The Press: New Hand at an Old Tiller

By Fleet Street standards, London's respected independent Sunday Observer (circ. 384,000) is not a very big paper, but it is accounted a very good one. It has only a twentieth the circulation of the garish, picture-strewn Sunday News of the World, but at least 20 times the influence. The sedate, 157-year-old Observer is only six years the junior of the hoary London Times,* and proud of its past. It missed the boat by giving the battle of Trafalgar a scant squib, but scooped the town on the outbreak of the Crimean War. In 1820 it broke the law by printing news...