POSH CUCKOO IN UPMARKET NEST
The press: Paul Johnson
reports on the new Sunday newspaper
'IT is not a had time to be launching a new newspaper,' said the Independent on Sun- day hopefully in its opening-issue leader. Not a bad week, anyway. With established Sunday quality titles covering themselves in ridicule in a courtroom battle featuring Randy Andy, Dirty Don and Pure Perry, the newcomer was an outstanding case of quartus gaudens. In the long tern, of course, this market is widely regarded as overcrowded and few people in the busi- ness think all five papers can survive. The problem would be solved if more middle- class people bought two Sunday qualities each. But with their weekend reading time already invaded by the greatly expanded quality Saturdays, that is most improbable.
Hence the new arrival has been awaited With genuine fear by the others, including the usually confident market-leader, the Sunday Times. The team which has so swiftly established the Independent both as a commercial success and an institution inspires respect and the dummies have been much admired. Two sections out of the three in the first issue lived up to this advanced reputation. Business on Sunday, With an excellent lead-feature on the sor- rows of 'Deadly Ernest' Saunders, achieved something which most business- sections persistently fail to do: made itself appealing to readers who are not primarily Interested in finance. The culture section, Sunday Review, was also impressive. True, the names were all familiar — Germaine Greer, Martin Amis, Anita Brookner etc and yet another feature on Mandela seemed excessive, especially since the main paper led on a Mandela story and also included a long interview with his wife; When will journalists learn that South African race stories are a huge turn-off for British readers? But it all looked elegant, cool, nicely varied, well-written (on the Whole) and unquestionably up-market. I Was glad to see, too, there is to be a regular Column on poetry written by the admirable James Fenton.
It was when I turned to the main section, Which after all is the newspaper as such, that my doubts began. One weakness of the .daily Independent has always been its habit of regarding essay-type features as a
substitute for hard-news reporting, a tendency which has become more marked recently. The Sunday has the same charac- teristic. It is true that Saturday is usually the most difficult day for genuine news (except in sport) and last Saturday was particularly barren, except for the reco- vered baby, which was really tabloid stuff. But that is all the more reason for a Sunday quality, in a highly competitive field, to develop a good news team. My quantity check on news-stories (a subjective one since it is sometimes hard to define them produced the following result: Observer 56, Sunday Times 51, Sunday Telegraph 62, Correspondent 75, Independent 46. In terms of quality (even more subjective), the Sunday Times was the best, though the Correspondent had the one real scoop, on the hostage John McCarthy (assuming it stands up).
The Correspondent's good showing in news draws attention to the sharp improve- ment it has made in the arrangements and layout of its main pages. The conventional wisdom is that it is by far the most likely casualty if the arrival of the Independent on Sunday proves the market will not bear five qualities. That is still on balance the most likely outcome, if only for the reason that the Correspondent has no daily part- ner and there are doubts about the lengths the Chicago Tribune, its rich US backer, will go to sustain it. But simply as a news-paper it is now, it seems to me, the best of the five, after the Sunday Times. It also has the advantage of an excellent
'I wouldn't mind, but I've just bought some new wire-cutters.'
colour mag, which ran a particularly strik- ing issue this week. No one yet knows whether a Sunday can survive without a proper colour-mag. The experience of the Sunday Telegraph, with its wretched Seven Days, a loser from the word go, is not encouraging. The Independent on Sunday's culture section uses colour but it is very far from being a glossy magazine and cannot match, say, the horrifying photo-report from Ethiopia in the current Correspon- dent Magazine or the Sunday Times Maga- zine's stunning feature on animal-survival.
The new paper had a huge print-run for its first issue but on present showing it seems to be aimed at a much more select readership of the well-heeled and especial- ly of the well-educated. As such it may take some readers from the Sunday Times, at any rate for a spell, as well as picking up some of the floaters who have been buying the Correspondent for its novelty. But with its moderate left-wing bias, which I detect even in its genesis, its real target is the Observer. The daily Independent helped itself to a hefty slice of the Guardian's readers, especially those who had been disturbed by the paper's hard-Left or sectarian element. Will the same thing now happen to the Observer, which has also been drifting further to the Left and has, in addition, been damaged by its over-close identification with Tiny Rowland?
The answer will depend on that most precious of all newspaper commodities — good writers. Old Christiansen used to say, 'You may speak with the tongues of angels and write with the pen of Shakespeare, but you can't beat news in a newspaper.' True enough, but in a crowded Sunday quality market you need a touch of brilliance too. The gravest handicap from which the Correspondent suffers, in my judgment, is that it does not have a single regular writer to whom I eagerly turn (though it's fair to say some good judges think highly of its television critic, Howard Jacobson). The Observer, which once had the best writing- team of any British newspaper, has lost most of its stars, by death or desertion. One of its last remaining talents, Neal Ascherson, has been captured by the Inde- pendent on Sunday, and the man the Observer chose to replace him is clearly not up to it, to judge by his first efforts. The huge expansion in the column-inches of British quality journalism in the last three years has not, so far, produced a corres- ponding increase in the number of good writers available to fill them. Naturally one can't expect to find writers of the highest quality, like Harold Pinter or Tom Stop- pard, every day of the week, But it is a truth often ignored that the real test of an editor's acumen is his or her ability to discover, bring forward and cherish gifted new scribes. As there are obviously not enough old ones to go round, that skill may well be the make-or-break factor in the struggle for survival among the Sunday qualities.
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