Leonardo Padura would say that he was “the man who loved newspapers.” His colleagues adored and envied his vitality, friendliness and journalistic culture.
He was equally capable of leading investigation and denunciation projects as he did against pharmaceutical laboratories (thalidomide “the safe medicine”), as well as writing manuals on graphic design and photojournalism, a great visual encyclopedia on the 20th century, splendid memoirs and books on the craft and business of informing. He was a total journalist.
He was probably the best British journalist of the last century, although he had to go into “exile” to the United States to avoid suffering the persecution of Rupert Murdoch, who never forgave him for publishing a book about his stormy years as director of the Times of London. He was previously editor of Lord Thomson’s Sunday Times.
The son of a “respectable working class” family, he was married to the journalist Tina Brown, then director of Tatler, the bible of the British aristocracy. In 1984, they both decided to emigrate to New York, where she was editor of Vanity Fair and The Daily Beast, and he founded Condé Nast Traveler, directed U.S. News World Report and the Random House publishing house where he bought for $40,000 the rights to publish the memoirs (Dreams of my Father) of a young politician who 15 years later would be the 44th president of the United States: Barack Obama.
I met Evans on a memorable visit that a group of Spanish journalists made before the launch of Traveler (“the magazine not for tourists but for travelers”). He attended to us for more than an hour as if he had known us all his life. We asked him about the terrible graphic design of North American newspapers and it was there that he dramatized how difficult it was to read newspapers full of “page breaks.” With all the sections of the New York Times in one hand, he began to leaf through it in a hilarious attempt to locate stories that began on the first page and continued in other notebooks, while piles of pages fell to the floor and Harold Evans ended up wrapped in paper.
We invited him to come to an international seminar at the University of Navarra to present the Traveler project and he accepted, but days before he told us that it was impossible for him to travel. In exchange, he asked me to read the text of his speech on his behalf and by courier he sent a surprise package containing three printed and complete prototypes of the future magazine and dozens of slides, with which the “secret” of the magazine was revealed in Spain before its launch in the United States.
Months later I saw them again at the Condé Nast offices in New York and had lunch with Harold and Tina in a private dining room. They said that they used to travel to Spain frequently because her parents lived on the Costa del Sol where Mr. Brown, who was also a journalist, published a weekly newspaper in English for British expats. They spoke glowingly of the Spanish press of the transition and on the other hand were very critical of the scavenger press of the Maxwells and Murdochs.
Harold and Tina became American citizens, but Elizabeth II invested him as Sir Harold Evans, “Knight of the Order of the British Empire” for “services in journalism,” and Tina Brown was named CBE (Commander of the Order). of the British Empire).
I have remembered Sir Harold Evans these days because just a week ago marked the fourth anniversary of his death in New York (1928-2020). He was 92 years old. And for this reason, a few months ago a seminar was held in Great Britain on the importance of Investigative Journalism, which always repeated the same question: “Investigative Journalism? But can there be journalism without investigation?” The meeting was a posthumous tribute to what Press Gazzete described as “the best journalist of this generation.”
Harry Evans was the promoter of Team Journalism, the great journalism that is the result of assembling teams of professionals (reporters, editors, analysts, experts, designers, photographers and computer graphics), as opposed to the “lone wolves” of many newsrooms where journalism is still worshiped. Vedetism of so many vain primadonnas who want to monopolize all the honors.
Shortly before he died, Sir Harold Evans left us a message that continues to be a wake-up call for the future of this profession: “The question – he said – is not whether the press will continue to exist, but whether what is going to exist will have something “to do with journalism.”
All sessions of “Truth Tellers: The Sir Harry Evans Global Summit in Investigative Journalism” can be viewed at https://ury1.com/HaoldEvans.
