What, then, explains the one-way nature of British-American trade in editorial talent? As noted just about everywhere in recent weeks, U.S. journalism has seen a fresh influx of British editors and executives, following in a tradition that famously includes New York magazine titans Tina Brown and Anna Wintour. There’s Lewis at The Post; Mark Thompson, formerly of the BBC and the New York Times, at CNN (chairman and CEO); Emma Tucker, former editor of the Sunday Times, at the Wall Street Journal (editor in chief); John Micklethwait, former editor in chief of the Economist, at Bloomberg (editor in chief); Keith Poole, a veteran of the Sun and the Daily Mail, at the New York Post (editor in chief of the New York Post Group); Joanna Coles, a British magazine executive, at the Daily Beast (chief creative and content officer).
Now for the list of U.S. journalists atop brand-name British outlets. Uh …
“I am struggling to think of a single editor of a major U.K. publication or outlet that is not British,” notes Mel Bunce, head of the journalism department at City, University of London. One British journo expert points out that American Albert Scardino served for a time as a highly ranked editor at the Guardian.
Of course: Who can forget the Scardino Epoch?
After browsing mastheads and leadership charts, I did find one stateside exec calling shots in Britain: former CBS News honcho David Rhodes, who is executive chairman of Comcast-owned Sky News Group. In a call from England, Rhodes endorses British newsrooms as “robust” and cites only slight transitional challenges: “A few pronunciations and the fact that everything is plural,” he says.
Rhodes’ title is quite a distinction: The United States racks up healthy surpluses with Britain on the strength of export goods like oils, machinery and lac — yet it barely cracks the British market for journo leaders. What’s the deal here?
First: American editors are boring, at least in the view of the British media establishment. They’re forever crowing about accountability and transparency, assigning multiple reporters to Pulitzer-bait investigative series long on word count and short on pizazz; they’re resourceful at devising rationales for why stories should be killed or delayed. On the other hand, says former CNN commentator and British journalist Piers Morgan, the Brits “manage to combine ferocious hard work, creative minds, a dash of adventure and flair and a liberal sprinkling of British humor” in their work.
That cultural gap works against the importation of American talent onto British mastheads. “There’s just no appeal,” says the aforementioned Scardino, 76, a Pulitzer Prize winner from Savannah, Ga., who has lived in England since 1993. “The British news industry doesn’t need earnestness. They don’t value honesty ahead of entertainment value,” continues Scardino, cautioning that the British media market does have some high-quality outlets.
Second: American editors know America. British outlets cover the United States as though it were one big, racy social media post, in a thong. When even pedestrian stories break stateside, British newsies rush to put them atop their websites and newspapers. U.S. outlets generally don’t return the favor. The result is that British editors learn a lot about the United States over the course of their career — and not so much vice-versa. “I don’t think American journalists ever feel the need to study London,” says David Yelland, a 61-year-old British journalist who worked in the states, including at the New York Post, in the 1990s. “By the time I got off the plane, I might have been young, but I knew who Rudy Giuliani was, I knew who Cuomo was, I knew how the city of New York works — the politics. I knew quite a lot.”
Third: You try breaking into the upper ranks of British journalism. “There’s still an awful lot of old-school patronage governing entry” to top editing jobs, Bunce says. Elite feeder schools supply a great deal of the talent in London news outlets, she says, pointing out that leaders at the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Sun, the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the BBC attended either Oxford or Cambridge.
Whatever their pedigrees, British editors cultivate communities of journalistic talent that tend to follow them from publication to publication — building loyalties that transcend ties to publications, Scardino says. So it’s no surprise that Lewis, who officially joined The Post in January, tapped former colleague Robert Winnett, deputy editor of Telegraph Media Group, as editor of The Post starting in the fall. (Asked about the hiring process at a recent staff meeting, Lewis said it wouldn’t be appropriate to detail the “ins and outs.”)
The appeal of running a British media outlet, particularly in its newspaper sector, peers out from the stories themselves: No scandal is too petty for a write-up, British politics is bonkers, and there’s a run-and-gun exhilaration stemming from the cutthroat competition all around you. Hilarious headlines are mandatory. “We like to create mischief and we like to stir the pot a bit,” Piers Morgan says.
Now consider the underside: Sleaze among Britain’s down-market tabloids, a strain of journalism that can infect the rest of the market. Books, essays, and laugh-out-loud news stories have been written about this culture, but all you really need to do is to click on a Fleet Street site or two, and the formula reveals itself.
The work of British papers came under painstaking review in the so-called Leveson Inquiry, a 2012 probe triggered by the phone-hacking scandal that documented the ethical horrors of British newspapering. (An ongoing lawsuit in Britain alleges that Lewis, when employed by Murdoch’s newspaper arm more than a decade ago, covered up evidence of phone hacking. Lewis has denied wrongdoing and has insisted that he acted “to preserve journalistic integrity.”) The Leveson report cited a culture of “blagging” (using deceptive tactics to gather private or sensitive information), tormenting of families who’d lost loved ones, “extremely personal attacks” on people who dare challenge them; a “significant and reckless disregard for accuracy” on big stories; and, of course, phone hacking itself, an intrusion into folks’ most intimate communications. “Too many stories in too many newspapers were the subject of complaints from too many people, with too little in the way of titles taking responsibility or considering the consequences for the individuals involved,” the inquiry concluded. (Bunce says things have improved since the Leveson’s findings but that some problems remain.)
Meaning, an American editor in London would face a choice between scolding their colleagues about ethics every day or capitulating. “Not only would it be inconceivable that an American would run a British newspaper, they’d be mad to do it — the culture gap between the two markets is just too wide” Yelland says.
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