The Old Lady's New Face

Only eight times in its 181-year history did the Times of London deign to put news on Page One. Nelson's triumph at Trafalgar made it, though not Wellington's victory at Waterloo. The British general strike of 1926 got front-page treatment; not the outbreak of World War II. Winston Churchill never made the first page while he was alive; only his death put him there. Aside from those few departures from tradition, Page One has been devoted to notices and classified advertisements: secretaries looking for work, wives imploring their husbands to return, Tibetan refugees seeking funds to build a monastery in India.

Last week the Times belatedly followed the lead of the rest of the British press. It relegated the ads to page 2 and replaced them with any newspaper's main offering: the news. Disconcerted by the front-page switch from solid blocks of type to a reasonably sprightly makeup, a Times editorial writer commented: "It's like seeing a very old lady take off all her clothes and put on a miniskirt."

Out of the Museum. The striptease was necessary, for the old lady is being upstaged by the competition. Once called the Thunderer because its authoritative voice of Empire was heard around the world and heeded, today the Times has become more flexible in its politics, but is influential only with select members of the British Establishment and upper classes. While its own circulation has slipped 5,624 to 254,377 in the past five years, it has watched its chief competitors in the "quality" press--the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian--gradually win more readers. As Times Editor Sir William Haley, 64, put it in an editorial last week, "Uniqueness is not a virtue if it becomes mere eccentricity. There is no future for any newspaper as a museum piece."

It was not easy to make the change. The possibility was first discussed in 1964. "The Times is like a club," says Haley. "There is no campaigning or proselytizing for a view, and no violent opposition, either." Timesmen worried about the effect that Page One news would have on readers. After all, they had grown accustomed to opening to the middle of the paper for the news. For months, Timesmen manipulated sheaves of paper in an effort to arrive at the ideal format.

In the end, not very much was disturbed. Besides the front-page revision, a political cartoon has been added to the center spread, although to date it has been as bland as another addition, a quasi-gossip column, known as a diary, calculated to offend nobody. Even so, readers have already written anguished letters. The Times reassured them in an editorial: "There were far more vehement fears when the Times started a crossword puzzle. We hope that the Times diary will come to be as eagerly awaited and as highly regarded as the Times crossword now is."

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