No editor of The Times believed he left the paper in a worse position than he found it, but there was much truth in Jenkins’s own assessment, that, had he not taken charge in 1990:
The programme that Whittam Smith undertook in 1986 to wipe out The Times would, I think, have been ultimately successful and we stopped it. That is the single biggest contribution I made, by boosting the morale of the paper and hiring particular people who were still all there ten years later. I said to Rupert, ‘I’ve done what I wanted to do, which is what you told me to do – to make it a paper I would want to write a column for.’99
He wrote his column for the next twelve and a half years.
CHAPTER TEN
CRITICAL TIMES
The New Editor; the Price War; Sport;
the Arts; Beauty; Science; the Internet
I
Judged by his appointments, Rupert Murdoch did not have a settled idea about what sort of man should be an editor of The Times. In choosing Harold Evans he wanted a dynamic leader with a strong news sense who would bring to the paper some of the excitement that he had brought to the Sunday Times. Yet, when Murdoch’s patience ran out with Evans he turned to Charles Douglas-Home, an editor more in the Rees-Mogg mould, whose primary interest was in considered comment and engagement with ideas. Next, the proprietor turned back in search of a strong news editor, which he found in Charles Wilson. Yet, within five years he had decided that The Times needed a less abrasive and more contemplative sage in the shape of Simon Jenkins. Each editor in succession appeared to be either a news editor or an Op-Ed editor writ large. The initial approach to Paul Dacre suggested Murdoch’s next instinct was to swing the pendulum back towards a hard news editor with a flair for campaigning journalism. Instead, in selecting Peter Stothard, he performed a volte-face, deciding in favour of another Op-Ed man in succession to Jenkins.
In fact, Peter Stothard appeared to fulfil several requirements. He had the intellectual engagement and breadth of interests that were to be expected of a traditional Times editor. Indeed, no previous occupant of the chair had such a grasp or passion for Latin and Greek literature. Yet he had none of the mannered, old-fashioned, donnish demeanour that suggested he would attempt to disengage The Times from the modern world. He was forty-one. His father had worked on radar research for Marconi1 and he had grown up in Essex, going to Brentwood School, which provided a good independent education without being in the senior ranks of the more illustrious public schools. Up at Trinity College, Oxford, to read Classics he had arrived armed with a case containing his father’s old blue-green-yellow cricket blazer (not that the son had a well-honed interest in sport) and his grandfather’s faded edition of the second six books of Virgil’s Aeneid. A contemporary there, Stephen Glover (later one of the three founders of the Independent) subsequently predicated the myth that Stothard had spent his undergraduate days wandering by the Isis in a kaftan.2 This was far from the truth for he was neither a college hearty nor a dreamer. Instead, he edited Cherwell and counted among his friends there George Brock and the future novelist Sally Emerson and her friend Tina Brown. Indeed, Stothard had developed the characteristics that were looked on with favour at News International. He was astute, intelligent and well educated but belonged to a generation that was meritocratic and open-minded.
One of the legacies to come out of Stothard’s period as The Times’s comment editor and deputy editor during the 1980s had been his role in scouting out young talent. The training scheme he established brought a new generation of the bright and the ambitious directly from university to The Times, a fast-track policy which undoubtedly attracted many to journalism who might otherwise have been lured elsewhere by the increasing financial returns offered by business and the professions. Other newspapers subsequently emulated this policy. The consequence was a marked increase in the number of journalists on major newspapers with excellent degrees from the leading universities – although those who liked their news pages unvarnished and without adjectives came to regret the effect that employing writers with analytical skills and the opinions that came with them had on ‘straight’ reporting. For Stothard, the short step from Broad Street to Fleet Street had not been so straightforward. After Oxford, he had experimented with various careers. At one stage he was employed by an advertising agency working on the Cadburys chocolate account while his neighbour on the next desk ran the campaign to boost The Times’s sales. Out of the corner of his eye, Stothard registered the attempt to sell the struggling paper’s charms. Yet it was into broadcast journalism that he next went, spending three years as a BBC trainee working on the Today programme. In 1977, he appeared to put the hack’s life behind him and, determined upon a career in management, joined Shell. But the journalistic instinct remanifested itself. He began writing a number of scoops in New Society. This brought him to the attention of the Sunday Times, where he was brought in as a business and political correspondent. There, he became a protégé of Harold Evans. In 1980 Stothard married Sally Emerson and the following year Evans married Tina Brown. Evans took him across the bridge to The Times. There, Stothard found himself alongside Anthony Holden and Bernard Donoughue as a core member of the editor’s praetorian guard. Some were surprised when, unlike Holden and Donoughue, he did not resign when Evans was tipped out of his chair in 1982. Instead, Stothard stayed put and prospered under the incoming Douglas-Home dispensation, becoming features editor and, soon after, chief leader writer. Charles Wilson also thought highly of him, making him deputy editor when Colin Webb left to take up his post at the Press Association. Stothard held onto the title in 1989 when he moved over to Washington DC, to became The Times’s US editor.
Stothard gained from the experience of overseeing the paper’s American coverage and filing regular and penetrating commentary from Washington even though – or perhaps because – it removed him from the daily skirmishes for power and position at Wapping. The Times remained, after all, a paper with an international profile and an American-based owner who expected his executives to have an equally non-parochial attitude. Out in Washington, Stothard had proved that he was not the sort of delicate desk-bound writer who could only thrive within the enclosed and somewhat claustrophobic atmosphere of the windowless rum warehouse off Pennington Street.
Whether from Wapping or Washington, Stothard had spent the 1980s watching the attempt of successive Times editors to confront increasing and improving competition, from traditional newspaper rivals, from other media like radio and television and from the new claimant for the paper’s core market – the Independent. Simon Jenkins had identified the latter as the principal threat. Indeed, he had been appointed as the man to repulse its tanks from the front lawn. In this respect he had failed and by the time he passed the chair on to Stothard, the Independent’s position had only strengthened. Circulation between the old and new claimants to informed opinion was running neck and neck.
No sooner had Stothard settled behind the editor’s desk than he acted decisively. A wave of sackings was announced. In all, more than twenty journalists were fired. The ‘Life and Times’ section – which Jenkins regarded as one of his achievements – was axed, having failed to attract much advertising. The prize scalp, however, was that of Clifford Longley. The chief leader writer and religious affairs correspondent had been at The Times for a quarter of a century and had been the journalists’ NUJ chapel father. The Economist credited him with being the last of the Times Black-friars.3 The manner of the sacking caused ill feeling that went beyond the two protagonists. Relations further deteriorated in early 1994 when The Times printed an article by Dr Tim Bradshaw, the Dean of Regent’s Park College, Oxford, that named Longley as one of a corps of Roman Catholic journalists who were motivated by malice in their analysis of the Church of England. Backed with legal assistance by his new employers at the Telegraph (who had also been criticized in the article), Longley instigated legal action not only against the author and The Times but also against Stothard personally. He won damages and his lega
l costs.4
There were other changes. Stothard’s arrival as editor coincided with the departure of the political editor, Robin Oakley, who was offered and accepted the same post at the BBC. Peter Riddell replaced him initially, but in a reshuffle in 1993 Philip Webster was made political editor while the post he had held as chief political correspondent since 1986 was passed to Nicholas Wood. Riddell, meanwhile, was free to write his daily political commentary. This was a formula that the other newspapers adopted too (and had its echo in the broadcast soliloquies of the BBC’s successive political editors, John Cole, Robin Oakley and, most especially, Andrew Marr). The concern about this development was that it meant mixing up comment and news on the same page with all the resulting possibilities that the former could contaminate the latter. Yet, so long as Riddell’s articles were properly displayed as a commentary there was little real danger of it causing any more confusion than Matthew Parris’s parliamentary sketches. Riddell certainly had his own view – he was, for example, sympathetic to the pro-European cause – but unlike a celebrity columnist he was not a hired controversialist. His observations could not be faulted for their deliberative qualities or their equanimity of expression.
Stothard, meanwhile, brought on several rising talents. Daniel Johnson became literary editor. Another who appeared destined for great things was Matthew D’Ancona, a Fellow of All Souls and who, like Johnson, had a First in History from Magdalen College, Oxford. Still only twenty-three, his route to The Times had been through the graduate traineeship. Initially set to work writing education stories, D’Ancona was identified by the new editor as a journalist with a good political brain who could write on a range of issues. As far as the outside world was concerned, perhaps the greatest sign that all was well came not from the promotion of younger voices but in the return of an older one. In January 1993, William Rees-Mogg returned to The Times to write a column for the Op-Ed page on Mondays and Wednesdays. Lord Rees-Mogg of Hinton Blewitt (as he had been since his elevation to the House of Lords in 1988) not only brought all the authority of a senior journalist with forty years experience but also his personal acquaintance with many of the major figures in the political and media Establishment. During the course of the past decade he had been the chairman of several publishing companies, chairman of the Arts Council, vice-chairman of the BBC’s board of governors, and chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Commission as well as a director on several company boards, including GEC. Not only was Rees-Mogg’s return a boon for the paper, it was a blow to the Independent’s desire to be seen as the embodiment of the finest traditions of the pre-Wapping Times (Rees-Mogg’s earlier stint as a columnist for the Independent had hurt many Times journalists who treated it as if it was a personal rebuke). The Independent was hit further with the departure of Alexander Chancellor who went to New York, from where he filed a weekly Saturday column for The Times throughout 1993.
There were also presentational changes to the paper. Some of Jenkins’s more conservative design instincts were also jettisoned. Headlines began to increase in size again and colour printing was used wherever there was the capacity to provide it. This reversed Jenkins’s more reticent approach that restricted colour photography to images that he thought specifically deserved it. The Times was no longer a definitively black and white product. Puffs above the masthead had started appearing on the Saturday editions in 1988 to advertise the highlights within Charlie Wilson’s four-section paper. The expansion of special features during the weekdays was an argument in favour of running the puff above (or below – opinion shifted on the question of their placement) the masthead during the week as well. Given the extra sales that could be put on by drawing the attention of passers-by to the paper’s contents in this way it was not surprising that when Stothard became editor they were made a fixed daily feature, running below the masthead. The commercial argument could not be countered. Aesthetically, they were an affront. The wider and more garish graphics the puff strip contained, the more the outward appearance of seriousness was debased.
Marketing The Times was a difficult process. Those who wanted to read Rees-Mogg on Monday did not necessarily want a huge puff on the front page screaming about goals galore at Stamford Bridge or the pick of the Paris fashion show. Nor could the columns on the Op-Ed page be expected to appeal to the size of audience The Times needed to survive. Spending money on television campaigns was a fast route to wasting millions. Targeting a specific audience appeared to make much more sense. An opportunity for this came from an unlikely source. In 1993 the World Chess Federation, FIDE, was plunged into crisis when Russia’s Garry Kasparov and Britain’s Nigel Short rejected the proposed match fee. Instead they established their own Professional Chess Federation. The Times agreed to sponsor the new tournament with a £1.7 million investment that would pit the two men against one another in what would be called The Times World Chess Championship. Extensively trailed in the paper, broadcast by Channel 4 and staged at the Savoy Theatre, Stothard envisaged it as a great way of promoting the paper’s association with thoughtfulness and strategic thinking. The paper’s chess correspondent, Raymond Keene, provided commentary and analysis in The Times while Simon Barnes wrote the sketch. There was even a friendly match between Short and Daniel Johnson. The main event, however, turned out less satisfactorily than its promoters had hoped. Short’s poor run of form reduced the contest as a sporting spectacle. The Times World Chess Championship proved to be a one-off tournament. Stothard was left to conclude, ‘Chess politics, I discovered, was probably the most difficult and unpleasant politics of any sort.’5 The issue of how to get more readers remained. An altogether grander plan was devised.
II
When Rupert Murdoch bought The Times in 1981 the intention was to make it profitable within five years. This he achieved. When the paper celebrated its bicentenary in 1985 it had finally moved into the black. Yet, this was to be a temporary phenomenon. The move to Wapping helped ensure News International’s strategic profitability although, in the short term, The Time’s share of Wapping’s start-up costs harmed its own financial figures. Wapping created the conditions in which the paper could modernize and expand – opportunities that required fresh investment rather than cost cutting. The conquering of one costly process – for instance, the reduction of union-protected overmanning in the print hall – was quickly succeeded by the realization of a new expense, like the introduction of colour presses. The revitalized competition, in particular the Independent and Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph, were also investing in bigger and brighter papers. The Times could not stand still and risk the destruction of its market share. The costs continued to spiral accordingly. A freer market behaved as expected, competition suiting the consumer rather better than the producer.
If The Times had a fresh opportunity to balance its books then there was no better period than the latter stages of the Lawson boom when advertising demand was at a premium. The profitability of the Sunday Times, with its 1.3 million circulation, ensured that Times Newspapers Limited announced a £20.2 million profit in June 1998. The opportunity existed for The Times to be profitable in its own right. Its advertising revenue increased by 38 per cent between 1987 and 1989. Unfortunately, production and editorial (salaries, expenses, etc.) costs soared well above inflation during the period too. The hope that improved advertising sales would bridge this gap proved illusionary. The onset of the recession abruptly ended any thought of pressing on into the black. Advertising revenue was decimated. Businesses stopped advertising for vacancies, luxury products became even more of an unaffordable indulgence and the sun began to set on the holiday market. By 1991–2, advertising was providing only half of the paper’s revenue.6
The only positive aspect of the economic slowdown was that it was affecting The Times’s rivals too. Indeed, during the recession, the paper’s advertising department outperformed many of its competitors, showing resourcefulness in reduced circumstances. This was demonstrated by its ability to keep its position in the
newspaper advertising market. Its 22 per cent share in 1991 was the same as during the boom time of 1987 and was only 1 per cent behind the leader, the Telegraph. Not only did it keep the Independent marginalized, The Times did significantly better than the FT which saw its share slide from nearly a quarter of the market in 1987 to less than a fifth by 1991.
With falling advertising revenue, the paper attempted to recoup its losses by raising the cover price. A paper that had cost its purchaser twenty-three pence on the eve of Wapping in 1986 had gradually crept up to thirty pence during the summer of 1990. From then, as the recession took its toll, the price hikes became more frequent. Between 1990 and 1993 the cost of The Times rose from thirty to forty-five pence, a 50 per cent increase. As with advertising rates, the paper’s situation was only eased by the reality that its competitors were in no position to outmanoeuvre it. At forty-five pence, The Times was the same price as the Independent and the Guardian and three pence cheaper that the Daily Telegraph. On Saturdays, all sold at fifty pence except for The Telegraph which cost sixty pence. The FT, meanwhile, was retailing during the week at a stately sixty-five pence.
Unsurprisingly, price increases during a period in which recession was forcing households to make economies had a negative effect on sales. Both the broadsheet and the tabloid market contracted. By January 1993, nearly a quarter of a million fewer national broadsheets were being sold every day than in 1989. The Times had lost 65,000 daily sales over the period. The question was how to entice the readers back. Simon Jenkins had maintained that it was about producing a quality newspaper. This, indeed, was the conventional wisdom. It was not just The Times that was investing in producing extra sections, better print quality and colour. All were seeking to add value to the product. Newspaper strategy had assumed the centrality of building and fostering reader loyalty. This was seen as a matter of investment. Although it was difficult to deny that the price increases had made papers less attractive on the newsstand, opinion in Fleet Street and in the City was still broadly that the national broadsheets were catering for a market that was more quality than price led. The belief that a largely middle class, and in the case of The Times often professional, readership would switch brand identity for the sake of saving a few pence a week was widely doubted.
The History of the Times Page 58
