Breaking News - Alan Rusbridger

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Independent had been born in the mid-1980s at the height of the furious struggle over computer-setting, which saw 13 months of pitched battles and picketing around the fortress Rupert Murdoch had secretly constructed at the newsroom and printing plant he had – astonishingly – built barely two miles east of Fleet Street on a brownfield site at Wapping. His aim in January 1986 was, in the words of one Sunday Times journalist, to move ‘from steam to microchip in a week’.

      Three former Telegraph journalists, led by Andreas Whittam Smith, responded quickly to the new opportunities of printing with much lower production costs. They launched a new broadsheet paper, the Independent, in October 1986. The original founders mainly had the Telegraph in their sights, but the paper was soon damaging the Telegraph, Guardian and Times equally. It was instantly elegant, authoritative, well-written and fresh. The Guardian immediately felt staid, predictable and stale. By the late 1980s the Independent had overtaken the Times and had come within inches of eclipsing the Guardian.

      There followed a ruthless Fleet Street fight – the last of the great newspaper battles.

      As the Indie raided both its star staff and readers, the Guardian relaunched first with a modernist redesign; and then by funding a new Sunday title, the Correspondent, aimed at discouraging Whittam Smith from launching his own Sunday title. In the latter ambition it failed, but the distraction of launching a Sunday newspaper so early in its life is generally thought to have led to substantial managerial and financial torments for the new upstart.

      The Murdoch price war had also had a devastating effect on the fledgling Independent. By 1995 the bulk of the shares were jointly owned by Mirror Group Newspapers and Tony O’Reilly, the owner of the Irish Independent newspapers. In a dozen years the daily and Sunday papers ran through 12 editors. The paper was struggling for cash, had started vigorous cost-cutting and had lost the sureness of tone it had enjoyed in its earlier years. The veteran former foreign editor Godfrey Hodgson wrote a piece in 1994 lamenting the plunge downmarket, trying ‘to second-guess the professionals in that Bermuda Triangle of British journalism, the “middle market” . . . The tragedy of the Independent is that it started as something special, something to which good people would give their best shot. Now it is – to use management-speak – just a product.’

      

      In the autumn of 2002 the Independent – by now losing around £7 million a year – had found another editor, Simon Kelner,5 who said he had enjoyed a eureka moment while in a supermarket. He later described the moment, using the language of consumer products. ‘I was buying toothpaste, and I noticed that the paste comes in a tube, a pump thing, in various sizes – but they are the same quality product,’ he recalled. If newspapers were just consumer products, he thought, why couldn’t they do two sizes, but keep the content the same?

      By the end of September 2003 – Kelner was producing the Independent in two sizes. Within two months the Times had followed suit with its own ‘compact’ version.

      By the spring of 2004 both titles had jumped to being tabloid-only: the toothpaste analogy only worked so far.

      The move presented the three remaining broadsheet papers (the Guardian, FT and Telegraph) with a dilemma. It was rumoured the Telegraph had its own tabloid dummy ready to go. Our marketing team had periodically looked at the question of formats and were convinced that Hodgson’s Bermuda triangle of the middle market was, indeed, the place to aim for.

      The Daily Mail’s gravitational pull was immensely strong: what if a left-wing competitor to the Mail moved into the middle-ish market? The marketing team felt sure we could end up vastly boosting our circulation. There was heady talk of doubling our circulation – perhaps even selling three-quarters of a million. Simon Kelner’s equivalents at the Independent had doubtless been telling him the same.

      The research kept coming in: broadsheets were masculine, old-fashioned and – especially on public transport – difficult to read and inconvenient to handle. They came from a different age. The editor of the Times, Robert Thompson, considered the length of arms required to handle a broadsheet and even pondered whether it wasn’t ‘an act of misogyny’ to publish one. The consensus was clear: if we didn’t move we were doomed. By December the Guardian’s circulation was 14,000 below forecasts – partly also due to the new free tabloid Metro. We dummied up another tabloid, to no great enthusiasm from the majority of those who saw it.

      *

      

      What’s in a size?

      Compared with almost any other issue the British press was facing at the time, the dilemma of whether to print on a large or small sheet of paper was hardly in the top five, or even top ten. The word ‘tabloid’ was often taken to mean lurid, sensational, downmarket journalism, but there were serious European tabloid papers, which proved that small and serious could be done.

      The decision about size was strangely frustrating, because it was so complicated, important and – possibly – pointless. The internet was surely a much bigger problem – or prize – than print. Changing formats was – on any long-term view – a distraction.

      I knew Simon Kelner saw things differently because a couple of times a year we’d meet for a game of golf, and he’d gently rib me about what he saw as my obsession with digital. ‘Tell me when it starts making money and I’ll start taking it seriously.’ That wasn’t just a flippant aside on the fairways. Interviewed a couple of years later by the American Journalism Review,6 he confessed he had no idea how many people worked on his website. ‘My only job is to sell copies of my newspaper.’

      He had a point, of course. He had two shareholders wanting – if not quick returns – at least smaller losses, and fast. Copies sold was money in. We needed money in, too – but the Scott Trust was there to preserve the Guardian in perpetuity. I was pretty sure that perpetuity wouldn’t feature a daily newspaper, of whatever format.

      Meanwhile we had built up 13 million unique users a month on our website (the Times, by comparison, was at 4.7 million – itself 150 per cent up on the previous year) and were bringing in seven-figure sums in digital advertising. What a moment to have to take the foot off the online accelerator and go back to thinking full-time about print again.

      Two things held us back from following suit to tabloid – one practical, one journalistic.

      The practical objection – ironic now – was that in 2002/3 we still published a staggering number of classified advertising on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which brought in £74 million a year. We calculated that in order to print all those ads in tabloid format we would sometimes have to publish editions of up to 220 pages. Any gain from the smaller page size would be wiped out by the reader having to juggling a multi-section paper – sandwiches within sandwiches – which could fall apart in their hands.7

      In short, producing a tabloid looked – for the Guardian in 2004 – pretty impossible.

      But what if staying broadsheet was, as we kept being told, a shortcut to oblivion? We consulted the editorial staff – with a hundred or so colleagues convening to debate the issue. The meeting ended with a 60 to 40 per cent vote against going tabloid. But, even if we did stay broadsheet, we would still have to re-press within four years when our printing contract expired. For eight years – since our own print plant had been terminally damaged by the IRA in a 1996 Canary Wharf bomb blast – we had been printed in London on an ageing, mainly black-and-white press owned by Richard Desmond.

      To make it more complicated I thought the Kelner ‘compact’ Independent was actually quite successful in its own terms. The paper, which had lost its identity as a broadsheet, had recovered some confidence and found a new voice as a tabloid. But it had come at a cost: it had sacrificed a consistency of tone for something more strident, politically unsubtle and obsessed with single issues.

      Similarly, the Times had gained something in focus and sharpness. Story lengths

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