Breaking News. Alan Rusbridger
aren’t all intellectuals or artistic’. It ended: ‘I would think twice before paying the new price of 4p but the basis is there for making it worth 5p if we all work at it.’ And a randomly preserved copy of the Times, the crossword half-solved: Saturday 8 November 1975. There are 22 headlines on its front page, some of them over entire stories, some of them flagging up further news inside. The typography is busy, workmanlike, factual. There is one small picture. The page is densely informative. The pattern continues inside, with multiple stories and very small black and white pictures.
South had also clipped an article from the New Statesman of 21 March 1975 (‘The Establishment and the Press’), which referred to the National Union of Journalists’ rule, introduced in 1965, that no one could be recruited to Fleet Street without first having had three years’ experience on a provincial newspaper. The author, Tom Baistow, reflected on why this rule had been introduced: ‘This letter was forged in the heated resentment that developed as growing numbers of Oxbridge graduates were hired straight from university and in many cases given “direct commissions” without any pretence of putting them through the ranks. The anger of newspapermen who had been through the provincial mill wasn’t based on the fact that these elite recruits had been to university but that they hadn’t been anywhere else.’
And, finally, a staff list for 1973, recording that the company then employed more than 70 journalists, including two reporters in each of seven district offices. In the composing room there were 18 Linotype operators to work the old molten Linotype machines. There were eleven compositors, ten stone hands to assemble the type into pages, seven readers to check the typeset galleys against the original and five print apprentices. There were eight men in the foundries and 29 to run the pressroom, including cleaners and machine minders. Finally there were 16 mechanics – and drivers to drop off the papers at newsagents and street sellers throughout the county.
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Back in 1976 there were, if we did ever pause to think about the finances, only two potential clouds on the horizon.
One was the advent of free newspapers, usually launched by small-scale entrepreneurs who imagined a much simpler model than traditional newspapers. They wanted to get the income (advertising) with almost none of the expense (journalism). But none of us really imagined that catching on because – well, people bought the paper for the stories to and read about their communities, schools and councils in a detail no free sheet could match.
The second was something rumbling away 90 miles northwest of Cambridge where a local newspaper, the Nottingham Evening Post, was locked in battles with its trade unions over the introduction of something called new technology. This apparently involved journalists doing their own typesetting, thus abolishing the need for all the type hands on the other side of the newsroom swing door. Our journalists’ union was against that. And, anyway, it all seemed a very distant prospect in 1976.
In a sense it was. It was another ten years before Rupert Murdoch would stage his bold confrontation with his national print workers, throwing 5,000 of them out of work and producing computer-set newspapers from behind barbed wire in Wapping, East London. And it was 13 years before the management at the CEN would sack all the pre-press workers and insist on full computer typesetting. After 124 years in independent ownership, the Cambridge News, by then renamed and a weekly paper, was sold in 2012 to a new consolidated company called Local World, backed by a hedge-fund manager intent on bringing together 110 titles and 4,300 employees in a ‘one-stop shop’ serving ‘content’ to local communities. Three years later the company was sold on to another newspaper group, Trinity Mirror, with the intention of delivering ‘cost synergies’ of around £12 million. The paper now sells fewer than 15,000 copies a week, reaching around 52,000 a day online.
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The film of the year in 1976 was All the President’s Men, in which Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman gave us the journalist-as-hero role model, which would prove very resilient over the decades to come.
It is the narrative we have often told the world, and which a few journalists might even believe. It usually involves the word ‘truth’: we speak truth to power; we are truth-seekers; we tell uncomfortable truths in order to hold people accountable.
The truth about journalism, it’s always seemed to me, is something messier and less perfect. Carl Bernstein, one of the twin begetters of Watergate, goes no further nowadays than ‘the best obtainable version of the truth’.
When living in Washington in 1987 I read a new book by the Washington Post’s veteran political commentator David Broder,2 which contained a passage that leaped off the page because it felt so much closer to what journalism actually does.
The process of selecting what the reader reads involves not just objective facts but subjective judgments, personal values and, yes, prejudices. Instead of promising ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’, I would like to see us say over and over until the point has been made . . . that the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we heard about in the past 24 hours . . . distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labelled the paper accurately then we would immediately add: ‘But it’s the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected updated version . . .’
‘Partial, hasty, incomplete . . . somewhat flawed and inaccurate.’ Most journalists I know recognise a kind of honesty in those words – as does anyone who has ever been written about by a journalist. That doesn’t make journalism less valuable. But, as Broder argued, we might well earn more respect and trust if we acknowledged the reality of the activity we’re engaged in.
As reporters and editors of the Cambridge Evening News, we lived among the people on whom we reported. We would meet the councillors and coppers the following morning in the queue for bread. Did that, on occasion, make us pull our punches? Probably. But that closeness and familiarity also bred respect and trust. We were on the brink of a new world in which a proprietor on the other side of the world could dictate his view of how a country should be run. Or when the chief executive of a giant newspaper conglomerate would have trouble finding some of his ‘properties’ on a map. Small was, in some ways, beautiful.
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While a young reporter on the CEN I fell in love. The relationship lasted just under two years. It was between two consenting adults – one male, one female – and was perfectly legal, even if it did not accord with one of the commandments in the Book of Exodus, Chapter 20. The relationship caused some happiness; and some unhappiness to a few people – literally, no more than half-a-dozen either way.
One Friday night there was a knock on the door. A reporter and photographer from the Sunday Mirror wanted to tell the ‘story of our love’, as he put it, to the 4 million readers who then bought the newspaper every week. The reporter, a man called Richard, was charming.
I was a cub reporter, she was a university lecturer. Nobodies, end of story. Well, almost – for her late father had, some years earlier, been on the telly. So you could, at a stretch, make a consumable tale out of it: ‘Daughter of quite famous man has affair.’
Our relationship really didn’t seem to be anyone else’s business and so we politely declined the opportunity to invite Richard and his photographer over the doorstep.
Richard’s tone changed. ‘We can do this nice or we can do it nasty,’ he said abruptly, and then explained what nice and nasty looked like. Nice was for us to sit down on the sofa and tell the world about our love, and be portrayed in a sympathetic way that would warm the cockles of millions of Sunday Mirror readers all over Britain. Nasty meant they would start knocking on the doors of neighbours and contacting our relatives to put together a story that would be altogether less heart-warming.
It was a good pitch. How many people want their elderly parents, friends or neighbours