The simplest question at the heart of the Telegraph’s HSBC shambles – and subsequent vileness – is also the one that matters most. Why on Earth was Peter Oborne, doughty political columnist, trooping back and forth to the chief executive’s office complaining about black holes and white flags? What had Murdoch MacLennan got to do with soft-pedalled coverage and cowardly retreats? Where was the stalwart soul who’s supposed to stand on the frontline defending journalism’s values? Where was the editor?
And the damning fact is that – lost in the melee of digital change, buried by the Barclay brothers’ indifference – the Telegraph doesn’t have an editor any longer. It has Jason Seiken, an amiable hiring from public broadcasting in America, who doubles as editor-in-chief and group chief content officer. But Jason doesn’t sit on an editorial floor. He’s upstairs, alongside the chief financial officer, trying to make more clicks and more bucks for the brothers.
Downstairs, the main man is Chris Evans, the “director of content” charged with “improving the content offering across web, mobile, tablet and print”. He’s the sort-of editor who succeeded the Telegraph’s last actual editor, Tony Gallagher, after Tony got dumped in the Seiken psychodrama and went back to his Daily Mail roots.
Evans has two “deputy directors of content” serving him, a “weekend editor” covering Saturday and Sunday, plus a “digital content director, a “director of audience development” and a “director of transformation and talent”. He theoretically answers to Jason, but Dave King, the omnipresent ad chief and his team, constantly patrolling the editorial floor, are really the only ones who matter before you get to MacLennan, running the shop for Aidan Barclay. “Chief executive officer”, it says on his door. The more basic the title, the more basic the power.
But the rest of the titular undergrowth, please note, is choking confusion. You can tell who plays boss on the day, choosing stories, pictures and the rest. That’s Chris. But who scotched Gallagher, hired Seiken and – year after year – rules the hiring and redundancies roost? That’s MacLennan. Who seemingly has to deliver profits around £60m a year, come hell or high water? Same answer. And who decided to run anonymous counterblasts about suicides at other papers? It’s a cruel, crude way to run a paper, buried amid all the bells and whistles of management speak. Aidan Barclay talks “customers”, not readers. Shop talk. And there isn’t any true editor anywhere on view. Oborne couldn’t look to a fellow journalist for defence. He had to treat with the chief executive instead.
It’s easy, in such murky circumstances, to lose sight of basic command structures. Much of Fleet Street, indeed, has planted “content” and “strategy” nametags across its digital garden. But the grisly lesson of HSBC is also a fundamental one.
Title inflation may make a paper look cutting-edge digital. It may impress advertisers and investors. It may seem a modern necessity in a world of “native advertising” and fast-flowing revenue streams. But serious newspapers, in whatever form, have a duty of trust: a duty not to be leaned on by pushy politicians, chummy bankers – or advertisers. For how can you put truth first if the truth is for sale?
That’s why the Oborne storm is so deeply damaging. It can’t be put right by appointing some “chief integrity officer”. What the Telegraph lacks, as it stinks and stings under pressure, is what it must now rediscover: a journalist who looks at the likes of HSBC and tells them to get stuffed as and when necessary. A human being, not a corporate assassin. An editor.