Paul Revere, the famous folk hero of the American Revolution, may not have actually shouted “The British are coming!” as he alerted Massachusetts to the march of King George III’s rebellion-quashing troops.
But if the whistleblowing patriot were alive today – and had developed an interest in the US media landscape – he would be well within his rights to sound the alarm, given the increasing march of the British into American journalism.
In the past 12 months, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and most recently, the Washington Post, have all appointed British bosses. The Times – the UK version – is beefing up its US office, after recent expansions by fellow British publications the Independent and the Sun, as British news organizations seek to attract American readers.
The BBC, too, has hired a slew of journalists as it seeks to crack the US market, while the Guardian and the Daily Mail have had dedicated US offices for more than a decade.
If the latter efforts are about British organizations seeking the readers – and the money – available in a country that has five times the population of the UK, the apparent trend for American news companies to hire Britons seems to suggest an enduring admiration in the US for UK news sensibilities.
The most recent organization to call for a Briton is the Washington Post, which this week announced Will Lewis as its publisher and CEO. The London-born Lewis, who was previously the editor of the Daily Telegraph and spent six years as publisher of the Wall Street Journal, will officially start in January.
Lewis takes over at a difficult time. After Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013, the paper enjoyed years of profitability, but it began to flounder in 2022 and is on track to lose $100m this year. In October, the Post said it would cut 240 jobs across the organization (it has 2,600 employees, 1,000 of whom are journalists) citing “overly optimistic” projections for traffic, subscriptions and advertising.
The Wall Street Journal, another legacy American newspaper, turned to its own Briton earlier this year. Emma Tucker, previously the editor of the British newspaper the Sunday Times – like the Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch – took over at the newspaper in February, and has already overseen the departure of several of its most senior journalists.
That included Kristina O’Neill, the long-term editor of the WSJ magazine, and her husband, Magnus Berger. “A fashion power couple”, according to New York magazine, O’Neill was a regular on fashion runways and cultivated a slew of famous contacts, including Gwyneth Paltrow and the model Karlie Kloss. It’s that sort of glitzy world that Tucker now finds herself in as she seeks to boost the rather staid image of the Journal.
The glamour of the role taken over by Tucker, described by the Journal in her hiring announcement as a “brilliant, inspiring editor”, is a far cry from the British incursion of the early 2010s, when the Guardian and the Daily Mail established offices in Manhattan, charged with producing journalism for a US audience.
MailOnline, the digital offering of the Daily Mail, has become, as of September, the 12th-most-visited outlet in the US (the Guardian ranked 18th), but it started out in somewhat chaotic beginnings in lower Manhattan.
Staffed by young journalists shipped out from the Mail’s UK mothership, the American operation was led by Martin Clarke, the combustible Briton behind the success of the MailOnline website. In those early days, when incoming UK staff were housed in dormitory-like accommodation in Little Italy, everyone was required to chip in for the good of the newsroom.
That included Clarke himself. On one occasion, the editor’s role extended to removing dog feces from outside the front of the office before a visit from Paul Dacre, the big boss of the Mail Group.
Mark Thompson, former director general of the BBC and former chief executive at the New York Times, is charged with clearing up a different kind of mess at CNN, the cable news channel where he was hired as chief executive earlier this year.
Under the disastrous leadership of Chris Licht, Thompson’s predecessor, CNN saw top anchors leave and ratings plunge.
An apparent attempt by Licht to move the network’s coverage to an imagined political center, typified by the widely criticized decision to host a town hall with Donald Trump in May, was among the issues that angered staff, while historically low ratings and shrinking profits upset bosses.
Enter Thompson, who spent eight years as head of the BBC, before revitalizing an ailing New York Times after he joined in 2012.
“I’ve long admired Mark’s transformative leadership and his ability to inspire organizations to raise their own ambitions and sense of what’s possible … and achieve it,” David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros Discovery, which owns CNN, told staff in a memo announcing Thompson’s appointment.
Away from Zaslav’s rather beige statement, there is a sense that British media executives may be sought after for a particular set of skills: a more tenacious, urgent style.
Tucker, for one, has reportedly already mused: “What do they all do all day?” of her American colleagues at the Journal. Bezos, the Amazon founder turned space enthusiast who is the world’s second richest man, cited Lewis’s experience “first and foremost as a journalist” in announcing his hiring at the Post.
The British incursion is not necessarily a new phenomenon. A decade ago, Piers Morgan, the emotional 58-year-old broadcaster who spent Thursday insisting he could beat Louis Theroux in a fight, landed his own show at CNN, and comedian John Oliver began his rise on The Daily Show. Gerard Baker, another Briton, edited the Journal from 2013 to 2018, while Deborah Turness, now CEO of BBC News, spent four years in charge of NBC News.
The British, David Carr of the New York Times wrote at the time, tend to have a grittier type of journalism: founded on a necessary scramble for news and a rush to publish it which can contrast with the more self-serious, we’re-doing-God’s-work-here nobility of some American newspapers.
“With more than a dozen newspapers that compete for national attention and a publishing model that is based on appealing to readers far more than advertisers, the British news media market is a brutal and competitive crucible; it breeds frankness, excellence and a fair amount of excess,” Carr wrote.
“In that context, American journalism’s historical values of objectivity and fairness seem quaint.”
With the recent influx of British bosses and interloping UK news outlets, those principles clearly still have an appeal. While Revere’s 1775 warnings of a redcoat invasion managed to quell the British, in 2023, any attempt at issuing a warning has surely come too late.
