Don't fight private battles. Readers aren't interested

Telegraph v Times, Mail v Express, Sun v Mirror: press rivalry has never been more intense

Britain has one of the most competitive newspaper industries on earth. What gives this a further twist is the intense rivalries between pairs of newspapers in different parts of the market. Owners, editors and management are not only concerned with doing as well as they can for their own newspaper in the circulation jungle - they also often have a specific target in mind in the shape of their nearest competitor.

The Sun-Mirror war has become less personal since Piers Morgan's departure from the latter, but his lunges at David Yelland will live on in media memory beyond both of them, and neither is going to pass up an opportunity to talk down the other. Richard Desmond dreams of doing the same to the Daily Mail, though it looks like one of those dreams that can never come true.

However, the most intense rivalry may well be between The Daily Telegraph and The Times, whose long-running argument over which circulation figures count has been sharpened by the great tabloid - sorry, compact - issue.

Shortly after Rupert Murdoch bought The Times, I happened to be in the office of the newly installed managing director, Gerald Long, with whom I had worked at Reuters. Murdoch came in and began to talk to Long about the Telegraph. It was, he said, ridiculous that it should be out-selling The Times by three or four times. Something must be done, and fast.

That was 23 years ago. Despite price cuts, promotion, hirings and firings, the Telegraph stays ahead. But the intensity of the rivalry is evident from recent exchanges between managers from the two papers in the neutral jousting ground of The Guardian's business pages.

At the end of July, Chris White-Smith, sales director for the Telegraph Group, decided it was "time to hit back" at attacks on the daily during the protracted purdah which its executives had gone through because of the trials and tribulations of Conrad Black. Comments in the Evening Standard by Times editor, Robert Thomson, had riled him, though - in keeping with the rules of the game - he dismissed them as smacking of "desperation from a man with no more tricks in the bag".

White-Smith had one irrefutable fact to advance - for all Murdoch's efforts, The Times still lags behind the Telegraph, and the £26m loss chalked up by Times Newspapers last year compares unfavourably to the Telegraph's continuing profitability. In reaction, Paul Hayes, general manager of Times Newspapers, fired his killer response - the Telegraph has depended more heavily than The Times on discounted copies and bulks. Full-price sales were, Hayes added, what increasingly mattered to advertisers. The compact Times had brought an "extraordinary increase" in these which has narrowed the gap between the two best-selling broadsheets.

Each man was right in his way, a seeming paradox that is usually a feature of newspaper rivalries. You can always find something to fling at a competitor, and something else to use as a first line of defence. Logic often plays a minor role. That can apply internally as well as externally, given the status accorded to top-line circulation figures. When I was editing The Observer, a corporate decision was made not to follow The Sunday Telegraph path of bulk sales; that did not stop the marketing department commenting admiringly at management meetings on the inflated figures flowing from Canary Wharf.

Competition is a wonderful thing, and pumps up the adrenaline that runs through the lifeblood of journalism. But there must be a question about the effects of the head-to-head battles that mark the daily newspaper market - such rivalries are less of a symptom of the Sunday market, perhaps because the sales dominance in their sectors of The Sunday Times and News of the World.

Looking over your shoulder or spending scarce time preparing barbs to fire at rivals is not the best recipe for successful editing. The decision to stay out of the price-cutting in the early 1990s, even if it restricted sales growth, was one of The Guardian's wisest decisions. As for readers, their interest in slagging matches between editors and managers can be, at best, limited.

Much better for editors and executives to concentrate on doing best what they can do best, with enough self-confidence not to need a punching bag to keep up their testosterone levels. A forlorn hope, I know; but, if you look back to the early years of The Independent, part of its success came from regarding itself as being, at the same time, in competition with everybody and with nobody, and doing its own thing. As it is again today. This being Britain, that early self-belief inevitably came to be seen as arrogance. Much easier to be down in the dog pound, snarling away.

Jonathan Fenby is a former editor of 'The Observer' and 'South China Morning Post', the author of books on France and China, and editorial director of an upcoming website, earlywarning.com

Peter Cole is away

Glory that is black and white

The death of Henri Cartier-Bresson last week brought a striking reminder of the power of black-and-white photography. Bravely and beautifully, The Times put his image of three women in the street in Alicante on the front page. Others used picture spreads, along with the obituaries. The Guardian turned a neat trick by using on the front a portrait of Cartier-Bresson by the peerless Jane Bown that could have been made by the master himself.

The French photographer may have sought anonymity when going about his work, hiding his face and concealing his Leica under a handkerchief; but his photographs of people and events were among the most personal ever taken. It is hard not to think that, had he used colour, that individuality would have been diminished.

All in all, a fine demonstration of the impact, elegance and relevance of the value of black-and-white photography, expertly taken, well displayed - and uncropped.

DIARY

Gently into the knight

Red faces at the pink 'un. The FT has been forced into printing a second letter in two months from business troubleshooter Adrian Montague (pictured), pointing out that contrary to the many references in the City newspaper he has not, in fact, been knighted. The chairman of British Energy and an adviser to Transport Secretary Alistair Darling, Montague is becoming irritated by the FT's insistence that he is Sir Adrian. "Gently chiding you for wrongly attributing a knighthood to me ... does not seem to do the trick as you have repeated the indignity," he writes. "I hope this further rebuke will finally see an end to it."

Size matters

As the "compact" revolution continues to make waves - The Scotsman is said to be the latest convert - Kamal Ahmed has been taking time out from his job as Political Editor of The Observer in order to oversee a Berliner-sized dummy version of the paper. Crunch time comes when it goes before the board of the Scott Trust next month.

'One' that got away

Taste-makers on Q magazine could do with a lesson in consistency. It named U2's single "One" the greatest track ever recorded when it put together an edition honouring the 1,001 Best Songs Ever late last year. Just weeks later it devised a buyers' guide to the Irish band, headed by Bono (pictured), in which the track failed to get a mention even as one of the stand-out tracks on the album from which it came, Achtung Baby. Now Q has put together a list of the 1,010 Songs You Must Own, and the it is back in favour again. This time, however, it has only made it to No 3. Ah, the fickle world of rock'n'roll.

Girl-crazy tabloids

"FA girl's revenge on Sven" screamed the front page headline in Thursday's Evening Standard. And how old exactly is Faria Alam, the "girl" in question? Only 38.

Off the record no defence

One of the morals of the FA saga is that "off the record" is no defence if it's only a mask for dubiousness, as Colin Gibson discovered last week. Let's not forget the story that won Paul Waugh of The Independent a Scoop of the Year nomination last year: a No 10 official's "off the record" dismissal of David Kelly as a "bit of a Walter Mitty".