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24 | denis beckett<br />
Which doesn’t mean it was in harmony. In charles’s view,<br />
we were in a minefield and our job was to tread softly and<br />
survive. World was the ultimate also-ran newspaper. We rocked<br />
no boats, stirred no strife, stimulated no particular thought. We<br />
sold in gigantic quantities, on the strength of a stock of posters<br />
so predictable that we could have printed them on plastic and<br />
swapped them forever. BucS MeeT cHIefS, cHIefS fOIL<br />
BucS, BucS SLaM BIrDS, BIrDS face cHIefS …<br />
Soccer was the formula, soccer and society funerals. Once<br />
a page traffic survey demonstrated that 85% of readers read<br />
something on the front page (soccer) and 85% of readers read<br />
something on the back page (soccer) and 5% of readers read<br />
something on the leader page (non-soccer). charles exulted,<br />
“You see! We should have soccer on the leader page.” To me<br />
the message was that we exhausted the soccer market and<br />
reached no-one else. You could not get two more opposite ways<br />
of reading the same survey.<br />
funerals, mind, I didn’t argue. The next best thing to a soccer<br />
match was a Socialite’s funeral. a Socialite was anyone famous,<br />
unless he was famous for business and was therefore a Tycoon.<br />
a good funeral could give us headlines for a week.<br />
among the black staff were several who hankered for<br />
World to get relevant, but on the whole they were half-hearted<br />
about it. World was a job; what the hell. among the whites<br />
there was a sum total of three “politically conscious” souls.<br />
Maggie Patterson, later to move to London and be active in the<br />
communist Party, edited the women’s page and flew a lefty flag<br />
with subtle dedication. John Marquard and myself both ranked<br />
as pallid liberals by any rational criterion but were viewed as<br />
agents of the Kremlin by many of our colleagues, especially<br />
after the start of People’s college.<br />
This was the idea of Dave adler and clive Nettleton at Sached,<br />
a leftish education trust with a problem: they were producing<br />
teaching materials they had difficulty distributing. World had a<br />
wondrous circulation but blow-all content. How about putting<br />
the two together? I was invoked for no better reason than that
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