Circulations are falling but content - and quality - have risen. In an edited extract from his acclaimed new history of the British press, Roy Greenslade argues against those who look back to an imaginary golden age and charts how the broadsheets have battled to maintain readership

Guardian

According to this myth, there is less to read, they no longer stick to the serious agenda, there are too many features, too little foreign news, too much emphasis on sport. These critics talk windily, even if sincerely, about the tabloidisation of the broadsheets.

In so doing, they conveniently overlook the added value, ignoring the fact that there is more so-called serious editorial content than back in those legendary good old days. The tabloids haven't come close to providing the range of material now regularly offered by the broadsheets.

Whatever the reasons for falling sales may be, they cannot be found in fatuous generalisations about the broadsheets having lost the editorial plot. But the head-shaking veterans certainly have shaped - well, mis-shaped - perceptions by indulging in their misguided nostalgia.

In truth, the annual output of South Africa's most productive goldmine wouldn't suffice to burnish all the golden ages of journalistic memory they so fondly recall. Their criticisms first gained credence during the middle 1990s when they persistently accused the broadsheet press of dumbing down and were supported by a variety of journalists from abroad, notably the United States and Germany where, it should be noted, there is almost no newspaper competition.

Indeed, competition lies at the heart of all that has happened to Britain's national press, and much of the reasoning behind the dumbing-down indictments can be traced back to the transformation in broadsheets after the 1986 Wapping revolution. Most significantly, we should note the dramatically heightened competition after the launch of the Independent that year. Over the following five years there were huge increases in pagination, extra sections and magazines, more elegant designs and the liberal use of colour. No longer was it feasible to make comparisons with the papers that existed in the 1970s, let alone years before. By 1991 every title, broadsheet and tabloid, had enlarged far beyond the imaginations of the proprietors and journalists of earlier generations.

Newspapers became packages: the old corner shop of eight poorly-printed, monochrome pages with its restricted editorial diet had been transmuted into a new supermarket offering scores of well-illustrated pages and a seemingly limitless range of content.

Even the staid old Daily Telegraph, under new ownership and benefiting from a new editor, Max Hastings, looked fresh and more appealing. It carried more features in order to attract a new audience essential to a paper with too high an age profile.

Competition ensured that no idea, good or bad, remained the province of one paper for long. Every supermarket felt it necessary to stock the same goods, claiming they were qualitatively better than those of their rivals, while trying to find one unique selling point.

Newspapers had always been advertising vehicles. Now they often resembled marketing agencies, offering readers opportunities to take low-cost holidays, enjoy cut-price restaurant meals and spend cheap evenings at the opera. The Sunday Times launched its own credit card. The Independent, despite its claim to the journalistic moral high ground, offered cash prizes in contests.

But the delight in editorial expansion and innovation, with its promise of luring a new generation of readers, didn't last long. Overall circulation dipped as the effects of a worldwide recession in 1991 began to bite. So every group found it necessary to increase marketing and promotion budgets to sell fewer papers which, because of their dramatic growth in size and a downturn in advertising revenue, were costing ever more to produce.

Between the first half of 1990 and the first half of 1993, 10 of the 11national daily titles lost sales, with the Times's sale falling briefly below that of the Independent.

Rupert Murdoch believed he had the solution to this circulation crisis, deciding to cut the cover prices of the Sun and the Times, and thereby launching a full-scale price war. Stung by the hostility towards his initiative, Murdoch offered an economic rationale for his decision: newspapers had increased in price at twice the rate of inflation.

Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph titles, was unimpressed, pointing out that prices had gone up because papers were offering added value. The Independent's founder and editor, Andreas Whittam Smith, was appalled, vainly calling for official sanction against Murdoch.

While the Times attracted many thousands of new buyers, both the Daily Telegraph and the Independent suffered from circulation falls and were reluctantly drawn into the war.

Maximising circulation had always been important but broadsheets had previously tended to stress editorial quality rather than sales quantity. From this point on though, sales assumed a tabloid-like significance.

The Guardian had suffered a surprisingly sharp downturn after the Independent's launch. The Telegraph was desperate to maintain its million-plus sale. The Independent's seemingly inexorable rise was over. Murdoch's pricing strategy at the Times was now setting the pace, and it had exposed the underlying drama of declining British newspaper circulation. People were buying fewer papers than they had done at any time since the 1950s and distribution departments were forced to devise a variety of cut-price schemes to prevent their overall sales figures from plunging and thus threatening their advertising revenue.

Editors grew increasingly concerned about how to broaden their audiences. Throughout the century the key ingredients of broadsheets had been news, analysis and comment. All gradually widened their scope to incorporate features, but this trend accelerated during the early 1990s with every title using colourful front-page blurbs to sell material that would never have been previously published in what was regarded as the "serious" or "quality" press.

This change was widely criticised by commentators, and some older staff, who argued that the broadsheets were copying tabloids and, therefore, dumbing down.

Editors were accused of abandoning their public-service remit by reducing the space given to foreign news, cutting back on the coverage of parliament and increasing the numbers of columnists and commentators. Some critics, especially from the US, scoffed at the use of big colour pictures and bold headlines, and the alleged brevity of articles. Others contended that the former impartiality in domestic news coverage had been compromised by heavily-angled headlines and biased reporting, an accusation previously levelled only at tabloids.

Anthony Sampson, a modern historian and former Observer journalist, articulated the concerns of many when he argued that "in the last 20 years most people accept that there has been a fundamental change in broadsheet newspapers" away from "consistent coverage of serious events towards short-term entertainment, speculation and gossip." In his lengthy assault, he maintained that the media could no longer lay claim to provide the first draft of history and were guilty of presenting to readers a "sense of a discontinuous, disconnected world".

But Sampson's substantive point was badly flawed. Broadsheets have always presented a "sense of a discontinuous, disconnected world" which, viewed in retrospect, does approximate to a rough first draft of history.

In a full-hearted response to the critics, the Times's editor Peter Stothard claimed broadsheets shared a determination "to reach out to new constituencies of readers and reverse the decades of decline". Papers had to be relevant to people's lives, had to appeal to casual readers and, therefore, had to broaden their coverage.

Stothard was passionately supported by the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, and together they illustrated how increased pagination allowed them to devote more space to foreign stories than 20 years before. Extra pages of comment and analysis provided a larger platform for debates, allowing papers to offer a range of opinions about issues compared with the previous era when there was room only for a single point of view.

Domestic news coverage was infinitely more comprehensive. Features content - whether about health, divorce, sex, relationships, pop music, parenthood, childhood, whatever - broadened a paper's scope. Much more space allocated to sport provided room for writers to breathe and also permitted the coverage of minority interest sports. Pages of listings offered readers a service they had never enjoyed before. Editors were delighted with their expanded papers and asked, not without irony, whether critics who were complaining so loudly about substantive differences were being unduly influenced by changes in style rather than substance.

Indeed, broadsheet editors discovered that they could incorporate the tabloid agenda without unduly compromising their authority and their central mission to inform and explain.

One consistent complaint levelled by politicians was about the supposed failure of papers to report MPs' speeches in the Commons. But it failed to take account of the changed political environment: parliamentary debating was less important because of the evolution of a presidential style of government and because MPs spent more time in committees. The broadcasting of parliament, which began at the end of 1989, also eroded interest in old-style gallery coverage.

Again, memory played tricks. Lengthy parliamentary reports in the past were often wildly overwritten, formal and pompous.

The dumbing down debate was also underpinned by snobbery. Many critics harked back to a time when broadsheets sold only to an elite of which they were part. They were ignoring the demographic, social and cultural changes wrought as a result of growing affluence and greater educational attainments. These had made a nonsense of society's former divisions in which broadsheets had served a relatively small, serious elite while the tabloids sold to the unserious masses. The notion that there were serious people who wanted to read only serious news was untenable. A rounded human being of the 1990s could appreciate reading about domestic political infighting, developments in rock music, the state of British football and the problem of third world debt.

Perhaps the most visible difference between the papers of the past and those of the 1990s was the proliferation of columnists. Both broadsheets and tabloids published scores of writers every day, usually offering their opinions on the news. Gradually editors and writers became more innovative, pushing the genre into new areas, with personal or domestic columns, pejoratively called "me" columns.

There was another profoundly important element too: the growth of material aimed at women. Tabloids were the first to offer editorial designed to appeal to women but - with the exception of the Guardian - broadsheets tended to speak mostly to men. That is no longer the case.

Now comes more innovation, with the Independent deciding to adopt the tabloid shape without sacrificing its commitment to broadsheet journalism. The owners and editors of broadsheets haven't been dumbing down: they have been wising up. They know they have to go on trying harder if they have any hope of retaining their diminishing audiences in the face of the threat from the electronic media, such as 24-hour TV news and the internet.