have to take the foot off the online accelerator and go back to thinking full-time about print again.

Two things held us back from following suit to tabloid – one practical, one journalistic.

The practical objection – ironic now – was that in 2002/3 we still published a staggering number of classified advertising on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which brought in £74 million a year. We calculated that in order to print all those ads in tabloid format we would sometimes have to publish editions of up to 220 pages. Any gain from the smaller page size would be wiped out by the reader having to juggling a multi-section paper – sandwiches within sandwiches – which could fall apart in their hands.⁷

In short, producing a tabloid looked – for the Guardian in 2004 – pretty impossible.

But what if staying broadsheet was, as we kept being told, a shortcut to oblivion? We consulted the editorial staff – with a hundred or so colleagues convening to debate the issue. The meeting ended with a 60 to 40 per cent vote against going tabloid. But, even if we did stay broadsheet, we would still have to re-press within four years when our printing contract expired. For eight years – since our own print plant had been terminally damaged by the IRA in a 1996 Canary Wharf bomb blast – we had been printed in London on an ageing, mainly black-and-white press owned by Richard Desmond.

To make it more complicated I thought the Kelner ‘compact’ Independent was actually quite successful in its own terms. The paper, which had lost its identity as a broadsheet, had recovered some confidence and found a new voice as a tabloid. But it had come at a cost: it had sacrificed a consistency of tone for something more strident, politically unsubtle and obsessed with single issues.

Similarly, the Times had gained something in focus and sharpness. Story lengths were certainly down. There were some early slips of voice as the venerable sub-editors tried to mimic a tabloid style. The paper had become a tighter read; it had also lost something in elegance, consistency and tone. The paper’s former veteran Middle East correspondent, Christopher Walker, wrote in the British Journalism Review: ‘The move down from heavyweight to the welterweight division has arisen not only from the new emphasis on the trivial in the choice of stories, but also an aggravating habit by the home and foreign desks to demand that stories be tailored to suit the angle emerging from the morning and afternoon conferences.’⁸

This led to my second reservation: I didn’t think the Guardian would necessarily succeed in a war against the revitalised tabloid Independent, in particular. Nor did I want to change the paper in ways that would have been necessary to be in with a chance.

Simon Kelner was pioneering a profoundly different kind of journalism from the restrained, original broadsheet Independent – with its small Century headlines; its artful pictures; its seven or eight stories separated by horizontal Oxford rules. Broadsheet papers tended to sell on their long-established identity and judgement. Tabloid newspapers relied much more on day-to-day impact, at least in Britain, with most sales on the news stand rather than home delivery. A brilliant tabloid front-page image and headline – and Kelner produced many – would shift copies. But the reverse was also true: a page that mundanely relayed the news of the day in quiet headlines could not stand out. Charles Moore’s ‘boring but important’ stories would not fare well in tabloid.

Kelner realised this and produced ever more powerful single-issue front pages – often quite unrelated to the news of the day. They were distinctive and often shouty. They got the Independent talked about. They halted the slide in circulation, even if the figures never soared anywhere near the peaks our marketing teams had whispered. But this was a new form of journalism in the UK: a broadsheet in tabloid clothing.

Kelner was quite frank about what he was up to. His front pages, he confessed, were ‘an elision of marketing and journalism’. In other interviews, he went still further: he was moving from a newspaper to what he called ‘a viewspaper’.

Newspaper–viewspaper? Hold on a moment. Was Kelner not just changing shape and style – but also bailing out of the primacy of facts? It seemed so. ‘Why pay 70p for something you’ve heard on the radio?’ Kelner demanded in his 2006 AJR interview. ‘We’ve got to provide something of value.’ The AJR writer, Frances Stead Sellers, continued: ‘The added value he promises is attitude. Pages of it. Right from the word go – on A1.’⁹

At least the AJR noticed that something had changed. In the UK, there was a kind of collective shrug, as if ‘a viewspaper’ was simply a play on words, or a cool piece of rebranding, as opposed to a completely different concept of editorial endeavour. Throughout all this time I can’t remember a single discussion in the mainstream press, radio or television about whether the greater public good would be improved or damaged by having nine tabloid newspapers in Britain, all using more or less the same techniques to sell copies.

In the office we’d start comparing each day’s Independent with the mid-market tabloids. There was no question: Kelner knew how to produce a Mail-style front page dominated by a powerful picture or headline. When the Butler report into the uses of intelligence before the Iraq war appeared in July 2004, the Mail and Independent had strikingly similar front pages mocking his conclusion: ‘No one to Blame!’ in one paper, ‘Who was to Blame? – No one!’ in the other. When the Hutton report into the BBC’s alleged failings of reporting was published, the Independent’s front-page headline read simply ‘Whitewash?’ The Daily Mail’s read ‘Justice?’

Views first, news later.

More strikingly still, the paper started ignoring news stories which shouted to be splattered all over the front page. In September 2004 the world was captivated by Chechen rebels holding 1,000 people hostages in a school in Beslan – a siege that led to hundreds of children dying. Front-page news around the world. The Independent decided otherwise: it had commissioned the editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, to mark George W. Bush’s ‘four years of double standards’ by compiling ‘Bush by Numbers’. So, no report on Beslan for Independent readers – just a graphic showing Bush’s failings. Asked to defend the front page Simon shrugged and said a newspaper couldn’t compete with television.

The Times settled down into a more even-toned newspaper. But there were still moments for years to come when the front page would make you blink at what had happened to a particular style of journalism. To take one random example: in 2012, the European Court of Human Rights halted attempts by the British government to deport a radical Islamist cleric, Abu Qatada. The case was a complex one, involving deadlines arguably missed by the UK Home Office and ambiguities in the law and translations of it. The tabloid Times devoted its front page to a photo of 11 of the ECHR judges under the headline ‘Europe’s Court Jesters’.¹⁰

Now, the Times has excellent and pretty comprehensive legal coverage. It is probably the paper most senior lawyers and judges read. But this was pure Daily Mail – a foreshadow of that paper’s infamous ‘Enemies of the People’ front page in 2017, which used a similar device to put judges in the dock.

The more I watched such shifts in presentation – especially in the hands of Kelner – the more dangerous it seemed to me to allow the Guardian to be lured into competition with this new kind of journalistic animal. The Guardian had comprehensively seen off the Independent after a period in which the newcomer had appeared to pose a mortal risk. We had, so to speak, ‘won’ at being a serious, broadsheet newspaper. And now here was a very talented editor luring us into a different game: Okay, so you were better at news, but can you beat us at views?

This seemed like a seminal moment for newspapers: an ongoing concern for complexity, facts and nuance versus a drift towards impact, opinion and simplicity.

I thought back to the occasions when I had sat in on the Page One meeting of the New York Times under a succession of executive editors – Joseph Lelyveld, Howell Raines, Bill Keller. As many as 30 senior editors would meet solemnly every day at 4 p.m. around a table with lengthy summaries of the main stories of the day. With a concentration and high-mindedness which wouldn’t have been out of place in a cathedral, the editors would pitch their offerings to a figure as magisterial as a cardinal. The executive editor – fingers steepled at the head of the table – would consider the world as presented to him and make decisions about the relative importance of each story.

A senior executive called Allan M. Siegal would, as the room emptied, draw up the agreed front page with a pencil and ruler. Geometry and typography were the NYT’s way of imposing a hierarchy of order on the otherwise random torrent of information pouring across its newsroom desks every minute of the day. Wasn’t that needed more than ever in an age when the ocean of information threatened to engulf us all?

But doubt kept creeping in. What if not enough citizens/readers wanted to be informed? Or, rather, that there was a level of surface news-grazing which was just fine for most people? You could argue Kelner was right: news was all around – the radio headlines in the morning, a ten-minute scan of Metro on the way to work, text alerts for breaking headlines, the internet, numerous 24-hour news TV channels. That was, arguably, all most people wanted.

The competition was gnawing away on all sides. The dent that the give-away Metro made in all our circulations was particularly baffling. The free newspaper owned by the Daily Mail & General Trust – skimming the surface and with little original reporting – was reaching more than a million people.¹¹ It seemed to have little overlap with a newspaper like the Guardian, but thousands of readers began substituting it on their morning commute.

‘How much more do I honestly need to read to be informed enough?’ these people might be asking. ‘It’s all very well to talk about the compact between citizen and legislator, but voting doesn’t seem to change much. And the real power in the modern world – and the real problems – lie way beyond my ability to do anything about them. Why do I need to know all this detail?’

The apathetic reader – if that’s what these people were – might not be apathetic about everything. They’d have their own passions, obsessions and causes. But it seemed just possible that the internet did passions, obsessions and causes better than newspapers. People could burrow deeply into their own subjects, engage with communities of other equally engaged people. And, as for the rest, well, maybe a ten-minute skim would do.

What, we debated over long sessions in 2003/4/5, should a news organisation do, faced with legions of apathetic readers? Give them what they want? If they don’t want difficult stuff, perhaps we shouldn’t give them difficult stuff. Or the (apocryphal?) BBC dictum: ‘Don’t give the public what they want. They deserve much better than that.’

Maybe we needed to be smarter in differentiating what print and digital could do? We argued it both ways: keep print for a comprehensive but shallow summary, with the depth to be found online? Or (as an equal number of colleagues wanted it) that print was the medium for depth, with the internet giving you constant, but shallow, updates.

Turn the volume up? Make the news seem more exciting, striking, pumped up? Try to shock and energise them out of their apathy?

Was there still some notion of duty that went with the privilege of mediating the news and the argument? Did we have any kind of responsibility to tell our readers things they might not think they wanted to know? Would it matter if all newspapers started turning up the volume . . . to shout, rather than talk? Would public debate be improved, or become impossible?