What with bloggers and tweeters and Wikipediasts, it seems anyone with access to the internet can be a journalist nowadays. So much so that those of us left in newspapers are scratching our headlines and wondering what to do to survive.
Publisher Revel Barker, a newspaperman for 50 years, bucks this trend not by producing newspapers but by producing books about them. So he is to be congratulated on his reprint of Hugh Cudlipp’s Publish and Be Damned, arguably the best book about newspapers ever written.
Mostly this is a memoir of the Daily Mirror during the war years and immediately after, and the paper’s fractious relationship with Winston Churchill and with Peter Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison. If that was all there was to it, this book would be of interest now only to social historians and political anoraks.
But within its pages chronicling the glory days of the Daily Mirror’s past may lay the secret of the newspaper industry’s future. The point Cudlipp makes, although he could not possibly have known he was making it back in 1953 when this book was first published, is that there are things a newspaper can do which a website cannot.
News, though, is not one of them. The
24-hour television news channels already give major events such blanket coverage that Is are dotted and Ts are crossed before they are even off the presses. BBC Online is the finest news resource in the UK, a model of what clear, well-written reporting should be. Comment is free from the bloggers, and the best of them are very good.
But Cudlipp shows how only a newspaper can really connect with its readership, something the Mirror failed to do when it was founded at the turn of the 20th century as a paper for “gentlewomen” and dipped to a sale of just 25,000 copies. Once it became a bright, bold, brash tabloid for the masses it cracked the secret of success and was clocking up circulation figures of 4.5 million by the time Cudlipp was writing about its first half century on the news stands.
He tells us how the Mirror invented the TV reality show before there was even TV. It was in the days leading up to war in 1939 when seven people from different backgrounds who had never met were put in a Tudor retreat in Surrey without telephone, radio or newspapers and told to say exactly what they thought of each other. The feature series “Seven Souls in Search of Sanctuary” was Big Brother by a longer alliterative name.
Not every stunt worked so well. The Ministry of Agriculture was delighted the Mirror should offer a £10 prize for each potato-ravaging Colorado beetle captured by readers. Until it turned out that enterprising London barrow boys were importing them from France to claim the money.
When cafés increased the price of a cup of tea by a halfpenny, most papers buried the news away, dismissing it as a minor matter of little consequence. The Mirror knew the impact a 25 per cent price rise on a cuppa would have on its readers and splashed the story across the front page. Rightly so, because that’s what most concerned its audience.
The relationship between writers and readers was so close that when the paper ran an editorial on roses its leader writer was sent bouquets of them. “I followed that up with a leader on banknotes,” he told Cudlipp. “But next day my postbag was empty.”
But a newspaper needs to do more than just march in step with the readers; it must also be the brass band at the head of the procession making the noise. Internet chat rooms cannot do that. Nor can radio or TV. Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun achieved it; and the Daily Mail still does, even if its politics are sometimes repellent. And newspapers must appeal to each new generation, especially the up-and-coming one which would rather play with computers.
The social networking site Twitter has grown to a £1 billion business in just three years and today’s journalists are obsessed with it. Yet it would not exist without so many wordsmiths working for it for free. The future of professional journalism may depend on somehow reversing that so newspapers can be full partners in the technological revolution.
The Daily Mirror of Cudlipp’s day had more readers under 45 than any other national newspaper. He writes: “A paper which has learned how to magnetise youth has grasped the holy grail of prosperity and power.”
That is as true now as it was then.
Nigel Nelson
