"I'm sure I'm going to spend most of my time as proprietor of the Press Gazette taking furious calls from my great mates.". When the actors Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes announced their engagement in Paris last week, the stage was set for a glittering London premier of Cruise's latest film last night. But waiting among 5,000 fans beside the red carpet in Leicester Square was a reporter armed with a water pistol. why would you do that?"As the prankster offered a barely audible excuse, Cruise said: "Do you like thinking less of people, is that it?"After an uncomfortable silence the joker went to walk away but Cruise said: "Don't run away."He told his assailant: "That's incredibly rude I'm here giving you an interview and you do that... We will be very aggressive online."He thinks he has an advantage in breaking such stories because of the Press Gazette's independence within the industry. It will be up to Morgan to demonstrate that such impartiality exists.
Since he was marched out of the Mirror by company security guards in May last year, he's hardly been out of the limelight.The publication of his memoirs, The Insider, (serialised with great fanfare by the Daily Mail) was followed by columns for the London Evening Standard and more features for the Mail, not to mention his frequent TV appearances, including hosting his own show with the former Sunday Express editor and Conservative Party communications chief Amanda Platell.But the purchase of the newspaper industry trade magazine gives him the chance to get right in the faces of old friends and foes alike."A lot of my friends edit newspapers, but they're all going to be susceptible, I'm afraid, to the impartiality of the Press Gazette," he warns. Come and show us what you're made of."Money will be invested on hiring big-name columnists, he promises. "To get every newspaper editor in the country reading the columns, they have got to be by people who grab the attention because of their positions, or who they are, or how they write - people who have got serious things to say about the industry, but also people who can be entertaining or downright bloody mischievous."In this respect, he hopes that the new Morgan-style Press Gazette will borrow from the likes of Punch and his own nemesis, Ian Hislop's Private Eye. "It will be an incredible story-breaking magazine for the industry, but secondly, we will have a lot of laughs, a lot of mischief."Apart from taking on the long-established trade magazines that cover other areas of the media, Morgan also wants to target the suppliers of online media news, notably the MediaGuardian website."What I want is, within a year, everyone clicking on to Press Gazette just as much, because we are breaking more stories and have more interesting ideas. He says a strong editorial product is his priority so that circulation can be driven up by readers wanting their own copies instead of waiting to read the newsroom one.Apart from carrying interviews in which leading media figures spill the beans, he wants a mix of "bust-ups and brawls and rows and all the things that go on in the passionate newsrooms in this country".He says: "I've been in newsrooms where journalists have fought each other over a byline - I love all that That's what it should be about. The best reporters in the world are not angelic little souls, they're aggressive terriers who want their names in the newspaper and want to get ahead in life and up the ladder. The Press Gazette will be very aspirational."He hopes that the magazine will become "an academy of excellence" for young journalists who may be denied the traditional routes into national paper newsrooms.
"You can't get the chance now to do shift work on the nationals in the way that you could when I was younger," he says "We need more bodies. We are already making inroads in the first week and I don't think we are going to find it too hard."Sponsorship has also been identified as a key revenue stream, so expect that to be reflected in next year's awards, including the notoriously boozy British Press Awards, at which Morgan himself has been an enthusiastic participant in the past."The awards will go to Freud Communications and I won't have anything to do with it, which will be a blessed relief to every journalist in the country who thought that something approaching Mad Max was about to erupt," he says. "We want to restore the prestige to this event to make these awards into something that everyone wants to win."He says there will be full consultation with the editors who threatened to withdraw their support from the British Press Awards after the raucous nature of this year's event.Despite Morgan's obvious interest in the money-making potential of the purchase, he claims that the PG's staff are "quite pumped up" by the idea that they have been taken over by a famous journalist, or as he puts it, not "a glorified bean-counter who's come in to make a few quid". "I'm very interested in the people, not cold statistics or hard facts - I'm interested in the people that run the big media buying companies, that run the big PR agencies. These people are as interesting to journalists as the people who run papers, and we need to be very broad-thinking in that way."Nevertheless, he is determined that Press Gazette will relocate to the spiritual home of British newspapers, Fleet Street, and he appears to have identified premises already."We think it would be a rather nice touch if the industry magazine went back to a street that is synonymous with the industry but no longer has anybody working there," he says.Morgan will attend the office "at least once a week", but it is clear that the commercial side of the operation concerns him just as much as the editorial.
