LET THY WORDS BE FEWER
The press: Paul Johnson on
the way in which photographs are taking over quality newspapers
ARE Britain's quality daily newspapers going downmarket? The question is worth asking against the background of their fierce circulation struggles. In May the Times sold an average of 396,268 copies, the Independent 383,017 and the Guardian 419,949. These relative positions are con- firmed by the latest six-monthly averages, which shows the Guardian (which has been spending a lot on promotion schemes) up by a marginal 0.6 per cent, and the Times and the Independent, both short of cash, down by 4.9 and 3.3. per cent respectively. Daily Telegraph ABC figures are not avail- able, pending the results of a voucher pro- motion, but we can take it they are a little under 1,100,000. That puts it well ahead of the other qualities but it nonetheless com- petes ferociously with them and, at the same time, keeps its eye closely on the bet- ter tabloids such as the Daily Mail.
One consequence is that the 'picture' people, as opposed to the 'word' people, are in danger of getting the upper hand. Since the Wapping Revolution, newspa- pers have become bigger, and I have point- ed out more than once that, especially at the weekend, there is almost too much to read. That remains true. It is also true that, since the unions were beaten, much more money has been available for foreign news coverage, which has improved mark- edly. But of the extra words now printed, most are in features, reviews and the like, and in the extra space given to news cover- age, the prime beneficiaries have not been reporters and correspondents but photog- raphers and graphic artists.
You can define a popular paper as one which habitually gives more space to pic- tures than to text. By this definition, the qualities are certainly going downmarket. Even in the parliamentary pages, tradition- ally a dense-text section of the qualities, photos are getting bigger. MPs now com- plain regularly to me about the shrinkage of space devoted to their doings. It may be that this represents an editorial judgment on the declining importance of Parliament as sovereignty is handed over to the Euro- pean Community, and a growing lack of reader interest in what MPs say in the chamber. At all events, on a typical day last week, Tuesday, the Times gave only 74 column-inches to Parliament, of which 19 were consumed by a picture. The Indepen- dent had 71 column-inches, 16 of them illustration. The figures for the Telegraph were 101 and 19, and for the Guardian 99 and 20. It is not uncommon now in a polit- ical story — the intervention of the Mili- tant candidate Lesley Mahmood in the Liverpool by-election was an example for quality newspapers to give more space to pictures than to text. Thus last Tuesday the Guardian, for instance, gave 32 col- umn inches to an enormous mugshot of Mrs Mahmood, and only 14 to the text.
Yet home political stories, on the whole, are less subject to the visual takeover than others. The latest sign of the downgrading of words is the ratio of pictures-to-text in main news stories. Last Tuesday, the front pages of all four qualities gave enormous space to England's test victory. The pic- ture printed by the Guardian occupied 36 column inches, the text a mere nine. On the Times the figures were 28.5 to seven. The Independent had 28 inches of photo, 14 of text. The Telegraph, using wider columns, had 28 to six. You may say: yes, but this was an important test occasion, the first England home victory over the West Indies in more than two decades, and sport naturally lends itself to illustra- tion. True enough, but until recently the front pages would merely have carried the news of the win in a couple of quiet para- graphs, and the photo razmataz would have been on the sports pages.
Moreover, visual material is now becoming dominant in all kinds of stories published in the qualities. On Monday this week, the Times, Guardian, Telegraph and Financial Times all displayed prominently on their front pages the same photo of Fil- ipino children beside cars covered in ash from an erupting volcano. The FT gave 18 column inches to the text of the story and a map, 20 to the photo. The Guardian's photo took up 35 column-inches, the text only 12.5. The Telegraph gave 99 column- inches to various photos of the eruption, 17 inches to text. The Times 63.5 column-inch- es of text, 10.5 to a map and 57.5 to pho- tographs. The Independent was the odd man out, preferring to decorate its front pages with the rubbish mountain Labour is piling up in Liverpool. This divided up into 15 column-inches of text and 31 of photo, and the inside coverage of the volcano was 21 column-inches of text and 22 of picture.
I have devised a further test: the number of instances in any one issue in which the text-picture ratio favours the photographer. For the purpose of the test, I have confined myself to the news pages and have exclud- ed picture-material chosen simply for its visual impact and accompanied merely by a short caption. Last Tuesday, I find, the Guardian and Independent each ran five news stories in which the picture occupied more space than the words. The Times and Telegraph ran six each. This Monday, four such stories appeared in the Guardian, 10 in the Independent, three in the Times, seven in the Telegraph. It is a debatable point which of the qualities started the move towards photo-journalism. Some would say the Guardian, others the Inde- pendent, which from the start helped to make a name for itself by well-chosen and prominently displayed photos. The readers seem to like it and all four now play the same game: my calculations show there is little to chose between them. The Financial Times, though still essentially a text paper, is moving in the same direction. In short the qualities have accepted the logic of the television age and give their message in- creasingly through images as well as words. Well: languages began as pictograms, and it may be that as educational standards fall, and civilisation recedes, such retrogression is inevitable. But you can't expect us word- smiths to welcome the advent of the quality pictographic newspaper.
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