The hugely expensive, new, full-colour printing presses are being installed. The dummy issues have been shown to a select few. Only the date of the launch is being kept secret. Yet remarkably, debate about the new-look Guardian, and what it might mean for the rest of what was once Fleet Street, has been remarkable only for its absence.
Old newspaper-buying habits are dying. Fewer people buy a daily; fewer still have the time or the inclination to do more than pick at the menu when they do. A growing proportion of the under-thirties has never taken up the newspaper habit. The internet has partly filled the gap, and the Guardian has ten million online readers, with 200,000 registering with its online media section. "Wouldn't C P Scott be proud of that!" says the editor, Alan Rusbridger, referring to his most famous predecessor.
The new Guardian, according to those who have seen the dummies, will look different and feel different. In full colour, it will resemble the Berliner Zeitung or Le Monde. "And," says an old Guardian hand, "don't forget that Alan wants to keep the fold in the newspaper." So more compact certainly, but not as crowded as the Times, which hasn't made an easy transition from broadsheet to tabloid.
What is the new paper going to do? And at whom will it be aimed? Rusbridger has been critical of the Independent: he sees it as a "viewspaper", something with which the paper's editor, Simon Kelner, happily agrees. Boldly polemical, the tabloid Indie leaves readers in no doubt where it stands. This approach worked well when opinion was hugely polarised over the Iraq war, but may not do so in quieter times. The Indie's forthright front-page editorialising makes it near impossible for it to champion Tony Blair at the general election. The Guardian in its present (and planned) format retains the flexibility to do just that because comment comes on the inside, though it seems more likely it will support tactical voting in favour of the Liberal Democrats.
According to those close to Rusbridger, the Guardian's choice was between going down the populist Daily Mail route or somehow rising above the melee, seizing the higher ground and taking the authority that once belonged to the Times. Rusbridger and his team have chosen the latter route. Yet some, while applauding him for that, are alarmed. They fear that siren voices, such as John Lloyd, editor of the Financial Times Magazine, and the Guardian's own Martin Kettle, both of whom berate fellow journalists for their noisy "attack journalism", could steer the new Guardian towards imitating the bland New York Times.
Rusbridger, like Kelner, is an apolitical editor. "What matters to Alan," says a Guardian journalist, "is that legal and literary people read the paper. Alan is not very interested in what politicians think." At a time when most politicians can't walk and chew gum at the same time, Rusbridger is in step with public opinion. But would a more eclectic comment section lead to a diminution of Scott's timeless liberal values? We won't know until we see the new product, but there are straws in the wind. "I write for the Guardian," says Sir Max Hastings, "because it is read by the new establishment." And few personify the timeless ability of the old establishment to morph into a new one better than Sir Simon Jenkins, ex-editor of the Times and Rusbridger's latest recruit as a columnist.
