UFO Info Week-End

Readers can seldom name the editor of the newspaper they read

Readers can seldom name the editor of the newspaper they read. One or two achieve celebrity status, usually through television Andrew Neil and Morgan are good examples. But books by editors, no matter how respected and talented they might have been as editors, are seldom big sellers. People like me and readers of this column buy and read editor memoirs.

Usually they are paying for revelation, new facts from somebody in a position to know, the inside story from a significant public figure. The author may be a major politician or a star from show business, music or sport, or somebody who has become a celebrity through television. The Daily Mail and The Sunday Times are the only titles that regularly pay large sums to serialise books. They should realise, though, that if they live in that rarefied corporate world their claims to share their readers’ concerns are not convincing.And so the memoirs. Publishing books, like publishing newspapers, is a commercial activity committed to making profits for the publisher Books cost publishers money.

Revenue comes from sales, of copies in various forms, of serialisation rights However you look at it, £1.2m takes some recouping. The Mirror is hardly likely to pay for their former editor’s revelations. Now one of their own has received the same sort of pay-off their newspapers would describe as an obscene reward for failure, but not a word of criticism has been published. Perhaps all editors know that one day their time will come, and they cannot risk publishing words that could be thrown back at them. And how often they criticise the pay-offs to private-sector chief executives who are forced to resign after corporate failures. All these newspapers who have not found it in their hearts to criticise Morgan often criticise government ministers for not taking responsibility, and resigning. He changed the Mirror into a serious, anti-war-on-Iraq tabloid with attitude, but couldn’t take enough of the readers with him.