The incumbent editors of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph have gone. So have their successors (one of them never more than a mere “acting editor”). Every senior management figure has been replaced. The entire marketing department left, along with the top 16 people in advertising. On the daily, the deputy editor, an assistant editor, the comment editor, the foreign editor, the managing editor, the City editor (and his deputy), the picture editor, the features editor and even the editor's long-serving secretary have all departed, after resignations or sackings. The staff leader-writing team has been disbanded. The Washington bureau chief, the Washington correspondent, the New York correspondent and the Paris correspondent have been axed. In all, 149 journalists have been made redundant, and, in two stages, 433 people (including many editorial support staff ) across the whole company. In November, the National Union of Journalists chapel – which has more than half the two papers' journalists in membership – voted overwhelmingly for a three-day strike, although such action was subsequently postponed when the management backed away from a demand that all production staff should work Saturday shifts. Journalists are habitual whingers, but they don't take easily to worker solidarity and collective action. It has been quite an achievement for the Telegraph management to drive them to the barricades.

Almost nobody who works or has worked for the company would deny the need for change. The Telegraph group, after all, is famed not just for the Conservatism of its politics, but for the conservatism of its working habits. When Max Hastings took over as editor of The Daily Telegraph in 1986, he found the average age of the arts critics was 72. Book-keeping was still done on paper, in longhand. The Telegraph, Hastings later recalled, “possessed no design team or presentational skills of any kind” and the only graphic artists were “a couple of spare hands on the picture desk capable of drawing quaint little maps of the world's trouble spots, of a kind familiar to 19th-century newspaper readers”. Departments suited themselves about typefaces and headings, and pictures were used only grudgingly.

But the Hastings approach – perhaps surprisingly for a man of such formidable physical presence – was gentle and evolutionary, both in easing the paper's politics towards the centre and in changing its editorial presentation and work practices. “It seems essential both to staff morale and reader confidence,” he wrote to Andrew Knight, then chief executive, “that in the early stages of the new regime, there are no dramatic wrenches.”

Radical break with the past

The papers, at a cost that pushed the group into a £12m loss in the last financial year, moved to new offices in Victoria. There, The Daily Telegraph newsroom is organised around “a central hub”, a circular table accommodating the editor and 11 section heads, such as home news, sport and business. Each section then fans out from the centre, producing not just conventional newspaper pages but also website copy, podcasts, videos, interactive “click and carry” pages, and the like. Sub-editors are abolished; instead, there are “production journalists” on “platforms”. Traditional deadlines are out, too. Telegraph journalists will work to “touchpoints”, the stages through the day at which, research purported to show, readers are likely to access different types of media and different types of content. The distinction between old and new media will disappear. It will all be a seamless whole and presumably, when the Telegraph does eventually stop printing on paper, the staff will scarcely notice. A far cry, indeed, from bookkeeping in longhand.

The revolution has gone beyond the transformation in editorial working practices. There has also been a revolution in management style. As the old Telegraph managers moved out, new ones moved in, nearly all of them from Associated Newspapers, owners of the Daily Mail and its sister titles. Murdoch MacLennan, former managing director of Associated Newspapers, became chief executive. Lawrence Sear, former managing editor of the Daily Mail, became group managing editor. John Bryant, another Mail man (as well as the former editor of two now defunct papers), became editor-in-chief and then the daily's acting editor.

All this was peculiar for two reasons. First, the new recruits were older than their predecessors; indeed, at the Mail, they were unfondly known as “the last of the summer wine”. Second, the Mail has hardly been in the forefront of technological change; it regarded the internet with lofty indifference until quite recently. But newspaper owners tend to be dazzled by Associated and its achievements, during four decades, in making its daily and Sunday titles the second highest-selling on Fleet Street, and in pulverising the once-mighty Express. Nobody loves the Mail papers but they are the most admired and imitated in the industry.

The Mail's success, however, is not based on management prowess as such but on the high value it places on its journalists (at least in monetary terms) and the untrammelled power it gives to its leading editorial executives, particularly Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail (it is impossible to imagine Dacre being told by any mere bean-counter whom he should appoint to his staff ). But MacLennan took the opposite course. It quickly became apparent, after his arrival, that he and Aidan Barclay (son of Sir David and chairman of the group) would call the shots. Management notoriously vetoed, late one afternoon, a leader supporting David Cameron for the Tory leadership. It hired journalists, including the columnist Simon Heffer – like a remarkably large number of recent editorial recruits, he came from the Mail. Management also fired journalists, most recently the three America correspondents. On some occasions, journalists have been assured by their editor that they are being moved from one job to another, only to be told by management that they don't have a job at all. All this has given the Telegraph, over the past year or so, the appearance of a comically dysfunctional company.

Opponents left in confusion

Management might have had a harder time if it had been up against a Max Hastings. But it wasn't up against even a Charles Moore. Hastings's successor, after eight years in the chair, had left towards the end of the Black regime, anxious to complete his official biography of the ailing Margaret Thatcher before she went to the great market in the sky. His replacement, Martin Newland, had been out of the country for several years, working in Black's Canadian empire, and had scarcely been heard of in Britain. He had been in office less than a year when the Barclays took over. They left him, as one Telegraph old hand put it, “dangling”. He had the authority neither of an established editor nor of an editor personally appointed by his new proprietor. He did not, by all accounts, push ahead with any vision of his own for the papers, either editorially or politically. He was, above all, a production man who could see a story on the wires and envisage it, with white-on-black headlines, on page three – which, at least, was a skill not possessed by any previous Telegraph editor.

Newland finally resigned, his authority, he felt, fatally undermined by the appointment of Bryant as editor-in-chief with indeterminate powers. Bryant himself took over as “acting editor”, with a close-to-the-bosses role aptly represented by his retention of an office on the management as well as the editorial floor. He had never previously worked at the Telegraph and, said an editorial executive, “didn't know a soul on the paper”. But that was what the management wanted: a man of easy charm and production competence, astute in office politics, free of friendships, alliances and (being over 60) ambitions, who could keep the show on the road while imposing the worst of the editorial cuts and further softening up the journalists for the revolution to come. Charles Wilson, a former editor of The Times translated into a Mirror Group managing director, performed a similar role as acting editor at The Independent in the mid-1990s and, when the job was complete, was pushed aside as brusquely as Bryant would be. With the cuts safely completed, and the papers ready for the move to Victoria, the management finally showed its hand. The new editor of The Daily Telegraph would be Will Lewis, aged 37.

It is a measure of how completely the management has bamboozled the journalists that nobody quite knows what this means. Lewis was initially recruited from The Sunday Times 14 months ago as business editor, only to be installed as joint deputy editor almost instantly. But he has never edited the paper even for a day. Most of his time has been spent planning the Victoria headquarters, and on honing his enthusiasm for all things digital. Only two months before his appointment, he was made managing director editorial, a new post said to involve preparing the entire group for the multimedia age.

So is Lewis, in effect, just another management man? Will he even edit the Telegraph in the normal sense of the term, given that an able and powerful deputy, Ian MacGregor (also from the Associated stable), has just joined? Management would probably reply (I have to speculate, because repeated requests for an interview with MacLennan were ignored) that, in the multimedia world, an editor in the traditional sense has no meaning.

If the future is uncertain for The Daily Telegraph, it can be no less so for The Sunday Telegraph. With a circulation more than 200,000 below the daily's (and half of that circulation comes from a shared subscription scheme), it is inevitably less important to the owners. Like most Sunday papers, it has a relatively small full-time subbing complement and has therefore, on paper, escaped quite lightly from the cuts. But it, too, has been a target for management whims. Dominic Lawson, an editor in the Charles Moore mould but without the charm, was fired in June 2005. His replacement, Sarah Sands, who had been editor of the Saturday Telegraph, could hardly have been a greater contrast. Her brief was to inject more glamour, femininity and lifestyle into a staid old Tory paper. She did press ahead with her own vision, introducing stories and readers' letters that can best be described as saucy. She changed the masthead from black to blue (and back again). She lightened headline faces. She had the news section set almost entirely in ragged columns. She started a new glossy magazine, Stella, highlighting fashion and beauty.

Out within months

The Sands episode might have been a warning to the Telegraph management of the pitfalls of rapid, uncontrolled change, but there is no sign that the lesson has been absorbed. No other Fleet Street paper has yet attempted anything as ambitious as the Telegraph in coming to terms with the digital age and the near-certain decline, if not extinction, of newsprint, though The Guardian has its own, somewhat steadier strategy. It is an enormous gamble, an attempt to take control of the future, rather than simply to manage decline, and to that extent deserves credit, even admiration. And just as other newspaper groups quickly followed Rupert Murdoch once he had made his breakthrough at Wapping in 1986, so they are sure to follow the Telegraph's lead if it succeeds.

But media products depend above all on their brands, and on public confidence in them. The Telegraph brand has thrived for more than 150 years on its printed product, with all its quaint eccentricities. “The paper you can trust”, the ads used to say, and you knew where you stood with the Telegraph. Even if that paper is now doomed to decline and ultimately to a marginal role in generating company profits, it remains vital to the brand and therefore still requires nurturing. Journalists may seem absurdly sensitive plants – deeply reluctant to embrace the change that they so often urge on others – but a successful newspaper is a living system and you disturb its ecology at your peril. Destroy it, and you have nothing to take into the digital age. That is the danger of the Telegraph revolution.