Every quarter it appears, size of a Barbour’s game pocket, buff yellow cover, elegant layout barely changed over 20 years. Derek Birdsall is still appearing on the credits page, one of few print designers to be thrown the sardine of a byline. Lucky Derek. It is probably more valuable than the two mites they pay us blunt nibs.

Happy birthday to the BJR. Most 20-year-olds celebrate by going out on the razzle, but that is somehow not the BJR way. Maturity, oaky understatement: these are the tasting notes as one surveys two decades’ worth of output. Certain members of the editorial board may be (correction: are) convivial lunchers, but the organ itself has always radiated sobriety. What a saintly observer of the journalistic circus it has been. Shades of a duchess fanning her cheeks in the front row at a boxing match.

The launch number stated the noble if dull intention to “reflect on the changing character and problems of the job”. Then came a terrific blast at the “squalid, banal, lazy and cowardly journalism whose only qualification is that it helps to make newspaper publishers (and some journalists) rich”.That was more like it. There may be something to the theory that the BJR has been overshadowed by the Monday media sections in The Guardian and Independent, but, unlike them, it is editorially an unattached entity, free from meddling by corporate thrusters.

The year 1989 was the era of the Gorden Kaye case when a redtop hack could burst in on a sitcom actor in hospital yet not be deemed to have violated his privacy. That ruling still baffles me. Drop The Dead Donkey was about to start its run on telly. Kelvin MacKenzie and his “human sponge” deputy

Volume 1, no 1, autumn 1989

Stuart Higgins were chimp-whooping around Wapping. (In a 1996 BJR, Lord Cudlipp wrote about “Kelvinism, which nobody confused with Calvinism”. Good line.)

In 1989 we were still drinking in the last-chance saloon with the bumbling Press Council. Early on the BJR carried adverts for the campaign to free John McCarthy from captivity in Beirut. Founding subscribers included Bob Edwards, Sir David English, Neil Kinnock, Louis Kirby, Sir Frank Rogers, and that incorrigible contributor to newspaper letters columns, Sir Sigmund Sternberg. It is a surprise that, so far as I can see, Sir Sigmund has not (yet) had a letter published in the BJR. Ten years later the journal was celebrating with BBC Online’s Peter Hill, who wrote in Tomorrow’s World tones about being a “computer-assisted reporter” and how we could all one day travel round the place with our office in our briefcase, without need of all the clutter of printed contacts books, cuttings, notepads, etc. Nah, many of us thought, it’ll never happen. Oops.

The point of a quarterly journal like this is to lend historic perspective, and maybe a little dignity, to a frenetic, round-the-clock occupation. Journalism may be “rubbish written in a hurry” (Charles Lamb, quoted in Vol. 11, issue No. 3) but it is influential rubbish, informative rubbish, rubbish that moulds our society. Something like the BJR perhaps helps us to cogitate as we compose. It turns the ephemeral into, well, not quite an art form, but certainly something more than tomorrow’s car-boot-sale wrapping.

Have we become less “squalid” over the double decade? A little, maybe, but we have also lost quality news coverage and, boy, have we lost sales. The circulation dive has been horrible. When the BJR was first published, the popular dailies were selling 12 million and the heavies shifted 2.5 million a day. The Sunday pops were selling 15 million and the Sunday heavies managed 3 million. BBC1’s Nine O’Clock News could expect a midweek audience of 8.4 million and ITN’s News at Ten one of 7.6 million. The British

Volume 9, no 2, 1998

population has grown, but consumption of print and terrestrial TV news has shrivelled. The BJR has been on hand to point out what we have done wrong, where and how.

Founding editor Geoffrey Goodman, now chairman emeritus, no less, wrote in his opening-issue sermon that a weakness of British journalism was “its lack of a reflective and analytical culture – and its lack of courage”. I don’t know if one is permitted to say this to a chairman emeritus without being reported to the headmaster, but come off it, Geoffrey, that was balls. There has never been a shortage of analytical culture among journalists. We love talking about ourselves and examining the fluff in our navels. Even as a 23-year-old holiday relief on The Daily Telegraph’s Peterborough column in 1986, I was invited along to lunchtime symposia at the Cheshire Cheese to discuss newspaper ethics, editors’ quirks and (favourite subject) subs’ stupidity. The BJR has chronicled lovingly the pubs of old Fleet Street. God knows how it manages to remember through the fug of booze that seemed to be compulsory in those days. I have some blurred recollections of veteran reporter R Barry O’Brien leaning back, eyes closed, as he delivered another

Volume 14, no 3, 2003

encomium to past times, and of local government correspondent John Grigsby gurgling with laughter into his five o’clock shadow, and of my boss Peter Birkett (ex-Daily Mail fireman) recounting how he once chased John Stonehouse to the far end of the world. There was camaraderie, certainly, but some of the sepia-tinted excellence may be exaggerated.

Journos are often wrong. Most of us in the Cheese in 1986 thought that the Telegraph’s new owner, Conrad Black, would prove a disastrous, short-term chairman. As it turned out, he was in many ways a model proprietor, albeit with quixotic accounting practices. Lord Black, as he became and remains, has been a BJR contributor. He penned a beaut earlier this year from his Florida prison cell, reviewing a biography of Rupert Murdoch (“This book has no redeeming virtues – it is half bootlicking and half pretension, and mainly fiction... even Murdoch deserves a more competent biographer than this one.”). Black’s “siege-engine” prose, as Charles Moore once described it, is undimmed by imprisonment. It may be too much to hope that on his release Conrad returns to media mogulhood, but he could surely earn a few bob as an op-ed writer.

Murdoch has appeared a great deal over the 20 years, the early issues being full of moans about the Murdochisation of London journalism. In 1994, Richard Littlejohn struck back for his Sun mate, Kelvin. “Picking up the broadsheets some mornings, one can’t help but conclude that they would have benefited from someone like MacKenzie sitting on the back bench yelling: ‘If that’s a splash, I’ll sell my arse in Simpson’s window’.” Simpson’s of Piccadilly, that was. Now gone. The Independent is still with us, just. An early number carried a providence-tempting piece by its then editor, Andreas Whittam Smith, talking about how his organ was making a profit. As the late-night correction pars used to say, “insert ‘not’ ”, now, Andreas.

The 10th anniversary issue carried an interview with Citizen Rupert, helping to balance one of the great pieces in the BJR’s history, Dennis Potter’s Malediction on Murdoch in 1993. Potter wrote as, perhaps, only a man near death can write: “There is an avid, wet-mouthed downmarket slide that

Volume 15, no 1, 2004

began its giddiest descent on the day marauding Rupert Murdoch first left his paw marks on our shores in acquiring The Sun and dragged so many others toward the sewers where too many of his too craven employees have their natural habitat.” Robert Maxwell escaped with less censure than the Digger, perhaps because the BJR sensed that Murdoch, one of life’s inkys, might actually pay some heed, whereas Cap’n Bob was too mad to care. Maxwell helped to wreck the Daily Mirror, spiritual home of many of the BJR’s grandees. It is the disappearance of intelligent, lively, eyewitness, urgent reporting from the pops that the BJR, rightly, has spent much of its time lamenting. How ill-served our population is by newsgathering today. How vapid and distracting many of the page layouts are. It’s a pity they do not hire Derek Birdsall. There has often been a pinkish tinge to the pages. The numbers after the 1992 general election might as well have been printed with black-crepe borders. Kinnock’s Labour party had been unexpectedly beaten, allegedly thanks to the Tory press. A certain Alastair Campbell wrote a readable complaint about government spin doctors.

Along the way he also defended the tabloids’ jaunty habits. Later, the

Volume 16, no 1, March 2005

press would suck up to Tony Blair and his glowering spokesman, Campbell, just as feebly as it once praised Maggie Thatcher at the behest of Bernard Ingham. Geoffrey Goodman was right about that “lack of courage”, but the BJR didn’t seem to mind so much when it was a Labour Government benefiting.

“Quotes of the Quarter” wanders through the drawing room now and again, leaving purists with their fists in their mouths. Please, any half-decent sub knows that “quote” is a verb and “quotation” is the noun. I preferred “Headline of the Quarter”, which in March 2002 went to this peach: “Irish cardboard maker receives no rival offers”. Can anyone come up with a duller headline?

Best boob was not, as it happens, on a Page 3 girl. It was a front-page typo on Vol. 1, No. 2, which promised “Alan Rusbridge on Sir Larry Lamb”. On the contents page he remained “Rusbridge”. The Grauniad would have been proud of such incompetence. But Rusbridge was on good form. After noting that former Sun editor Sir Larry agreed with Jonathan Aitken MP that “the reporter’s profession has been infiltrated by a seedy stream of rent boys, pimps, bimbos, spurned lovers, smear artists, prostitutes and perjurers”, Rusbridge notes that the tabloid knight was himself convinced that “prattlers, knockers, prigs, Guardian-readers, chattering classes and prudes” were all out to get him. In the end it was Murdoch who “got” Sir Larry. He picked him off like a sniper shooting a sparrow.

Perhaps the BJR could have done a little more to examine the sort of territory covered by Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News, and chronicled more closely the destruction of the local news networks, the dismantling of the district reporters, most of all the disappearance of court reports. Look how the recent Desmond v Bower trial was under-reported by national news outlets. That would have been a Page 3 lead every day in the old Telegraph. The bloggers are sometimes hailed as journalism’s future but they failed

Volume 19, no 4, December 2008

lamentably to report the Desmond libel action.

Along the way there have been some significant warnings. A then largely unknown Heather Brooke wrote for the BJR in 2005 about the implications of Freedom of Information – something many of us only caught up with in recent weeks. There have been some lovely nuggets, too. The late Hugh Cudlipp, in one of his many contributions, reminded us of Express proprietor Lord Matthews barking: “I don’t care a bugger who the editor is.” With that sort of attitude he should have been a sub, or even a pre-Wapping printer. In a special Daily Mirror centenary collection of his work, Cudlipp also recalled that Cap’n Bob’s secretary, Debbie, had “the amusing trait of disassociating herself from the lunacy around her by rolling her eyes until only the whites were visible”. No newspaper office should be without such an artiste. We learned that newsreader Anna Ford was once a folk singer. Can’t you just see her swinging her head from side to side while giving a folksy, fey rendition of some Seekers’ song? Tom Stoppard, after pleading for weekday papers to be less laden with features, reckoned that if Piers Morgan had been a proper editor he would have called his memoirs The Outsider rather than The Insider.

Volume 20, no 2, June 2009

Talking of editors, chairman emeritus Goodman, taking his leave as editor in Vol. 13, No. 3, disclosed that “one of my most surprising discoveries was how few editors could write attractive copy”. One exception was Mark Seddon, who bashed out a lovely piece about Tribune. Matthew Engel did an “emperor’s new clothes” job by pointing out that there is too much sports coverage in today’s papers. After theatre critics were attacked by Sunday Times restaurant reviewer AA Gill, Daily Telegraph drama critic Charles Spencer exacted revenge by passing judgment on the food writers. Delicious.

We could perhaps have done with more rows like the one between the late Alexander Walker, film critic of the Evening Standard, and BJR board member Julian Petley. They took sharply different lines about a film called Crash and you could almost hear the shattering of valuable Meissen from Covent Garden. Elsewhere, pollster Peter Kellner went in for some Opus Dei-style self-flagellation after the 1992 election result was wrongly called by many of his trade. And that man Littlejohn was back, predicting confidently in 1994 that Kelvin MacKenzie would become “a brilliant television executive”. We’re still waiting, Richard. The one surprise, perhaps, is that there has been little about journalists’ favourite topic: pay. The lamented Tony Bevins, writing in 1990, reckoned that “salaries of £50,000, along with cars and fat expense accounts, are not uncommon for political editors”. Don’t tell today’s MPs, but I suspect that rate has doubled in the intervening 19 years. The higher you go in journalism, the worse the job security, mind you. Katherine Whitehorn wrote a BJR piece about the old Observer’s carelessness with staff. “You’ve fired the women’s editor and the champagne’s run out,” Whitehorn told her editor, Donald Trelford, one day. The managing editor turned to her and said: “Haven’t you said that before?” Whitehorn, furiously: “Yes. About six times.”

Derek Birdsall has lasted rather longer. So, despite its often worst efforts, has “Fleet Street”. And so, let us hope, will the British Journalism Review.