Why the dumbed-down Times is no advertisement for going tabloid
STEPHEN GLOVER
Aiiy heart sinks when I pick up the Times tabloid of a morning. Evidently my normally accommodating newsagent is under instructions from News International 'reps' to restrict delivery of the broadsheet version. Many correspondents report similar difficulties. I certainly have no innate resistance to the idea of a quality tabloid, and even quite like the Independent's version, though God save us from those front pages with their hectoring lists of statistics. But the Times tabloid is poorly designed — a sort of compressed broadsheet. Stories, columns and even leaders are shortened, and if anything the pruning is becoming more severe. My esteemed colleague Professor Roy Campbell-Greenslade has memorably described the Times tabloid as 'Times lite'. It is becoming liter and liter.
Nevertheless, the word is that the Times will cease publishing its broadsheet version next year, perhaps as early as the spring. One reason is cost: it is very expensive to produce two versions. But there is a deeper motivation, Rupert Murdoch seems to have given up any idea of maintaining the Times as an upmarket title. (Do the famous so-called 'independent' directors of the paper not have any view on this? Perhaps they are all dead.) His strategy is to attack the Daily Telegraph, and perhaps more particularly the Daik Mail. I must say that the idea that the existing Times tabloid, weak as it is, could lure away many Mail readers seems highly fanciful, but I suppose that it might always be improved.
Where does this leave the Daily Telegraph? Various commentators have been writing that the paper's new owners are seriously considering publishing a tabloid version. I have no idea whether they are, but one can imagine the arguments of thrusting young marketing types. They will point out that the newspaper has been losing sales for a quarter of a century, and say that a tabloid Telegraph — commuter-friendly and modern and all that — might reverse this process. They will argue that since the Times went tabloid, it has, at the very least, stabilised its much more recent fall in circulation. In a declining newspaper market, they will claim, a tabloid is a way of reconnecting, of giving readers what they want.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. We know that there is a substantial minority of Times readers who do not like the tabloid version for the reasons I have touched on. It is a very fair bet that the Telegraph's own research will have revealed that a significant minority of the paper's readers, mostly the older and naturally conservative ones, prefer the broadsheet to the tabloid form. No doubt the hope is that these people could eventually be cajoled or, if necessary, bludgeoned into accepting the smaller format, as is happening in the case of the Times. It may well be, though, that the Telegraph readers, being on average somewhat older than those of the Times, will be correspondingly more resistant. Consider, too, that when the Times does go entirely tabloid there may be a hard core of disgruntled readers who could be lured away by a broadsheet Daik Telegraph. They would not be very happy if their new paper soon jettisoned its larger format.
The arguments against the Telegraph producing a tabloid version are strong, yet I have a feeling that they may be ignored. Tabloid mania is sweeping the newspaper industry. Even the Financial Times is said to be considering producing a scaled-down broadsheet, while the Guardian is planning to adopt a 'Berliner' or Le Monde-type format — i.e., slightly longer and wider than a tabloid — as soon as it can install new presses, probably at the beginning of 2006. (This seems to me a smart decision.) Everybody is on the move, and the Telegraph, worried by its long-term circulation trends, may feel unable to sit out this dance. My only point is that not all readers of so-called quality titles like the smaller format. And also that, pace the Times and even the Independent, no one has yet succeeded in producing a truly appealing upmarket newspaper in tabloid form.
Because of unusually early deadlines last week, my little encomium to Melvyn Bragg preceded his extraordinary outburst
about the Blair family and the 'colossal' crisis which he says engulfed it earlier this year. Some believe that Lord Bragg was encouraged to make this indiscretion by Tony Blair, who wished to extract a little human sympathy, as well as to explain why he appeared so low in the water a few months ago. Others maintain that Melv's remarks were entirely his own, calculated to win support for his friends the Blairs, and perhaps to show how intimate he is with them. Either way, I have to confess that the episode does not show my hero in his very best colours.
The upshot of Lord Bragg's indiscretion has been a lot of futile speculation. He was at pains to say that the 'pressing' problem did not relate to Mr Blair's relationship with his wife, Cherie, but to the family. The media have known about this for several months, as, I imagine, have most people in the Westminster village. But following a request from No. 10, newspapers and broadcasters agreed not to mention the problem, in order to protect the Blair family.
According to your point of view, this either shows how supine the media are or that they are not, in fact, as voracious and inhumane as they are generally supposed to be. I incline to the latter view. It might be argued that there is a very small public interest in revealing the story but, even if there is, it is easily outweighed by proper considerations of privacy. The media are right not to have delved into this. It may still emerge on the Internet (there has already been one inadvertent mention on a BBC website) and could be written about in the foreign press. A friend in Australia tells me that newspapers there have already been referring to an 'explosive' issue to do with the Blairs. They are wrong about that. It is not at all 'explosive' in the way, say, that Edward VIII's relationship with Wallis Simpson was — another story kept out of British newspapers by agreement until the Bishop of Bradford blew the gaff.
So I think the media have behaved correctly. And yet I remain a little uneasy about any conspiracy of silence on the part of the media-political establishment. If you are a member of that establishment, dear reader, you will know what Lord Bragg was talking about; if you are not, you probably won't. A curtain has been drawn. The idea of any piece of information, however unimportant, being deliberately withheld from the people inevitably has worrying implications. Let's hope it does not become a habit.
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