People power

The People has been relaunched with a £2m cash injection, but now has a major fight on its hands. Its editor, Neil Wallis, tells David Lister how he will combat Richard Desmond's new paper – and why secretaries are a good source of news

Neil Wallis, editor of The People, enjoys birdwatching. When the tabloid editor, who is also a member of the Press Complaints Commission, had the embarrassment of having to defend and apologise for snatched pictures of the Radio 1 DJ Sara Cox, more than one wag suggested that as a birdwatcher, he could appreciate the skill of a photographer lurking in the bushes.

But, the genuine skills of his hobby – patience and perseverance – have just paid off. Last month, Wallis persuaded a normally obdurate Trinity Mirror management to invest £2m in improvements to the paper, with an ongoing accompanying marketing push including a £300,000 television advertising campaign. The reason they agreed, and the reason that he is about to undergo his greatest test in his four years as editor, is the launch, in a fortnight's time, of Richard Desmond's Sunday Star, a Sunday sister for the Daily Star, one paper that has been enjoying consistent circulation increases.

Wallis is upbeat about yet another competitor in the Sunday tabloid market, a market in which The People has long struggled for a clearly identifiable niche – even in its own publishing house, where it has to compete with the better resourced Sunday Mirror. Now, Wallis is at last also on the receiving end of some extra cash. And it means he has been able to achieve a long-held ambition of a separate, impressive sports section, neatly inserted into the main section upside down, so that you have to physically take it out. The adverts for "SP", as the 48-page pull-out sports section is called, are evident during every Premiership match, showing the importance that Trinity Mirror is attaching to it.

All papers reflect their editors and staff; but with The People (the change back to its old name from The Sunday People was another result of last month's relaunch) you can often trace the big story of the week back to Neil Wallis coming to the reporters' desk or the sports desk, putting his feet up and chatting. Take last Sunday. Wallis hates the show I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, but when he chatted with staff he found that the conversation turned to it within 30 seconds. So, on Sunday, it was pages two and three with a picture of one of its stars, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, on the front. The story about Tara's alleged sex addiction had more than a whiff of self-publicity and damn the consequences; but Wallis had identified a story he believed would fascinate his readers and identified it in a rather old-fashioned and endearing way.

"I insist on talking to my staff all the time," he says. The former deputy editor of The Sun recalls: "Kelvin [MacKenzie] was like that. He would go and talk to people all the time and they could give their opinions, have a good argument. I have a juvenile streak in me. I don't like places to be quiet. I like energy. And, if that means being silly and doing daft things or running around and shouting to get that energy, then I will do it. I often shout out questions to the room in general at the top of my voice. And, if I'm not shouting, I might be singing."

His door, he adds, is not just open; he expects people to come in. "I require people to come and see me and chat. And I go to them. I will go and sit at the sports desk and say, 'Have you heard the new Bruce Springsteen album?' If you talk to people for more than three minutes, their interests come out, and that sparks ideas. With the celebrity Survivor show, I began to realise that the fact it was so appalling actually captivated people. When Piers Morgan was struck by the fact that his secretaries were talking about 11 September and no longer about EastEnders, he was right to be struck. You learn a lot from talking to your secretaries, to your ordinary reporters, to your writers."

Mind you, even if a story didn't come out of it, Wallis would enjoy talking about Bruce Springsteen. He told me how marvellous it was that Radio 2 had A-listed every track on the new album. Outside of newspapers, Wallis is very clear about his priorities. They are, in order of importance, his family (he has been married for 27 years to Gaye, a former schoolteacher, and they have two children, Amy, 18, and Charlie, 8); Manchester United; Springsteen; and bird-watching.

This month, though, there is no escaping the office. Richard Desmond is just about to launch The Sunday Star, and The People must be its chief target. "I've got to be concerned," says Wallis. "You'd be a fool not to be worried. The thing Desmond really does well is red-top tabloid. He gets behind it and is committed. He is plainly a considerable operator. But we are not going to be doing anything extra."

The reason for that is explained by a Trinity Mirror management source. "We've got our retaliation in first," he says. "We've been thinking of investing for some time. The Desmond paper was a jolt in the ribs." So, though it is not being officially acknowledged, the £2m investment is to combat Desmond's Sunday Star. Neil Wallis won't worry what the reason is. He has, after years of pleading, got new investment and can continue to shape the paper as he wants. The People has always been strong on sport, but the new pull-out section – with entire pages on boxing, tennis and rugby as well as exhaustive football coverage – is marking the paper out among its competitors.

Wallis couldn't make much publicly of his relaunch last month, as it came at the height of the Soham case – the wrong time for him to trumpet his philosophy of a happy, positive, entertaining tabloid, "a Sun on Sunday", as he puts it. He had bad luck, too, earlier in the year when his much-anticipated exclusive on the adulterous Premiership footballer finally got into print, after a long legal battle, on the weekend the Queen Mother died.

But Wallis's luck might now be turning. After a year in which the circulations of red-top tabloids dived by more than 5 per cent, competition would be intense even without a new entrant on the market. The People sells more than 1.3 million copies. Ten years ago it sold two million; 30 years ago, 4.5 million. Wallis can't realistically aim to turn back the clock that far. But he can aim to see off the new competition from Desmond – and he may have noticed, too, that his stablemate, The Sunday Mirror, with sales of 1,764,000, and some generous investment from the management, is not all that far ahead of him.