One day while editing The Sun I came to a momentous conclusion about my
colleagues: they weren’t academic enough. Glancing round the newsroom I
simply couldn’t see University Challenge material. There wasn’t
much evidence of Blue Peter material either.
A revolution was needed. A new hiring policy would be adopted to raise the IQ
in the newsroom. Out would go the traditional employment pool of Britain’s
No 1 selling newspaper, ie, the devious, the deceitful and those with
alcohol-dependency issues.
Instead, from now on, all the new reporters would come from Oxbridge. It would
be brains, brains and more brains.
The Sun, as you may have already concluded, is not the natural dropping
off point for academia, but slowly, as word spread, the firsts and PhDs
began making their way to my office. I hired them in a matter of seconds.
Balliol College, Oxford, you’re in. Trinity, Cambridge sign here, Magdalen,
Oxford, welcome aboard. Satisfied that my bold move would take The Sun
to a higher plain I waited for the results. They were not forthcoming. In
fact, very little emerged from my new hirelings. Most disappointing.
I had to get to the bottom of this. It became clear that with their keen and
analytical minds they had made a fatal mistake — they had continued
investigating every story to the point where they had satisfield themselves
that there was no story at all. This would not do.
I called in one of the super-brains and explained a philosophy that had served
me and the paper reasonably well over the years. The reporter leant forward
with an earnest look as I told him the secret: if a story sounded true it
probably was true and therefore should appear in the paper or there would be
lots of white, unexplained spaces.
Whether it was my pep talk or the sense that The Sun was not for them I
will never know, but over the months ahead they slowly headed for the door
never to return.
I had only one O level and it was a massive disappointment that I was not to
be surrounded by clever clogs, but we were now short of reporters and
therefore a fresh approach was needed — one that I could not pass by the HR
department.
From this day forth, we would employ only women with large breasts. You may
not be all that surprised that this initiative was a major success. It
became clear that a grisly and overworked chief superintendent at a murder
scene responds more warmly to questions from a lady with a hint of cleavage
than a balding newshound with four pints of Boddingtons on his breath. And,
frankly, who can blame him.
Even to me it came as something of a shock that breasts beats brains, but you
have to embrace change, don’t you?
So it was with some sense of trepidation that I arrived in Cambridge the other
day to see a new tabloid that was entirely run by the brains department.
It’s called The Tab, an online newspaper, aimed at the 15,000
students in the city. And to give them credit, the editorial staff — all
students at Cambridge — have embraced the tabloid world I know and love.
There are photo-shoots of attractive students — both male and female — called
“tab totty”, stories about would-be rap stars in their midst, new boy bands
plucked from the university’s a cappella choir as well as requests to
readers to rate handsome couples as hot or not.
The Tab — full name Cambridgetab.co.uk — has only been going for six
weeks and already receives 7,000 to 10,000 hits a day. They have 50-strong
editorial staff — that’s more than The Independent! —
made up of newshounds, columnists, sports writers and editors. They write
most of their stuff on iPhones using open-source apps that put their words
straight on to the site.
On my day trip to Cambridge I was expecting to be treated as a vile piece of
tabloid filth — it’s a position I am well used to. At the height of the
Elton John libel row in 1988 — The Sun had to pay £1 million
damages for some untrue stories about him and rent boys — I even refused to
shake my own hand. But the world has moved on. Populism dominates every
youngster’s life — aren’t Facebook and MySpace simply the online children of
the Sun generation? The photos, the gossip, the news. It’s what they
live for.
Everywhere I went I was met with openness. Take my encounter with The Tab’s
literary reviewer. I was introduced to him in the pub where he was sipping
what I hope was, at 11am, his first beer of the day. I asked how he was able
to do his studies and read so many books. “Oh, that’s simple,” he replied.
“I don’t read any of the books. I simply compare the covers and urge my
readers to buy the one that I like best.”
This boy will go far.
The speed with which The Tab brings university news to the students
gives it the edge over its print rivals Varsity and the student union
newspaper. Competition has reached the kind of open warfare witnessed only
between Lidl and Tesco. When the traditional May Week balls were threatened
by protests from the locals over noise and too much alcohol (shurely not —
Ed.), The Tab ran the story a full week ahead of Varsity. One Tab
writer told me: “I used to be quite friendly with the editor of Varsity,
but once we started Tab she cut me dead in the street . . . In fact
she turned her head into the wall the other day.”
(I used to hate the Editor of the Daily Mirror in the same way when he
sold four million a day and we were the underdog. Now that The Sun is
top dog by many millions while the Mirror manages only just over a
million a day, I feel vaguely sorry for him for having such a bloody awful
job and also being forced to support Brown every day. Life doesn’t get much
worse than that.) The Tab is run jointly by a bright and ambitious
trio. They are Jack Rivlin, aged 20, from Chiswick, West London, who is in
his third year at Downing College studying politics. He is the great-nephew
of the man who invented bubblegum. Good tabloid background.
George Marangos-Gilks, 22, is halfEnglish, half-Cypriot, has lived all over
the world and is studying politics at Downing. His dad is head of a United
Nation’s programme in India. The third editor is Taymoor Atighetchi, a
21-year-old British-Iranian studying history of art at Trinity College.
During his last year at school he ran a stall selling antiques on the
Portobello Road. Admirable entrepreneurial qualities.
As you can see brains galore but with the tabloid touch. Their HQ is the
Maypole pub in the heart of the city. The landlord has given them,
rent-free, a room over the pub. Why would he want 50 students wandering in
and out of his pub all day? Answers on a postcard please.
The sports department focuses almost exclusively on inter-college battles as
that proves to be of considerably more interest — if the crowds on the
touchline are anything to go by — than the interuniversity battles.
The fascinating thing is that I didn’t have to lecture the team on the joys of
tabloid — it was already in their genes. They knew what their audience
wanted — the secret of The Sun’s 40-year success.
Everywhere the editors went they took a digital video camera with them,
getting terrific interviews out of people such as Ozzie Akushie —Zeeko to
you and me — a second-year economics student who wants to be a rapper. I’m
no Simon Cowell but if I was a record producer I’d get the first train to
Cambridge (helpful hint: it leaves from King’s Cross) and sign up Zeeko.
So as I said farewell to Cambridge I realised that I made a mistake all those
years ago — I should have persevered with the brains. They are the tabloid
titans of today — and tomorrow.
And yet . . . By the time I got home, I found myself wondering how these
youngsters would deal with the rough and tumble of real politics — “the dark
actors playing games”, as the late weapons expert Dr David Kelly so
graphically put it.
John Major once asked me, just before the paper was to be printed, how we were
going to report Britain’s exit from the ERM, which was going to cost our
country around £5 billion, thanks to his ineptitude.
I told him we were going to pour a bucket of shit over him. My sense is that
the Cambridge mob are too middle class, too well-mannered, too educated to
pour anything but a bucket of Puligny-Montrachet over anyone’s head.
That’s their one drawback to a life in the tabloid arena. They were simply too
nice. How awful.
Kelvin MacKenzie was Editor of The Sun from 1981-94 and is chairman
of Myvideorights.com
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