My Paper Chase
Review by Lionel Barber, Financial Times
Published: September 19 2009 00:20 | Last updated: September 19 2009 00:20
My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times – An Autobiography
By Harold Evans
Little, Brown £25, 512 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20
Amid the pervasive gloom surrounding the future of newspapers, Harold Evans has produced a memoir to lift the spirits. My Paper Chase is the story of a locomotive driver’s son from Manchester who wins fame and fortune, first as a crusading editor in London and later as an author, broadcaster, publisher and showman in New York.
There is a touch of Horatio Alger about this transatlantic tale, though Evans is no sentimentalist. As editor of The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981, he pioneered a brand of hard-hitting investigative journalism that produced a string of scoops: The Crossman Diaries, the Thalidomide scandal, the Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland and the unmasking of Kim Philby as a KGB agent working for MI6.
The diminutive, irrepressible Evans belongs to a generation that saw print journalism as a craft rather than a profession. (Full disclosure: my father worked alongside Evans as a splash subeditor for 13 years on The Sunday Times. He shared the same passionate view.)
Evans left school at 16, learning his trade at the Ashton-Under-Lyne Weekly Reporter. After national service in the RAF and a postwar degree in social studies at Durham University, he joined the Manchester Evening News, then a leading (and profitable) regional daily with a million readers.
Newspapers in the 1950s were an essential part of the community. Television was an upstart; computers were the stuff of science fiction. What gripped Evans was the industrial process of putting together a paper.
More than 50 years on, he still marvels at the experience. Here is his description of his first day as a downtable subeditor at the Manchester Evening News: “Mr Bow Tie ... indicated an empty chair at the long table and equipped me with the tools of the trade: spike, gluepot, two pencils, scissors, a galley listing deadline times for every page of the day’s edition, a pad of copy paper and an office book of typefaces.”
Subeditors these days are an endangered species as newsrooms cut back on production costs but Evans venerates subs as “the hidden impresarios of the news”. These male craftsmen (women were virtually non-existent) sorted out the reporters’ stories, wrote the headlines and ticked up the copy to length before it was dispatched for processing into hot metal and, finally, the printed word.
Evans himself was a master craftsman. Few journalists could match his expertise in basic editing skills, whether cropping a picture, honing an intro or selecting the correct font size. His five-volume series on editing, design and photojournalism, published 30 years ago, still ranks as the last word on the subject.
As an editor, he was a self-confessed meddler, especially when deadlines approached. But he also possessed two other enviable strengths: an eye for talent and a willingness to publish and be damned. He recognised that it was not always enough to print the truth once. “Amnesia is a characteristic of all newspapers,” he observes, “because we move on to the next story.”
Evans’s success as editor owed much to the high-mindedness of the Thomson family owners, especially Roy Thomson, the bespectacled patriarch. The latter’s belief in editorial independence was unshakeable, born of a conviction that a great newspaper depended on the dedication and skills of a professional journalist rather than an interfering proprietor. Thomson also had a mischievous sense of humour, declaring that “part of the social mission of every great newspaper is to provide a home for a large number of salaried eccentrics”.
The era of benevolent ownership ended with Rupert Murdoch’s successful bid in 1981. The Thomson family had no strategy for dealing with the unions which had rendered Times Newspapers ungovernable and unprofitable. But the Australian parvenu had a plan.
First, Murdoch persuaded the Thatcher government to pass on a competition probe, despite having a sizeable share of the UK newspaper market. Then he seduced Evans into leaving his Sunday stronghold to edit The Times, only to fire him less than a year later. Evans confesses that his ambition to edit a distinguished daily paper got the better of his judgment. More interesting is how he has reappraised Murdoch and his legacy.
The Mephistophelian character of Evans’ account in Good Times, Bad Times (1983) has transformed into a visionary reformer. Evans now accepts that by moving his titles from Gray’s Inn Road to Wapping in London’s Docklands in 1986, Murdoch outwitted the unions and gave the newspaper industry a new lease of life.
In fact, both Evans and Murdoch have more affinity with each other than either would care to admit. Both rose to prominence as anti-establishment characters; both moved to a bigger stage in America and became US citizens. Evans writes that Britain has “a penchant for secrecy, social privilege and the nurturing of an educational elite remained pervasive in the culture and has not been quite expunged to this day”. Murdoch could easily have written the same words (though he did attend Oxford).
After the privations of wartime Manchester and the snooty sniping of the Oxbridge elite in London, Evans revelled in meritocratic America. He and his wife Tina Brown became one of New York’s power couples – she went on to edit Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and now runs The Daily Beast, a news blog. Evans even accepted a knighthood, confirming his view that in the US everyone has a second chance.
Is there a second chance for the newspaper industry? Murdoch has signalled that he wants all his titles to be charging for online content by next year. Once again, he is being heralded as the saviour of the industry. But the methods and scale of charging are still up in the air, even if the principle is sound. My Paper Chase is an inspiring tale but in the end it is a vivid and eloquent testament to a bygone age. For once, Evans has buried the lead. The sub-head tells the story: True Stories in Vanished Times.
Lionel Barber is editor of the FT
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