Peter Stothard on Editing Newspapers

Can books tell us much about what it’s like to edit a newspaper?

Peter Forster’s The Spike is probably the least well-known but the author does, unusually, set himself the task of describing, as he puts it, “the nature of the job, and the conditioning effect upon the person who does it”. The plot is rather trite, but he at least does give you some indication of what it’s like to see the news sked and have the power to decide what’s important in it.

And, having been an editor yourself, did you think it was an accurate portrayal?

Yes. Instead of describing high politics, the prime minister on the phone, proprietors breathing down your neck and all that tends to make up the caricature notion, he talks about the problems between the editor’s secretary and the secretary in the sports department, and the problems of having too many lunches in the same week with people you don’t need to have lunch with, and how easy it is to waste your time. He talks about primadonnas on the brink of resignation, and how lawyers and diarists have different standards of truth…

It’s not a great novel. To some extent it’s a novel of management with a romantic plot, but it does at least attempt to deal with the personal aspects of editing a newspaper. It’s a kind of cautionary tale. It’s got a wonderful opening line: “He eased himself into the chair behind the big desk and thought, ‘Well now it will be different’.” Now he was editor! And it describes all the things he thought he would do before he became the editor, and how they would be done. And the things that stop him doing all these things are not big things. They’re all the little things that I can recall so well. It is one book which describes the experience from the inside. Most of the books about newspaper editors tell it from the outside, from the point of view of people who are critical – of which Trollope’s is one of the most famous.

Let’s talk about Trollope’s The Warden.

The plot of The Warden has been a familiar one this year. It’s about middle-ranking, mostly decent people who have had financial privileges, which to them – in terms of their own internal logic and their own rules – are absolutely OK. Then there’s a protest and a leak. The Times gets hold of the story and suddenly everything is upside down...

There are no bad people in The Warden. The comparison with our own MPs is quite telling. The top churchmen always had most of the money once bequeathed to support the local pensioners. They justify that to themselves on the grounds that the church should make its own rules, and that society was better if it did. And only when it was given a harsh write-up in the press did it become clear that the internal, moral logic that they thought was perfectly fine actually wasn’t. And the warden loses his job, even though the whistleblower takes pity on him, goes to the man at The Times and says, look, can we call this whole thing off? And, of course, he can’t, because the thing by that stage had its own media momentum.

It’s always good to learn from critics of newspapers. Sometimes newspaper people feel that everyone is getting at them. In fact, newspaper editors do have a great deal of power, and it is sometimes possible to put abstract principles above the ordinary good. It’s always possible to forget the effect of what you are writing on the people you are writing about. However much newspaper editors try to stay close to their readers and to ordinary life, the prospect of becoming a distant figure is always there. The fictional editor of The Jupiter wasn’t called Tom Towers for nothing. He may not have been exactly in an ivory tower, but he was not easy to meet. And the notion that he could send off “the thunderbolt” from so far away was what upset Trollope so much, the power to fire and forget at no risk to yourself.

Now, I’m not saying that Trollope was correct, or that what Tom Towers does in The Warden wasn’t exactly the right thing to do – I’m sure it was – but, what Trollope explains is the effect the newspaper has not just on “bad people”, the people cleaning their moats at public expense, but the people doing things they thought were ordinary. There’s a clear link with what happened over the MPs’ expenses scandal last autumn: good people are dragged down with the bad. It is a nuanced book, which draws attention to that, and a good one for any editor to read.

Now Philip Knightley and The First Casualty. He first wrote this in the 1970s after Vietnam, and has subsequently updated it to include most of the more recent wars. Tell us about it.

Yes. It’s a pretty terrifying book for an editor to read, but I think it’s essential reading for anyone sending reporters into war. I think modern editors tend to feel quite superior to their predecessors, the ones who sent official reporters to the First World War, whose job was nothing but to make sure that people at home felt that everything was OK.