The Guardian will turn 195 in 2016. If we could step back 50 years and let the staff of 1966 know that the newspaper would be alive and well today, they would undoubtedly greet the news with relief, and probably a good dose of surprise.
Fresh from its gutsy leap south, the Guardian of 1966 had a huge challenge ahead. Printing in two cities put a strain on the company and it would take more than a change of name to wipe out the provincial feel of the former Manchester Guardian and set it up as a real competitor in the London market. Unfortunately, circumstances were not exactly favourable. Evidence for this is scattered throughout the records of the GNM Archive.
Laurence Prestwich Scott’s records from his time as chairman of the Manchester Guardian & Evening News (1949-1973) contain disappointing circulation and advertising figures and, more worryingly still, correspondence relating to his plans to merge the Guardian with the Times. The merger was abandoned because editor Alistair Hetherington won the support of the Scott Trustees in opposing it, and because the Times found a more attractive solution to its own financial insecurities, rather than because Scott was convinced that the Guardian could make it in London alone. Jim Markwick, later GMG Chief Executive, admits in his oral history interview that he felt ‘the whole London thing had really gone prospectively belly-up in late 1966’, and he only decided to return to it from New York in 1967 because he had a Harvard place lined up for ’68 anyway, and might as well ‘give it a whirl’ in the meantime.
Some of the causes were external (Markwick tells a ‘tale of fast growing interest rates, devaluation … investment revenue had slumped’), but some were not. He recalls that ‘it was the advertisement condition that was exercising everyone’s mind’ and it was this that, according to Scott’s Chairman’s Statement for April 1967, left the company in ‘a most dangerous situation ... in which it was momentarily trading at a loss’. It wasn’t a problem unique to the Guardian, but Gerry Taylor, who joined in 1967, remembers how bad things were - the paper announcing his arrival carried only one display advertisement. Circulation figures and advertising rates were caught in a vicious circle: the Guardian could not charge more to place adverts in the paper unless they could show they had enough readers to make it worthwhile; it could not reach more readers without lowering the paper’s cover price, which would spell bankruptcy for the Guardian while income from adverts was so low.
Meanwhile, London printing wasn’t going to plan and, according to Geoffrey Taylor’s history of the Guardian, a lack of funding and attention for the editorial side of things meant that ‘the paper was stale. The sport was pedestrian, the financial news unreliable, the features unreadable’.
The Guardian was being kept alive by the profits of the more lucrative Manchester Evening News (MEN), also owned by the Scott Trust. In Gerry Taylor’s words, at best ‘The Manchester Evening News made a million, and the Guardian lost a million’ – an unfortunate arrangement when the MEN was, according to journalist Harry Jackson, ‘going through a bad patch’ itself. In 1967, Markwick was tasked with separating out the concerns of the two publications, leaving managers free to make changes to each according to its own needs.
A more separate Guardian needed a managing director of its own - and got one in the form of Peter Gibbings, a barrister then working as circulation manager and deputy director of the Observer. Harry Jackson is by no means alone in identifying this as the turning point for a newspaper in need of dramatic change – in his oral history he claims that Gibbings ‘frankly did save the paper’. Gibbings’ commercial background made his attitude to advertisements and marketing refreshing at a newspaper steeped in editorial tradition. He brought in an advertising director - Gerry Taylor - straight from advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather, and together they set about reforming, and rescuing, the newspaper.
On 3 February 1969, in spite of job losses and money-saving cuts, readers received a newly redesigned Guardian, with a fresh masthead and extensive editorial reorganisation. Gone were the days, though, when staff could sit back and hope that the redesign would automatically raise circulation and adverting income by its merits alone. A new energy had been injected into the Guardian’s commercial affairs. Instead of raising advertising fees, Taylor recalls in his oral history how he ‘slashed rates and bargained and did deals’. He swept through the advertising reps’ torpid culture of long, boozy lunches - even retitling the job ‘sales executive’ in an effort to ‘smarten it up’.
He had time for marketing (historically a ‘concept somewhat foreign at the Guardian’, according to Geoffrey Taylor) and together with Gibbings made an effort not only to identify and celebrate the Guardian’s existing qualities and readers, but also to use these strengths to focus ad sales techniques. As a result, he recognised the potential value of small ads, and rapidly hired ‘a team of girls’ to sell more classifieds. He was building on the Guardian’s existing reputation as ‘a place where women worked’, as well as his own memories of life on the other side of the negotiating table (where ‘it was so unusual to be sold to by a woman’, that he’d once been put on the back foot with embarrassment about paying for a saleswoman’s business lunch).
Culture change is rarely welcomed and journalist Tim Radford remembers that ‘people could be snobby about [Taylor]’, who often seemed to be ‘saying the wrong thing’. Taylor himself acknowledged that, as his Guardian career progressed, he ‘may have had a reputation for being a bit frivolous with jobs and getting rid of people quickly ... but it was jolly hard to find people who were good enough to stick!’ Universal popularity proved unnecessary though, and Taylor went on to become managing director when Gibbings took over Laurence Scott’s role as chair in 1973.
The 1970s saw a great investment in small ads at the Guardian, and a renewed focus on marketing. Radford recalls the effect this had on journalists’ knowledge of their readers. Having previously assumed that they were read by ‘teachers and social workers who wore leg warmers and drove Volvos and gave lots of money to Oxfam and were inclined to have a son on the dole or something’, they learned that ‘Guardian women spent more on cosmetics, and especially the sort that were tested on rabbits, than any other paper and that they flew the Atlantic more than any other paper and that they spent more on hi-fi equipment than in any other paper’. Beyond the obvious advantages to a writer of knowing who is reading your work, this kind of information had clear benefits from an advertisement sales point of view and it was not wasted.
By 1972, the financial crisis had settled down, and Markwick felt that things were going ‘much, much better’ at the Guardian, which had reached ‘a level playing field’ with the rest of the London press and begun to feel like a bona fide national newspaper (‘it even had racing!’). As Peter Preston has noted, ‘there’s never a safe haven’ in newspapers. The next challenge was, and always is, just around the corner. Nevertheless, the Guardian emerged from its 60s crisis a little more secure, a little more flexible and a little better acquainted with its readers - and so a lot more prepared for the ups and downs of the 50 years that followed.
Further Reading:
- Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: The History of the Guardian 1956-1988 (1993)
- Peter Preston, Success has many fathers in Michael McNay (ed), Newsroom: The Guardian past and present (2002)
- Goodbye to Manchester
- Records of the Chairman of the Manchester Guardian and Evening News Limited (1920-1978)
- Jim Markwick oral history
- Gerry Taylor oral history
- Harry Jackson oral history
- Tim Radford oral history
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