Interview: Andy Coulson, News of the World editor (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
IN the end, it was the News of the World's night. At last night's British Press Awards, the "Oscars" of the national press, the News of the World walked away with newspaper of the year, scoop of the year, not to mention Ryan Sabey as young journalist of the year.
For the News International contingent, this was the first time in recent memory that one of their titles had been voted Britain's top paper. No wonder its editor, Andy Coulson, was so busy filling his colleagues' glasses with champagne until the early hours.
Coulson, in charge for just two years, has had a tough time lately, unable to stem a circulation drop of 7.6 per cent in the year to February, while having to defend his methods from attacks by royals, celebrities and the occasional courtroom prosecutor. So he was naturally delighted last night to hear the judgment of his peers that his paper, full of "vitality and originality", had broken "important stories with far-reaching consequences".
It has been a vintage year for News of the World exclusives. "Beckham's Secret Affair" may have won scoop of the year, but the shortlisted entries included "Sven's Secret Affair" and " Blunkett's Affair with a Married Woman" - both News of the World splashes. No wonder the 37-year-old editor felt able to break his own rule for once and grant the Evening Standard a rare interview.
Coulson is controlled and assertive, and first of all he wants to disabuse those who dismiss his paper as largely titillation. "The News of the World is all about telling people great, exciting, interesting stuff on a Sunday morning that they didn't know on a Saturday night," he says. "The most pleasing thing for me last year is we got a good spread of stories, breaking a great sports scandal in Sven, a great political scandal in Blunkett, and a classic tabloid story in Beckham. Two of those stories ran over several weeks, and it's a pretty rare thing these days for a story to dominate the news for a month."
The Beckham story is said to have lifted circulation temporarily by up to 500,000. The paper negotiated a kiss-and-tell deal with Rebecca Loos through Max Clifford, reported to have cost more than £300,000. But sex scandals are only part of the mix, Coulson insists. "I can't say they're not important, but there's nothing new about sex. We happen to have had three this year, but we've broken other stories, too - Ryan broke the 'Prince Harry exam cheat' story. We had the Kieren Fallon story. It wouldn't work if all we ever did were sex scandals."
Coulson, just 34 when appointed editor of Britain's biggest-selling newspaper, has made his career at News International. He grew up in Essex, and after leaving school took a reporting job on the Basildon Evening Echo, before moving to the Sun's "Bizarre" showbusiness desk in 1988. Just like Piers Morgan, he made his name editing the showbiz column, being photographed with celebrities and developing mutually beneficial relationships with publicists. "Showbiz gives you a pretty good grounding, especially on The Sun," he says. "And running a column-gives you a good idea of how a tabloid works."
He became assistant then associate editor and gained a reputation for mischief - while on Bizarre, he fed a false story to his Daily Mirror rival that Paula Yates was having some ribs removed for cosmetic reasons. Richard Wallace, now editor of the Mirror, has called him "a good schmoozer and operator" with "an immense amount of charm". Colleagues also recall a ruthlessness and a strong sense of team loyalty. He joined the News of the World as Rebekah Wade's deputy in 2000, and succeeded her three years later when she moved to The Sun.
The royal family, for one, may have wished otherwise. There have been regular outbreaks of tension, most recently before Christmas when he published a photograph of Prince Harry on holiday. Clarence House claimed the Prince's privacy had been breached. But Coulson insists the princes are fair game. "I feel very strongly that the royals shouldn't be treated any differently to anyone else," he says. "The kids are of an age now where they have no special rights in my view. There was a rumour recently that the palace were lining themselves up to try and extend the agreement [not to cover their private lives] into Wills's training at Sandhurst, which would have been a terrible mistake."
He has a simple answer to those who bemoan his willingness to pry into public figures' private lives. "If we'd done anything wrong, there's a pretty well established set of Press Complaints Commission rules, and there's the law. We know the law, we know the PCC, and we work within it."
Neville Thurlbeck, the chief reporter who broke the Beckham scoop, is more explicit. "On every single story we sit down and discuss the privacy issue," he says. "With the Beckhams, for example, we decided they have always used their marriage and their celebrity to sell themselves as a marketable commodity. They'd made an awful lot of money trading off the back of a so-called fairytale marriage, and, like most fairytales, we realised it wasn't true. And we had to expose that."
The secret to bringing in the scoops, Thurlbeck says, is simple. "To be brutally honest, we pay big money for big stories. But very often we are presented with stories that are very difficult to prove, and we have to spend a lot of time beavering away to prove things. When we've done, there may be hours and hours of painstakingly boring work that ends up in a lawyer's safe that the reader will never see."
THE Guardian called Thurlbeck's Blunkett scoop "indefensible" as a publicinterest story, and he has been accused of using entrapment and of paying police sources for confidential information (he was cleared of one such charge). But he has no qualms. "The socalled liberal press who criticise us are also very happy to repeat our stories. The News of the World doesn't pretend to do anything other than reveal big stories and titillate and entertain the public, while exposing crime and hypocrisy. I'm not saying it's a grandiose ideal, but it's something we're proud of and our readers enjoy."
Besides, Coulson adds, the paper's critics should acknowledge all its "good campaigning work" last year, including issues such as school bullying and random drugs tests for schools. "That's as important to us as the front page."
But when it comes to the tougher questions - such as is his paper too reliant on the likes of Max Clifford -Coulson decides that he really ought to be back partying with his colleagues. "Do you mind if we knock it on the head now?" he asks sharply, without answering the question.
After all, it's not really News of the World style to be on the defensive.
(Evening Standard, March 16 2004)
IN the end, it was the News of the World's night. At last night's British Press Awards, the "Oscars" of the national press, the News of the World walked away with newspaper of the year, scoop of the year, not to mention Ryan Sabey as young journalist of the year.
For the News International contingent, this was the first time in recent memory that one of their titles had been voted Britain's top paper. No wonder its editor, Andy Coulson, was so busy filling his colleagues' glasses with champagne until the early hours.
Coulson, in charge for just two years, has had a tough time lately, unable to stem a circulation drop of 7.6 per cent in the year to February, while having to defend his methods from attacks by royals, celebrities and the occasional courtroom prosecutor. So he was naturally delighted last night to hear the judgment of his peers that his paper, full of "vitality and originality", had broken "important stories with far-reaching consequences".
It has been a vintage year for News of the World exclusives. "Beckham's Secret Affair" may have won scoop of the year, but the shortlisted entries included "Sven's Secret Affair" and " Blunkett's Affair with a Married Woman" - both News of the World splashes. No wonder the 37-year-old editor felt able to break his own rule for once and grant the Evening Standard a rare interview.
Coulson is controlled and assertive, and first of all he wants to disabuse those who dismiss his paper as largely titillation. "The News of the World is all about telling people great, exciting, interesting stuff on a Sunday morning that they didn't know on a Saturday night," he says. "The most pleasing thing for me last year is we got a good spread of stories, breaking a great sports scandal in Sven, a great political scandal in Blunkett, and a classic tabloid story in Beckham. Two of those stories ran over several weeks, and it's a pretty rare thing these days for a story to dominate the news for a month."
The Beckham story is said to have lifted circulation temporarily by up to 500,000. The paper negotiated a kiss-and-tell deal with Rebecca Loos through Max Clifford, reported to have cost more than £300,000. But sex scandals are only part of the mix, Coulson insists. "I can't say they're not important, but there's nothing new about sex. We happen to have had three this year, but we've broken other stories, too - Ryan broke the 'Prince Harry exam cheat' story. We had the Kieren Fallon story. It wouldn't work if all we ever did were sex scandals."
Coulson, just 34 when appointed editor of Britain's biggest-selling newspaper, has made his career at News International. He grew up in Essex, and after leaving school took a reporting job on the Basildon Evening Echo, before moving to the Sun's "Bizarre" showbusiness desk in 1988. Just like Piers Morgan, he made his name editing the showbiz column, being photographed with celebrities and developing mutually beneficial relationships with publicists. "Showbiz gives you a pretty good grounding, especially on The Sun," he says. "And running a column-gives you a good idea of how a tabloid works."
He became assistant then associate editor and gained a reputation for mischief - while on Bizarre, he fed a false story to his Daily Mirror rival that Paula Yates was having some ribs removed for cosmetic reasons. Richard Wallace, now editor of the Mirror, has called him "a good schmoozer and operator" with "an immense amount of charm". Colleagues also recall a ruthlessness and a strong sense of team loyalty. He joined the News of the World as Rebekah Wade's deputy in 2000, and succeeded her three years later when she moved to The Sun.
The royal family, for one, may have wished otherwise. There have been regular outbreaks of tension, most recently before Christmas when he published a photograph of Prince Harry on holiday. Clarence House claimed the Prince's privacy had been breached. But Coulson insists the princes are fair game. "I feel very strongly that the royals shouldn't be treated any differently to anyone else," he says. "The kids are of an age now where they have no special rights in my view. There was a rumour recently that the palace were lining themselves up to try and extend the agreement [not to cover their private lives] into Wills's training at Sandhurst, which would have been a terrible mistake."
He has a simple answer to those who bemoan his willingness to pry into public figures' private lives. "If we'd done anything wrong, there's a pretty well established set of Press Complaints Commission rules, and there's the law. We know the law, we know the PCC, and we work within it."
Neville Thurlbeck, the chief reporter who broke the Beckham scoop, is more explicit. "On every single story we sit down and discuss the privacy issue," he says. "With the Beckhams, for example, we decided they have always used their marriage and their celebrity to sell themselves as a marketable commodity. They'd made an awful lot of money trading off the back of a so-called fairytale marriage, and, like most fairytales, we realised it wasn't true. And we had to expose that."
The secret to bringing in the scoops, Thurlbeck says, is simple. "To be brutally honest, we pay big money for big stories. But very often we are presented with stories that are very difficult to prove, and we have to spend a lot of time beavering away to prove things. When we've done, there may be hours and hours of painstakingly boring work that ends up in a lawyer's safe that the reader will never see."
THE Guardian called Thurlbeck's Blunkett scoop "indefensible" as a publicinterest story, and he has been accused of using entrapment and of paying police sources for confidential information (he was cleared of one such charge). But he has no qualms. "The socalled liberal press who criticise us are also very happy to repeat our stories. The News of the World doesn't pretend to do anything other than reveal big stories and titillate and entertain the public, while exposing crime and hypocrisy. I'm not saying it's a grandiose ideal, but it's something we're proud of and our readers enjoy."
Besides, Coulson adds, the paper's critics should acknowledge all its "good campaigning work" last year, including issues such as school bullying and random drugs tests for schools. "That's as important to us as the front page."
But when it comes to the tougher questions - such as is his paper too reliant on the likes of Max Clifford -Coulson decides that he really ought to be back partying with his colleagues. "Do you mind if we knock it on the head now?" he asks sharply, without answering the question.
After all, it's not really News of the World style to be on the defensive.
(Evening Standard, March 16 2004)
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