WILL LEWIS, the coming man at the Telegraph, is leading a team of about 20 outriders over at the newspaper group’s new Victoria headquarters. The corps d’élite is testing a range of initiatives, the first of which is filing stories to the internet and the paper simultaneously. Second is “click and carry”, a neat idea, of mid-afternoon updates that readers can print out and eye on the way home. There is already one available during the World Cup.
The bit that has caught the eye, though, is the third scheme, dubbed Telegraph London, where journalists are filing dummy stories for a new tabloid. This has sparked excitable speculation about the future of the only mainstream broadsheet left, but that is wide of the mark. Instead the idea is to see if it is possible to produce a London product alongside the national, hitting a market where the Telegraph is weak. Nothing has been decided yet, and the project winds up in a month or two. But the scheme is very much Mr Lewis’s baby, triggering talk that his next job is to become not Editor of The Daily Telegraph but replace Murdoch MacLennan as chief executive.