Light moderation was not unusual on small technology blogs or Usenet discussion groups, but really rare on a national news brand. It was considered by many onlookers elsewhere in Fleet Street, not to mention within the building, as slightly crazy. A newspaper had so many layers of editing around everything. It was a huge philosophical leap for an organisation full of people dedicated to refining everything before it was allowed into the outside world to enable anybody to post anything.
Why allow it, anyway? It had nothing to do with journalism, did it? We had managed for 200 years to produce newspapers without giving much thought to whether readers wanted to meet each other or hold conversations. Weren’t we losing sight of our main function: to find stuff out and publish it? Anything else was a distraction.
That was always possible. But it seemed to me then – and still does now – that technology had to drive behaviour. If, for centuries, technology only allowed one-way communication then – of course – that’s what your journalism would look like. If it suddenly opened up two-or multiple-way communication then it was probably a mistake to carry on as though the world hadn’t changed.
Plenty of people disagreed, some quite vehemently. The argument went to the heart of how we regarded journalism in the coming century. Were readers a mob, best ignored while we got on with what we always did? Or were they part of what we did – part of our club? They were now beginning to connect in ever-growing numbers to the most mind-blowing network anyone in history could ever have imagined. Should a newspaper become part of that network, or would its chances of survival be greatest by remaining separate, and distinct, from it?
The talkboards were certainly ahead of their time. Someone later described them as ‘Web 2.0 social networking before Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman’. It was when Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard in September 2003 that he started playing around with ways of linking up communities of students – four years after the first stumbling efforts on the Guardian and elsewhere. Reddit – with an equally unsophisticated interface – started five years after the Guardian talkboards as ‘the front page of the internet’ and, with 250 million unique monthly users, was by 2017 the ninth-biggest website in the world. Mumsnet was launched by Ian Katz’s wife, Justine Roberts, around the same time as the Guardian talkboards and has 12 million unique monthly users today.
Was it an accident that the Guardian led the experimentation with reader participation in this way? It’s difficult to imagine a company more driven by the bottom line seeing the immediate point of creating these spaces. There was no obvious way of monetising them. In the absence of a proprietor our main relationships were horizontal – with the readers, and with sources. Guardian readers were, by and large, a bright crowd with much in common. Why not put them in touch with each other? We might discover the commercial value in time.
But meanwhile we were learning how people behaved in this new space. The driving principle found articulation in a new mantra: ‘Of the Web not just on the Web.’ It was a small thing to say, but a huge thing to imagine, let alone do. But it became a useful way of testing anything we proposed to do. ‘Is this really something that we would do if we were purely digital?’ became the key question.
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The division (including the Observer losses) was due to lose £9 million in 2000/1. Circulation was still over 400,000 but all papers were beginning to pad out their figures by distributing ‘bulk’ copies either abroad, or in hotel chains, airlines and trains. Advertisers, it seemed, were none too fussy about whether a reader had parted with cash for a newspaper or whether the copy ‘sale’ had, in effect, been ‘subsidised’ by the publisher.
Headline numbers seemed fine. It was the dying light of the broad-brush world. Within a decade advertisers would want scrutiny of figures down to the level of individual users.
Buying circulation, through whatever marketing wizardry, was expensive but, if it kept the ABC figure up,9 it was generally considered worth it. In 2000 we were generously distributing copies of the Guardian to French hotels and on KLM. The Independent were price-cutting regionally and offering two-for-one cinema tickets and flights to Australia from £20. The Times had two-for-one flights and cut-price vouchers for the paper. If you were a Telegraph reader, you could benefit from short-break offers, receive a week of papers for £1.50 and collect a ‘free’ Mark Knopfler CD from the newsagent by presenting vouchers clipped from the newspaper (20 per cent off at Debenhams for Sunday readers).
The full price sales were not wonderfully healthy for anyone – 95 per cent of Guardians sold for full price. Over at the Indie it was 75 per cent, the Times 65 per cent, the Telegraph 59 per cent and the FT 39 per cent. A casual glance at the headline figures showed a barely perceptible annual decline across the broadsheet market of 0.66 per cent. The real figures were more alarming, but less visible. There was a cloud of nostalgic dismay when the Express, which had at its peak in the early 1960s sold 4 million copies a day,10 was passed on to Richard Desmond,11 then the publisher of Asian Babes and other ‘adult’ titles.
Along with everyone else, we did from time to time consider whether we should be charging readers to pay for our journalism online. It would be five years before a major general newspaper – the New York Times – would make a determined stab at extracting money directly from online readers. Around the turn of the millennium virtually all newspapers held out little hope of persuading their users to part with cash. Almost everyone who had tried to charge had abandoned it. In the US there were only two newspapers – the Wall Street Journal and the Champaign News Gazette charging.12 The NYT originally tried to charge $35 for readers outside the US, but abandoned that. Even the Financial Times, at that point, wasn’t convinced it could make people pay.13 Instead there was much talk of the ‘attention economy’.
We were with the consensus. We were a very small newspaper (still the ninth-biggest) in a very small pond: Britain. If we could break onto the world stage, the commercial managers figured, we might stand a chance of acquiring a big enough audience to attract significant advertisers. The market of English-speaking, college-educated potential readers was possibly 500 million. The BBC would, in time, reach 150 million of them.14 If the Guardian could get launched, even modestly, on that global ocean it could stand a chance of survival. Overseas expansion couldn’t work if you asked non-Brits to pay. But trying to move into the digital age with a tiny, mainly British, not notably wealthy readership did not strike anyone as a recipe for long-term survival.
Editorially, the paper was making waves. We’d just been named newspaper of the year four years running. We were breaking stories. We brought a £2 million fine down on the heads of Carlton TV (corporate affairs chief, one David Cameron) by proving they had faked key scenes in a documentary about drug running. We had devoted ten pages over five days to examining the science and commerce behind genetically modified food. We forced the resignation of two government ministers – Peter Mandelson and Geoffrey Robinson – over our revelations of the unusual mortgage agreement they’d entered into for buying the former a house. We had first-rate reporting from Kosovo, Libya and Iraq by veteran correspondents Jonathan Steele and Ian Black. We’d opened an archive and readers’ centre across the road for debates around our work – another extension of our journalism. And there was a little schoolroom where a class of kids a day came to put together a ‘newspaper’ of their own.
And then, on 11 September 2001, four passenger airliners were hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists and the world shook.
8
Global
It was quite possibly the biggest news story of all time – watched in real time by maybe a third of the world’s population. Even as the raw, horrific drama played out on the screen, billions of people began calculating the appalling geo-political consequences. Sites all over the globe