The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  Hall had a haul of personal stories. The Archbishop of Canterbury once told him he bought the News of the World in order to find out what his staff was up to. On one occasion, Hall was house hunting and found himself in the home of a former prison governor who explained he was obliged to sell up after the News of the World had written a sensational story about his prison. Hall kept his own counsel.

  It was Hall who exposed the author and politician Jeffrey Archer for perjury during a libel trial. He was sentenced to four years in prison. At the time, Archer was running to be London’s first mayor and Rupert was thinking of endorsing him in The Sun. I waited until the last minute to tell Rupert about the story. ‘Oh. Poor Jeffrey,’ was all he said.

  Rebekah Wade succeeded Hall as editor of the News of the World, before becoming editor of The Sun. Her cool, determined deputy, Andy Coulson, followed her at the News of the World. Both would later become world famous.

  The broadsheet editors were more sedate. Peter Stothard would glide dreamily through the office. His high chin and the haughty droop of his eyes could intimidate those who didn’t know him well enough. During Stothard’s decade, The Times began its radical reshaping, with an enlarged Saturday edition, a magazine, and its first timid flirtation with a tabloid format. When Stothard moved on to edit The Times Literary Supplement, with his knighthood for services to journalism, Robert Thomson, an enigmatic Australian from the Financial Times, replaced him. Thomson was famous for his unfathomable demeanour, presumably adopted during his years as a correspondent in the less scrutable societies of China and Japan. His staff puzzled to penetrate his real meanings and thoughts, although, on the rare occasions he lost his temper, they would be vividly evident. John Witherow of The Sunday Times was the most in-the-office, heads-down editor. He was also tough. Witherow once asked his sports editor: ‘Alex, what do they think of me out there?’

  ‘They think you’re a complete cunt,’ came the reply.

  Witherow beamed: ‘That’s fantastic.’

  On the fringe of the editors were the marketing people, whose job was to please editors by enhancing sales with giveaway promotions and snappy television commercials. Ellis Watson, the most exuberant among them, had the inexplicable habit, when he was over-excited, of rugby tackling people. He once sent Rupert’s son-in-law, Alasdair MacLeod, flying across my office. I was grateful that day for the over-thick executive carpet. One of Watson’s promotions, offering rock-bottom holiday flights, was such a terrifying success that I found him tearfully calling airlines to charter extra aircraft, filled with dread that he did not have enough seats to meet demand.

  There were difficult times, and missteps. The Sun filled its front page with the story of a video purporting to show Princess Diana and her adulterous lover, James Hewitt, cavorting together inside Prince Charles’ Highgrove estate. It was an elaborate hoax.

  In a moment of madness, The Sun also ran a topless photograph of Sophie Rhys-Jones on the eve of her wedding to the Queen’s son, Prince Edward. There was a huge outcry. Buckingham Palace described it as an act of ‘premeditated cruelty’ and the Press Complaints Commission called it ‘reprehensible’. We ran an apology next day, complete with a cartoon showing the editor, David Yelland, in chains as he was led to the Tower.

  The Sun lost sales after both these mishaps. No government need worry about regulating the press: readers do a fine job of punishing its mistakes.

  Well-meant campaigns sometimes had unintended consequences. The most infamous was during Rebekah Wade’s editorship of the News of the World. The paper published dozens of photographs of known paedophiles in an effort to persuade the government to allow parents to know if a child-abuser was a neighbour. The campaign provoked shocking incidents: in a Welsh village, a woman paediatrician found the word ‘PAEDO’ scrawled on the wall of her home; in Manchester, a brick was thrown through the window of an innocent man. The Daily Telegraph ran an editorial headlined ‘Rebekah gets her riot’ after a paedophile fled his Portsmouth home in the face of a stone-throwing mob of 150 people who also set fire to an innocent woman’s car.

  High and lows blended together over the years, and those long-ago days seem like a bliss of big sales and high profits — a time when Wapping was at its most successful.

  The special difficulty of working at his newspapers was that Rupert really did know more about the business than anyone else. By the 1990s, he was the victorious old warrior of Fleet Street, interfering, argumentative, convinced of his point of view, and loving every detail of the job of putting out a newspaper.

  He could spot a poor photo crop, or a careless headline, or a badly inked page, or a clunky story mix. He knew how to write a picture caption, which is not a straightforward skill, and an editorial, and he could sketch a clean layout. He didn’t like layouts to be too tidy: they look too still, he would say, and a newspaper should look urgent, as if put together in a hurry. Large ‘reverse heads’ — black blocks within which white headlines appear — also annoyed him. He had a mysterious loathing of curly serif type in headlines. Serif fonts are traditional in heavies like The Times and The Wall Street Journal, and where there is an outbreak of sans serif headlines in their pages, that’s Rupert’s imprint.

  He would debate with a printer the technicalities of operating a press, discussing manning, paper quality, and press speeds. He would spring awkward questions on executives with commercial responsibilities: How much does this newspaper cost per page — which meant the total cost of paper, editorial, and distribution. How much is Ford spending each year on advertising? How does our advertising-to-editorial page ratio compare with the competition? What’s the year-over-year circulation of the Irish edition? It was important to know these things, but a mistake to bluff when you didn’t because Rupert often knew the answers to his own questions.

  The sense that he was connected to everything was almost universal across the company. This had been true when the company was smaller, but even as it exploded in size, and it was impossible for him to know it all, the mythology of Murdoch perpetuated the idea he was all-seeing and everywhere.

  Rupert played the part, lived the legend, but he also built an efficient management machine that freed him to burrow down into the company wherever he chose: to solve, or create, any crisis; or to dedicate himself to a single project.

  He left others to oversee those parts of the business that didn’t much interest him. The book publishing division was not a passion and he occasionally considered selling it. One of his businesses made large profits printing and distributing supermarket discount coupons to American Sunday newspapers. Its boss for years, Paul Carlucci, rarely heard from Rupert. But when Carlucci became publisher of the New York Post, a newspaper that lost millions a year, Rupert was on the phone almost every day.

  Rupert folklore, apocryphal or not, was handed down through the years. There was young Rupert the prig, protesting at suede shoes in the office — ‘We don’t belong to a bloody jazz band!’ — or his attempt to ban office beards, only to face a rebellion on The Australian sub-editors’ desk when every member grew one. There was Rupert the tyrant, who so terrified an underperforming classified advertising manager that he would secretly re-run the same pages — unpaid — to keep the boss happy. One Sydney editor hid beneath his desk whenever Rupert arrived, crying, ‘Run for it, the great sacker is on the way.’ There was the boss with mystical instincts who visited the site of a new press facility in San Antonio, studied the new concrete foundation that was under construction, told the gathered architects and engineers that it did not look level, and turned out to be right. David O’Neill, one of the company’s brightest technicians, told me the story, and he was on the scene.

  Rupert enjoyed these stories himself. His favourite was about the Manhattan cab driver who told Rupert about his brother’s high-paid job in a Melbourne pressroom where he had almost nothing to do. The pressroom was, of course, owned by News Corp, and the luckless managing
director soon had his angry boss on the phone. Rupert told that story with glee for years.

  This feeling of his presence ran deepest in the places he built from nothing. In Australia and Britain, he felt a closeness to his businesses, an emotional ownership that was not the same everywhere.

  His charismatic authority was an actual aura in these places. Old hands were his agents, undaunted loyalists spreading the word of their wonderful lives with Rupert, recalling small moments in his presence and seeming blessed to have been victims of his ire. They had tales of his furies and mistakes, but for them every transgression faded away in the burning light of his cleverness and energy. Like party commissars, they guarded his reputation, correcting the careless frankness of newcomers and internal dissidents.

  At a meeting in Sydney, when I raised the matter of Rupert’s mortality, the man in charge of Queensland looked thunderstruck. ‘Mate,’ he said, straight-faced. ‘I don’t think we’re allowed to be talking about things like this.’ I started to smile, then realised he wasn’t joking.

  People spoke guardedly about his off-duty quirks: the altering colour of his diminishing hair; the diet fads; the personal trainer he took everywhere; and the feng shui man who appeared during his marriage to Wendi Deng, prowling the Wapping plant, placing ‘lucky’ objects everywhere and denouncing colour schemes, desk positions, and the choice of office plants.

  The feng shui man told me to remove a tree in the boardroom. ‘It will create conflict,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ I told him. ‘A little boardroom conflict is an excellent thing.’

  The feng shui man’s magic did not prevent the living-room ceiling collapsing at Rupert’s refurbished London flat. It fell harmlessly but noisily in the middle of the night, when Wendi and her two children were safely in bed. A few days before there had been a gathering in the living room of the News Corp board and senior executives. The architect told me the ceiling was very heavy. ‘It would have broken everyone’s neck,’ he said.

  We wondered at Rupert’s appetite for work. His life merged work and play so closely that in his mind there seemed to be no difference. In 1999, Rupert married Wendi Deng aboard his yacht Morning Glory as it cruised the Hudson River off Manhattan. As I went ashore in the early hours of Saturday, he took me by the arm. ‘You will not be hearing from me for a month,’ he said. ‘I want to spend time with Wendi, and read.’

  Back in London, fewer than 48 hours after his pledge, Rupert called from his honeymoon villa in the hills of Tuscany. Two days after that, having assembled the team he requested, I was on board his Gulfstream jet heading to Italy to talk business. For three days we talked, hiked, and dined, taking a break when Rupert disappeared each day with his trainer to challenge the local curves and peaks on a racing bicycle. Ten days after that visit I was on the plane again, with a different group ready to brief him on other topics. Wendi’s forbearance impressed us all.

  The prospect of Rupert’s presence had a visible impact on those who worked for him. At executive meetings, when I announced Rupert was coming to town, there would be a physical reaction, a wave of sighs and mutters, a shiver through the room as everyone shifted in their seats, or rearranged their papers. I knew how they felt. It was a mixture of dread and thrill, and I was not exempt from it.

  When I arrived in London, a large portrait of Rupert was hanging in the boardroom, positioned to the right of my chair. He was wearing a blue suit and had been captured in a businesslike pose, peering sharply into the room. It was one of those painted Mona Lisa gazes that followed you everywhere. After a few weeks, I banished Rupert to the downstairs lobby where visitors could enjoy his grim welcome.

  I was luckier at Wapping than my predecessors. Rupert was absent often, busy developing his US television business and Sky, and struggling to grow in China and India. This gave me more space and safety. Thirty years after the company’s arrival in Wapping, no one had come close to the 12 years I lasted.

  Absent or not, the small businessman in him wanted to know everything. Each business division delivered to him a weekly financial report. Ours alone ran to 30 pages, meaning that each Wednesday he received scores of pages outlining the corporation’s worldwide performance. Gathering and printing these reports was an internal publishing operation that occupied dozens of people. He couldn’t have read it all, but always read some. Thursday was the day to be prepared for a telephone ambush, when he would seize on obscure issues: an increase in the percentage of paper waste on the presses, a slip in retail advertising rates, overspends in editorial or marketing.

  In meetings, he went easy on junior people; he must have seen how terrified some were. When I included bright juniors in lunches with him, I was firm. ‘Don’t just sit there. Speak up, or you won’t be invited back.’ Without this threat, they were likely to sit dumbstruck by his presence.

  With senior people who displeased him, he could be savage. I witnessed more of these moments than I suffered, and they were never a pretty sight. He would often ask, when one more beaten executive walked limply from his office: ‘Did I go too far?’ Usually the answer was yes.

  I consoled over drinks more than one tearful editor. He went too far with me now and then, and I wish I could say I became accustomed to it, but that wouldn’t be true. Sometimes he knew he had gone over the top.

  I flew once to New York with an idea I loved and, it turned out, he hated. The idea wasn’t so important as the argument we had. He kept telling me it was a rubbish idea and I kept telling him it wasn’t. It was pretty unpleasant. When I was leaving the office to fly back to London that night, he wouldn’t let me go. ‘Don’t go tonight,’ he said. ‘Let’s have dinner.’ We went to a Greek fish restaurant on the West Side with Wendi and didn’t talk business at all. Next day, he told me to go ahead with my idea.

  Not too far from now, talk of Murdoch the newspaperman will be misty history. When I arrived in Wapping — and the company’s first faltering footsteps onto the web were more than a year away — no one knew he would be the world’s last newspaper tycoon.

  The old press titans were already fading away. These dynasties began their rise around the turn of the twentieth century when high-speed printing, the first mass media, was at the frontier of information technology. They were famous: Northcliffe, Rothermere, and Beaverbrook in Britain; Hearst, Pulitzer, Ochs, and Sulzberger in America; Packer and Fairfax in Australia.

  The age of the press baron yielded to a mightier generation of information moguls whose technology would swallow the world and make newspapers puny. These pioneers — Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs — would unleash an infinite torrent of information and entertainment that would crowd every moment of our lives and make human attention the world’s most precious commodity.

  When newspapers got round to launching websites in 1996, they had no coherent strategy. There was so little fear or understanding of the web, they offered content free of charge, following the geek mantra that ‘information wants to be free’, along with the woolly assumption that advertising would sustain their businesses. The Wall Street Journal, in an almost solitary act of sanity, made the decision to charge its users.

  High-priced journalism — the product of generations of inherited experience and tradition — was sucked into a vast electronic maw, to be purloined and distributed to millions, unpaid and often unacknowledged. The internet was a digital vampire, draining the lifeblood of the press and stealing its profits. Tiny start-up ‘news’ sites and giant search engines sold low-price advertising alongside newspaper journalism they paid nothing to produce.

  As consumers became accustomed to getting their news free and abandoned newspapers, advertisers naturally followed them. By the time the industry came to its senses, it faced years repairing the damage — if it ever could.

  But the dilemma for newspapers went deeper than the decision to give its content away. Economically, a newspaper is a manufacturing and dis
tribution business with huge fixed costs. It needs thousands of tons of paper, printing presses and buildings to house them, and fleets of trucks to distribute bundles of hard-copy news.

  Free online news sites swept into the market with nothing to lose. They had cheap and instant distribution, and tiny fixed costs compared to newspapers. They were able to deliver profits with advertising alone, while charging advertisers far lower rates than print could afford.

  Newspapers hesitated because they were in a trap. Migrating into low-profit digital would undermine their traditional high-cost, high-profit operations. They would cannibalise themselves, and, while readers and advertisers abandoned print, they would still have to carry the burden of costly printing presses and physical distribution.

  No amount of business school theorising about the virtues of permanent renewal and creative destruction can factor in the emotional challenge, or the human difficulty. So, while newspapers edged along, riding two horses, hoping against reason that the threat might not be so great as they feared, freewheeling digital ate their businesses.

  I can tell this story with more clarity now, but I was lost in the fog as much as anyone. As a corporation News Corp had long ago diversified across different media and countries: Rupert first invested in television in 1958. But for newspapers, digital wasn’t just another thief of people’s time. It wasn’t a version of radio, television, and film that was competing for human attention by providing more vivid forms of information and entertainment. It wasn’t a competitor at all. It was a substitute.