Gossip or news? Who can tell?

What makes a front page story is changing - for the worse

There used to be news and there used to be gossip but today, in what we once called the posh papers, it gets ever harder to distinguish between the two.

It is not just the prominence given to stories about pop stars and sporting heroes: that simply reflects the homogenisation of popular culture. What is new is the appearance on broadsheet news pages of stories with such a fragile basis in fact that, only a few years ago, they would properly have been consigned to the gossip column or to breathless features called "Just Fancy That".

Thursday's Times devoted 56 column inches on page three to a story and picture claiming that dogs can tell instinctively - perhaps telepathically - when their owners are on their way home from work. It was given more space than the Northern Ireland crisis and Labour's plans for tax cuts.

Last week's Sunday Telegraph also dallied with the paranormal. It revealed at the top of its front page that after the Brighton bombing in 1984, Bernard Ingham, then Margaret Thatcher's press secretary, asked an astrologer to keep an eye on the portents and to let him know if any other dangers loomed for the Prime Minister.

On the previous day, the Guardian, too, had a yarn about the great lady, given pride of place on its front page above the main story about Iraq: "Thatcher 'ready to cut ties with Conservative Party'". Quotation marks inside a headline are a giveaway, telling us we are about to read a story that the paper cannot substantiate and does not quite believe itself.

Sure enough, the "news" that Baroness Thatcher was about to quit the Tories in favour of Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party was attributed only to "bizarre rumours circulating among right-wing anti- Europeans" which had been "emphatically denied by Thatcher admirers". The gist, then, was that a bunch of fruitcakes were saying things about Lady Thatcher that were probably untrue. Hold the front page.

The definition of news has never commanded consensus. A rule of thumb, accepted by most journalists until a few years back, is that to qualify as news something must be true, interesting and have happened fairly recently. The Guardian's story falls at the first of those hurdles, the Sunday Telegraph's at the last and the Times's psychic dogs, arguably all three.

Whether something is interesting is a subjective judgement which depends on the view an editor takes of his paper's audience: and that is the crux of the issue. The gossip-as-news phenomenon (from which no title is immune) is a symptom of the current uncertainty in the broadsheet papers about whom they are addressing.

Until 20 years ago there was little doubt: the Times was aimed at the elite who inhabited the clubs of St James and the corridors of power; the Guardian at schoolteachers and the liberal intelligentsia; the Telegraph at the horsey set from the shires who bemoaned the state of the nation but relished a little discreet filth with their court reporting. The advertisers who kept these papers in business (only just, in some cases) knew exactly whose attention they were purchasing.

Today, the approach is less focused. The technique is to cater for as many readers as possible, trying to coax the sales figures upwards by any means.It is tempting to trace the origin of this scatter-shot style of editing to 1993, when the Times began marketing itself aggressively on price rather than content. Since then the paper's circulation has more than doubled to 750,000 and the new, wider readership is thought to demand a different product from that enjoyed by the old coterie of top people. Some of them will have graduated from the mid-market tabloids and could be put off by too lofty an approach.

The veteran journalist Anthony Sampson believes that the process began earlier. In the latest issue of the British Journalism Review, he writes that "since the 1980s the frontier between qualities and popular papers has virtually disappeared". The broadsheets have learned the "trick of making sensationalism look serious".

I can date the phenomenon more precisely. In 1977, when Elvis Presley died, I was working for the Times in America and suggested that I might go to Memphis to cover this seminal event and the reaction to it. "Sorry," I was told. "Not a Times story." Four years later, when Bob Marley died, not only was I sent to Jamaica for his funeral but when I arrived I found another Times writer there, assigned by the arts section. Rupert Murdoch had acquired the paper two months earlier.

The role of newspapers has been in question ever since television became our dominant cultural influence in the Fifties. Fears were expressed then that people would, in future, get their fix of news from the flickering box and abandon the papers entirely. Reporters were encouraged to give stories an individual twist, and more space was given over to features.

As it turned out, TV and the press learned how to feed off each other. Newspapers routinely lift quotes from broadcast interviews, while TV and radio largely follow the news agenda set by the print. (The Times dog was barking on the Today programme within hours of the paper hitting the streets.) Yet although newspapers have kept their place in the information market, their total circulation has been in gradual decline for years, making the competition for readers more frenetic.

Old-timers must guard against looking back wistfully at a golden age that never was. If I were to suggest that the Guardian stops reporting the rantings of right-wing xenophobes on its front page, and the Times pensions off its canine psychiatrist, I would be accused of being an old fogey, out of touch with contemporary interests.

Yet I regret the change. It used to be said that the diversity of the British press made us one of the best-informed nations in the world. As it becomes less diverse and less wedded to reality, it is turning us into a nation that is prepared to believe anything.