Letter from the Editor

THIS is the 10th edition of the Sunday Independent I’ve edited and I have yet to be in the same room as any of my new colleagues. We talk all the time, of course — video calls, phone calls, endless emails. But it’s not the same as being in the newsroom together. We’re working hard. We’re all making the best of the strange circumstances. But there’s something missing and we need it back.

Most people’s idea of how things work in newspaper office comes from watching movies like All the President’s Men, that unsurpassed classic about Watergate and how journalism can change the world.

It has many great scenes, but one in particular came to mind this week. The great Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the

Washington Post, is listening to reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein talk about new information from their sources. (Jason Robards is so convincing as Bradlee he could surely have done the job for real).

“Can we use their names?” asks Howard Simons, another senior editor.

“No,” says Bernstein. At this, Bradlee explodes: “Goddamit! When is somebody going to go on the record in this story?”

I thought of that scene because it reminded me of the cut and thrust of a newspaper office, the robust exchanges that often lie behind good copy.

As soon as I was offered this job, I started thinking ahead — a little nervously — to my first Sunday Independent conference meeting. In the movies, and in real life as we previously knew it, these meetings shape the content of a newspaper. It’s fair to say that the more lively they are, the better the end product for the reader.

In My Trade, his terrific book about journalism, Andrew Marr writes: “The only absolute disaster for a news conference is dullness, a sense that no one cares. If there isn’t electricity in the room, that paper is drifting. The drift in conference is followed by a drift in stories, then a drift in the readers’ attention, and a drift in sales.”

All true.

Creating electricity on a video conference call is hard. When somebody’s face is frozen on screen because of dodgy broadband, what comes out of their mouth doesn’t have quite the same resonance.

Sunday newspapers have a different rhythm to dailies. We have more time to put together our offering — and less of an excuse if it’s not as good as it should be. The world moves on quickly, so what sounds like a promising idea on Tuesday or Wednesday might seem old hat by Saturday. It’s all part of the challenge.

So what did we talk about this week, you might wonder? Well, the first of our video conferences didn’t start well. After nearly an hour without electricity — and just as I felt like ending the meeting early — a debate about the lockdown finally ignited. There was, as they say, a robust exchange of views – the kind that comes as a relief to any editor with a paper to fill. Full disclosure: I may have started it with what could only be described as a rant.

On Friday, the Government surprised us all by accelerating the release from lockdown rather faster than we had anticipated at that first meeting. So it meant rethinking our Covid-19 coverage, throwing out pieces already pencilled in, changing others and coming up with some new angles. As ever, more new stories emerged as the week went on, so we’ve ended up with a rather different paper to the one we’d talked about early in the week.

Now read on to see what we came up with. And take care, as the country enters a new phase in the lockdown exit tomorrow.