Hugo Young Lecture What are newspapers for?

Alan Rusbridger Sheffield University, March 9h, 2005

It’s now 18 months since Hugo Young died, leaving a really gaping hole, not just in , but in British and European journalism generally. Many journalists have some of the things Hugo had - keen intelligence, avid curiosity, a deep knowledge of the subject matter he tackled, an astonishing range of contacts, a prodigious memory, a clarity and toughness in his ability to think and in his writing – but very few journalists have them all.

We miss him – colleagues, readers, friends, family – here in Sheffield and elsewhere. It’s particularly good that Hugo’s mother, Diana, is here tonight. It is great honour to be giving this inaugural lecture on journalism in his memory.

Hugo died just before a significant moment in recent journalism in this country: the decision of - and, within weeks, - to change shape, breaking the traditional link between broadsheet size and a certain style of quality journalism.

That change in size brought increased circulation for the two papers and demanded a response – if only a defiant refusal to change – from the three remaining broadsheet dailies. And this moment happened at a time of unprecedented change, challenge and churn everywhere within the newspaper business.

- Newspaper publishers, alarmed by falling sales, were increasingly experimenting with free newspapers, produced by much smaller teams of journalists, some of them relying largely on agency copy.

- The Internet effect was finally felt in boardrooms as well as newsrooms, with readers and advertisers drifting – sometimes rushing – online. The future reading habits of the younger members of this audience are of deep interest to newspaper publishers.

- Some of the biggest, most respected news organisations in the world – including the NYT, the BBC, le Monde, CBS and USA Today – were hit by scandals or controversies about journalistic methods and ethics.

At the Guardian we were - directly or tangentially – affected by all these squalls or storms. The Independent and Times were taking some of our readers, especially those journeying to work on cramped public transport. Some of them undeniably found the tabloid size altogether more convenient. The London Metro – a quick, free read on the way to work - was taking some more.

We were thrilled to find our website amongst the most popular in the world – with 10 million unique readers a month. The Guardian was now, as they say, a global brand, one of the biggest. But, along with that excitement and success, there gnawed away a suspicion that the internet Guardian was to some extent cannibalising the core print

1 product. And the big ethical journalistic debates raging elsewhere found an echo in our own newsroom, as in all others.

As we considered our response we found ourselves having some very fundamental debates about what, in a crowded media hypermarket, a newspaper was for? What task should it set itself? And how should it measure its success?

For generations there had been a quiet understanding about what newspapers were for. They were there primarily to tell a society about itself, to act as a pollinator of information. To be a conduit between subjects and rulers, citizens and legislators, legislators and citizens, citizens and citizens. The Enlightenment brought with it an understanding that decent liberal democracies relied on having a sufficient number of adequately, or reasonably informed citizens. The contrary was also true: that it would be difficult to maintain a liberal democracy - in all its subtlety and with all its finely-tuned balancing acts – if the people were ill-prepared, ill-informed, or, worse-still, mis-informed.

Of course, newspapers sought to entertain as well. And they were also there to challenge power - to hold it to account. And, in this country as elsewhere, there has for 200 years or more, been a tradition of robust, unfettered comment. Some papers worked harder than others at the separation of comment and fact. But – in the story we told to others in our attempts to win our freedom of speech, not to mention additional privileges and protection - there was at its heart the civic value of news-telling.

Just recently decent, thoughtful, liberal voices have begun to question that unfettered freedom. In her 2002 Reith Lectures, and since, Professor Onora O’Neill has questioned whether freedom of speech deserves its sacred cow status. Why, for instance, should there be a freedom to mis-inform people, she asks? Is there not a vast gulf between protecting small voices threatened by powerful institutions – monarchs or despotic governments, for instance – and protecting vast, wealthy and powerful modern media organisations, which may be as much concerned with entertainment and profit as informing citizens about the society in which they live? Other legal scholars have begun to ask whether entertainment speech deserves the same protection as political speech. There are some clear amber lights out there if we want to see them.

But what if the citizens don’t want to be informed? Or, rather, that there’s a level of surface news-grazing which is enough for their purposes? News is all around – the radio headlines in the morning, a 10 minute scan of Metro on the way to work, text alerts for breaking headlines, the internet, numerous 24-hour news TV channels. That’s fine for more and more people, it seems. How much more do I honestly need to read to be informed enough? 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. Please tell me: why do I need to know all this stuff?

The apathetic voter is a cliché of modern politics. Perhaps we’re now facing the apathetic reader? As with politics, the apathetic reader may not be apathetic about everything. They’ll have their own passions, obsessions and causes. But it’s just possible that the internet does passions, obsessions and causes better than newspapers. People can bury deeply into their own subjects, engage with communities of other equally engaged people. And, as for the rest, well, a 10 minute skim will do.

What should an editor do, faced with legions of apathetic readers?

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- One reasonable response is to say, we’ll give them what they want. If they don’t want difficult stuff, we won’t give them difficult stuff. - Another response might be to turn the volume up. Make the news seem more exciting, striking, pumped up. Try to shock and energise them out of their apathy. - A third avenue is to paraphrase the BBC producer who said, “Don’t give the public what they want. They deserve much better than that.”

So what does an editor do? Is there still some notion of duty that goes with the privilege of mediating the news and the argument? Or is that for the birds? Do we have any kind of responsibility to tell our readers things they may not think they want 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?

If readers don’t have the time, or appetite for much complexity, does that mean we shouldn’t give it to them? Running a health service in 2005 (or an Army, or a police service or a large public company) is intricate, complicated and – except to those involved – perhaps not very interesting. Not many people on their ride to work are going to want to bury themselves in the difficult detail.

So, shall we pension off the correspondents who know these subjects inside out? And if we did, what would that do to the political process? Would we end up reinforcing a pattern of ignorance, or carelessness about things that actually matter to us all, when we choose to think about it? How would that affect the political process? At its mildest it might simply frustrate politicians, unable to get their message across. Or it might create a breed of politicians who felt they could get away with more or less anything because the main medium of political communication had abandoned the territory.

Is any of that our business? Or do we just concentrate on the task of selling more copies?

These are big, challenging questions. And, as we’ve sat down and grappled with them over the past 18 months we’ve been struck by how muted the debate was out there, in society at large. Most commentators within the industry saw an increased circulation figure at the papers that had shrunk or gone partly free and made a straight correlation with success. And, of course, the monthly ABC figures are one important measure of how a newspaper is doing – not least because they can affect the price the paper charges for its advertising. No editor minds selling more copies. No editor likes selling fewer.

If market forces were all that mattered, that would be the end of the story. But, of course, there’s a part of us that knows that, where the media is concerned, figures alone can actually be dangerous indicators. The most trusted and serious newspaper in Britain – the Financial Times – sells easily the fewest copies. The Sun and the News of the World sell the most. The BBC’s least admirable periods have, in many minds, been when it’s chased ITV for eyeballs. Newsnight and C4 News are the best there is in current affairs journalism. Not many people watch.

Our period of reflection at the Guardian coincided with the publication of two provocative books about journalism, John Lloyd’s polemical analysis of the effect the British media

3 are having on our politics and a book called the Elements of Journalism, by two veteran American journalists – the culmination of much similar soul-searching amongst American editors.

Again, the debate around these two books was extremely limited. In particular, John Lloyd, where he was noticed at all, was almost universally rubbished by other journalists. Whose side are you on, they wanted to know?

So I thought I’d try an exercise to test his central hypothesis – that the world, as described by British journalists, exists in a kind of parallel universe to the world as it’s actually experienced by doctors, public administrators, soldiers, politicians, judges, teachers, bishops and so forth.

Why not ask a random sample of such people what they thought?

So in January we gave over 20 pages of Media Guardian to the unedited responses of such people, prefaced by the late Anthony Sampson’s last essay. As Sampson recognised, the respondents overwhelmingly agreed with Lloyd. “There can be no doubt,” he wrote, ”about the genuine anguish of many distinguished people who feel aggrieved or simply resigned to the misrepresentations of the press.”

Once again, what was notable was the almost complete absence of any response. One or two media commentators dismissed the 50 writers, more less asking, what do they know? Not one of the 50 was asked onto any radio or TV programme to discuss the subject.

Imagine something similar happening in any other walk of life. 50 distinguished leaders in the community unite to suggest something close to crisis in the police, or in the army, or in medicine, or in the universities or the nuclear industry. Would such a moment be greeted by a weary shrug by newspapers and current affairs programmes?

Three explanations suggest themselves.

- One is that journalists, as gatekeepers of all debates, do not want this particular debate to get off the ground. - The second is that journalists genuinely can’t see a problem. They may be in denial, or, like many groups and professions, they’re poorly placed to judge on the issues that most closely affect themselves. - The third is that journalists do see the problem – but they believe that it’s a problem endemic in the very nature of journalism. It’s always been like that. Nobody loves us, but we don’t care.

All three explanations are potentially alarming. Where other organisations and institutions and professions or trades benefit from precisely the sort of debate that the media, at its best, is good at stirring up, the media itself may be operating in a cocoon of absent – or denied - debate.

If everything else in the garden were blooming, then journalists and the people who run our big media companies could at least point to our old friend market forces.

Well, we continue to have some extremely good newspapers and journalists – at their best, the equal of anything in the world. But only a blind optimist could tell you that

4 everything is currently blooming in the national newspaper industry. The overall story of paid-for newspaper circulations is that they are, and have been for some time, in decline. In order to maintain, never mind grow, national circulations, most publishers - including the Guardian - are forced to spend larger and larger sums on bulk sales (the copies you find on trains, planes and hotels), foreign sales, cut-price subscriptions and promotions involving CDs, books, dream cottages and DVDs. We’ve become an industry of freebie junkies.

Of the five broadsheet newspaper publishing groups – the FT and four groups publishing both daily and Sunday titles – only one declared a profit last year, and even the profitable one, the Telegraph titles, are currently in the middle of forcing through the biggest programme of job cuts in the industry.

Of the others, the FT managed to lose £55 million in two years, its last declared loss being £9m. The Times and Sunday Times declared a loss of £26 million (though there may be some funny figures in there: is vastly profitable, the Times isn’t); the Guardian and Observer declared losses of £6.2m; and the Independent titles an estimated £15m. The move to dual and compact formats will, in the short run at least, make those figures worse. And all these titles are spending, or are about to spend, significant sums of money in building new presses, or changing their printing arrangements. Hundreds and hundreds of millions, in fact.

If one answer to the question, What are Newspapers for? is “to make money” then some of us are not doing very well.

Let me pause there and show a few random snapshots of our industry over the last two or three years. Hold that earlier thought in your mind – that newspapers’ primary duty (or so we say) is to tell a society about itself.

FIRST SLIDE. FOOTBALLERS CLUTCHING HANDBAGS.

The first slide – footballers clutching handbags – is about what we, as British journalists, choose to celebrate and honour in our own profession.

5 This picture won a prize for the best news photograph published in any British newspaper during 2002 – the year of post 9/11 wars, the Bali bomb, the Moscow theatre siege, the Potters Bar train crash and much, much more. This was not just any prize, but one of the two most prestigious prizes of the year. This is the nearest Britain has to a Pulitzer Prize.

Let me prompt you with some images from that momentous year,

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To get some of those pictures, press photographers risked a great deal, including their lives. So you can only guess at their reaction when the judges of the What the Papers Say Awards chose to ignore all that work, and more, and give a prize to a jokey piece of Photoshop trickery downloaded from the internet.

That same year saw other British Pulitzers going to

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The Daily Mirror – reporter of the year - for debriefing Princess Diana’s former butler.

A special showbiz award to The Three AM girls – the Daily Mirror’s showbiz writers, who chronicle what the rich and occasionally famous get up to after dark in London’s nightclubs…..while the editor of the year went to the man who – those ABC figures again - succeeded in boosting the circulation of this paper the most.

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Out of eight awards, just one went to a piece of international reporting, and one other to a columnist. The heat, the glory, was elsewhere. We sometimes like to sneer at the American or European newspaper industries. What on earth, on days like that, do they make of us?

My next snapshot concerns the bestselling British daily – the Sun. On the evidence of ABC figures, it wins hands down over its rivals. At its best, it’s terrific fun and boasts one of the most formidable political editors of his generation. But that’s not necessarily the way it sells itself.

Here are 10 recent Sun front pages, all of them entirely typical. Don’t concentrate too much on the individual stories. Rather, look at the presentational technique of the front

8 page – the respective space and priority given to news, as opposed to showbiz or celebrity or promotion.

The point is very simply made that the editorial team at the Sun has evidently decided that – on most days of the week – the main news of the day is not the thing that’s most guaranteed to shift copies. So they’re trying a variety of techniques – very few of them to do with news – to sell the paper. Let’s call it an elision of news and marketing. In some post-modern sense the selling of the newspaper has acquired a higher priority than the selling – let alone the telling - of the news.

What’s a newspaper for? On this evidence, less and less about news.

Now look at a recent poll carried out by the Committee of Standards in Public Life into whom people trust.

9 Who do you trust?

38%

7%

All surveys on trust in British newspapers make gloomy reading. I’ve seen so many, I can no longer judge whether the overall figure of 38 per cent trust in broadsheet papers is a cause of despondency or celebration.

But the figure of seven per cent trust in red top papers such as the Sun is surely pretty arresting. If you exclude people who don’t read these papers you still get to only 11 per cent of Sun, Mirror and Star readers who actually believe what’s in their paper of choice.

Think about the significance of that. Something approaching one in two adults in Britain reads a paper they don’t remotely trust.

Now think about those Sun front pages again. Maybe there’s a perfectly rational editorial choice behind those pages. If people aren’t reading your paper for news they can believe, then logic might suggest it’s futile to try and sell the paper on news.

Of course, a different sort of logic might push you towards building greater trust with your readers – trying to address the reasons they don’t believe you. But you’d be a brave editor to try that. They might trust you more, but like you less. You might gain in circulation, but you might also lose. And, as we’ve seen, a failing ABC figure is almost always seen as a failing newspaper. Why risk it?

This might explain my next snapshot, which we might call the Katemossograph.

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Bear with me, for the point I’m about to make is a slightly obvious one. This is Kate Moss, beautiful woman, very rich super model, painted by Lucien Freud, sometimes dates unsuitable men. It’s interesting to be kept up to date on her story, but we don’t need to know any more. If we never read another story about Kate Moss few people would feel an empty space in their lives.

And here, to scale, is a picture of a polar bear - equally beautiful, not yet painted by Lucien Freud - there to symbolise the threat to the planet of global warming.

Again, I won’t labour an obvious point. Increasingly, scientists agree that alarming things are going to happen to us during the lifetime of our children as a result of climate change – and that includes Sun readers’ children. Global warming may threaten us more than terrorism. Or so says the Government’s Chief Scientist.

The stories may be a bit repetitive, but they matter. I.e. they’re the opposite of Kate Moss. Taken by themselves, the may not be very interesting, but we do need to know more. We can sneer at George W Bush over Kyoto. But, actually, no democratic leader can take meaningful action over global warming unless their citizens are fully informed about the seriousness – and imminence – of the threat.

11 I said the picture was to scale. The scale is the number of stories devoted to Kate Moss over the past 12 months in the Sun compared with the number of stories about climate change. The ratio is about 15 to 1.

The climate change figure, incidentally, includes stories which present global warming as a good thing.

BRITAIN is set to enjoy its best barbecue season ever this year, says TV weatherman John Kettley.

The number of days with ideal conditions for outdoor cooking will top last summer's sizzling record of 41, he predicts.

And climate change will bring us as many barbecue days as AUSTRALIA by 2099

BRITAIN is set to enjoy its best barbecue season ever this year, says TV weatherman John Kettley.

The number of days with ideal conditions for outdoor cooking will top last summer's sizzling record of 41, he predicts.

And climate change will bring us as many barbecue days as AUSTRALIA by 2099.

The Sun’s editor would, I’m sure, say she’s giving the readers what they want. But all editors are familiar with the category of story which – without trying to sound like Donald Rumsfeld on a bad day – might be described as stuff you don’t know you don’t know.

Now another snapshot.

12 - £6.2m -£15m? -£20m ? + £30m ?

+ £ 120m !

The figures show the respective profits of the various groups, as discussed a moment ago.

Let me try an entirely hypothetical scenario here, for I have no evidence at all to support this.

The striking figure on that chart is the profit made by the Mail titles. Wouldn’t it be the most natural thing in the world – if you owned, or edited one of those loss-making, declining newspapers in the market at the top of the slide – to ask: Why can’t we do that?” Or even, “Why can’t we have some of that?”

Rupert Murdoch, in particular, might be forgiven for thinking – “I’ve poured hundreds of millions into trying to make a go of the Times as a broadsheet. Why the hell am I doing that, when – with a tweak or two – I could slip into a different market and give Jonathan Rothermere a run for his money?”

It’s not simply about money. In any one generation there’s usually a newspaper which exerts a peculiar gravitational pull on others. Think of Harry Evans’s Sunday Times, Kelvin McKenzie’s Sun, David English’s Mail, Andreas Whitham Smith’s Independent. Today, it’s Paul Dacre’s Mail that has others dazzled in its headlights.

How best to subliminally slide into the upper end of the Mail market? A start is obviously to change shape - to look more like the paper that makes those huge profits. But – our hypothetical editors and managers might have thought – a change in shape alone probably won’t do it. So why don’t we steal some of the techniques that seem to work in this new market:

- punchy front pages - opinionated copy: views before news - picture-led lay-outs - striking, lively, focused presentation. - headlines with attitude

13 - take-no-prisoners writing.

Now, of course, if that was the hypothetical plan, the last thing you’d do is to admit in any way that this was what you were doing. That would frighten the horses, poison the brand. So the story you’d tell is that the papers were exactly the same! We’ve just made it more convenient for you, the reader. Like toothpaste in different tubes. Or polo mints, big and small.

Now, of course, anyone with half a brain and/or a ruler could work out in seconds that these two new kids on the tabloid block were not the same as the dead cocoons they’d shed behind them. The Independent’s front pages – love them or hate them – are utterly different from the front pages of Andreas Whitham Smith, or even of early Kelner. That may be a good thing or a bad thing. But the starting point of the discussion ought at least to be a frank acknowledgement that things have changed.

The same with the Times. For a while the paper was produced in dual format and it was easy enough to demonstrate that the two papers were markedly different. Different in tone, priority, prominence, news values, story length and so on. But through it all the paper refused to budge from its public assertion that the two products were exactly the same! And, by and large, the media commentariat went along with the claim.

Again, this is not to argue that the present Times is worse – or better – than the old Times. I’m a rival editor: you would hardly trust me to be unbiased in my opinion. So I offer no opinion. All I say is that two of our most important newspapers have changed, quite strikingly, in ways far beyond mere shape. And that, it seems to me, is not without significance. How journalists tell stories has an effect on the civic process. Ask anyone in public life.

Let me illustrate what I mean. In discussing the Independent, let me say I admire Simon Kelner , its editor. His paper was failing as a broadsheet, it’s acquired an identity as a tabloid. And – to do it justice – it does care about important things.

But try this test: you go away for a year – a sabbatical, a gap year, a short prison sentence - and imagine you returned to find all the national newspapers in Britain using these techniques. How would you feel?

14 QuickTime™ and a Photo - JPEG decompressor are needed to see this picture.

This is one of the Independent’s trademark front pages when they forget the news agenda and strike out on their own. For this page they purchased second serial rights to a book criticizing George Bush by the editor of Vanity Fair Graydon Carter. Independent readers were being told – on the front page, and not, it’s fair to say, for the first time - what a bad man George W Bush was.

It’s a striking page, and each time they hit the nail with one of these pages they reckon to have a spike of circulation – sometimes a few thousand copies, sometimes more. Simon is quite frank about the aim behind these pages: he calls in an elision between news and marketing. Which is a phrase we’ve heard before, this evening.

But to get the full significance of the page you have to know the news the Independent ignored that day. Nearly a thousand people -were being held hostage by Chechen rebels in Beslan. The following day more than 300 hundreds of them would die, half of them children. It was front page news on virtually every paper around the planet. Here are the Times, Telegraph and Guardian that day.

I’ve discussed this front page with Simon. I thought that, in retrospect, he’d regret it. There are plenty of Guardian front pages I wish I could make again.

15 But, no. Simon continues to defend Bush By Numbers.

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This was a story in which newspapers could not compete with television, he has said publicly. He was happy to have left the story alone and concentrated on something eye- catchingly different. Newspapers, he says, are increasingly about views rather than news. He has coined the phrase “a viewspaper.”

Well, again, leave aside the rights and wrongs of that call on Beslan. Once again – let’s just acknowledge that something fundamentally different is happening here. A newspaper is regularly setting out its stall, not on what happened yesterday, or what it means, but on what you should think. That is a very big change in the culture of how a newspaper is run..

Here’s another example.

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The captured British hostage, Margaret Hassan, gives a tearful television interview, pleading for her life. It’s front page news everywhere. But the Independent gives it a twist. The paper’s serializing the memoirs of Clare Short. Short thinks Blair lied over the war. So it’s elided the two stories – Short on Blair and Margaret Hassan - into one. Dramatic white headline on black background. No inverted commas, no room for doubt. This is, in headline writing conventions, a statement of fact. What it says is that Blair is to blame for Margaret Hassan’s fate.

16 Well, that would make an strong, if deeply contestable, comment piece. And the comment pages are, until now, where such a charge would have been leveled. But here it is, stated on page one, with the story – a perfectly straight one – relegated to page two.

If you’re wondering where you’d seen these sort of techniques before, the answer, funnily enough, is on the front page of the Mail titles. Both daily and Sunday titles – highly successful and profitable, as we’ve noted – use almost identical techniques regularly. I picked up the Mail on Sunday the very day after that Independent’s Margaret Hassan front page and saw the very same device.

There’s a mid-market title reporting the signing of an EU common policy on immigration and asylum. No pretence at telling the story straight. It hits you between the eyes as you approach the newsagent‘s counter in the morning. It sells copies. What’s wrong with that? People are voting with their pockets.

Two more Independent slides – their reporting of the Hutton and Butler reports, two big milestones in British public life over the last year or so. In each case I’ve juxtaposed the Independent’s treatment with the Daily Mail’s front pages of the same day.

Hutton first

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One says Whitewash? One says Justice? The technique is the same.

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Both begin by suggesting to readers that the report is pretty much worthless – and somewhere inside they’ll tell you what the report actually says.

And then there was the Butler Report.

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Again, identical techniques in both papers. No-one to Blame! plays Who was to Blame? No-one!

But, in fact – as one or two of the beady eyed may have spotted – those pages have in fact been transposed by a clever graphic artist at the Guardian. In fact it was the other way round.

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But the point is made. What may be happening here is less a revolution in broadsheet newspapers than a simple convergence of markets, with a straightforward acceptance that some newspaper techniques sell more copies than others.

I’ll show just two slides to show the development of the Times front page during the same period. By and large, it has struck a straighter, more serious tone in its front pages. But on odd days you can detect an urge to break free of the shackles – to abandon all the weighty baggage that went with the burden of being a sober paper of record.

The first front page was assembled on a day when two stories competed for attention – an announcement that badgers could be culled, and a major shedding of jobs in the civil service. How to accommodate both stories in the straitjacket of a tabloid front page?

The solution was, as you see, to combine both under the two-for-the price-of one headline, Countdown to the Culling, over a fetching picture of a badger.

20 The second page was built around a picture – a rather striking picture of ’s teeth. It was around the time of one of his periodic spats with his neighbour at Number 11 and the story began as follows: “Tony Blair is telling Gordon Brown to tell a full part in Labour’s manifesto and election campaign as fresh evidence emerges of policy differences between the two.”

A very straight and businesslike Times-like intro. This appeared with the picture of Blair’s gleaming incisors under the following headline:

BLAIR BARES HIS TEETH

What works admirably as a picture caption has suddenly become the main headline of the day. It sort of reflects the story, though it undeniably pumps it up a bit, injects a drama and intensity that’s not entirely there in the copy. Again, leave aside the rights and wrong of it. We might just note that it’s not the same. No Times splash sub in 200 years would have written either of those headlines. Something has changed – for good or bad. **

The question is , is all this just an esoteric debate about typography, or is it something which deserves wider discussion – not just among journalists – but among the people out there actually doing and deciding things, peoples whose lives and actions are viewed though this prism. Do they get a say, too? If so where and how?

Many people within the media saw it as both inevitable and desirable that the Guardian and the Telegraph should get into this converging market as well. Both papers had prepared dummies and could have moved.

I have nothing against the tabloid form itself – I was the launch editor of both the tabloid Weekend Guardian and the tabloid G2. But it wasn’t clear to me that you could compete in this – the most competitive sector of the most competitive newspaper market in the world – without adopting pretty much the same techniques as all the others. How dull and dowdy plain old straight news would look.

Throughout all this time I can’t remember reading a single piece in the mainstream press – or hearing a single radio item or television piece – debating whether the greater public good, the overall level and tone of public discourse in this country - would have been improved by having nine tabloid newspapers in Britain, all using more or less the same techniques to sell copies. It was as if a quarter of our teachers had suddenly decided to adopt a different curriculum, but nobody discussed whether the new curriculum was

21 better or worse than the old one. Or all the doctors in the North adopting a new surgical technique – one that treated more patients more efficiently – without a single newspaper analyzing whether the patients got better, or not.

Some of these issues – but only some - are discussed in some newspapers, if rarely in any depth. But media pages suffer from being so easily dismissed. A fair proportion of you here tonight will have discounted a certain amount of what I’ve said so far because I work for a rival newspaper. He would say that, wouldn’t he?

Now, a lot of what I’ve said tonight would be strongly contested by many of my colleagues in newspapers. They would argue that the press continues to hold power to account where many other supposed checks and counter-balances have failed.

Of course, there’s much in all that: I’ve made that speech, too.

But what if some of my themes tonight are also right – declining circulations, declining profits, unprecedented challenges from other media and other technologies, really dreadful levels of trust, a convergence of presentational techniques, a sense that market forces increasingly determine content; and a widespread feeling that newspapers are failing in their duty of truly representing the complexity of some of the most important issues in society. If just some of these things are right, where and how would society discuss them? If newspapers themselves can’t have this debate very effectively; and if it’s a debate of considerable importance beyond journalism, where could the debate be held?

Other countries have been through this cycle of doubt and have responded in different ways. In America a thousand senior journalists formed themselves into the Committee of Concerned Journalists. They looked at the business management of papers and its effect on editorial side. They looked at issues of civic engagement, and a newspaper’s role in the community. They looked at the fundamentals of reporting and editing and ethics.

In France – only last Saturday – the 13 leading French newspapers combined to hold a day’s seminar in Lille to discuss the relevance of the written press to 15-25 year olds. In France only 1-4 per cent of that age group regularly read a paper, compared with 62 per cent from the internet. The organisers unashamedly made the link between the indispensability of newspaper reading and good citizenship. It’s difficult to imagine either initiative - led by the newspaper industry – taking place here. It’s difficult to argue the link between newspaper reading and citizenship if the Kate Moss Tendency is the predominant narrative of the age. Can anyone in Britain imagine a Government adviser – this happened recently in France – suggesting that all children should be given a two month free subscription to a newspaper of their choice on their 18th birthday?

Most discussions of What to Do About the Press in this country concentrate on legislation and regulation. I don’t think we want, or need, any more legislation and I’m doubtful whether the press itself is ready for any tighter form of regulation.

What about something less formal, less threatening, potentially more helpful – let’s call it scrutiny – not a lofty, finger wagging, one-sided scrutiny, but the kind of examination and review that engages those within and without the industry. Or let’s call it, helping journalists to think through the challenges they face.

22 Who might do the scrutinizing?

-It would have to be someone big enough to stand up for themselves: the press in this country has a habit of getting quite nasty and personal when it feels under attack.

- It would have to be someone who could look at the issues rigorously – but also someone with an understanding of the processes of journalism.

- It would have to be someone who could simultaneously offer engagement and criticism.

The BBC could do some of this if it had the will – though I’ve always sensed a reluctance at the higher levels of the organization to get involved. The BBC has few enough friends in the press as it is. Why make enemies of them all?

There was a time when C4 broadcast a regular programme looking at some of these issues – perhaps in an over-confrontational way which sometimes mimicked the very techniques they were examining. But that channel, too, seems to have lost the appetite. In America, magazines such as the New York Review of Books perform something of this function – see the brilliant pieces on coverage of Iraq by Michael Massing. But we don’t really have an equivalent.

It’s been suggested that Parliament itself might take a more active interest in scrutinizing the press. But MPs show no inclination to do so, and, in any case, it’s doubtful whether newspapers would pay much heed.

So that many explain why more attention is now turning to the role of the Academy in taking the lead.

Again, there are useful examples abroad of centres which – instead of, or as well as, being concerned with the vital task of vocational training – engage in well-funded examination of the sort of issues we’ve been thinking about tonight.

A number of British universities are actually looking into setting up a centre – or centres – to do this sort of work.

What would such a centre, or centres, do?

- First, they’d do credible, timely, relevant research. - They’d engage in argument and provocation. They’d get the issues out there, for others to join the discussion. - That debate might take place in a regular journal, produced by the centre . - It should also flow through a lively, provocative website. - The centre should host debates, discussions and long-term projects of the sort that have been happening in America and France. - Finally, it should, like the Columbia School of Journalism, administer an annual set of awards celebrating the best that British journalism can produce.

What sort of issues might such an institute or centre get its teeth into if it could magically hit the ground running tomorrow?

23 Well, here it gets subjective. Everyone would have their own pet hobbyhorses, Here are some subjects I’d like to feel that there was someone out there thinking about in some depth.

- Is there a breakdown in trust between the media and politicians? If so, who’s mainly to blame? What could be done to remedy it? (There’ currently no forum for getting the two sides to get together to discuss this sort of issue - Is there a link between the apathetic voter and the apathetic newspaper reader, or news consumer? - What is the final verdict on – and lessons from - the Gilligan affair? - How is the so-called Reynolds defence of qualified privilege (the right to be wrong on matters of public importance) working in practice? The centre should be the place where discussions between journalists, lawyers and judges take place. - What effect are conditional fee arrangements (which have led to a sharp rise in libel cases) having on legitimate investigative journalism? - What are the early lessons of Freedom of Information, here and elsewhere? - How has the reporting of Europe affected the policies of successive governments? Will we get fair and balanced reporting of the imminent referendum on the European Constitution. If not, what effect will that have on the result? - How is the Press Complaints Commission doing? Does it meet the needs of the public? - Is the adoption of mid-market selling techniques a sign or dumbing down or a long-overdue recognition by the broadsheet press that the mid-market papers had it right all along? - What – apart from ABC figures – are the measures of quality in a newspaper? - The newspapers always tells us that privacy and right to reply laws abroad are unworkable and/or undesirable. What is the foreign experience? - How is the internet affecting the reading habits of young people? - What’s happening abroad in terms of advertising migrating from newspapers to the internet? - How does our press report such things as science, risk, business, the environment? - How did our newspapers do over Iraq? - What’s the future for paid-for regional evening papers? How can they maintain comprehensive coverage of a community if sales decline and advertising revenue migrates elsewhere? - Are bloggers a passing fad or the future? - What has happened to foreign coverage in the broadsheet and mid-market sectors? - How can newspapers clean up their act on correcting and clarifying things they get wrong, or partly wrong? Are Reader’s editors the answer? Should they be compulsory? - Is separation of comment and fact an old-fashioned concept with no relevance today, or should it be one of the things all journalists should aim for? - What’s he best response to doubts about the continuing validity of some treasured notions of freedom of speech?

24 As I say, that’s a subjective list – off the top of the head of one person within the industry. Each journalist in the audience would have a different list. Everyone whose lives come into contact with the press, in whatever form, is likely to have other priorities and pre-occupations.

There are, of course, many problems

- Funding, inevitably. Decent research is costly. Should the industry help out or is it vital the industry stays at arms length? - If there’s no buy-in from the industry are you just setting up a situation of conflict, rather than engagement and dialogue? This is not about oppositional name-calling. It’s about constructive scrutiny. - The scrutiny must have traction on the industry. Long books on the semiotics of sport writing may be worthy enterprises, but they’re not what this is about. This is not geared at producing obscure books no newspaper editor or publisher will ever notice. - That poses a challenge to the Academy. How do you engage in relevant terms with a particular industry or profession or power-base while still maintaining academic rigour and standards? Again, I’m sure there are examples of how this can be done. - The university that takes this on must brace itself for a certain amount of return fire. Do not underestimate the sheer fear many people and organizations – powerful individuals and bodies in all walks of life – feel at the prospect of a big national newspaper turning its guns on them. If you don’t relish the prospect of that kind of heat, stay out of this particular kitchen.

Anthony Sampson updated his Anatomy of Britain shortly before he died. In the 40 years since the first edition, he noted, virtually every institution or profession in Britain had been weakened. The one exception was the media, whose influence had grown stronger. It seems to be rather extraordinary that this power remains so comparatively unexamined.

Of course, there will always be people within the media who will - at least at first - find this sort of scrutiny deeply threatening. A few if we’re frank – should. But – if the centre worked as it should – it might help us think through some of the most challenging questions journalists in this country have ever been required to address. Besides, it seems unlikely that journalism is the sole exception to the near-universal belief amongst newspapers that every other organisation in Britain would benefit from greater transparency.

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I’ve come to the end of my time.

I said that many of these issues had been rattling around inside our heads as we decided where the Guardian should go next. You’ll doubtless know by now we decided not to go tabloid and not to remain broadsheet. We’re currently constructing new presses and will appear in the Berliner format – a popular size on the continent (think Le

25 Monde) which, it seems to us, combines the portability of a tabloid with the seriousness of a broadsheet. It will, I promise, be beautiful.

One final thing. The reason we could take a long view in our decision was the fact of our ownership – the Scott Trust, which has, since 1932, believed in some notion of a higher purpose for journalism, while still requiring that the Guardian is run efficiently and cost- effectively.

Hugo was a wonderful, wise and calm Chairman of that Trust for many years. I know he would have been deeply interested and involved in these discussions and a great source of cool advice. He was succeeded by Liz Forgan, happily with us tonight. And I can report that, under the equally wise guidance of Liz, the Trust instantly understood these issues and has been the most brilliant rock of steady support that any editor could wish for. Other newspaper groups have deeper pockets, which we sometimes envy. But I suspect that all my colleagues in editorial chairs have at some point turned an envious eye on the complete and utter freedom Guardian editors have, and have always had, thanks to its Trust ownership.

The only question left hanging is when this stunningly beautiful paper we have designed will hit the streets. And, of course, I could tell you. But then, as the saying goes, I’d have to kill you.

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