Abstract
Whoever could have imagined that the spirit of London 2012 would reach into our broken society and introduce a lost generation to discipline and honest competition? The Olympic Games cost plenty, but what a sense of self-worth they have instilled in the British newspaper industry.
For one happy fortnight the world was no longer declining circulation, broken economic models and Lord Justice Leveson, but multiple page changes, passionate writing and inspired design. Some titles even put on readers. Better still, they rose to the occasion in the face of competition from a BBC that provided remarkable coverage on television, Five Live and online.
When the digital revolution took hold a decade ago, we were told that online news coverage would stimulate rather than sate the appetite for newspapers. Last month it did. Readers discovered again the ability of newspapers to renew each morning the excitement of the night before. As the double gold medallist Mo Farah put it, albeit talking about a different contest: “It has been a long journey grafting and grafting, but you know, anything is possible.”
It is odd to describe a period in which so many journalists laboured so hard as a fortnight's holiday, yet it feels as if newspapers are now back at work — and that their world is threatening to go all gloomy again. As autumn approaches, sales recede and Brian Leveson prepares his mighty report, let us seek, if not an Olympic legacy, at least some positives on which to build.
The first is that people still want to read — and many of them in that old-fashioned medium that is print. The word “content” never did any favours to the creativity shown by the industry. We are probably stuck with it, but should never use it without “original” in front.
Next, advertisers remain eager if they feel they will find the right readers. They never abandoned print, though they did have their heads turned by online. It was surely more than an ironical gesture last month when Google promoted its online advertising with a half-page in a newspaper. We can welcome the commercial without knocking down the boundaries that separate paid-for copy from editorial. If strange page shapes and a couple of advertising wraps will pay for a year's supply of journalists, then let us have them. The Times was content to cover its front page in classified advertising all the way to 1966: recent wrap-arounds of The Sun, Evening Standard and Sunday Telegraph have done nothing to diminish the quality of journalism and much to fund it.
Third, advertising on newspaper websites is beginning to work. The graph-line of online revenue is rising a little more steeply. It may actually meet and pass the line of paper revenue, going down, before the bailiffs arrive. The Mail Online, an international success that now bears little relation to its paper parent, is in profit and expects to take £45 million worth of advertising in the coming year. the Financial Times has more people on digital subscriptions than buying the actual paper. The paywall at The Times — a title short of the mass audience that is beginning to make advertising work for The Mail Online but without the specialist coverage that makes people pay for the FT — is yet to prove itself. Few now doubt that the task is to work with rather than against online: The New York Times took the former BBC director general Mark Thompson as its new CEO for his digital skills rather than his newspaper nous.
So here and there a little hope, despite so much that remains uncertain. At the Financial Times they worry whether Pearson will sell them to Bloomberg. At The Times they worry whether an international billionaire will see a purchase of the paper as a shortcut to UK status. At The Independent and The Guardian they worry how long they can go on losing so much money.
Here, in the calmer waters of the British Journalism Review, we place our faith in an alternative economic model that sees editorial performing for love. With this edition, the torch lit by Geoffrey Goodman more than 20 years ago and carried with such style by Bill Hagerty for 10 years, passes to a third editor. Brian Bass and Carolyn Cluskey, who have worked so tirelessly to produce the magazine, hand the managing editor's baton to Joanna Leapman. Happily, Geoffrey, Bill, Brian and Carolyn continue their relationship with the BJR as members of an editorial board that advises and encourages without seeking the power to command. Which editor could ask for anything more?