Free Widows & Orphans by Michael Arditti

provoking industrial unrest, he put off investment in new technology and, when he suffered a fatal heart attack in March 1986 while proposing the loyal toast at a Rotary Club lunch, the paper was still produced using hot metal. The inflated wage bill was just one of the drains on the company, which, as Duncan found out, owed almost £800,000 to the bank and the Inland Revenue. He was in his second year at Cambridge when his father died and, although expecting to succeed him in due course, he had never imagined that it would be so soon. It rapidly became clear that the only way to save the
Mercury
and to safeguard his mother’s future was for him to come home and take over the paper, thewrench of leaving his friends assuaged at least temporarily by the spate of media interest in ‘the youngest editor in the country’. He persuaded his creditors to defer their demands while he streamlined the basic operation. After selling off the bookbinding and design divisions, the staff houses and sports fields, and taking out an additional loan, he invested in a web-offset printing plant, imposed new working practices and prepared to confront the print unions. To his boundless relief, their attention was focused on events in Wapping and he was able to impose the necessary redundancies with minimal conflict.
    For the first fifteen years all went well. He had the satisfaction of restoring both the paper’s finances and its reputation. He was fortunate in that the
Francombe Citizen
, a free sheet launched in the early Eighties to counter what it saw as the
Mercury
’s subservience to the Chamber of Commerce and the Town Hall, collapsed shortly after his arrival. Its much-vaunted independence was not matched by editorial rigour and, despite a public appeal for funds, it was bankrupted when the Mayor successfully sued it for naming his underage ‘carjacker son’. With his rival removed, Duncan established a culture of campaigning journalism at the
Mercury
, which led, among other things, to the rescue of a mobile library, two day centres and an ancient right of way through a pop star’s new estate; the exposure of the Council’s attempt to conceal the Saxon burial site under a proposed multi-storey car park; and the jailing of the director and two nurses behind the sadistic regime at Rosecroft psychiatric hospital.
    In recent years, however, the position had changed dramatically. The growth of the Internet and effects of the Recession had dealt the paper a double blow from which it was doubtful it would ever recover. There were only so many pages that the paper could lose before it lost its purpose. In the past, Duncan had been able to assign a two-man team for two months to a single story; now, with a skeleton staff, he could barely affordto send one man for a day
on patch
. The news team spent as much time paraphrasing press releases as filing their own reports. Without the resources to hold the police and the Council to account, the paper was as tame as it had been in his father’s day, although the imperative now was economic rather than social. It sometimes felt as if the journalists’ sole function was to supply copy in order to sell advertising. But advertising revenue had fallen by seventeen per cent over the past year. Classified adverts had migrated to the web, where they would be up and running in an hour rather than the week it took at the
Mercury
, and display adverts, once a guaranteed moneymaker, had been hard hit by the cuts in public spending and dearth of job vacancies.
    Turning to his mother, who was chiding him for the dead bulbs in the chandelier, Duncan felt a pang of unease. His sustained attempts to spare both her and Alison the full extent of the paper’s decline would make today’s disclosures all the more shocking. They were granted a temporary reprieve when Sheila brought in tea and digestives, Duncan noting with relief that she had abandoned the broken-biscuit assortment, which, penny-wise, she had taken