Across the pond

Less than a week after the party to celebrate thirty years of journalism teaching at City University comes the best possible reason for celebration; the first appointment of an ex-student to the editor’s chair of a national newspaper. Will Lewis, who was just seven when journalism teaching began at City, has over-taken all those oldies who came to City before 1991/92, to became editor of The Daily Telegraph. Will was on the first periodical journalism course that I ran myself.

He, was, as I told him at the time, one of my more troublesome students. He did not take the delivered word of the teaching staff as unshakeable gospel truth. Though he was on the periodical course he was determined to become a newspaper journalist. Not so easy as it sounds, because although the periodical course taught much the same skills as all City print courses, it was regarded in the conventional journalism training wisdom of the times, as inferior to the flagship newspaper course. (I even had one course who used to chant, as I joined them in the pub, ‘We are the second class citizens.’)

Will, entirely through his own efforts, got himself a work attachment on the Mail on Sunday, and some freelance assignments from them, which he managed to do with also completing satisfactorily his work for the course.

The moment of truth came when Will delivered the draft of his project one Friday afternoon in early-June 1992. After I read it I told him that it needed substantial amendment if it was going to pass. Will blew his top. Much of it, he told me, had been published by the Mail on Sunday, and they loved it. I told him that to pass a City project bold assertions needed to be backed by hard evidence. He continued to argue with me that if his work was good enough for the Mail it should be could enough for the journalism course. He finally stormed out of my office.

I did not see him again until the following Friday when he came to my office at five minutes to six, the deadline for delivery of the completed project. He had a smile on his face. When I read it I found that he had done exactly what I told him was required. Which in my view was a clear demonstration that he had learnt one of the most important professional skills of the job.

After he graduated he went to work for the Mail on Sunday. But he did not stay long. He moved to the Financial Times, which was even tougher than me in demanding evidence to back assertion. He became one of their most outstanding journalists taking over the running of the American edition, where the FT has to compete with the Wall St Journal on its home territory. His success was such that he was able to put himself forward as a candidate for FT editor when Richard Lambert stepped down in 2001.

It was too big a risk for the FT to appoint an editor in his early thirties, so they opted for Andrew Gowers instead. Shortly afterwards Will moved to the Sunday Times to become their business editor. He stayed there until just over a year ago when he moved to the Daily Telegraph with the dual role of City Editor and Deputy Editor.

He will need all his talent and skills if he is going to make a success of The Daily Telegraph, whose Canary Wharf office floors are covered with blood. For the past twelve months competing newspapers have carried more column inches on the troubles at The Telegraph than on any other national newspaper. The redundancies and the leaving parties are still going on.

These troubles have reached a crescendo in the past year while the papers have been owned by the Barclay brothers. But the roots of the problem go back much farther. The Daily Telegraph established itself as the largest circulation quality broadsheet national newspaper under the long ownership of the Berry family. For most of the last half of the twentieth century it had a circulation of between 1.2 and 1.4 million, three or four times the circulation of The Times and The Guardian. It also had an excellent reputation for traditional journalistic values, with a clear separation of news and comment and it supported one of the biggest and best teams of foreign reporters covering all the major countries of the world.

Conrad Black, the Canadian newspaper proprietor, wrested control from the Berry family in 1985. For the first ten years of the Black ownership, The Daily Telegraph got better under the editorship of Max Hastings, who managed to modernise it while maintaining the high quality of its journalism. The rot began to set in under the editorship of Charles Moore, who did not have Hastings’ news sense. The really serious problems began with the increasingly odd behaviour of the proprietor, Conrad Black, which eventually landed him court accused of financial impropriety.

The new chiefs brought in by the Barclays have not so far stemmed the decline of The Daily Telegraph. The latest ABC figures show the circulation hovering around the all-time low of 897,000 while The Times is now selling 675,000. But it is not only the print circulation the Telegraph has to worry about. Like all the broadsheets the Telegraph has to come to terms with the new world of web journalism, where The Guardian has far outstripped all the other nationals attaining a web circulation of 13 million.

Lewis was given the task of masterminding the Telegraph response to the digital age when he was made managing editor and also given the task of overseeing the move from Canary Wharf to the new headquarters in Victoria. It is still not clear what happens to these responsibilities now Lewis has been made editor of The Daily Telegraph. In that role Lewis committed himself on the side of those who believe that news scoops should published immediately on the web, rather than held up in the hope of boosting circulation of the printed paper the next day. Inevitably, Lewis has also taken an active part in the blood spillage.

So now he has the task of rebuilding shattered morale, restoring the journalistic reputation of the paper with a new team, and cajoling that team to work for both the web and the print version. This is a dilemma facing every editor of a serious newspaper. How do you ensure that your reporters and columnists have sufficient time to report, to reflect and to analyse, when they are also being urged to break and update their stories every minute of the day?

It is by any measure a huge challenge. But not impossible, as has been demonstrated by the success of The Guardian and BBC in riding two horses at the same time.

Both of these organisations are hate targets for many Telegraph readers. Which reminds me of the other major problem Lewis has on his hands. Does he position the Telegraph behind the new Cameron centrist policies or does he take it further to the right?

Either position is possible in terms of the history of the paper, which was founded in by one Colonel Sleigh, a right wing reformer, and is still called the Torygraph. For most of my own lifetime the Telegraph has clearly positioned itself to the right of The Times, with The Guardian as always championing the left cause. Today’s Times is so far to the right that if the Telegraph seeks to be even more rightwing it will end up wooing UKIP.