by Bruce Page
The Sun story is very different. When Murdoch agreed to pay the International Publishing Corporation (IPC) £800,000 for it in September 1969, its most recent ABC monthly average (June) was 964,156. Since 1965 it too had been in a ABC monthly average (June) was 964,156. Since 1965 it too had been in a 7, 10.0 per cent in 1967-8 and about 11.5 per cent in the last pre-Murdoch year. For later 1969 – a chaotic takeover interlude – there are no audited figures. But the circulation in November perhaps averaged 800,000. Then in 1970 under Murdoch the circulation averaged 1,600,000.
A settled decline exceeding 10 per cent year on year had become a year-onyear gain of 100 per cent. By 1978, many editions of the Sun were selling more than four million copies, and it had become the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain. This rebound and ascent is unparalleled in ABC statistics. It is a famous media legend, the basis of Murdoch’s talismanic reputation. But why were the two cases so divergent? Why did his magic refresh the daily and not the Sunday paper? And had there not been big, even bigger, circulations in Britain before this? What kind of newspaper was the Sun? How was it made?
Obscure as it may have been to Sir William Carr, Rupert Murdoch knew without reflection that presses capable of turning out a huge weekly paper must not – however well worn – stand idle the rest of the week. He needed a weekday product to run with the News of the World, and there was not much doubt that it would have to be what universally we now call a tabloid.
Page dimensions don’t altogether fix a newspaper’s character. Indeed the News of the World at the Murdoch takeover consisted of broadsheet pages (some 40 centimetres wide by 60 deep) but they contained material radically more prurient than anything in the tabloid (20 by 30 centimetres) format of Le Monde. Nominally, a tabloid section of thirty-two pages accommodates as much text as a broadsheet section of sixteen. In practice, the big sheet is handier when deadlineheavy stories are arriving from the outside world, but it has no particular advantage in presenting material which is internally generated, or divorced to some extent from events. This need not be spurious or fantastical, as Le Monde shows with its sedate coverage of international affairs. But, supposing it is, no requirement exists to inconvenience readers with a broadsheet page. So by the end of the twentieth century the smaller page stood for a class of journalism, and David Krajicek’s ‘tabloidization of America’ refers to a cultural divide, not a choice of press technology.
Just such a divide existed in Fleet Street at the end of the 1960s, but not as format; among daily papers only the Mirror and the moribund Sketch were physically tabloid. The distinction was between ‘popular’ and ‘quality’ newspapers, or (in Larry Lamb’s words) between the ‘Populars’ and the ‘Unpopulars’. A favourite conceit of Murdoch’s is that newspapers differ only in that some sell more than others – the editorial commodity being similar, however dispensed. This is not so, and anyone in the 1960s or 1970s could see that it was not.
Visiting American journalists could identify one group of British papers which were rich in intrusive gossip, often skipped over weighty affairs, were heavily illustrated, and – staggeringly, from the viewpoint of anyone trained on (say) the New York Times – felt free to spike their news cover with political invective. Even though such characteristics were not always displayed to the same extent, this was a recognisable group. There was then another group working in roughly the same way as the New York Times (or the Sydney Morning Herald or the Asahi Shimbun). In the first group were the Mirror, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Sketch. In the second, The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Financial Times. (It now contains the Independent. Veterans, in 1969, knew it had once contained the Morning Post, and that ghosts of both type were numerous.)
Sunday papers, whether or not allied with a daily, were divided in similar fashion. Any publisher would have seen in each group a distinct commercial anatomy. For the Populars, which in 1969 had a combined daily sale of twelve million, revenues were dominated by cover price. The Unpopulars, with sales of two-and-a-quarter million, covered less than one-fourth of their costs from cover price, compensating with a richer advertising stream. Neither kind of newspaper (then or since) survives without advertising. But relative dependence makes a big difference. Circulation income is stable, and quickly collected. Advertising income is volatile, and takes months to arrive. A successful popular newspaper, everyone agrees, is not hard to manage. There is disagreement about whether it is hard to create – a question we shall come to.
Two Populars, the Sketch and the Sun, were so derelict by 1969 that they sold less than the Telegraph, the biggest Unpopular (at 1.3 million). Murdoch and Lord Catto quickly learnt that the Sun was the one up for sale. In name it was only five years old, but history traced it to 1911, when it originated as a printers’ strikesheet. Named the Daily Herald, it had after the First World War a short, brilliant spell of socialist independence (including Will Dyson’s cartoon of the Versailles statesman with the weeping infant named ‘Class of 1940’). It then became the official organ of the British unions, and proved that dullness may take any political colour. A partnership between the Trades Union Congress and the commercial publishers Odhams Press then proved that readers can be gained for a dull paper by sacrificial promotion – it briefly topped the circulation league with two million.
Later it proved the hollowness of such gains, and in 1961 Odhams wearily sold the Herald – as part of a magazine deal – to IPC, who as owners of the Mirror did not need it. Their relaunch of it as the Sun in 1964 was followed by the sad figures cited earlier. Hugh Cudlipp, IPC’s editorial director, was loath to fold it. He had hated ending another fruitless IPC investment, the once-famous Melbourne Argus, and was relieved when Robert Maxwell offered to maintain the Sun with reduced mechanical employment. Murdoch enlisted Richard Briginshaw – most devious of London’s print-union bosses – to back his own counter-offer, by threatening that sale to Maxwell would lead to strike action against the Mirror. Briginshaw did not, of course, object to Maxwell’s business morals, only to his suggesting – unlike Murdoch – that Fleet Street print shops were overmanned.
Murdoch and Catto got the Sun on deferred terms, but the £800,000 purchase cost was least among the problems to be tackled. It was bleeding perhaps £2 million a year, a flow which might destabilise the News/ NOTWO deal unless swiftly dammed, and Murdoch decided the Sun should become a new publication on the first day he could take control.
He had to improvise bravely to create in seven weeks a daily-paper system at the News of the World’s cramped home – barely adequate for a news-averse weekly – on Bouverie Street, one of Fleet Street’s newsprint-clogged southern tributaries. It was ‘an awful workplace’, as one of its veterans recalled, insanitary and smelly, ‘with a low ceiling, poor lighting and cheap office furniture’. There were insufficient telephones and insufficient headline type. But the date, just, was met.
‘REACH FOR THE NEW SUN’, said the announcement on Launch Minus One … the most important thing to remember is that the new SUN will be the paper that CARES. The paper that cares – passionately – about truth, and beauty and justice.’ These values were dubiously visible in the launch serialisation, The Love Machine, second novel of Jacqueline Susann, whose Valley of the Dolls had established her at world level in quasi-pornography. Machine concerned dark events within the psyche of Robin Stone, a sexually voracious television executive apt to exclaim ‘Mutter, Mother, Mother’ at orgasm. Terminologically, ‘orgasm’ itself was disallowed in the new Sun, which dealt in circumlocutions like ‘moment of fulfilment’ or (with classical overtones) ‘going for gold’. Murdoch did not care for an inclusive sexual gamut, and when Nicholas Lloyd, recruited from the Unpopular Sunday Times, produced a piece on homosexuality, his response was icy: ‘Do you really think our readers are interested in poofters?’
Why not, if incest was on offer? – though Love Machine’s psychopathological import may have lost something in the Sun’s production system. In their compreh
ensive account Stick It Up Your Punter, Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie suggest that the developed sexual style of the Mark I Murdoch Sun was best exemplified in The Great Knicker Adventure: readers were invited to apply for a pair of panties supposedly irrigated with Chanel No. 5. Anyway the gamut, narrow or not, was exploited without rest. The staff churned out:
features like ‘the Geography of Love’ – where were the best lovers in Britain to be found?; ‘Do Men Still Want To Marry a Virgin?’; ‘Love 30 – women of thirty talking about the facts of living and loving in middle years’; ‘The First Night of Love’ – with riveting details of the first time; ‘Are You Getting Your Share?’; ‘The Way Into a Woman’s Bed’; ‘How To Be a Cool Lover’; ‘How to Pick a Mate’ … ‘Casanova Girls’ featured … a Swedish woman of twenty-one who claimed to have had 789 lovers since her first bedding at the age of twelve …
Chippindale and Horrie’s amazement at this catalogue blends with considerable reverence for Murdoch as the ‘hands-on’ proprietor:
involving himself in every aspect of the business, shaping his papers down to the last detail … Before and during the launch Murdoch dominated the Sun … the journalists’ trade paper, UK Press Gazette, reported how he had rolled his sleeves up and pitched in … ‘It’s bloody chaotic,’ he chirped, ‘but we’re getting a paper out.’
His uncanny gift was for selecting not ‘the best editor’, but infallibly ‘the right editor’ – and Larry Lamb was certainly right in terms of accommodating Murdoch’s dominating role. First-night troubles aside, Murdoch and Larry Lamb were able to make production of the Sun into a boyish adventure – exclusively boyish, for in those hot-metal days women could write for Fleet Street papers but not enter the composing room, the clattering space where subs and printers hacked out the final form of a newspaper around the ‘stone’ (actually an ink-soaked steel table). Lamb struck just the right note of rough flattery when Murdoch turned up to take a hand: “‘I’ tell you one thing this paper’s got that no other paper’s got – the two highest-paid stone subs in history,” Lamb joked. Murdoch grinned back …’
Over a few months the Sun evolved into a smoother product of which Lamb became defensively proud (until, later in the story, disillusion arrived). Defensive because it was junk, as a simple listing of its content shows. Why did it make Murdoch’s fortune, when his dominion over the Australian produced a debacle? Standard accounts give us a simple triumph of fresh thinking and colonial daring over fusty British backwardness, like a state-of-the-art southern hemisphere sports combine crushing half-trained English cricketers. John Menadue, the deft manager who kept News Ltd’s Australian base in order while the Sun took off, gives a representative version in his memoir Things You Learn Along the Way: ‘Fleet Street was in a sorry state of flabbiness and decline … In Sydney I was cheering from the sidelines. The boy from the colonies, the “dirty digger”, was getting up the noses of the English Establishment.’ That so thoughtful a man, later one of Australia’s most accomplished public servants, should have considered this a valid analysis of his chief’s activities shows how rarely the Murdoch story carries a contextual frame. To grasp what really happened it’s necessary, as in any battle, to look over the hill and see what the opposition were doing, or failing to do.
Rather than a period of simple decline in British newspapers, the transition of the 1960s to the 1970s was one of multiple experiments, many of which remain prosperous today. The Guardian was part-way through the risky project of recreating itself as a national competitor (having lived more than a century inside the regional security of Manchester). At the Financial Times the processes were under way which have made it one of the very few international newspapers. In general, boldness animated the Unpopulars: the Sunday Times, having easily passed one million, was running investigations and narratives of a complexity once thought unsaleable, but achieving sales which are still its high-tide mark. While the new Sun spouted about truth and justice, The Times was exposing corruption inside Scotland Yard – as if Delane had returned to remind people why Abe Lincoln once called his paper a bigger force than the Mississippi River.
In Popular territory confidence was lower. The Mirror was over five million – still with a rising trend – but the Express and Mail were sinking, and the Sketch was on its deathbed. Reasons and causes were much discussed: experiments, everyone knew, must be made to find a new direction for popular journalism. As it happened, the experiment which was statistically biggest – involving the Daily Mirror – was most thoroughly mishandled, to Murdoch’s crucial benefit.
The Mirror’s distinction as a daily paper was to have achieved working-class readership on a national scale – a phenomenon not truly paralleled elsewhere in the world. Britain’s social layer-cake has always been exceptionally deep, and the populists of the Northcliffe and Beaverbrook eras, successful as they were, didn’t penetrate quite to its base. Harry Guy Bartholomew, who did so with the Mirror, took up the methods of New York ‘yellow-press’ chieftains, and their savage tabloid successors of the 1920s, and used these on a population base six times the size of New York’s. Much media history turns on the vast commercial numbers generated by interplay between Britain’s complex social system and simple geography.
Francis Williams, a contemporary, described the methods Bartholomew used in the 1930s and 1940s to reach people who before had scarcely read newspapers. There was:
a frenzied gusto in dredging the news for sensational stories of sex and crime and a complete lack of reticence in dealing with them …
To this he added radical muck-raking, personal invective, ‘live letters’ that give [readers] a sense of participation in a warm, communal life … strip cartoons with characters with whom they [could] identify.
The men Bartholomew gathered around him for his purpose invaded privacy shamelessly. They embraced every stunt, however contemptible in terms of normal human dignity, the public could be got to swallow and set practically no limits on what was permissible in print …
But this scandalous publication took a part – arguably the most spectacular part
– in a unique expansion of the newspaper marketplace. Between 1940 and 1957 Britain’s population increased by 7 per cent, while newspaper sales increased several times over. Adolf Hitler’s gruesome career had much to do with this: prewar, the Mirror mocked the authorities seeking to appease the totalitarians; subsequently, using ‘FORWARD WITH THE PEOPLE’ as a slogan, it elected itself as a raucous kibitzer to the process of social reconstruction.
Momentum continuing through the 1950s and 1960s enabled the Mirror to displace the Express as the world’s biggest-selling newspaper even if some critics doubted it was a newspaper at all. Many front pages in September 1957 displayed Elizabeth Ekford’s confrontation with the troopers at Little Rock, Arkansas. One which did not was The Times, still using small ads there. Another was the Mirror, which ran Jayne Mansfield (a sub-Monroe of the day), and asked, ‘HAS THE BUST HAD IT?’
Hugh Cudlipp and his IPC colleagues did not imagine that their biggest property was immune to forces affecting its rivals. But they were nervously aware how well Machiavelli’s caution to reformers – nothing is ‘more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things’ applies to a successful newspaper. Readers, to be sure, are conservative, but editorial executives more so, and for the reason sailors are: handling immediate contingencies gives them a liking for what seems to work now over what offers to work better tomorrow. When ‘the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions’, organisational politics assumes Machiavellian intensity.
In search of a persuasive rationale, Cudlipp turned to Dr Mark Abrams, a celebrated pioneer of market research, social analysis and advertising science. Abrams, who shared Cudlipp’s broadly left-wing views, was quite unlike the passionless image of his profession: he handled statistics with an oracular vision, and believed a sea-change was impending among the much tried British proletariat. Bett
er education and economic advantage would produce a demand, already visible in the middle class, for journalism with more intellectual depth. Abrams’ estimate has attracted much scorn. But a ‘vivid and correct imagination’, says the historian Sir John Masterman, may well antedate results ‘though it sees clearly the course of future events’.
IPC’s unhappy recreation of the Daily Herald as the Sun was in fact a first attempt to apply Abrams’ notions, but in the manner of a respray on an elderly vehicle. As it was a failing newspaper, there was little internal resistance. But the staff ordered to attract the emergent working class was substantially the staff which had bored the available workers – and a good many of its members considered ‘serious’ a synonym for ‘dull’. The launch sale of 3.5 million decayed at much the same rate – with extra noughts – as that achieved by the Australian at the same time in the southern hemisphere. A sad remnant was what passed to Murdoch five years later.
Cudlipp, however, persisted boldly, and in 1967 risked bringing his experiments into the Mirror itself, as a section called Mirrorscope – four and sometimes more pages containing current-affairs background material such as might be found in any efficient Unpopular. It tried to address questions of context, relevance and significance – questions journalism still handles poorly, and which popular journalism had steadfastly, often cynically, ignored.
Mirrorscope split the Mirror’s staff in two, shattering its ebullient culture. One party said the new section effectively insulted the readers’ native judgment, the other that it was nonetheless an overdue reform. (Rare neutrals took heavy crossfire.) Today, we may think both sides had significant points. According to Christiansen’s doctrine, newspapers endlessly encounter didactic requirements, but have to discharge them without didactic excess. This severe test of technique Mirrorscope did not always pass. Often it gave background to a foreground invisible to readers, for in ten years the Mirror’s basic news sense had not got far past Mansfield’s bust. Mirrorscope exposed as much as supplied the need for reform.