DOWN AMONG THE TABLOIDS
The press: Paul Johnson
argues that big circulations can be won without sleaze
ROBERT Maxwell's announcement that he is to give the People two years to prepare for a management buy-out is an ominous sign for this once highly successful but now ailing Sunday paper. In its heyday it specialised in 'We-Name-the-Guilty- Men' stories, which were in fact very professional investigations of con-men and other social pests, especially those who preyed on the poor. It had a clear aim and a distinctive character. But when the Mir- ror Group swallowed Odhams its position become anomalous because it was compet- ing with the Sunday Mirror for roughly the same kind of readership. It sometimes surprises me that it has survived so long. But it has gradually lost its special flavour and nowadays it is not always easy to distinguish it from its competitors. The People has been the big loser at the bottom end of the Sunday market. The June- November 1989 average sales figures showed it with 2,641,379, against 2,748,253, a drop of 106,874 on the year or 3.8 per cent. The figure for November was 2,672,192.
A paper with sales, albeit falling ones, of this magnitude ought to make a lot of money. But clearly Maxwell sees bad times corning for the downmarket tabloids, and he is not the only one. The external and internal pressures on tabloid editors to clean up their papers and stop invading privacy are having their effect, or so the wiseacres think. The News of the World, so triumphant in recent years, dropped 2.2 per cent in June-November averages for 1989, falling from 5,346,890 in 1988 to 5,225,523 this year. The November 1989 figure was 5,154,242, which indicates that the slide is, if anything accelerating. The Sun lost 180,848 sales over a similar Period, a drop of 4.2 per cent and its November average was only just over 4 million. The Daily Mirror dropped 32,232 or 0.9 per cent. The Star lost a further 9.6 per cent and is now barely 900,000.
Do these figures suggest, as some argue, that popular newspaper editors do not know how to deal with restraints on their freedom to intrude and to exploit sex? It is surely too early to say. I for one reject the view that it is not possible to sustain huge
circulations without resorting to methods and material which more and more jour- nalists, as well as the entire public, find unacceptable. An interesting case in point is the 1989 performance of the Sunday Mirror under its editor, Eve Pollard. With the exception of the Financial Times, it was the only one of the 'old' nationals which actually improved its position in the six months June-November 1989, raising aver- age sales from 2,931,357 to 2,957,520, a gain of 26,163 or 0.8 per cent. At this rate it has a distinct chance of passing the 3-million mark before the end of 1990. All the other Sundays dropped sales, some heavily: the Sunday Express down by 8.7 per cent, Sunday Sport by 9.7, the Sunday Telegraph by 8.2, the Observer by 9.6. What see& to me significant is that the Sunday Mirror's performance in sustaining and even increasing sales in a falling market was achieved without an extra- special advertising effort. Indeed the Mir- ror Group actually spent less on advertis- ing the Sunday Mirror in 1989, some £1,926,000, than it did on the People, £2,366,000. In fact the Sunday Mirror had a smaller 'ad spend', as they call it, than any of its competitors. The News of the World spent £2,658,000, the Sunday Ex- 'Then we had an LP in the Noriega campaign.' press £1,995,000 and the Mail on Sunday a massive £4,561,000, though it still ended the June-November period 3,137 average copies down on 1988.
Miss Pollard is a recruit from magazine journalism, coming from the highly re- garded You stable. The creator of this brilliant magazine, John Leese, has gone on to become a formidable editor of the Evening Standard, seeing off the Maxwell intruder smartly, and actually, in the June- November period, raising sales by 0.9 per cent. It may be that, in the television age, soon to be the television, cable and satel- lite age, a magazine background offers a better training for a newspaper editor than one in news itself. It has been striking, during the recent astonishing succession of big news stories from Eastern Europe, how dependent one has been on hourly news- bulletins from radio and television, looking to the newspapers more for background information, interpretation and features in short, magazine stuff.
Miss Pollard's gift, I think, is that she has anticipated the clamp-down on intrusion and sleaze and made the Sunday Mirror a paper with a much broader-based family appeal. Of course she has been helped by two factors: the Sunday Mirror had an excellent colour magazine, which outclas- ses the one produced by the News of the World and stands comparison with the up-market mag. Equally, the paper itself makes lavish and effective use of colour, the one big advantage Maxwell has posses- sed over Rupert Murdoch who, uncharac- teristically, was slow to recognise that the day of popular newspaper colour had come. All the same, it is Miss Pollard's intuition that a popular Sunday newspaper is for the whole family which chiefly explains the Sunday Mirror's performance.
Those popular tabloid editors who de- spair of keeping up sales under the new codes should remember this. There are thousands of fascinating human-life stories waiting to be reported all over Britain. They take place in the courts, every day, and in the overwhelming majority of them no reporting restrictions are imposed. The original News of the World made its reputa- tion and built its vast circulation by com- bing through the courts for the prize stories and printing them, often in considerable detail, and in large numbers. It did not need to invade privacy or invent interviews or besiege soap opera actors and pop-stars in their homes. The truth was told in open court, under oath, and the paper simply reported it. No one can possibly complain, on legal, moral or any other grounds, if a tabloid reports what happens in a court of law. Naturally, a return to this kind of journalism will require more reporters, and highly trained ones too. That means more money for editorial budgets. But that is a small price to pay if it enables the popular newspapers to recover their repu- tations with the public — and keep their circulations too.
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