Daily Telegraph

Eric Kallgren    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 1:35pm on Saturday, June 6th, 2009

A very brief history of the Daily Telegraph, and a discussion of how the newspaper broke the M.P. expenses abuse scandal, written by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair magazine in the July 2009 edition:

"London has long prided itself on the vitality and number of its quality newspapers. But they have not been immune to the recent downturn in print fortunes. This is true even at The Daily Telegraph, one of Britain’s finer broadsheets, which two years ago moved to shiny new offices in Victoria, in Central London—a stone’s throw from Google’s headquarters there, and a lifetime away from the vaunted squalor of Fleet Street. Long a small-c conservative paper (“The Torygraph” in Private Eye), it was taken over from Conrad Black in 2004 by the Barclay brothers, two press-shy working-class outsiders, who made their first fortune in real estate. Three years ago, they installed Will Lewis, then 37 and the youngest editor in the paper’s history. Lewis was a star at the Financial Times and The Sunday Times. He was also a technophile who believed that news was not just something you read the next morning. He revamped the paper’s Web site and got the reporters to blog, produce Webcasts, and even Twitter to bring in a broader (and younger) audience. To many in the business, it seemed the Telegraph had fallen prey to the same near-lunatic fascination with its Web site that has been bedeviling American papers, not least the Times. You might think the Telegraph was following the general battle plan for all papers going off a cliff everywhere."

The full story:
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/07/graydon200907