The small - but, doubtless, high quality - band of people who read both this blog and my column in the London Evening Standard will note a rather obvious disparity between what I wrote here yesterday about the appointment of Will Lewis as Daily Telegraph editor and what appears in today's Standard. Yesterday I pronounced that he was the right man but given the job at the wrong time. But an hour or two in journalism, as we all know, is an age. So, after more phone conversations, and more thought, I came to see the logic of giving Lewis the editor's chair at this point after all.
So this is my understanding of the Telegraph's logic. Lewis is the only senior editorial figure who knows what must be achieved by the integrated newsroom at the Telegraph's new office in Victoria. He, and senior management (most notably, the ceo, Murdoch MacLennan), also know that they need to achieve this as soon as possible. The learning curve may be steep but it must be climbed in the shortest possible time if the papers are to succeed in this new multi-platform world of journalism. (See Shane Richmond below). To accomplish this, it is important that Lewis has the power and authority of editor. Of course, that implies that the man who has been forced to give up his role as acting editor, John Bryant, could not be trusted to give the fullest possible support to Lewis during the difficult period of readjustment (and I'll come back to that in a moment).
Lewis is, in effect, going to be Mao Tse Tung in the Telegraph's Great Leap Forward. He will be Leader and Teacher as he takes the Daily Telegraph into the digital age, ensuring that everyone understands both the philosophy and practice outlined in his Little Red Book: the "touchpoints" with their rolling deadlines, the instant transmission of news, when to blog and when to podcast, how to create pdfs (and what to put in them) and so on. He also has to drive through the immense cultural changes in the newsroom itself with its wholly new way of operating from its revolutionary "hub".
In order to achieve this, Lewis will need to employ a judicious mixture of tact and bloodymindedness. But he can't hope to do it if he is being undermined. Given the nature of newspaper production against the clock, with at least five key deadlines throughout the day, there is going to be very little time for debate. Lewis must be able to call the shots. In a popular paper environment, where the editor's word is law and the staff jump to it without question, this state of affairs would hardly be a matter for comment. In a serious broadsheet, and taking into account that it is Britain's most conservative paper, this is a radical situation.
So, in sum, I now see why Lewis has been elevated. I'm not saying that he will pull it off, but he has been given a unique opportunity to make a name for himself. He has no experience of editing a traditional paper. But maybe, just maybe, that doesn't matter because he isn't going to be thinking of how it used to be done, only how it can be done. Then again, the newsprint Daily Telegraph remains a big seller and, at the last count, had more than 2m regular readers a day. That audience still needs to be served in the old way and any failure to do so risks a further decline in sales. Lewis will need to keep in mind all the things that still concern his newspaper readers, such as the paper's rather incoherent stance on the current Conservative party and the post-Blair Labour government.
Now let me turn to Bryant, who is supposedly resuming his role as editor-in-chief. His power in that post is surely diminished by the strength of Lewis and that of the Sunday Telegraph's admirable editor, Patience Wheatcroft. But everyone also recognises that he has done a fine job in the past year. He has steadied a ship that appeared to be going off course. But he was unable to grasp the Lewis revolution.
And that brings me to an entirely different point: in recent weeks, despite my scepticism - informed by voices within the Telegraph editorial staff - I have been assured by the Telegraph's official spokespeople that Bryant has been nothing but happy with the new plans for the paper. I received complaints that I was overstating his disaffection. On that basis, I was naive enough to offer an apology for getting it so wrong. But now I am told that "it is a matter of public record" that Bryant was out of sorts with the changes. That really is rich, is it not? I was part of the "public record", after all. I'm afraid that I'm going to be treating my "guidance" from Telegraph PRs with even greater scepticism in future, and I apologise to those staff who have told me that I was being misled.
Finally, then, let me wish Mao Tse Will the best of luck. There's no doubt that the rest of Fleet Street is going to be watching his every move. If he succeeds, he will be copied. The mistakes he makes will be magnified and, of course, they will provide lessons to those papers that will inevitably introduce integrated multi-media newsrooms in future. It's going to be a bumpy ride. But there cannot be a Great Leap Backward now.
