Even a week in, you can begin to sense an unexpected flaw in the Editor Osborne theory. At first glance, when the MP for Tatton and lord of BlackRock added the Evening Standard to his portfolio, there seemed lots of juice as George sniped away at the woman who had sacked him: a pro-Remain lead story here, an editorial there, a speech in the House that tied everything together.
And there’s been a good deal of that already – but without either Tatton or the House, which somehow diminishes both clout and resonance.
The Standard isn’t a must-read political paper. That role went west decades ago, after it dropped the late editions that kept Westminster afternoons in focus. Now it’s much more clearly a free paper, keen to be picked up by any passing hand – and relatively politically anodyne.
Sarah Sands, Osborne’s predecessor, has gone to edit the Today show, which she’ll surely do with judicious balance. Sands is a professional journalist, first and foremost, not a political campaigner. The paper she bequeathed to Osborne is interested enough in governments, but even more interested in entertainment and its attendant ads. This isn’t some Evening Tract. Readers may soon grow tired if it turns into the Tory party at war by other means. That’s not entertainment.
• You can debate whether 100 days of Trump have been good for the US, but there’s certainly no question that it’s been fruitful for America’s mainstream press. Just look at New York Times figures for the first quarter of 2017: a profit of $29m as the paper adds a tidal wave of 308,000 new digital subscriptions at a rate near 3,500 a day. Digital advertising – significantly enough – is up 19% year-on-year. Revenues are up 5%. But it’s the same old story of print decline, down almost 18% on the same period of 2016.
This, then, may be the transition we’ve talked about for years, the moment when online shoulders the burden of ensuring survival as print’s commercial potency drains away. And you can find parallel Trump boosts far and wide as, for instance, the Guardian tops 200,000 supportive members.
The president himself, of course, insists on berating journalists almost hourly – and scorning “the failing New York Times”. It’s a gorgeous irony that, in fact, he’s the saviour of the paper he despises, and that the most damaging thing he could do to bring it down would be to quit the Oval Office early and go golfing in Florida permanently.
