It is January 1997, the dying days of John Major’s government, and newspapers, fighting for a dwindling readership, are plunging downmarket amid wild rumours that the internet is about to change the world for ever. Tamara Sim compiles lists of what’s in and what’s out for Psst!, the weekend entertainment supplement of The Monitor.

Read the last of our exclusive extracts from Annalena McAfee’s new novel The Spoiler.

The Monitor was a broad-church broadsheet, a daily and Sunday
operation embracing a tabloid robustness in its gossip and celebrity
coverage and a rigorously cerebral approach in its Opinion Pages and
its S*nday colour magazine. While other newspapers, as the new millennium
approached, might cling to old-fashioned, monocultural notions
of their readership, the pioneering Monitor swung both ways.
It was founded in the nineteenth century by an aristocratic Whig
who hoped the enterprise would make him a rapid fortune. He went
bankrupt within a decade and the newspaper, in keeping with its tradition,
had been losing money ever since. In the early years of the twentieth
century, in the hands of a social-climbing northern industrialist,
it had restyled itself as a ‘paper of record’, hoping to woo the
Establishment readers of The Times and The Courier. But in its most
recent incarnation, under a new proprietor from the former Soviet Union,
The Monitor had energetically set about broadening its appeal in an
effort to boost dwindling circulation. Politically, too, though its current
editor’s personal inclination was rightwards, the paper hedged its bets,
judging that if the tired Tory government was defeated by fresh-faced
New Labour – or vice versa – in the coming elections, The Monitor
should not be too closely identified with the losing side. In this spirit,
it attacked MPs on both sides of the house with a high-minded evenhandedness.
Its aim was to be all things to all men and women and,
like a twentieth-century Tower of Babel, the paper accommodated many
competing voices in its five-storey ramshackle block of dun concrete.