FORGET THE CASH, FEEL THE QUALITY
The press: Paul Johnson
presents a balance sheet of the newspaper revolution
DURING the last Parliament the mould of politics was not in the end broken: set in concrete, rather, with the Tories as the governing party looking to the future, and Labour as the angry underdog, clinging to the Celtic-Northern past. But the mould of Fleet Street went for good. Most of the papers have left, or will soon be leaving, the area; the Mirror and Express groups have not yet settled their destination but my guess is that both will be gone within two years. Who benefits? Well, the reader for one. Favourite papers are more secure, the choice is wider: in the capital we have six tabloid dailies, five qualities, two met- ropolitan evenings, five Sunday tabloids, four broadsheets. I don't believe any other city in the world is so lucky, and it is a job getting through them all, let me tell you.
Then again, the publishing of newspap- ers is becoming a profitable industry. As often happens in capitalism, the real re- wards go not to the absolute pioneer (Eddie Shah in this case) but to the first properly financed and professional outfit to follow. Rupert Murdoch took the big- gest risks and is now pulling in the shekels. Three of his British nationals are coining money and the Times too, in my view, will make large profits over the next few years. The journalists who backed him, against all the efforts of the union which supposedly represents their interests, are also doing well: editorial salaries at the Sun and News of the World now average £30,500 a year. The Mirror, Express, Mail and Telegraph groups should also be prosperous by the end of the new Parliament, though to a lesser degree since all four have chosen to remain in bed with the unions rather than risk a divorce. \ The new papers have met with mixed fortunes. Sunday Today is finished, killed to make way for extra contract printing of the triumphant News of the World. It was never any good. Today survives but entire- ly at the whim of Tiny Rowland. This paper was more effective and noticeable during the election campaign than I had expected, but it has no self-sustaining future unless Rowland provides the cash for a complete re-launch and has the sense to appoint an editor who will give it real character. Neither is likely. The News on Sunday, I fear, will not survive. As some of us predicted from the start, its manage- ment had little or no experience of running a newspaper and its editorial set-up was bedevilled by impossible demands from its constitution, its hard-Left activists and the unions. As a pathetic article by its sacked editor, Keith Sutton, in the current UK Press Gazette makes clear, the paper never had a chance. It is now in a kind of limbo, while its Lancashire 'proprietor', Owen Oyston, decides if it can be refinanced. This week's issue has been heavily de- politicised — perhaps dried out is the right term — but amounts to nothing very much. All the experiment proves so far is that the unbridled Left cannot run newspapers, and we knew that already. Robert Maxwell's London Daily News is said to he selling around 250,000 (it has no ABC figure yet) and that is plainly not enough. The paper started well editoriallY and had the great merit, even before its first issue appeared, of forcing the Stan- dard to improve, thus once again demon- strating that all newspapers need competi- tion. There have been days when the LDN looked distinctly better than the Standard but they have become fewer and fewer of late, and there can be little doubt now that the Standard has won the commercial battle. The LDN is costing Maxwell a lot of money. But then he has a lot of money, and he is also obstinate and determined. I cannot see him giving up yet. But he must steel himself for a re-launch, which makes good the LDN's initial promise of provid- ing Londoners with some really first-class writing and so getting itself talked about among the people who set London trends. As Mrs Thatcher would say, There Is No Alternative.
It is some satisfaction to us scribes that what the events of the last two years have demonstrated, overwhelmingly, is that it is not new technology or beating the unions or even good management which deter- mines the success of newspapers. All these things are, indeed, the preconditions of survival. But in the end what makes a paper viable is editorial content and, not least, the quality of the words. My abiding memory of the 1987 election (which proved, if anything, that the media really had little influence on the way people vote, at any rate during the campaign itself) will be the superb articles of Michael White and Terry Coleman in the Guardian. Both these writers have, to an unusual degree, the essential journalistic gift of conjuring up word-pictures of people and events, pictures which shine through even the Guardian's snowstorm of misprints. They pounce on the telling detail which reveals the big truth beneath, and they make you laugh with them at the tragedy, triumph and folly of it all. I shall not easily forget Coleman's vignette of the 18-year-old waitress in Lord Forte's motorway caff teaching Mrs Thatcher how to pour boiling water into a teapot.
It is not surprising that the only worth- while newcomer among British nationals, and by far the most likely survivor, is the Independent, where writers are seen as important and provided with the space and presentation which allows them to give their best. It is now selling well over the critical 300,000-mark and must be regarded as established. It has, in my view, too much of a left-wing slant in its selection and presentation of news. This contrasts oddly with its leading articles, which are begin- ning to acquire coherence. But I would not be without it. It suggests that the new era in British newspaper publishing may in the end produce not just more papers but better ones.
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