Addis marries young and old in bid to revive Express’ fortunes

Little did we know, when I arranged to interview the new editor of the Daily Express last Thursday, that Lords Stevens and Hollick would make our meeting quite so timely.

Richard Addis is by no means the first editor to try to halt the sales plunge at the Express, but he is the first to have worked for Marketing Week and as such he is bringing a refreshingly marketing-oriented eye to the task. The merger between MAI and United News and Media – which will increase the resources available to him – can only help.

It’s a formidable – some would say impossible – challenge. On the wall of the conference room next to his office is a reminder of the Express’ heyday – the Coronation Day front cover, headlined “All this and Everest too!” In those Beaverbrook days, the Express sold more than 4 million copies. Today it’s 1.25 million, and the Daily Mail has just passed 2 million for the first time for many years.

Since his appointment, a frenetic few weeks ago, Addis has revived two of the Express’ Fifties icons – William Hickey and Beachcomber – as well as hiring a string of authoritative and intellectually respectable writers to enliven the features pages. They include Mary Kenny, Anthony Holden, Philip Norman and Geoffrey Wheatcroft.

And as a former Mail and Evening Standard executive, Addis is not afraid to buy good features from the broadsheets, such as an interview with Elizabeth Smith, the widow of the former Labour leader, from the previous day’s Independent.

All this, he says, has been part of an “emergency procedure” to make the paper more literate and intelligent. He is now working on the news side, aiming to make the reporting more reliable and less slanted, with more detail and information. He wants more foreign news and more analysis – devoting, say, a page to the issue of grammar schools, explaining concisely and clearly how they came about and the arguments for and against.

If this seems a little upmarket for a tabloid, it is deliberately so. For Addis has a clear view of the readers he wants to attract as he faces up to his old employers at the Mail. And since he doesn’t believe it is practical to challenge the market leader head-on, he hopes to redefine the market, so the Express has a realistic chance of becoming the top paper in a different arena.

“I want to find a younger market within the middle market,” he says. “The Mail has a rather ageing readership and so have the Telegraph and Times, while The Sun and the Mirror are moving too far downmarket. Research shows there’s a clear gap in the market, which we want to make our own.”

His paper and a few others, I suggest. He concedes it’s easier said than done, not least because there is no great evidence that young people want to read newspapers. “They’d rather buy Loaded and Marie Claire,” he says. “Our aim is to create something that they will want to be seen with – a badge, in marketing terms.”

So why bring back Hickey and Beachcomber? What relevance can they have for young readers? “They’re only small bricks in the edifice, small weapons in the armoury, but they are reminders that the Daily Express was once a great brand. People have warm memories of the Express – they say, ‘we used to have it when I was young but Mum now reads the Mail’. Bringing back a few of the old features is just a way to hook people in again.”

More fundamental to his vision of the new Express is his belief that young people are better-educated than their parents (despite all those newspaper stories about the decline in education standards). He’s convinced they want a paper that is intelligent but not stuffy, in a tabloid format.

“The trick is to take the habitual middle-market look and tone and make it a little bit more literary and intellectually respectable, like the Evening Standard does. Without changing the pattern of really good revelatory stories, hard-hitting headlines and good pictures, you introduce more reliable reporting, and more sophisticated features and comment.”

He wants to make the paper more aspirational, particularly in its features. “Young people want to improve themselves and have a better life, so for example our gardening features will show larger gardens that our readers can aspire to.”

Still to come is a relaunch of the sports pages, with new writers and columnists, and of the Saturday magazine, which will have a strong TV listings section at its core. The new editor gives himself until April to get the paper on the right lines. Then the ad campaign begins, with a 10m budget for 1996.

But what about the paper’s politics? Surely, its previous unswerving loyalty to John Major will hardly attract young readers? With Lord Stevens emphasising he will remain in charge of the paper’s editorial line and Labour’s Lord Hollick vowing not to interfere, Addis says he’s already agreed that in a General Election the Daily Express will back the Conservatives.

But in his quest to attract the young, intelligent reader, he says he wants to make it more independent in its political line – “intelligently aloof”, as he puts it. And with that small bombshell, he was off to the House of Commons – for his first meeting with Tony Blair.