Breaking News. Alan Rusbridger

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СКАЧАТЬ was impossible to forget that newspapers were as much light engineering as fine words.

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      There are many things we did not discuss back in 1976. We didn’t talk about business models. The model for the Cambridge Evening News was relatively straightforward: nearly 50,000 people a day parted with money to buy a copy. There was display advertising – a local department store or car showroom promoting a special deal or sale. And then there was the lifeline of local newspapers: classified advertising. The vast majority of second-hand cars or houses in Cambridge and surrounding towns were offered for sale through the pages of the Cambridge Evening News. Every job vacancy was announced in the paper, along with every birth, marriage and death. Every official notification from the council or other public authority: they were all printed at the back of the newspaper between the news and the sport.

      The profit margins on local papers at their peak – and the mid-’70s were as good a time as any – were in the 30 to 40 per cent range and would continue to be until the end of the century. Nearly 30 years later the regional press was still taking something like 20 per cent of the UK’s advertising spend.

      

      So, no, we didn’t talk about business models; we didn’t need to.

      We didn’t talk about ethics. And we didn’t talk about technology. Not much had changed about the way our journalism reached the readers in a hundred years or more. Hot metal typesetting machines had been around since the 1880s. The presses had got faster over the years, but otherwise a journalist from the late nineteenth century would have found little to surprise him in the 1970s. We banged out stories on battered typewriters – the only technology we used apart from telephones. If we were out of the office on deadline we’d phone it in to copy takers who did their best to conceal their boredom. No intro more than 30 words. Get the salient facts into the top of the story so, in haste, it could be cut from the bottom. The production methods of a newspaper seemed timeless and immutable.

      We met our readers out on stories and, by and large, we were welcomed and – apparently – trusted. Sometimes we deliberately intruded on grief. The ‘death knock’ was the name given to that heart-sinking moment when the news editor might send you to see the parents whose daughter had just died in a traffic accident. Oddly, we were rarely sent packing by devastated relatives. More often, the response was to welcome us in, even at this moment of unimaginable pain. For many, it seemed to be something of an honour for their relatives to be remembered in the pages of the paper.

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      Some 40 years after my stint in Cambridge I made contact with my old news editor, Christopher South, to check my memory of my local reporting days. South, now nearly 80, produced two cardboard boxes of old papers he’d stuffed into brown envelopes as he cleared his desk between roles. He was, he explained apologetically, a bit of a hoarder.

      I had a Proustian moment as I unsealed the first box. The smell of the Newmarket Road office seeped out of the battered cardboard container as I sifted through the papers – mainly the smell of the cheap newsprint on which we typed. I found a story written by my old (now late) colleague John Gaskell on 27 April 1976. In the top right corner, his surname: in the top left, ‘sweepers 1’ – the catchline, or running head, given to the story so that it could be followed through the process from sub to compositor to printing press. The intro was tight, 23 words long. At the bottom of the page ‘m.f.’. More follows.

      On another piece of now-tattered copy paper – evidently intended for the staff newsletter – a call for any stamp-collecting enthusiasts who would like to ‘pool their knowledge, contacts, exchange deals and ideas in order to enrich their hobby’. On another, a memo from the editor stressing the ‘vital necessity for keeping costs down’. No reporter was to spend more than 75 pence on lunch, or £1.20 on dinner, without prior approval.

      There was a memo from the agricultural correspondent on the state of the paper – presumably in response to some invitation for feedback. It suggested that the arts coverage should be ‘more down to earth and more relevant to the readership we serve who aren’t all intellectuals or artistic’. It ended: ‘I would think twice before paying the new price of 4p but the basis is there for making it worth 5p if we all work at it.’ And a randomly preserved copy of the Times, the crossword half-solved: Saturday 8 November 1975. There are 22 headlines on its front page, some of them over entire stories, some of them flagging up further news inside. The typography is busy, workmanlike, factual. There is one small picture. The page is densely informative. The pattern continues inside, with multiple stories and very small black and white pictures.

      South had also clipped an article from the New Statesman of 21 March 1975 (‘The Establishment and the Press’), which referred to the National Union of Journalists’ rule, introduced in 1965, that no one could be recruited to Fleet Street without first having had three years’ experience on a provincial newspaper. The author, Tom Baistow, reflected on why this rule had been introduced: ‘This letter was forged in the heated resentment that developed as growing numbers of Oxbridge graduates were hired straight from university and in many cases given “direct commissions” without any pretence of putting them through the ranks. The anger of newspapermen who had been through the provincial mill wasn’t based on the fact that these elite recruits had been to university but that they hadn’t been anywhere else.’

      

      And, finally, a staff list for 1973, recording that the company then employed more than 70 journalists, including two reporters in each of seven district offices. In the composing room there were 18 Linotype operators to work the old molten Linotype machines. There were eleven compositors, ten stone hands to assemble the type into pages, seven readers to check the typeset galleys against the original and five print apprentices. There were eight men in the foundries and 29 to run the pressroom, including cleaners and machine minders. Finally there were 16 mechanics – and drivers to drop off the papers at newsagents and street sellers throughout the county.

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      Back in 1976 there were, if we did ever pause to think about the finances, only two potential clouds on the horizon.

      One was the advent of free newspapers, usually launched by small-scale entrepreneurs who imagined a much simpler model than traditional newspapers. They wanted to get the income (advertising) with almost none of the expense (journalism). But none of us really imagined that catching on because – well, people bought the paper for the stories to and read about their communities, schools and councils in a detail no free sheet could match.

      The second was something rumbling away 90 miles northwest of Cambridge where a local newspaper, the Nottingham Evening Post, was locked in battles with its trade unions over the introduction of something called new technology. This apparently involved journalists doing their own typesetting, thus abolishing the need for all the type hands on the other side of the newsroom swing door. Our journalists’ union was against that. And, anyway, it all seemed a very distant prospect in 1976.

      In a sense it was. It was another ten years before Rupert Murdoch would stage his bold confrontation with his national print workers, throwing 5,000 of them out of work and producing computer-set newspapers from behind barbed wire in Wapping, East London. And it was 13 years before the management at the CEN would sack all the pre-press workers and insist on full computer typesetting. After 124 years in independent ownership, the Cambridge News, by then renamed and a weekly paper, was sold in 2012 to a new consolidated company called Local World, backed by a hedge-fund manager intent on bringing together 110 titles and 4,300 employees in a ‘one-stop shop’ serving ‘content’ to local communities. Three years later the company was sold on to another newspaper group, Trinity Mirror, with the intention of delivering ‘cost synergies’ СКАЧАТЬ