Memo on Fleet Street

The lords of the British press, like everyone else in Britain, are on austerity rations. Last week, after a two-month trip to England to see how its restricted press is faring, TIME'S Press Editor Richard L. Williams reported:

Like the eggless breakfast and the eye-cup-sized jigger, the skinny London newspaper is a hard fact for a visitor to get used to. After eight lean years, British journalists are not used to it either. Wrote Lord Layton, chairman of London's Liberal News Chronicle, while head of the industry's newsprint rationing committee: "With international responsibilities second to none, our newspapers are among the smallest in the world. . . . You cannot build . . . a peaceful world on ignorance or breed world citizens if they have no access to knowledge."

The access to world news through British newspapers is necessarily small. The penny press prints four pages a day, the tabloids eight; Fleet Street's 15 dailies can be tucked under the arm more easily than a midweek copy of the hefty New York Times. Rather than drop pages, some editors, like Robert Barrington-Ward of the London Times, have chosen to save newsprint by dropping readers.

Jigsaw Puzzle. Britain's editors have found ways to give their readers (50 million plus, daily and Sunday) more & more news in less & less space. They have trimmed margins, shrunk headlines, fitted stories into pages like jigsaw puzzles, even used the "gutters" between pages. And they have sharpened their copy pencils: one of the sweeter uses of austerity has been a gain in crispness and readability.

This intensive cultivation makes it impossible to skim a "national" daily* like the Express or Daily Mail as you might glance through a big U.S. paper. There are too many items on a page, and a headline is craftily written less to tell the news than to lure the reader into the story. Having learned to condense, the press never intends to go back to "big" papers if it can help it. ("Big" was 24 pages; since British papers never depended on vast areas of display ads, they never had papers that Americans would call fat.)

What with the dollar pinch, there is no chance of going back, anyway. At least, not for years. Young Harold Wilson, president of the Board of Trade, has warned of another newsprint cut of about 7%. Newspapers can have only 115,812 tons of paper, 31% of prewar, for November through February. The government's allotment to itself: 20,500 tons (158%).

Dry Run. The years of grubby austerity have filled Fleet Street with a certain frustration--a neurosis Britain's hardy provincial papers seem to have escaped. "How can we train reporters," asked a London news editor, "when even a good man can go for weeks without getting a line into print? It's just a dry run, night after night." Some journalists have been overtaken by a creeping lethargy: it is hard to hustle for scoops when editions will sell out without them. "I keep feeling guilty," said a circulation manager. "Instead of talking people into buying more papers, I'm talking them into taking fewer. It isn't a proper way to do business."

Nevertheless, some editors still play the news in the way that (they were taught) will sell papers. They still give a quarter of their space to sports. If it means throwing U.N. into the hellbox, they find room for the day's crimes, knowing that the Sunday News of the World (circ. 7,500,000) was built on news of the half-world.

U.S. news rarely makes the front pages--unless it is such musicomedy stuff as the "Hollywood hearings." In general, the U.S. is covered by such grab-bag gossips as Don Iddon (in the Mail) and C. V. R. Thompson (in the Express). Without such serious correspondents as Sir Willmott Lewis of the Times and Alistair Cooke, the Manchester Guardian's man at U.N., and the shrewd jotters of the "American Survey" in Geoffrey Crowther's Economist, an American in London would feel hopelessly cut off from home.

There is a brighter side to the record. The emaciated British dailies have no room for the cuff-shooting political pundits who clutter up the U.S. press. Instead, they often make their points through cartoonists who are real caricaturists: alongside the artful sharpshooting of David Low, Strube, Vicky, Illingworth and even the Daily Worker's "Gabriel," much U.S. political cartooning seems as subtle as a paleolithic sledge hammer. London's newspapers and weekly journals alike print comment and criticism more literate and provocative than in most of the U.S. press. And the Sundays, led by the urbane, open-minded Observer and Lord Kernsley's Sunday Times, run no funnies but offer an influential, once-a-week type of commentary that is unknown in the U.S.

Whispers from Below. A good many proprietors of London's predominantly Tory press have felt that the Socialist government is gunning for them, taking away newsprint so they'll have less space to criticize Labor. The proprietors have also heard the whisper of mutiny from below. It was the National Union of Journalists that started the parliamentary ball rolling for a Royal Commission to investigate whether Britain's press is monopolistic. Now that the commission has settled down to work, the press isn't so alarmed. Oxford's Sir William David Ross, the chairman, is a gentleman and a scholar, and no man to let Labor use him.

Many people have tried to help the commission, or guide it. The Guardian, replying to a commission questionnaire, quoted from its late, great editor, in C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian:

"A newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. . . . At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply [of news] is not tainted. . . . Comment is free, but facts are sacred. . . . Comment also is justly subject to a self-imposed restraint. It is well to be frank; it is even better to be fair. This is an ideal. . . . We can but try, ask pardon for shortcomings, and there leave the matter."

* Thanks to geography and the far-darting teleprinter, a Fleet Street journal, by printing simultaneously in Manchester or Scotland, can be truly national, circulating almost from Land's End to John o' Groat's.

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