Media Matters
After nearly 40 years, the tycoon is set to pull off his dream merger
When Rupert Murdoch bought the Times and Sunday Times in February 1981, he was asked by the Thatcher government to give an undertaking that he would not merge them. The worry was that Murdoch might close the loss-making Times, which then sold around 280,000 copies a day. The much more successful Sunday Times, by contrast, had a circulation of over 1.4 million, and was profitable.
Thirty-eight years later, Murdoch has asked the government whether he can amalgamate the editorial departments of the two newspapers in order to cut his overheads. Jeremy Wright, the Culture Secretary, has said he is ‘minded’ to let this happen – which means it will.
But a lot has changed in nearly four decades. With a daily sale of just over 400,000, the Times is doing much better than it was in 1981, while the Sunday Times’s circulation of about 700,000 is slightly less than half of what it was when the Australian media tycoon acquired it all those years ago.
There are several reasons for this role reversal. In general, Sunday titles have fared less well than Monday to Saturday ones. The Times, meanwhile, has outperformed all other dailies in the quality market. In recent years, it has seemed sprightlier than its sometimes rather leaden Sunday sister.
So whereas 38 years ago the fear was for the Times, it is now for the Sunday Times. Jitters are being experienced among those who work for the paper, some of whom believe that Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of the parent company, News UK, and a woman with a reputation for ruthlessness, is already measuring the coffins. The titles together employ about 500 journalists, and many expect the axe to fall disproportionately harshly on those who work for the Sunday.
It is also pointed out that John Witherow, who now edits the Times, did the same job on the Sunday Times between 1995 and 2013. (It’s interesting that he has blossomed much more in his present position than he did in his former one.) Witherow certainly knows where the levers and pulleys are to be found on his old paper, whose editor, Martin Ivens, was his deputy for many years.
Rupert Murdoch is of course loathed in parts of what was once called Fleet Street – so many people will automatically assume that the merger is a bad idea. But actually there’s no good reason it shouldn’t go ahead. Conditions are tough for all newspaper groups, as print circulation falls ineluctably (the Times’s feisty performance over the past four decades is an exception) and digital journalism turns out to be less lucrative than was hoped. All other daily newspapers now share resources in varying degrees with their Sunday siblings in order to reduce costs. It hasn’t so far happened in the case of the Times and Sunday Times only because of the undertaking Murdoch gave in 1981.
All the same, some editorial mergers in the past have been badly done. These two papers have very different characters and readerships. (For example, the establishment Times opposed Brexit, while the more buccaneering Sunday Times supported it.) It is absolutely fine to have the same foreign correspondents or sports journalists writing for both titles. The danger arises when what might be called the brain of one paper is appropriated by the other.
If the Sunday Times were to lose its own editor, deputy editor, senior writers and columnists – all of whom are attuned to the rhythms and requirements of once-a-week journalism – it would cease being a distinctive Sunday newspaper and become merely an adjunct of the Times. That would be unlikely to go down well with its already diminishing band of readers.
Ian Mcewan has a bone to pick with the BBC. Auntie gratuitously introduced a ‘dangling participle’ into his latest novel, Machines Like Me, during its recent reading on Radio 4 by the actor Anton Lesser.
Mcewan happens to be very sensitive on the subject. Almost 20 years ago he wrote an eloquent memoir in the Guardian in which he confessed to having included a ‘dangler’ many years previously in a letter of rebuke to the Spectator that he had drafted in a hurry. He had passed this letter around literary lights such as Martin Amis and Julian Barnes during lunch at Bertorelli’s restaurant before his error was pointed out to him in a kindly way by the critic Jeremy Treglown. ‘Osso bucco never tasted so vile,’ wrote Mcewan in his newspaper piece.
You may therefore imagine my surprise when I heard the following sentence in Lesser’s reading of Mcewan’s novel: ‘Walking behind him, the butter dish caught my eye.’ What shame!
And yet a thorough search of Machines Like Me establishes that nowhere in the novel does this faux pas appear. It was entirely the work of the BBC, or its ungrammatical abridgers. Ian Mcewan has been made to appear guilty of the last stylistic crime in the world he would want to commit.