Breaking News. Alan Rusbridger
couldn’t cope.
It was an object lesson in how news knew no national boundaries. Many of those coming to the Guardian site that day were American, unable to find news from domestic sources with less robust technology. Some of them went onto the talkboards to update the rest of the planet with what they knew. The same was happening through thousands of weblogs. Those days in Manhattan were captured not only by newsrooms but also in a multitude of disparate voices able to speak to virtually all humanity.
We’d recently refurbished our servers to allow a million page impressions in a day. On 9/11 we served two and a half million. At one point there were 146 page impressions a second. The Guardian – with anxious tech developers sitting up all night – didn’t go dark.
Something about the Guardian audience changed dramatically in the period immediately following 9/11. Page views for September were 42 million (up from 29 million), October 51 million. A decade later the comparable figures would be more than 400 million. The realisation dawned that these new readers might be here to stay. Was it that hundreds of thousands of Americans had suddenly woken up to the fact that their own security was irrevocably bound up with things happening halfway across the globe? Was there something about the less objective style of British journalism that caught hold? Were there not enough liberal non-consensus voices back home? Whatever it was, we had to get serious about finding out – and to get better at, well, everything.
Guardian Unlimited relaunched at the end of 2001 with a big marketing push – just as advertising growth went into reverse after the political shocks of 9/11 and its aftermath. Break-even was pushed back again. But we were now the market leader in the UK, tabloid or broadsheet. Carolyn McCall, the managing director, was completely clear with the staff about her appetite for patient planning: ‘We have always seen this as a long-term investment and a fundamental part of where we see our brands and our business in the future – not a get-rich-quick scheme.’
That was just as well because it was plain the future was about to get expensive. It had cost £3.5 million to junk the old dumb terminals and get the newsroom onto terminals which could actually see the internet, but it was clear we’d need to spend much, much more to create a modern content management system that could take an early-twentieth-century process of editing and make it reasonably fit for at least the first decade of the twenty-first century.
New people with new skills started appearing on the commercial and tech development floors. The word ‘monetise’ was in the air. They called journalism ‘content’. ‘How are we going to monetise the content?’ they asked. Or, sometimes, ‘How can we monetise the reader?’
When would we see the end of print? It was the most often-asked question and it was impossible to answer. My stock response was that it was completely out of our control. People would keep inventing ever-cleverer, ever-faster, ever-lighter devices. We couldn’t stop that from happening, even if we wanted to. At some point, I assumed, the old Victorian production chain of newsprint – light manufacturing; lorries driving through the night; wholesalers and newsagents taking their cut; and (if you were lucky) news delivery boys on their bikes before school – would no longer work economically. I had no idea when that would be, but the prudent course was to be ready for it.
Many colleagues were binary – understandably suspicious. If you loved digital then you must hate print, right? What was wrong with print? It still paid our wages – unlike digital pipe dreams. It had serendipity and portability – and generated cash. What was not to like?
I would patiently explain that I loved print. I had spent my life in print. I still thought of myself as a writing journalist who liked words. But I was also overwhelmed by the possibilities of the emerging digital world. Loving one didn’t mean hating the other. In the end the choice would be out of our hands.
No one, to paraphrase William Goldman,1 knew anything.
*
Even before 9/11 the pain of disruption was being felt throughout the industry. ‘2001’ said a forlorn internal note by a senior commercial director, ‘was the most miserable year for newspaper publishers in living memory.’ A hike in the price of newsprint had been the last straw. Each week there were rumours that national titles would have to close. Every newspaper responded by raising the cover price; slashing marketing; cutting headcount; dumping internet investment; freezing wages and abandoning product development.
This was a familiar pattern in the American newspaper market – the so-called death spiral. Circulation decline led to advertising decline. Managements cut back editorial employees to stem declining margins while, at the same time, asking them to work harder and adding new digital requirements to their roles. Newspapers shrank and became less compelling. Readers found less of interest and stopped buying them. With few readers came fewer advertisers. The margins declined further. Managements made further cuts . . .
The consultants were back at the Guardian, this time looking at each individual day of the week to work out its contribution to the bottom line. The greatest immediate worry was still over the anticipated flight of classified advertising from print. Companies were beginning to do their own recruitment through their own corporate sites. There were numerous new competitors on the block. Finally, there was a shift to CV searching rather than advertising.
The good news was that we were no longer the minnow in UK terms. For its entire history the Guardian had languished at or near the bottom of every league table of readership. In February 2002 the Nielsen NetRatings survey placed the Guardian at number one. It measured us at 934,000 users against 286,000 for the Telegraph, and 249,000 for both the Times and the Sun.
That was cheering, but had to be seen in a wider context. We ranked at only 50 in the same rankings of the UK’s 100 biggest domains. We were the only newspaper in the ranking, but we were well outside the premier league of big sites and advertising networks. Price Waterhouse Cooper reckoned 80 per cent of all digital spending was going to the top ten sites. We were still nowhere near.
The areas that had previously been profitable for newspapers – such as IT, motoring and finance – were now in competition with specialist portals on niche websites. In the old world, advertisers – like journalists – had only a rough sense of who was reading what. In the new world, every advertisement was measured on the effectiveness of its response. ‘We have a problem,’ wrote the forlorn commercial director, ‘that people come to our sites to read stories – not click on ads. Our response rates are very, very low – particularly on our news site, where we have most inventory. This means we often find ourselves falling off schedules after advertisers evaluate their performance on our sites.’
It was a prescient note. But we were not alone at the time in not divining what Plan B was.
Still, none of the British competitors were serious about charging – not least because there was so much good, free, English language content available, including the public broadcasters, the BBC and ITV News, and numerous American portals (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) and news sites. The Irish Times had recently tried a paywall, found they ended up with an audience of just 6,000, and promptly dropped it. Peter Chernin, the President of News Corporation, had recently admitted that they could see ‘no viable business model that works’ for the internet. The UK newspaper websites were, he said, nothing more than adjunct, promotional vehicles for the newspapers.
We had further debates about long-term reach or short-term revenue. The Board didn’t think too long about which route to take. The revenue route involved the Guardian probably having a readership not much bigger than the New Statesman magazine.2 It was impossible to imagine breaking further into the American market with a paywall or to hope that younger readers would contribute. The advertising revenues were speculative, at best. So a revenue strategy looked like a route to a niche UK-only publication for older readers.3 The fact that, at this stage, virtually no other general news publisher in the UK or US was prepared to go for revenue over reach suggested that their boards were all looking at a similar dilemma and coming to the same conclusion.
In time future commentators would describe this period as the moment of ‘original sin’. The phrase was