‘Expect the unexpected” is the bland but pointed advice given by the evasive editor of the Daily Beast to the bemused William Boot, accidental protagonist in Evelyn Waugh’s deathless Fleet Street satire, Scoop. This has turned out to be durable counsel when observing the ins and outs of newspaper proprietors: much that is solid has a tendency to melt.
So the Spectator (for which I worked in the late 1990s under the Telegraph Group ownership of Conrad Black) had a long period under the sway of the Barclay family, which has come to a debt-laden crashing close. The weekly magazine has been sold for a reassuringly high £100m to the hedge funder Sir Paul Marshall, after an Abu Dhabi-backed bid to buy it collapsed amid concerns that state-backed entities should not own UK news outlets.
The Daily Telegraph and its Sunday sister have attracted last-round bids from Marshall, a former Lib Dem and later Brexiter (though not at the same time) who has clearly decided that he is prepared to empty considerable pockets into UK media via his backing for the rightwing GB News channel and eclectic UnHerd website. In a donkey derby of remaining bidders, the recipe is ideological with a major injection of investment or private equity cash.
Many thousands of miles away in Nevada, the future shape of the nonagenarian Rupert Murdoch’s vast News Corp will be decided in the coming weeks by a confidential hearing on a bid to vary the terms of a family trust, to ensure that his eldest son, Lachlan, remains in control of an array of publications and TV networks (including Fox News in the US and the Times newspaper group in the UK after his death. His three other adult children, including James and Elisabeth, both of whom have media business track records, oppose the move.
Ownership battles, whether inside families or in the open market, matter hugely despite the inevitable promises to “protect editorial independence”, because the culture and presence of a changed ownership is always felt. That is, after all, why many rich individuals seek to run the difficult hybrid business models of digital media and print legacies, which send most investors scrambling for an easier return on their investment.
Why do they do it, and do they still matter? Often they seem to matter because they allow pursuit of very particular ideological ends, in contrast to the wicked James Bond media mogul Elliot Carver (a thoroughly Waughian invention), who wanted to start a third world war.
In Marshall’s case, his journey from Lib Dem to the more rightwing end of the classical liberal trajectory has ridden on a distrust of “we know better” left-liberalism. So, yes, he is a Brexiter seeking control of publications that supported leave. He is probably in it not so much for the stake it allows in debates about the politics of today or 2016, but more for about being prominent in the fray to set the agenda on what lies ahead.
I don’t know what he has in store for the Spectator and UnHerd (and the Telegraph titles if that works out). But the challenge will be to combine the thick-and-thin Conservative outlook of many Spectator readers and subscribers with the populist, nose-thumbing of UnHerd. Efficiencies of scale usually mean some forms of cohabitation, if not all-out merger.
As well as the joy of being a publisher, access and a degree of sway in politics and the City are reasons that bidders queue up. Robert Jenrick, now leading Kemi Badenoch in the race for the Tory leadership, was quick to announce his 45-minute audience with Murdoch last week as a sign of the momentum of his campaign. Given the affinity between Badenoch and the media baron on previous visits, that is understandable: even titles that do not have the vote base to directly sway the contest (the Telegraph has more clout here than the politically broader-based Times), the anointment matters, for the simple reason that most proprietors can meet anyone they want. So ambitious politicians from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to Jenrick and Badenoch are unlikely to leave the invitation long unanswered, whatever the ideological tensions.
All of this reminds me, after over 30 years in the business and now on the European leadership team of Politico, a title that did not exist until its foundation in the US in 2007 and 2014 in Europe, that the “death of newspapers” was always a limited way to look at the bigger and more exciting disruption under way in the media.
Titles are simply that – a nicely designed masthead, a set of ideas, ambitions and cultures with common threads and some default settings – but the ability to accept change and understand new audiences and consumption patterns will decide whether they end up in the news business hall of fame (or infamy) or just managers of decline.
In a world of globalised business, where you can combine media stocks with helming real estate companies, owning online jobs portals or any number of spin-off businesses (Logan Roy’s accident-prone amusement parks in Succession gets the idea perfectly): a media title you covet is still something someone else hasn’t got – and badly wanted.
There are also disruptions that free marketeer owners such as Marshall and Murdoch might relish as an irony as well as a challenge, as their top talents thrive on alternative platforms like Substack. Podcasters and YouTube stars build vast followings on similar terms – media titles are finding it harder to keep their favoured talent exclusive.
For all the talk of over-mighty media moguls, they attract the same problem as any other business – the unexpected keeps happening, just faster than it used to.
• Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico Europe and host of the Power Play podcast
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