Harold Evans, who has gone into bat for the Observer in recent weeks, mounts a vigorous defence of newspapers in the latest edition of the New York Times Book Review.
In a review of Alex Jones’s Losing the News he argues that in an age of rapid-fire headlines the more patient and reflective approach taken by the press is a positive virtue:
Obviously we don’t want to be told what we know already, but significance may not be governed by the clock. The most valuable element in journalism is often enough not an episode that occurred today, yesterday or, horrors, the day before. It’s the creation of a new awareness provided by either months of investigation or relentlessly regular coverage.
The extraordinary investigation by the Daily Telegraph into MPs’ expenses as well as those by the Guardian into tax avoidance, police brutality and the News of the World’s phone-hacking operation are testament to this.
Evans, who edited the Sunday Times from 1967-81 and the Times from 1981-82, doesn’t settle on a solution for preserving quality journalism (options include online content charging, state subsidy or more nonprofit trusts) but he does make it resoundingly clear that one must be found.
Even the best of the new media, such as the Huffington Post, remain dependent on newspapers, particularly foreign correspondents, for the news they analyse and comment on. The New York Times’s willingness to spend $3m on maintaining its Baghdad bureau is a good example.
But while Evans remains incurably romantic about newspapers, he sensibly recognises that in this age we must be “platform agnostic”: “I love newspapers, too, but in the end what really matters will not be saving newspapers. It will be, as Jones himself says, ‘saving the news’.”
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