Appointment stuns Fleet Street

By Simon Bond

       Janet Street-Porter, one of the most flamboyant figures in the UK television industry, has been appointed editor of the Independent on Sunday newspaper, in a move that has astounded staff.
     Street-Porter has no experience of editing a newspaper and last worked in the print industry in the early 1970s. She replaces Kim Fletcher with immediate effect, in a move has been widely derided in the UK press as a publicity stunt designed to boost the ailing title, which sells just 254,000 copies a week.
     Simon Kelner, editor of the daily Independent and editor-in-chief of the both newspapers, is said to have approached Street-Porter after getting to know her in London’s famous media bar, The Groucho Club.
     Street-Porter’s detractors say that her lack of experience will leave Kelner effectively editing both newspapers. But Kelner denies that he has hired the famously loud-mouthed former newscaster and inventor of "Youth TV" as a publicity stunt. He says he hopes her "unique energy, enthusiasm, intelligence and ability to surprise will make the newspaper stand out from its rivals."
    The Independent on Sunday has proved a cash drain on its more successful daily sister publication ever since its launch. But staff argue that the paper has never been given a big enough budget to compete seriously in a Sunday market dominated by the heavy-weight Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph newspapers.
     Wild, wacky, or just plain desperate--whatever the motive behind what must be the most bizarre appointment in recent Fleet Street history--if she is true to form, Janet Street-Porter will not waste any time making her mark on the paper.
    As a television executive, film producer, chat show host and unlikely President of the UK Ramblers’ Association, Street-Porter has done it all and--as her new employers are about to find out--thoroughly stirring things up along the way.
    After a short career in print journalism she moved to London Weekend Television in 1975, where she became a presenter of a street music program. She then moved behind the cameras and won a TV industry award for originality for her pioneering youth program, "Network 7." The show combined weird camera angles, on-screen text and pop video-style filming and went on to spawn a generation of me-too youth culture TV shows.
   In 1988, Street-Porter was snapped-up by the BBC and given a department where she continued to make her own unique flavor of avant garde television. She left six years later, complaining of having been stifled by the corporation’s bureaucracy and its unreconstructed attitude toward high-flying women executives like herself.
     More recently she attacked TV industry managers, calling them "male, middle-class, middle-aged and mediocre" during a high-profile speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.
     Street-Porter left the BBC to become managing director of the Mirror Group’s cable station, L!VE TV, which offered a tabloid TV mix of programs, including a "Topless Darts" show and weather bulletins read in Norwegian.
    The move proved disastrous. She clashed immediately with the station’s equally loud-mouthed head of television, Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of The Sun newspaper.
    At the peak of their in fighting, the two executives were forced to inhabit different floors of L!VE’s offices. MacKenzie nicknamed Street-Porter’s floor "Planet Janet" on account of its lurid decoration, flashing exclamation-mark light fittings, nightclub furniture, khaki computers and purple carpet tiles. After the pitched battles with MacKenzie were memorably broadcast in a TV documentary, Street-Porter left the station in 1995.
     Clearly smarting from her time at L!VE , she has stayed away from an executive role in television ever since, despite her many high-placed fans, which include Sir John Birt, the outgoing director general of the BBC.         Whether she can now leverage her obvious creative talents successfully in the world of print is anyone’s guess. However in the opinion of Kelvin MacKenzie, now departed from L!VE and currently chief executive of Talk Radio, "She couldn’t edit a bus ticket."

-Simon Bond writes from outside London.