Breaking News - Alan Rusbridger

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also lost something in elegance, consistency and tone. The paper’s former veteran Middle East correspondent, Christopher Walker, wrote in the British Journalism Review: ‘The move down from heavyweight to the welterweight division has arisen not only from the new emphasis on the trivial in the choice of stories, but also an aggravating habit by the home and foreign desks to demand that stories be tailored to suit the angle emerging from the morning and afternoon conferences.’8

      This led to my second reservation: I didn’t think the Guardian would necessarily succeed in a war against the revitalised tabloid Independent, in particular. Nor did I want to change the paper in ways that would have been necessary to be in with a chance.

      Simon Kelner was pioneering a profoundly different kind of journalism from the restrained, original broadsheet Independent – with its small Century headlines; its artful pictures; its seven or eight stories separated by horizontal Oxford rules. Broadsheet papers tended to sell on their long-established identity and judgement. Tabloid newspapers relied much more on day-to-day impact, at least in Britain, with most sales on the news stand rather than home delivery. A brilliant tabloid front-page image and headline – and Kelner produced many – would shift copies. But the reverse was also true: a page that mundanely relayed the news of the day in quiet headlines could not stand out. Charles Moore’s ‘boring but important’ stories would not fare well in tabloid.

      Kelner realised this and produced ever more powerful single-issue front pages – often quite unrelated to the news of the day. They were distinctive and often shouty. They got the Independent talked about. They halted the slide in circulation, even if the figures never soared anywhere near the peaks our marketing teams had whispered. But this was a new form of journalism in the UK: a broadsheet in tabloid clothing.

      Kelner was quite frank about what he was up to. His front pages, he confessed, were ‘an elision of marketing and journalism’. In other interviews, he went still further: he was moving from a newspaper to what he called ‘a viewspaper’.

      Newspaper–viewspaper? Hold on a moment. Was Kelner not just changing shape and style – but also bailing out of the primacy of facts? It seemed so. ‘Why pay 70p for something you’ve heard on the radio?’ Kelner demanded in his 2006 AJR interview. ‘We’ve got to provide something of value.’ The AJR writer, Frances Stead Sellers, continued: ‘The added value he promises is attitude. Pages of it. Right from the word go – on A1.’9

      At least the AJR noticed that something had changed. In the UK, there was a kind of collective shrug, as if ‘a viewspaper’ was simply a play on words, or a cool piece of rebranding, as opposed to a completely different concept of editorial endeavour. Throughout all this time I can’t remember a single discussion in the mainstream press, radio or television about whether the greater public good would be improved or damaged by having nine tabloid newspapers in Britain, all using more or less the same techniques to sell copies.

      In the office we’d start comparing each day’s Independent with the mid-market tabloids. There was no question: Kelner knew how to produce a Mail-style front page dominated by a powerful picture or headline. When the Butler report into the uses of intelligence before the Iraq war appeared in July 2004, the Mail and Independent had strikingly similar front pages mocking his conclusion: ‘No one to Blame!’ in one paper, ‘Who was to Blame? – No one!’ in the other. When the Hutton report into the BBC’s alleged failings of reporting was published, the Independent’s front-page headline read simply ‘Whitewash?’ The Daily Mail’s read ‘Justice?’

      Views first, news later.

      More strikingly still, the paper started ignoring news stories which shouted to be splattered all over the front page. In September 2004 the world was captivated by Chechen rebels holding 1,000 people hostages in a school in Beslan – a siege that led to hundreds of children dying. Front-page news around the world. The Independent decided otherwise: it had commissioned the editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, to mark George W. Bush’s ‘four years of double standards’ by compiling ‘Bush by Numbers’. So, no report on Beslan for Independent readers – just a graphic showing Bush’s failings. Asked to defend the front page Simon shrugged and said a newspaper couldn’t compete with television.

      The Times settled down into a more even-toned newspaper. But there were still moments for years to come when the front page would make you blink at what had happened to a particular style of journalism. To take one random example: in 2012, the European Court of Human Rights halted attempts by the British government to deport a radical Islamist cleric, Abu Qatada. The case was a complex one, involving deadlines arguably missed by the UK Home Office and ambiguities in the law and translations of it. The tabloid Times devoted its front page to a photo of 11 of the ECHR judges under the headline ‘Europe’s Court Jesters’.10

      Now, the Times has excellent and pretty comprehensive legal coverage. It is probably the paper most senior lawyers and judges read. But this was pure Daily Mail – a foreshadow of that paper’s infamous ‘Enemies of the People’ front page in 2017, which used a similar device to put judges in the dock.

      The more I watched such shifts in presentation – especially in the hands of Kelner – the more dangerous it seemed to me to allow the Guardian to be lured into competition with this new kind of journalistic animal. The Guardian had comprehensively seen off the Independent after a period in which the newcomer had appeared to pose a mortal risk. We had, so to speak, ‘won’ at being a serious, broadsheet newspaper. And now here was a very talented editor luring us into a different game: Okay, so you were better at news, but can you beat us at views?

      This seemed like a seminal moment for newspapers: an ongoing concern for complexity, facts and nuance versus a drift towards impact, opinion and simplicity.

      I thought back to the occasions when I had sat in on the Page One meeting of the New York Times under a succession of executive editors – Joseph Lelyveld, Howell Raines, Bill Keller. As many as 30 senior editors would meet solemnly every day at 4 p.m. around a table with lengthy summaries of the main stories of the day. With a concentration and high-mindedness which wouldn’t have been out of place in a cathedral, the editors would pitch their offerings to a figure as magisterial as a cardinal. The executive editor – fingers steepled at the head of the table – would consider the world as presented to him and make decisions about the relative importance of each story.

      A senior executive called Allan M. Siegal would, as the room emptied, draw up the agreed front page with a pencil and ruler. Geometry and typography were the NYT’s way of imposing a hierarchy of order on the otherwise random torrent of information pouring across its newsroom desks every minute of the day. Wasn’t that needed more than ever in an age when the ocean of information threatened to engulf us all?

      But doubt kept creeping in. What if not enough citizens/readers wanted to be informed? Or, rather, that there was a level of surface news-grazing which was just fine for most people? You could argue Kelner was right: news was all around – the radio headlines in the morning, a ten-minute scan of Metro on the way to work, text alerts for breaking headlines, the internet, numerous 24-hour news TV channels. That was, arguably, all most people wanted.

      The competition was gnawing away on all sides. The dent that the give-away Metro made in all our circulations was particularly baffling. The free newspaper owned by the Daily Mail & General Trust – skimming the surface and with little original reporting – was reaching more than a million people.11 It seemed to have little overlap with a newspaper like the Guardian, but thousands of readers began substituting it on their morning commute.

      ‘How much more do I honestly need to read to be informed enough?’ these people might be asking. ‘It’s all very well to talk about the compact between citizen and legislator, but voting doesn’t seem to change much. And the real power in the modern world – and the real problems – lie way beyond my ability to do anything about them. Why do I need to know all this detail?’

      The apathetic reader – if that’s what these

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