Paris terror attacks in print and online
Saturday 14 November, 2015
If you're looking for a quiet Friday night, a newspaper office is the place to be. The Saturday supplements are all printed; the news pages are largely filled with softish features planned and written earlier in the week in the knowledge that Friday was unlikely to throw up too many live stories since politicians (and newspaper executives) like to get away to the country as early as possible. Yesterday was unusual in that there was a strong news story in the bag: the killing of Mohammed Emwazi by an American drone was announced too late on Thursday to make the British papers, so there was still plenty of ground to cover for this morning's papers. The only things likely to disturb the peace of the night watch were Children in Need updates and the Spain v England football match. Staffing levels everywhere will therefore have been low. Those who think journalists are idle layabouts would do well to bear all that in mind when looking at today's papers and websites. My word, what a lot of work those elves did for their shoemaker bosses overnight. 
Here's the Telegraph for a start. Four editions - and there was at least one more, since my copy at home (a version of the second from the left) has 40 rather than 35 dead in the heading.
The final version had a couple of spreads inside, with the original Emwazi splash relegated to page 5, and then another on the drone strike that killed the Isis murderer. Words were a bit thin on the ground, but the commitment was there. 
The Times, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have changed much from start to finish. But the similarity of the first and final front pages belies the effort involved.
The paper was the only one to have the attacks in all editions - thanks to a delayed off-stone time to accommodate the football. Strange that no one else took advantage of that. The first explosions were heard near the Stade de France at about 8.30, and reports of the restaurant shooting came an hour later. But there was no real indication of the scale of the attacks - or their co-ordinated nature - until shortly before 10 o'clock. The Times got the story into the first, which went off stone at 10, then quickly slipped to drop the right-hand puff. The page in the middle of the triptych above went to press at 11.05. By the time the final slip went offstone at 1.45am, the paper's journalists had produced four versions of the front plus this set of inside pages, packed with live reports and analysis: 
And so it was across what used to be called Fleet Street (and in the regions - see some of their efforts in the panel on the right). The Mail, Mirror, i, Sun and Guardian all changed up two or three times and expanded on their planned inside coverage of Emwazi. The Independent, Express and Star opted for a single update.
The pictures below show how the front pages evolved through the night (apologies for the scruffy nature of some of them - they are photographs of real newspapers made of dead trees): 
All very commendable. But the next question is: was it worth all that effort?
Everyone knows that people no longer turn to newspapers for breaking news. Did it matter that the FT had no mention of the attacks in print, having gone to bed at 8pm? Barney Thompson, deputy editor on the paper's UK newsdesk, doesn't think it does and he explains why: 
The FT knows that nobody reads its front page to discover there were attacks in Paris the previous night.
We have about three times more web subscribers than print buyers, so we sensibly devote more time to that. Last night we had three corrs in France working with news editors in London and New York, plus Simon Kuper from inside the stadium. Today we have had people in NY, London and HK all day editing and updating the site while three Paris corrs, plus people in Brussels and Berlin, run around reporting. The call has just gone out for extra volunteers tomorrow. It really has been a web-first operation. 
It seems a reasonable argument - and this is how the website looked at six o'clock this evening.
Journalists who still live for the thunder of the presses - even if they are doing their thundering 50 miles away - will not lightly give up the thrill of the all-night rip-outs for papers they know only a few thousand will see. But there is more than sentimentality at play on a Friday night. The deadlines are earlier not so those execs can take off to their country seats, but because the print runs are bigger. The Saturday papers still sell more than those for the rest of the week. They are more visible, too. People will see them as they do the Sainsbury's run and might be tempted into an impulse buy - or at least a visit to the website when they get home. That is why the puffs get bigger and bigger every weekend. Only a few years ago, the puff would have been chucked out the moment the scale of a story like this became apparent, partly as a matter of taste and partly to maximise the potential for display and give the story room to breathe. Last night only the Telegraph dispensed with the blurb - and that decision may have been influenced by the oversized ad at the foot of the page. The Times (which offends SubScribe every Saturday with its giant Eat!) had signed up Bake-Off's Nadiya and wasn't about to surrender a millimetre of her promo. The Guardian was similarly wedded to its taste of autumn and the Mail to its Lego toy - although it surrendered its TV guide strapline. The Express and Star both took the simple route and slotted new material into the existing design, leaving the puffs - including, in the case of the Star, a semi-naked woman - undisturbed. Neither demonstrated any awareness that the surrounding material might jar with the splash, apparently believing that the function of every element of the page, including the lead story, was not to inform but to sell papers. And so we come back to the old battle between the commercial departments and journalists who want to tell their readers the news - and really care about that, whatever the Twitter cynics may think. The Sun threw out its column one puff, leaving only the little slot alongside the titlepiece to promote its TV mag. The Mirror also reined in for the later editions, putting its TV guide puff in the same place. 
But there you have to ask why? Why was there a puff for the supplement at all? Because it might bring in casual sales? That seems unlikely, given that this is what the passing shopper would have seen on the news stand.
A Christmas pudding. When you see something like that on a news day like this, it makes you want to weep for the old days. Barely a week goes by now without some paper - or at least a supplement - hiding its wares behind an advert; the Evening Standard hardly ever seems to have a proper front page these days. But the Standard is a freesheet. Is it reasonable for papers that want readers to part with cash to see their journalism to wrap that journalism in a Christmas pud? Newspapers need to make money to survive, so time to face reality perhaps. Nic Andrews, chief night editor at The Times, says that on reflection perhaps the top puff could have gone - but he had other things on his mind during a shift that ran from 10am to 3am.
A team of six subs stayed for that final edition and we printed a total of 89,000 copies of it at Knowsley and Broxbourne, so I believe it was well worth the effort. And the iPad and online editions were obviously able to take all the later material. We took the puffs off the side for the 11pm slip and probably should have removed the Nadiya one too later on, when the enormity of the event became more apparent. But, frankly, we were working too hard and fast to stop and reflect properly - and I bet we sold a few more copies by keeping it on.
As Andrews points out, the folk on duty through last night weren't serving only their print readers, they had to keep updating their online offerings in real time. So here are a few screen grabs from the home pages of newspaper sites this morning. In each case, I have cropped the picture at the point where the Paris coverage stops.
The Mail - which, as we know, is way ahead of the opposition in terms of reach - shows the greatest commitment to the story, filling three screensfull with it before moving on to the weather.
The sidebar of shame is in its usual place (I've truncated it here) and the only interruption to the coverage is a "flick through the pictures" box near the top, which is essentially the sidebar of shame in a different format. It's unfortunate that the slideshow had reached a woman in a bikini when I took the screen grab; the next one was of Andy Murray and his pregnant wife, which was equally out of place. The Daily Star (above the Mail) is all over the place by comparison. There's some Paris, then other news, a bit of reality TV then some football, then a block of pictures, then back to Paris and a lot of people getting stick for unfortunate jokes or tweets. It's a real hotchpotch, with the most egregious juxtaposition coming in the PICS block, which you can see enlarged below: 
The editorial v commercial problems are just as much in evidence on the web as in print, with the wraparound ads an unpleasant assault on the senses.
The Telegraph's Axa ad is horrendous: it attacks the editorial from the sides, then batters it into submission with a video incarnation across the top. Only the Mirror preserves the top of its home page for editorial; everyone else has at least a banner. You don't have to pay to see the Times's home page, which might explain why it was necessary for it to give Durex pride of place. The Star's Halifax ad seems most discreet in comparison. So what am I saying here? That the journos did a brilliant job and that their work is being shrouded by commercial concerns? Yes. The journos did do a good job. The ads are intrusive. Before I get too pious, perhaps it's worth looking at the "most read" panels on those websites to see what the readers care about. Paris claims nine of the top ten slots In the Telegraph, eight in the FT, and seven in the Guardian (life with big breasts is number eight). All five of the most-read stories on the Mirror site are about Paris - even if number one is Facebook "allowing" users to use the French flag on their profile pictures. On the Independent, four of the top five slots are occupied by coverage of the attacks, while the fifth goes to "transgender man's bloated stomach turns out to be baby bump". The strike rate is lower at the Times, where Paris claims three places in the top five, with the Top Gear producer suing Clarkson coming in at 3 and the death of Warren Mitchell at 5. On the Daily Star home page, however, four of the most-read stories are about football, while the fifth is "Europe can't send failed migrants back to Africa". But overall, perhaps I'm not being too precious. A few dozen journalists worked bloody hard last night to bring the news to their readers. And from the only statistics we have so far - those "most popular" panels - it seems that people wanted to read what they had to say. So from a position of total impartiality (born of four decades devoted to the trade), SubScribe declares journalism the winner. |
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