The great Telegraph debate: is Cameron too young?
The Daily Telegraph hates David Cameron, because he is young and embraces the future. Now they have appointed a new editor. His name is Will Lewis and he is, er, young (37) and embraces the future.
I had lunch with Will Lewis a few months ago. On the way there, I was feeling this was a bit of a duty lunch, not helped by having to schlep into the City. In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Will is utterly charming, interesting and engaging and a thoroughly nice bloke. (You can tell I’m sucking up here, but it’s also true, as I think the profiles show.)
Will is part of the “Bristol set”, which is far more well-connected than the Notting Hill Set, comprising as it does top financial PRs, TV moguls and business tycoons who were all at Bristol University in the late 80s. Expect to see a few articles detailing the links in this new establishment.
It will be interesting to see what Will (note I have put myself on first name terms) does at the Telegraph. His brief is to make the Telegraph more technology friendly with podcasts and the like. Lots of newspaper types are worried by the internet. The reason is that they don’t understand it. Too many are trying to reproduce their papers on line. Wrong. Instead, they should see the opportunity to build web sites using their brand. Have a great sports website, a great business news site, a great politics site etc., and build from there.
Papers like the Telegraph should also be buying blogs. Now, I know this goes against the grain a bit, as blogs are meant to be anti-establishment. But the Telegraph pays its dead wood columnists something like £300,000 a year. For the same money, they could probably buy Iain Dale’s site, but they would have to give him complete editorial freedom for it to work. The traffic to his site could then be “monetized” through advertising and promotion, and links to the rest of the Telegraph empire. It would also attract younger readers.
All very simple. Not that I could do Will’s job of course. Or that I am insanely jealous.
James said on October 17th, 2006 at 11:55 am:
I agree that David Cameron’s election as leader is a positive step forward for the Conservative Party and his relative youth can play to his advantage over someone like Gordon Brown. What we’ve seen so far from Mr. Cameron is him deomonstrating his exceptional talents in presenting and marketing himself favourably in the public domain.