The proprietors and managements which lack regard for journalists and bound to fail. It is bewildering that so many people aspire to own newspapers, while despising those who produce them. The success of the Rothermeres- and I suppose we should add, Rupert Murdoch- reflects their understanding of the peculiar, undisciplined and erratic ways of the people who get their papers out. The failure of other proprietorships, including at least one prominent family ownership today, reflects the fact that they want the power and influence which possession of a newspaper confers, the access to political leaders and sense of owning a private rifle range, while regarding their journalists as mere trained circus animals who should jump hoops to order. They fail to understand that in the media as everywhere else in life, mutual respect is indispensable between those who pay the bills and those who deliver the goods.
Yet let us banish nostalgia. The Daily Express may be dreadful now, but it has been pretty dreadful for the past 40 years. Many titles have endured long periods of atrocious management, including the pre-Black Telegraph. I have scanned the yellowing files of lots of 20th century newspapers. Some did notable things and promoted outstanding talents. But it is an illusion to think too highly of their overall quality. The old Times and Telegraph may have been pillars of respectability, but they were infernally dull. They often published unsceptically the deceits of those in high places, and sometimes deliberately colluded in them. The old broadsheets conveyed much useful information such as is absent from their columns today, but they also did plenty which they should have been ashamed of. When I became Telegraph editor, one of my first jobs was to get rid of a lot of specialist correspondents, who perceived their role as merely to recycle press releases. Although Harry Evans’s Sunday Times produced some of the great scoops of the century, in between there were plenty of longeurs. Quite large parts of the paper were less inspired than their modern counterparts. The same might be said of David English’s Daily Mail. Today, in their different ways the Financial Times, Guardian, Mail- and Evening Standard- have never been better. The Sunday Times and Observer feature some of the finest journalists of their generation.
One new problem does seem worth mentioning, however. Many reporters are now required to deliver news to readers and viewers through multiple outlets- podcasts, blogging, TV soundbites. Yet their proper role is surely to gather information and translate it into publishable prose. They should be trawling Britain, lunching and dining. One of the most important parts of doing our job is simply to hang around. Ignorant proprietors dismiss this as sloth. Yet talking, listening, watching are our lifeblood. If newspaper reporters and worse still, specialist writers are instead chained to a 24-hour, 7-day treadmill, servicing their organisation’s customers by land sea and air, or rather by print and blog and broadcast, devoting hours of each day to technical delivery functions, it seems as if they were being required to cook dinner in a restaurant’s kitchens, then hasten out in waiter’s aprons to serve it at table, I cannot see how on these terms reporters can have time to acquire the information that enables them to have interesting things to say.
If I was still running a newspaper today, I would beseech my staff like an Old Testament prophet: ‘flee the tyranny of the screen, the sterility of inter-activity. Get out there on your flat feet and find out something which we would not otherwise know’. Malcolm Muggeridge, as far back as 1968, lamented a world in which, I quote, ‘there is so much information and so little knowledge. A few seconds after Martin Luther King is shot there is no bullet, no King, only a story’. Muggeridge was not wrong. He was an early harbinger of doom at the birth of the soundbite society.
Yet forty years after he wrote those words, it seems astonishing not merely how many newspapers survive, but how much good journalism some contain. Substantial sections of the print industry, including local titles, are in structural decline. No modern newspaper can underrate the importance of offering its wares online. Yet those titles which still offer readers the serendipity of well edited and packaged products, together with content created by outstanding writers, still sell staggering numbers of copies. British newspapers boast some of the worst journalists in the world, but still also some of the best. For years, we have been fixated by the ageing profiles of our readerships. I remember joking back in 1986 that the cheapest marketing option for the struggling Daily Telegraph would be to offer massed injections of monkey glands to its zimmer-frame readership. But I now think we were wrong to become so obsessed with this. Sure, Western societies are ageing. But our new longevity seems to promise both leisure and willingness for a sufficiency of people to keep reading newspapers in the old way.
Trollope’s Dean Arabin observed disdainfully: ‘I know no life that must be so delicious as that of a writer for newspapers…to thunder false accusations against men in power, pick holes in every coat, to damn with faint praise or crush with open calumny ! What can be so easy as this when the critic has to be responsible for nothing ?’. Yet Bernard Levin once memorably asserted that irresponsibility is at the heart of the function of the press in a democratic society. If this was characteristic hyperbole, there is something important in it. I should like to think that, over the past 45 years, I have been as irresponsible as most, and will try to continue to be. Arthur Miller memorably said that ‘a good newspaper is a nation talking to itself’. I doubt whether such a compliment will ever be paid to the net, however important is its role in the new world. Newspapers have changed, are changing, and must continue to change. In the face of sliding circulations, today they badly need an injection of self-confidence, as well as the confidence of others. But I cherish a faith that they will survive and can prosper as hubs of a multi-media world, the finest platforms that anyone who calls himself or herself a journalist can aspire to. I think myself amazingly fortunate, to have been rewarded so handsomely for so long to live a wonderfully happy life in print. Like Neil Collins said: ‘It beats working’.