Unlike Mr Banks, the Observer 's new tabloids don't have the bulk
Published 22 January 1999
Media
The first time I met David Montgomery, head of the Mirror Group, to talk about the Independent and my then forthcoming role as its editor, he pressed me to rethink at once the paper's format. "You can have anything you want," he said, in the manner of Hannibal Lecter addressing a lambkin. "Broadsheet, tabloid, any combination."
In order to concentrate my mind, he then despatched his nuncio, the 20-stone David Banks, a former Daily Mirror editor, to my holiday in the Dordogne, along with a designer from the Scottish Daily Record. Our task was to reformat and redesign the Independent in the two weeks before I started work there.
Having hesitantly explained to my wife that we would be sharing our swimming pool with a man capable of emptying it at a single plunge, we braced ourselves for what became a summer frolic. I spent the first week rifling through newspapers and magazines from around the world and when Banksy and Braveheart MacApple arrived, we were ready to reformat our way into history. As the Mac disgorged printouts of oversized tabloid pages, we dreamed of creating Britain's first broadloid - a paper with pages midway between tabloid and broadsheet size, combining the attitude of the tabloid with the seriousness of the broadsheet. Such newspapers are familiar not only in France, but also in Italy and Spain, where the Independent then had minority shareholders. Mission accomplished, Banksy treated us all to the menu gourmand at the best restaurant within driving distance.
Unfortunately, back in London, indigestion set in. Banksy, having billed the Independent for the menu gourmand, moved to other projects. Montgomery still babbled that anything was possible. But when I talked to the Mirror's harassed printers at Watford, the menu gourmand became the menu touristique. The rigid scheduling of Mirror titles meant that our broadloid (which would have required time to reconfigure the presses each night) was impossible. Not only that, but the number of pages, even in conventional formats, was highly restricted. Anything larger than a 32-page broadsheet section was impossible; a two-section broadsheet would require sections that had identical numbers of pages; and there was no money for extra pages. The menu touristique had become steak and frites, without the steak.
So we entered the familiar cul-de-sac of the British tabloid, its page size exactly half that of a broadsheet, as a device to bulk out an emaciated second section, centred around arts, features and consumer items. It was a mistake. The right format for a cash-strapped newspaper with upmarket intentions was a single broadsheet with as many pages as the budget would bear. But the presses couldn't do it.
I am reminded of these events by the latest changes at the Observer. Two weeks ago, the new editor Roger Alton launched three tabloid sections: Escape (for travel), Screen (including radio, naturally) and Cash (for personal finance). Alton, as the man behind G2, the Guardian's outstandingly successful second section, cannot be blamed for rifling through a favourite drawer, but I am afraid that, even with his skills, he has taken a turning that will not help him.
It is not just that his new tabloids look unkempt - G2 is hardly middle period Hockney. No, the problem is that these spindly sections, one wrapped inside the other for bulk and for ease of production and distribution, lack the presence of a broadsheet, but worse still have no prospect of the lucrative classified advertising which sustains G2. Although G2 is justly famous for Pass Notes - a mannerism tediously echoed all over Alton's new tabloids - it flourishes because of the ad revenue generated by its specialist sections on media, education and public services.
No such opportunity exists for the Observer's travel section, which is just another package tour operator in an overcrowded market. Screen looks especially tacky alongside its high-lustre listings rivals and Cash's application of consumer journalism techniques in the manner of G2 ("Top ten rip-offs"), itself borrowed from the world of Which? and a thousand imitators, is neither effective nor sustainable.
I'm afraid that in Britain, the moment has passed when a "quality" newspaper could create a worthwhile frisson by producing a "quality" tabloid. Apart from anything else, we already have quality tabloids of a sort, notably the Daily Mail, serious to the point of being culpably unhumorous, and frequently running features around the 4,000-word mark - a length that no broadsheet editor in town today would risk running on a regular basis. It is also a commonplace to note the extent to which broadsheets and tabloids pursue the same stories - for example, I don't think a single editor has resisted a feature built around Anna Pavord's new book on tulips. As the Prime Minister says, we are all middle-class tulipomaniacs nowadays.
True, last Sunday's Observer devoted about 20 per cent of its newsprint to what some of us still call public affairs (politics, foreign etc), against 10 per cent for the Mail on Sunday. But the real, old-fashioned, aggressive tabloid journalism is now largely confined to David Yelland's Sun, whose cut-out-and-keep Robin Cook "throbbin' Robin pulling kit" and phone survey testing the market for nookie with Cookie is tabloid stuntsmanship at its most gruesomely effective.
I don't think Alton and his advertising department should dream of tabloids, any more than Yelland's gags demand broadsheet acreage. Editors and owners who spend too much time worrying about formats are worrying about the wrong things. If you don't believe me, ask Banksy.
The writer is professor of journalism at Cardiff University
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