21 January 2021
Fleet Street
Decline and fall.
By J.R.Thomas
Bored with sudoku? Finished Boffles in our pages? Nothing on the racing page catch your eye? Here is a little exercise to pass the long lockdown winter evenings. You need a newspaper, any newspaper will do, though maybe the more upmarket ones will work better. No, we are not going to light a fire using only newspaper, twigs and two dry branches. Nor make papier-mache.
Now, find an article on a subject about which you know a little. Any subject. You do not need deep and specialist knowledge, just a little insight. Read carefully. Mark up the number of errors which you find, including factual and of grammar, spelling and syntax. Repeat as often as you like and can bear it. Do you really believe that the British press has produced the densely marked-up mess which probably lies before you? Alas, it has. Any resemblance to truth or reality of any given article is, one increasingly feels, purely coincidental. Most writing in our press is depressingly bad, inaccurate and misinformed. And is often principally about the feelings or opinions of the journalist, usually one you have never heard of, who wrote it. Worse still, any ability to write in good and elegant English seems to have fled. Not so long ago, journalist’s pieces were often shown to young readers as examples of how interesting and powerful writing should be. (Even if the articles had been proof-read by the fearsomely erudite sub-editors, the first drafts, perhaps dictated from a telephone box at midnight, or from the bar of some noisy pub, were of a remarkable standard.) And this collapse of analytical power, penetrating research and crisp polished English, is true of any national newspaper, on any point of the political spectrum, aimed at any social category or level of reader. (We award though a silver star to The Guardian, which still expects and gets good work from its journalistic team.)
What on earth has happened here? Why have things slid so consistently into a mire of unchecked facts, inaccurate stories, incomplete analysis and sloppy grammar? Why all this bosh about the lives of young unknown scribblers, their pets, their holidays, their relationship problems?
The Times was for 200 years regarded as the newspaper of record in the British Isles, certainly by itself, but also by readers and by historians. If The Times reported it, it was true. If The Times did not report it, it generally was not worth reading about. The Daily Telegraph aspired to those heights as well, but whilst catering to a clientele whose tastes were perhaps more politically skewed to the right and more fascinated by lip-smacking scandals in society; The Guardian balanced that by a high-minded leftism and an especial reach into the civil service and teaching professions. The Mail, Express, Sun, Mirror, and latterly, Independent, all had their peculiarities and specialities but they would not publish stories which they had not researched pretty thoroughly, using diligent and energetic writers who could turn their material out to a good standard.
Do you know the names of the current editors of the three quality newspapers, and perhaps of the Mail and the Sun? Thirty years ago they were mostly well known and highly regarded. Not anymore, alas. The days of Charles Moore, Peter Preston, William Rees-Mogg (the latter arguably more influential than his cabinet minister son, Jacob) are long gone, and if editors still get invited to dinner at 10, Downing Street, their attendance goes unnoticed. That reflects how the traditional media has become almost incidental to most citizens of the UK but also, and all respect to them, that the present generation of journalists are not quite the calibre of those of the past – nor so well rewarded materially.
And it is probably that latter point which sadly answers our grumbles about the poor quality of what fills the pages (a reduced number of pages at that). Journalists are no longer well paid; indeed most are very badly paid, and there are a lot less of them (except on The Guardian, which we will come back to). The money has gone from owning newspapers, because newspaper circulations have dropped heavily, and especially in the print versions (Telegraph 250,000 from 1.1 million fifteen years ago, the Mail just over a million from around 4 million at its peak). The competition of social media makes it much easier for the public to procure news, gossip, views, and indeed to contribute, free. Most young people would not dream of buying an unwieldy slab of newsprint from their local newsagent, or indeed paying a subscription to read the offerings on-line. Every month even the most loyal and ancient readers drift inexorably to digital versions, so much easier to procure, to read, and to rapidly turn the pages. One side-effect of that is that we can all flick across the adverts which were a key part of the newspaper proprietor’s revenue from his prints; the advertisers know this and either pay a lot less for their space or have given it up altogether. There is no reason why newspapers should have print versions at all, and sooner or later one, or more, of them will give up the excitements of the late night press and the rush of lorries at 4am to the newsagents. The problem with physical print is that the fixed costs do not vary much whether you sell 4 million a day, as the Daily Mail did at one stage, or 400,000. At the former circulation, it is like owning a different printing press – one for £20 pound notes; but at the latter it is a recipe for ultimate disaster.
So, sales and advertising revenue is well down, profits are reaching the zero point. Our newspapers probably only exist because they are almost all owned by families who have fortunes principally focused on something else – the Murdochs (entertainment), Harmsworths (diverse holdings), Barclays (mostly property). Then there’s The Guardian, which however appears to have discovered how to do the impossible. Most newspapers have trimmed their staff to their bone – and the results show in the under-researched, badly written, unproof-read gibberish which assails their readers at breakfast. But The Guardian (print circulation 126,000, about half of ten years ago) has not; it maintains much of its forming staffing, lots of experienced long timers on reasonable salaries and sub-editors to keep them to the mark, and even allows any digital passer-by to read their output instantly on publication on their website, free. They must be brilliant businessmen at Kings Cross. No, they aren’t. The truth is they have a pot of gold in their basement. Or the equivalent thereof. That is the pot of the Scott Trust, a charity which owns The Guardian, and which has for many years made up the newspaper’s losses. It has been apparent for some time that this nest egg will run out sooner or later, leading to some cost cutting, endless appeals to readers to give generously, and to serious thinking about whether the paper should move solely to digital, presumably on a paywall basis, no doubt with free access for the deserving poor, young and leftie.
That decision may soon be taken for The Guardian at the present rate of decline of sales – it is after all a bit odd that anybody pays for something they can read for nothing. But The Telegraph must be hovering over the same dilemma, and no doubt the rest will follow. You might not miss them much if they vanished altogether. But what would you light your fires with?
