Breaking News. Alan Rusbridger
Sin among most (but not all) publishers was permitting their content be consumed for free on the web’.4 He made comparisons with the ‘far more proactive’ music industry, though that was hardly a happy example, with ten songs downloaded illegally for every song purchased lawfully.
‘By the end of the decade,’ wrote the Spanish academic Ángel Arrese, ‘the general consensus in the world of the press was that free online news content would attract massive readerships, whose accumulated attention could be sold efficiently to advertisers.’ He went on to describe a period (2001–7) of what he calls ‘the frenzy of failed trials’ following the bursting of the so-called dot.com bubble.5
Newspaper executives, seeing the bubble burst and the old model teetering, returned to insisting on payment – including subscriptions, e-paper, pdf formats, premium content, and micropayment. Some (including the Guardian) tried charging for particular features (in our case, the crossword). Others ‘closed’ their websites completely: El País in Spain was an early pioneer and managed to attract 45,000 paying subscribers. It dropped the barrier within three years: there was no business that worked on such low numbers. The NYT abandoned a similar attempt at charging for access to columnists and the archive.
‘By the end of 2007,’ wrote Arrese, ‘a general consensus existed that free content would remain the standard way of commercial exploitation of digital news.’
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In October 2002 one or two colleagues stumbled across a new service called Google News. One self-mockingly responded by slumping across his desk in a pose that suggested there was little point in carrying on. How could one compete with this all-seeing eye on the world, hoovering up anything that happens, anywhere on the planet and alerting users within minutes in a remorseless perpetuum mobile of breaking information?
The most sinister thing from the point of view of the average desk editor sitting in Farringdon Road or Wapping or Canary Wharf was the little line at the bottom of the site: The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.
That’s right: it was produced entirely by machines. Not one human being was involved in the generation of this modern, news version of the Doomsday Book. It was all produced by a cyber spider which whisked its way around the world filtering news sites and linking to them. Quite how it was done was a mystery as closely guarded as the recipe for Marmite or Coca-Cola.
I discussed it with a colleague working on the Washington Post website. He shrugged: ‘None of us can predict anything more than six months out. This is TV in 1948.’
We began to debate what it meant to run both print and digital alongside each other in a way that acknowledged the qualities of each. If the net was so much better at handling large amounts of text, why try to compete? What was the point of a verbatim parliamentary report if the whole thing was online the following morning in Hansard? Why not just link to it? Why publish long official reports, speeches or inquiries? We can digest them, explain them, contextualise them and analyse them in print. But aren’t there better uses of space than to print them?
Similarly, with the online version, why simply replicate the paper, as if we were putting radio on television? Wasn’t our strategy right of building deeper, richer sites around specific subjects? You can cater for fragments of the paper readership who want more of the feature, issue or individual they most treasure. There were people who wanted more football or news from Brussels than we could ever serve in a newspaper. There were writers with individual followings that, we suspected, could dwarf departments. All the talk was of the Wall Street Journal technology blogger, Walt Mossberg, and how the Journal had upped his salary to nearly $1 million a year to stop him taking his blog elsewhere. Another high-profile blogger, Andrew Sullivan, set himself up as a blogging brand – launching the Daily Dish in 2000. It was said to be more profitable than Amazon.6
But this idea of seamlessly linking the paper and the website to exploit the best of both did rather depend on newspaper readers having access to broadband computers and vice versa. Every time we told paying newspaper customers that they could get more detailed, better material online we alienated a significant proportion of them. They would write politely angry letters explaining that they knew about the internet, thank you, but had no wish to use it. What they wanted was a proper newspaper. Which they were happy to pay for.
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A small last-days-of-Fleet Street vignette . . .
On 9 March 2003 I give the after-dinner speech at the Thirty Club – a members-only gathering of big commercial cheeses in the advertising and media worlds. There are a hundred or so guests at Claridge’s hotel in London, all black tie and gowns. I wish I was better at the mix of badinage and homily that the best after-dinner speakers manage. As I stand to speak I’m very conscious of the contingent from News International across the table. Les Hinton, the amiable if faintly menacing executive chairman of Murdoch’s newspapers, is sitting right opposite me, flanked by Rebekah Brooks, editor of the Sun, and Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World.
I’m talking about trust – and the truly abysmal ratings for newspapers. Depending on the poll and the year, we were lucky if 13 to 18 per cent of the population trusted newspapers. I try to avoid catching my colleagues’ eyes as I add that the red-tops sold most, but were trusted least.
I liken British journalists to fans of the London football club Millwall – official chant: No one likes us, we don’t care. I know what Andy and Rebekah are thinking: We’re in for a pious sermon from someone who can barely make a profit and whose sales are embarrassingly small. I can hear the ritual jibe from Piers Morgan, editor of the Mirror, every time he sees me: ‘I sell more copies in Cornwall than you do in the entire country.’
I waffle on more about trust; how we’d lost it; how to earn it back; why it would matter so much more in the digital world. It is worthy stuff.
Afterwards the three Murdoch colleagues are very friendly. They suggest we go on to a club. We end up drinking in the Soho House till the early hours. The champagne’s on them. The speech is not mentioned. The evening is fun. Rebekah and Andy are good company. Les is full of seen-it-all bonhomie. Deep down, we’re all hacks together.
Cut to 11 years later: Coulson was in jail, Hinton had resigned and Brooks had suffered the ordeal of a nerve-shredding trial at the Old Bailey – all because of reporting in the Guardian. That night in the Soho House feels like a lost world of Fleet Street innocence. A funny word – ‘innocence’ – to use about Fleet Street. But we were certainly all innocent of what was to come – in virtually every way possible.
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,