The Press: The Promising Editor

During its investigation of British newspapers five years ago, the Royal Commission on Press Freedom pointedly asked Tory Press Lord Beaverbrook whether anyone in Britain could start a newspaper that would compete with him. “There is a young fellow called William J. Brittain,” replied Beaverbrook, “who is showing great promise.”

Brittain had shown the promise right in Beaverbrook’s own backyard. At 25, after making a name as a reporter and editor, he became assistant editor of Beaver-brook’s Sunday Express, three years later was named editor of Lord Rothermere’s Sunday Dispatch. In 1934 Brittain started out on his own. borrowed $1,600 to buy a weekly, Recorder, which had a circulation of only 700. He built it into a moneymaker, boosted its circulation to 22,500 and put together a chain of eleven other weeklies and trade papers.

Last week Brittain made part of Beaverbrook’s prediction come true. He converted the weekly Recorder into a daily, the first new British daily since the London Daily Worker was started 23 years ago. For his new paper, Brittain has a staff of 70, and to finance his venture, he has close to half a million dollars from a stock issue and notes. (Fleet Streeters gossiped that Beaverbrook himself had invested in the paper, but both the Beaver’s office and Brittain denied it.) Editor Brittain hopes to find a “new public” of 500,000 readers who are “the product of our largely extended universities [and] are repelled by the vulgarity which admittedly appeals to millions” of readers of other British dailies.

In its first issues, the Recorder avoided vulgarity. But in its place it offered little that was exciting in news coverage or in editorial opinion. The Recorder shares the Beaver’s enthusiasm for the ability of the empire “to go it alone,” Tory politics and “individual initiative” to solve Britain’s economic problems. So far, it is long on background stories, profiles and quiet features, put together in a trim eight-column, ten-page paper. But to find new readers Brittain will have to show some of the same journalistic flair that has made the Beaver’s papers among the most successful and widely read in Britain.