DAMN THE BONK, FEEL THE QUALITY
The press: Paul Johnson
chalks up two victories for public taste
WHILE the morals, literary standards and sense of responsibility of our national newspapers have rarely been lower, recent events have provided occasion for at any rate two thin cheers. In the first place, it has been shown there is a limit to the Gadarene rush downmarket. The birth of Britain's prototype bonk newspaper, the adulterated Star, has ended in tears, recri- minations and quite possibly writs — what you might call a busty flush. H. L. Menc- ken's maxim, that no one ever lost money by underestimating the taste of the public, has been thunderously disproved. Lord Stevens, who last week severed his links with the Sunday Sport and sacked the Star's editor, Michael Gabbert, has lost plenty.
The joy of this mini-disaster, which has dented the reputation of United and Ex- press newspapers for commercial judgment as well as public spirit, is that it demons- trates the power of the distaff. Essentially the bonk was killed by female disapproval. Building-site workers and the like may have a limitless capacity to absorb soft porn, but at the Star's level of the social hierarchy men do not participate in the shopping. They are downing Guinness while their wives push the trolley. Bonks may suit the brewing trade but they turn off the supermarkets, whose advertising is essential to the survival of any downmarket tabloid. I doubt if the shrewd gents who run Tesco etc. would be influenced of their own accord by a paper's mammary-count, but evidently there is a quantitative point beyond which the trolley-reader protests. The Star passed it, and the women rose in revolt, the advertisers cancelled and that was the end of Lord Stevens's squalid attempt to turn lust into lucre.
At the other end of the market, the Independent has triumphantly ended its first year of existence with sales of over 350,000 and the standards it has set itself intact. Let me list its virtues. A clean and elegant appearance, which is consistent without being repetitive and enhanced by brilliant photo-editing (forcing all the other qualities to improve their pics). A deter- mination to treat readers as educated and sophisticated adults. A respect for journal- ists as writers, as opposed to competitive news-grubbers. Indeed, a feeling for wri- ters generally, so that good contributors feel at home there and perform above their average in its pages. Whenever I pick up the Independent, I am agreeably surprised by something I read in it. So I now would not be without it. On the other hand, I would not like to be solely dependent on it either. It has a visual character but no Weltanschauung. More important, it does not yet cover the news adequately, except in its City pages, and some of its foreign correspondents seem to think it is their job to produce nicely turned, timeless essays rather than tell us what happened yester- day. The temptation for the Independent, it seems to me, is to be content with a role as everyone's second-choice paper instead of going all out for leadership. However, it has clearly established itself as the first choice for many people and in doing so has dramatically expanded the quality market. Since the Independent was a marsupial offshoot from the Daily Tele- graph's pouch, there was some apprehension at Peterborough Court that it would grievously accelerate their long- established slide. But the commercial re- volution which Conrad Black has carried through at every level of the Telegraph Group's activities — largely silent and invisible, he is the brainiest of our press tycoons — has enabled the Daily to end the first year of the new competition with its circulation substantially increased.
The Times too has done better than might be expected, for the Independent, in so far as it has a coherent policy, theoreti- cally aims at the non-party middle ground which the Times traditionally occupied. Yet this September the Times sold an average of about 450,000 copies daily, only 38,000 down on September last year. The real loser, at any rate in sales, has been the Guardian. With its left-of-centre reporters and news-values and its well-heeled prog- ressive taste, the Independent is competing for exactly the same type of reader. For the Guardian, the experience has been salut- ary. Until last autumn it had enjoyed natural growth springing from a virtual monopoly position on the quality Left. It has become complacent, chaotic and in- clined to think its readers would have to lump any lunacies it cared to hand out. The coming of the Independent cost it 50,000 readers: its September 1987 sale was 473,000, compared to 527,000 last year, and in August it actually fell below the Times. The Guardian's losses might have been greater but for a determined effort to pull itself together both editorially and commercially. It has sharpened its news coverage, especially from abroad, and moved the paper's political centre of grav- ity appreciably nearer the centre. With writers of the quality of Polly Toynbee, Terry Coleman, Michael White and Hugo Young it had no shortage of talent. What it needed was the stimulus of fear, and that the Independent provided. The Guardian is now a much better paper than it was a year ago. Whatever the Left may say about competition, it certainly works.
Hence the Independent's first year has been of great benefit to the British press and merits a cheer. But it has to be a qualified one because the new paper is not yet within sight of balancing its books. The people who created it made astonishingly few mistakes of any kind. But according to a survey in Campaign, the adman's weekly, one error was serious: they underestimated the importance of classified ads. This is an expanding market, now worth £200 million a year to the nationals, especially the qualities. But classified unlike display ads do not tend to arrive automatically with the size and quality of circulation. They have to be worked for inch by inch and success is the cumulative result of sustained effort. The Independent, which seems set fair to develop the personal, intimate relationship with readers which makes the perfect environment for classifieds — which then become an important part of its editorial appeal — has so far failed in this area, while papers like the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and Guardian continue to break records. What the new paper needs, more than anything else, is a first-class agony column.
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