150 and counting: Northern Echo editors share memories of leading famous newspaper
The Northern Echo, known as the Great Daily of the North, celebrated its 150th birthday at the start of January.
It invited former editors to share their stories of leading the famous title, which was once led by the great Sir Harry Evans in the 1960s.
Editors from over the past 30 years wrote features for a special supplement which appeared in the Echo earlier this month.
Here is some of what they had to say:
Allan Prosser, editor of The Northern Echo from 1982 until 1989:
“I thought of Darlington with the death last month of Sir Frank Barlow, one-time boss of Westminster Press which owned The Northern Echo before it moved to Newsquest and subsequently its parent American company, Gannett.
Barlow had been in charge of WP during the acrimonious closed shop strike at Darlington in 1977 before moving to Pearson and the Financial Times and overseeing its restructuring during the 1980s and early 1990s. He signed off on my appointment both as editor of The Northern Echo in 1982 and my return as managing director at York and Darlington in 1993.
It became clear that the group and its newspapers were being hurriedly, too hurriedly, fattened for sale during 1994 and I had little appetite for the negative impact I believed this would have on readers, staff and circulation. It became clear that it would be best to leave, which I did.
But that is not the end of this account.
A group of us approached venture capitalists who thought Westminster Press (and The Northern Echo) was an interesting proposition and we put together a concert party to bid for it. Perhaps this was in the tradition of Charles Starmer’s 1902 corporate rescue package, but with a less happy ending.
I attended all the meetings, including the final negotiating session in 1996, but stayed in the shadows and the anterooms.
Long story short is that we raised £303m to buy the group while the Newsquest bid was £305m. We could have bid more (Pearson’s original price tag was £350m) but our information was that ‘non-institutional purchasers’ would have to pay a premium. And we baulked at that.
I don’t think this story has been told until today. Whether we would we have been better or worse owners I cannot say. I think we would have done things differently.
Peter Sands, editor from 1990 to 1993, on how the 1992 General Election proved to be life-changing:
Editing the Echo was a dream. I regularly had to pinch myself to remember I was sitting in the same chair as Harold Evans, who had been my journalistic idol since I was a teenager.
I inherited an Echo that was in great shape with a vibrant newsroom from Allan Prosser and I set about taking it to the next stage.
The introduction of colour, despite the press problems, meant we could add supplements. Seven Days was a TV magazine, Echoes was aimed at our older readers and we did one-offs — not least for the Gulf War of 1991 — all graphic-heavy.
Sometimes I got carried away with the ideas of ‘specials’.
When Margaret Thatcher stood down as Prime Minister in 1990, she did so at 9am. Everyone headed into the office and I had the bright idea that we should do an afternoon edition. We threw all our efforts into a broadsheet paper with no advertising and no means of distribution to readers who weren’t expecting it.
Once we had finished, I thought “now what do we do”?
We had spent lots of money, used all our material and, on a huge story, we were starting the paper three hours later than usual.
Still, I will perhaps go down as the only editor to publish an evening Echo!
David Kernek, editor from 1993 to 1997, was immersed in the region’s politics both before and after he took his place in the editor’s chair, having been deputy editor and the paper’s man in Westminster too:
Sometimes the job involved entertaining guests. One of them, in 1983, was the new MP for Sedgefield, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, elected on the back of a Labour Party manifesto described by another Labour MP as the “longest suicide note in history”.
The New Hope for Britain promised, among other things, unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the European Economic Community.
Tony had asked for a tour of our Priestgate building. I explained, roughly, how a newspaper was put together and took him out for lunch. I cannot now recall a word of our conversation. I had him marked down as a smooth southern lawyer. A southern visitor — albeit one from Lincolnshire — to the region in 1985 was Mrs Thatcher who, having been photographed looking at wastelands where factories once stood, proved that she’d read How Not To Make Friends and Influence People. People who kept banging on about unemployment, she said, were “moaning Minnies”. Didn’t that go down well?
Her tour of the region finished in Newcastle, where she invited journalists — thought to be opinion-formers — to dinner. We left with the impression that she was not greatly interested in our opinions.
I returned to the Echo in 1993, honoured — as were all of my predecessors — to be in the office that had been occupied by WT Stead and Harry Evans. The centuries-old business model that had funded their campaigning journalism, however, was unravelling.
Perhaps the rot began with free newspapers. How could anything free have value?
The Northern Echo, committed to attacking the devil, was not returning the new, alarmingly higher profit margins demanded by owners now committed to the achievement of — jargon alert! –maximum shareholder value.
We had lost our great press and the magical mix of ink, clatter and rumble that came with it every night. The paper was now printed on an inadequate machine in York. Next to go were editions, district offices and, harrowingly, 51 people.
I went, too, but with not one regret — other than that diary problem — about my years, with all their ups and downs, with England’s finest regional newspaper.
Andrew Smith, editor from 1997 to 1999, was the man in charge on the day Prince Diana died. It began with a phone call from his deputy, Peter Barron:
We agreed that the Echo needed to publish a separate supplement the following morning recording all the details of Diana’s death, her life, her family, her connections with the North-East, her visits to the region, her impact on communities and so on…
We would need to book extra press time to print the paper, beef up our distribution and delivery — all manner of things.
One aspect we didn’t need to discuss was how we might muster the editorial team we needed to produce such a supplement. As is the case with doctors, nurses and emergency support crews and services at times of major disaster, journalists don’t need to be told to report for duty when the biggest stories need to be told.
By the time I had travelled the hundred miles or so from Lancashire to Darlington on eerily quiet roads early that warm summer morning, the Echo newsroom was a hive of activity, with more staff than one would expect to find on a normal midweek shift tasked with individual work that would assemble into a Monday morning newspaper that would compare favourably with any other on the newsstands that day.
When big stories such as Diana’s death break — 9/11, Lockerbie and other terrorist atrocities, the Iraq War, the Dunblane school massacre, the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise to name but a few — newsrooms become calm, thoughtful and studious places where reporters, feature writers, photographers and page editors work methodically to do the job for which their talents and skills have prepared them. They are not the frantic places of panic often depicted in the movies.
And The Northern Echo had experienced, professional people in abundance. The abiding memories of my all-too-brief time as the paper’s editor are of the workrate and creativity of the 50-plus editorial staff, ably assisted by highly competent and committed teams in advertising, newspaper sales, promotions and production.
But the people who produced the Echo were only part of the incredible story that has now seen it prosper as “the great daily of the north” for 150 years. The other part of the team comprises readers, advertisers and communities in our diverse heartland encompassing Durham City, the county’s former coal mining towns and villages, the rural Durham and Yorkshire Dales and the fairly affluent market towns of North Yorkshire.
