Breaking News. Alan Rusbridger
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