What the papers save

A brief glimpse of the front pages on Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday. Credit: BBC

As this blog is fond of saying, there’s nothing like page one. While breaking news went online a while ago, British newspaper front pages still retain a salience vastly in excess of their dwindling sales: nothing beats them for rhetoric, and nothing in the digital realm has been invented that has their capacity to summarise the events of a calendar day.

Despite app alerts and rolling broadcasts, the 24-hour news cycle still exists, and nothing fits into it quite so well as a daily newspaper. That is one reason why there is still a What The Papers Say-style segment on TV and radio news programmes, morning and evening. Or at least, why there has been until now.

However, the BBC TV’s new flagship politics show, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, seems to be breaking with this tradition. Whereas her Sunday-morning predecessor, Andrew Marr, would show every paper in turn, poring over sellotaped double-page spreads and holding articles up to the camera, Kuenssberg throws up a perfunctory montage of some, but not all, of the front pages on a single screen before pulling it down again and turning to her guests. Marr used to have two journalists on the show to talk about the journalism; Kuenssberg seems to operate an anyone-but-hacks approach for her three-person panel, who discuss issues at her prompting with scant reference back to what the papers have actually been saying.

The blog has dreaded this moment: the possible first signs of the waning currency of the front page. I rather thought it would happen as a result of the advance of online news organisations into the discussion (where they are fully entitled to be), rather than simple lack of interest in the Fleet Street agenda. Nonetheless, it’s unsettling.

Does it matter? Of course it does to a middle-aged print hack like me, but more widely? I think so, especially given what has been said about social media recently in the US culture wars.

Over on HeadsUp, there is an excellent post about the fallout from the “Twitter Files” – the leak approved by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, of discussions on censorship and moderation under the site’s previous management. It cites one of the journalists involved in publishing the leak, Matt Taibbi, who writes that he had felt “the version of the world” he had been receiving from Twitter pre-Musk had been “distorted” and “ridiculous”, and that the discovery of the moderation discussions had been a “balm” for him.

“This is the reality they stole from us!” he writes of the censors, making the complaint often heard on the American right that liberal censorship and “cancel culture” has silenced certain voices in certain debates, including ones he wanted to hear on Twitter.

However, as HeadsUp puts it:

What baffles me most about the “Twitter Files” is the quaint belief that someone – generally “our elite overlords” or some variant on that – monkeyed with Twitter and ruined forever the level media playing field on which American politics had played out from the dawn of time through 2019 or so.

To which one could go on and on, but – has AM radio just entirely vanished from public consciousness, or did none of you out there hear Rush Limbaugh’s “Largest Radio Rally in History,” featuring two hours or so worth of Donald Trump… four weeks before the 2020 election?

True, the infamous Hunter Biden laptop (or the copy of its hard drive, or whatever) doesn’t come up in that transcript, but it was certainly no secret to the Limbaugh audience in the weeks before the election. You can try your own site search at foxnews.com (replete with complaints about the rest of the media). What you can’t do is say that reality was somehow stolen from you because your message wasn’t front and center on every platform.

That last point skewers the weakness in this type of argument perfectly: no media organisation is necessarily obliged to align its values completely with one’s own. Twitter was entitled to be dubious about the bona fides of the Biden laptop story: Fox News is fully entitled to embrace it. Both are private companies with the power to set their own rules, standards and agendas. A disagreement on this issue with one social media network – and one that is far from being the largest in the world – is not evidence of a conspiracy.

In times gone by, there was a tradition of impartiality, or hands-off fair dealing, in mainstream American journalism, where newspapers with geographical monopolies would play it straight down the middle, politically speaking, so as not to alienate half their captive audience. Critics of the US media scene, such as Prof Jay Rosen, have dismissed this approach as “the production of innocence” – an artificial neutrality that can fail its readers when difficult truths need telling. And in any event, as HeadsUp says, the advent of new media in the form of Fox News and shock jocks has shattered the old non-partisan model.

But it’s tempting to wonder if some of that tradition still informs the likes of Musk’s and Taibbi’s expectations: that there should somehow be one “version of the world”, one consensus “reality” that sounds the same from all media outlets. If so, it is an American rather than a wider anglosphere problem, because British audiences – thanks to the partisan excesses of Fleet Street – have never believed that.

Laura Kuenssberg discusses the papers with a non-journalism panel. Credit: BBC

As a whole, the British newspaper industry will never present what Barack Obama calls an “agreed set of facts”, but it does manage to produce a plurality of facts – a sense that, taken in the round, most stories, from most points of view, have a chance of being covered. And it’s long exposure to this – at the newsstands, or in the broadcasters’ press reviews – that I think insulates the British public from the slightly paranoid fear of having “reality stolen” in the way Taibbi describes.

The UK national press has never been trusted for its probity, but it is, grudgingly, trusted for its breadth. It ranges so far to the left and right that most constituencies feel their views and concerns are getting an airing. The messages are not front and centre on every platform, but they will usually be on one or two. This has also led to a sophisticated form of media consumption in Britain in which even hated papers will be given a selective hearing if it appears that they’ve got something big – think of the Guardian on the Windrush scandal, the Daily Mail on “smart” motorways, or the Telegraph on MPs’ expenses. British readers have learned to look past newspapers’ glaring institutional biases if the bona fides of a story are convincing enough.

One of the main reasons this mechanism functions is because of programmes such as What The Papers Say and its successors. Because broadcasters are regulated for impartiality in the way papers are not, they must be even-handed about every front page they show, but are not obliged to identify with any of them. Meanwhile, the parade of different agendas and political positions, one after the other as the front pages flash through, is broadening and chastening for viewers: you see your concerns aired in one headline, but a quite different set of priorities in the next one. Many “realities”, not just one.

However, if you take the Kuenssberg approach of curating the talking points and reducing the warts-and-all selection of front pages, you lose that sense of a world beyond the careful broadcast-news consensus. In effect, you take the responsibility of setting the news agenda, the points for discussion, yourself, rather than letting the papers do it for you – and perhaps eventually exposing yourself to criticism, like Taibbi’s, that you are narrowing the discussion.

Fleet Street is guilty of many sins, but its journalism still plays a vital role in complementing public broadcasters’ – not because it is better, but simply because it is more plural.

The case of the recurring rowlocks

Another baffling incident in a Sherlock Holmes film and another flurry of newspapers swirls across the screen. BRITISH SUBJECT MISSING ON AMERICAN TRAIN. Hang on, though – haven’t we seen some of these stories before?

In The Woman In Green it was the London Daily Chronicle. In this one, Sherlock Holmes In Washington, it’s the London Beacon. But in both cases the Oxford rowing coaches still seem to be having trouble with their swivels.

The two films are two years apart, so it would seem that these experiments must have gone on quite a long time. (Although, as we discussed last time, this story, which seems to be a real-life one, must date back about 10 years, as swivels instead of fixed rowlocks were coming into vogue by the mid-1930s.)

And as before, a largely convincing-looking paper – much better than standard movie-prop fare – is let down by one item: in this case the Middlesex v Derbyshire match report. Two county cricket teams playing in a Test match? I hardly think so. It’s a good thing Watson, still recovering from the shock of learning the Navy has piled up 428-6 against the Army at Lord’s, apparently missed seeing it on the front page.

’Orrible murder! Readallabahtit!

Drugged, disoriented and with something horrific in his jacket pocket, Sir George Fenwick rolls out of bed in a cheap boarding house and stumbles to the window, where a man with a slightly orotund Cockney accent is selling papers on the street below. “Mornin’ paper! All abaht the murder! ‘Orrible murder! Mornin’ paper!”

Fenwick, ashen, gathers his hat and flees the scene, but the next thing that appears on screen, of course, is this:

The scene is from The Woman In Green, one of the classic Sherlock Holmes movies of the 1930s and 40s that starred Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Although the series moved the characters forwards in history to contemporary (ie wartime) Britain, they were made 5,000 miles away in Hollywood, usually to a budget, with the result that London seemed to be populated by an unusual number of left-hand-drive cars and mid-Atlantic accents.

However, authenticity doesn’t seem to be a problem here for the “London Daily C…” (“Chronicle”, perhaps?). The headlines fit well and read well, unlike those in most movie newspapers. There is a story about football (Blackburn and Derby), and one about Oxford’s travails before the Boat Race. There’s even some proper copy for the fictional lead story.

Only one thing really jars: the headline about Puerto Rico. Would news from a US-administered territory really make the top of page 1 in a “Great Daily of the Empire”, and would “Beverley” (presumably James R Beverley, former governor) be a name well-known in Marylebone?*

Well, only that and the other thing, of course. Edgeware? With three E’s? “the Edgeware Road”? Gor blimey, guv, anyone could tell yer not from rahnd ‘ere.

*Also, if it is James R Beverley, he did indeed preside over rescue efforts after a devastating hurricane – but in 1932. He ceased to govern Puerto Rico in 1933, which would make that story several years old in wartime London. Furthermore, online research suggests that the controversy over using “swivels” (swivelling rather than fixed mounts for the oars) was already raging in Oxford rowing circles by the mid-1930s. That raises some interesting questions about how the props department put this edition of the Chronicle together for the screen.

‘I’ve got a great idea …’

…let’s do a mock-up of Harry Kane as Michael Caine for the front page! The Euro 2020 quarter-final’s in Rome, so it’s “The Italian Job”, get it? (OK, so The Italian Job was set in Turin, but close enough.)

However, there are deep undercurrents of British popular culture swirling here. Ostensibly, the visual references are indeed to the evergreen heist film – there are the England flags, the patriotic Minis and so on. But the “Harry” of Kane’s name, as well as his lugubrious expression and black-framed glasses, point to a character in a different film altogether – the laconic spy Harry Palmer in one of Caine’s early breakthroughs, The Ipcress File. Charlie Croker, the cheery criminal he plays in The Italian Job, hardly wears glasses at all. And the instantly familiar phrase on which the headline is based – “My name … is Michael Caine” – doesn’t come from a film at all, but from a song. It was a hit for Madness in 1984, with a voiceover by the great man himself, and a video that, again, draws on an Ipcress-ish aesthetic.

All of this probably got processed completely subconsciously by readers: you have to stop yourself to notice that you’re looking at a portmanteau joke comprising two cinematic genres and a pop lyric. And it also happens too quickly for you to remember that The Italian Job ends with the plucky Brits teetering on the brink of disaster and the prize slipping out of their reach. It’s a good thing that didn’t happen on Saturday.

Old-school wrap

There’s nothing this blog likes more, as a rule, than a vintage front page layout. But perhaps not this one:

There are 19 headlines on the page and they are all the same size, set in sans caps ranged left, centre and right, with the result that (i) huge amounts of unintended white space are created, and (ii) almost every kind of word has to be omitted to make them fit. Not just nouns, although there is a flying verb in there – WILL SING MESSIAH – but verbs (REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION AT CLEVELAND) and prepositions (BROTHER DYING CONDITION) too.

The page is presented, more in sorrow than in anger, by Radder and Stempel in the second edition of their book Newspaper Editing, Make-up and Headlines, the 1940s treasure trove of old-school techniques first brought to our attention by HeadsUp for its clear chapter-and-verse about using flying verbs (or as it likes to call them, “implied subjects”). It also contains this spectacular example of overdisplay, or “circus make-up”, from the Denver Post:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a headline above a masthead before, and in practically the same size type as well.

But what’s most interesting about the many front pages in the chapter is not the layouts, good though most of them are, but something else: the number of semicolon headlines they have. I had previously assumed that these were almost unique to the New York Times, and only then brought out for special occasions, but here – in papers large and small, on busy news days and quiet ones – they seem to be quite a regular thing after all.

This edition of the book was published in 1942, and most of the contemporaneous front pages are war-related. So what these headlines all seem to encapsulate is what we at the Tribune would call a “wrap”: a roundup of the day’s events on a number of fronts without a particularly strong lead item. This is something else the semicolon head is suited for: not just huge stories where every paragraph might deserve its own headline, but long-running stories that require a wider perspective to grasp them fully. Give or take a major breakthrough, it seemed newspapers understood even at the time that the war was so all-encompassing as to only be properly understood in the round.

None the less, it’s interesting to see wrap stories running as front-page leads. At the Tribune, they are very much second-order items, destined for an inside spread; you know when you pick up “polswrap23” from the queue that it can be cut without too much anguish from management.* In 1940s America, it was clearly different: perhaps because the war was always the biggest story in town, like the pandemic is today. Even so, though, modern Fleet Street papers would never settle for a roundup as the splash; in their ferociously competitive market, they would usually try to lead with a single-aspect scoop on Covid, however manufactured it might be, and save the wrap for page seven.

Wherever they end up, though, you’ve still got to write furniture for them, which is another reason to mourn the unpopularity of the semicolon hed. The reductive temptation is simply to write a simple headline based only on the first item in the article. If you try to capture the portfolio nature of the piece, modern practice would be to use conjunctions – “as” or “while”. But these hint at a causative, or at least thematic, relationship between the clauses, when what you really want to do is write multiple, unconnected headlines. Semicolons are perfect for that; if only journalism wasn’t so afraid of them.

*In this respect, wrap stories differ significantly from the blow-by-blow, long-form features that back up major front-page investigations. At the Tribune these are, rather unexpectedly, known as “guts”, meaning that otherwise cardigan-wearing desk editors start sounding like Vince Lombardi when they’re late: “Where’s the gut? Have we got the gut?”

That hint of print

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“Sometimes,” says Andrew Marr, halfway through the Sunday paper review, “the best front pages are the ones online.” And he turns to an image of the tabloid Independent.

But of course, as we have previously discussed, the modern Independent front page is a curious thing. It is online, in the sense that it only exists virtually: the paper stopped printing in 2016. But in appearance, concept and execution, it relies on the language of print. It exists almost exclusively to be included in “what the papers say” roundups, where the visual rhetoric of the front page still has greater impact than a web article called up on an iPad. It is not a native digital format: the Independent’s true front page these days is its homepage, which looks very similar to other digital news fronts, and suffers from the same problem of being updated too often and too quickly to ever serve as a snapshot of a calendar day.

Another curious thing about it is that it still looks the same as it did when the paper stopped printing in 2016 – still with a visually dramatic single story next to the distinctive vertical masthead. In fact, that look dates all the way back to 2013; since that time, for instance, the Financial Times, Telegraph and Guardian have all been redesigned. Will the Independent’s digital front page ever be redesigned as well? Or will it have to stay as it is, fossilised by the necessity of reminding viewers of the time when it was a newspaper too?

The front page that never died

What can you tell from these front pages, just by looking? They’re very design-conscious, with that vertical masthead; socially left-leaning, judging from the columnists in the skybox; highbrow, judging by the news stories, in a broadsheet-turned-tabloid way. Oh, and none of them are real.

In March 2016, the Independent’s owners gave up producing a print newspaper altogether and went online-only. But ever since, they have produced a facsimile front page, entirely for distribution online, in the style of their last ever edition. Look closer and you notice that there is no issue number or price in the masthead. In real life, the bylines, captions and body text would be disproportionately big, like a large-print book; but that improves their legibility on screen, which is the only place they will be ever be read.

Whether Independent Print Ltd (still so named) wants to produce something that sums up the day better than any online news format yet can, or whether it just doesn’t want to give up its chance to set the agenda on What The Papers Say, it remains as wedded to its old-media traditions as it can still afford to be. It may have had to give up printing a newspaper, but it hasn’t given up having a front page.