HE DISHED THE DIRT, BUT KEPT HIS OWN LIFE UNDER WRAPS. MARK DAY ON TRUTH EDITOR EZRA NORTON

Sandra Hall opens her book Tabloid Man with a classic piece of tabloid writing: “When Ezra Norton was a baby, his father, John, snatched him up and threatened to dash his brains out. At least, this was the story told in court during his parents’ divorce hearing in 1915. In later years, Ezra professed not to believe it, but by then it scarcely mattered. It had become indelible – a tabloid tale no more extreme than many others which coloured John Norton’s scandalous life.”

There you have it: drama, horror, conflict, intrigue, colour, scandal and the sweep of a turbulent life covered in 69 words. That’s what tabloid writing is all about: gutting the facts and going for the essence; telling a story with brevity, clarity and intrigue to entice the reader.

Tabloid has become a sullied word in recent times, used to identify and cast a dubious air over a genre of newspapers, rather than the compact size it was meant to convey. The cause lies primarily with the excesses of many titles that embraced the style. In their pursuit of popular appeal they have overdone drama and shock-horror to the extent that they have lost their credibility.In pursuit of entertainment in an era of rampant celebrity, they have parodied themselves and ultimately made themselves expendable.

This is a pity because tabloid journalism, well done, remains an art. It requires great skill – an eye for the unusual and the human interest angle, an ability to marshal simple words even for complex propositions, and a healthy dose of wit.

I remember Les Hinton, now the boss of The Wall Street Journal, but then the chief executive of News International in London, flipping through The Sun, stopping to laugh at some of its headlines and story treatments. “The people who do this are brilliant,” he said. “If they lived in Los Angeles they’d be writing scripts for The Simpsons.” In the halcyon days of tabloid newspapers – and that describes much of last century – the best practitioners of the craft relied on their instincts.

They knew the difference between stories that were interesting and those that were important. An understanding of human nature was essential: people love gossip and prying into others’ secrets. Today, of course, we see the same factors influencing websites which have a clear bent towards celebrity goss and the shock/amazement of the unusual (such as the recent “pregnant man” yarn). The difference is that technology delivers a popularity scale through the number of hits, whereas in John Norton’s day the only measurewas gut instinct – a trait he was not lacking in or afraid to use in his most famous publication, Truth.

Hall tells the story of John and Ezra Norton in a racy, easy-to-read style. She marshals the facts and delivers them with clarity. She sketches the times in which they operated, and backgrounds the personalities and politics of their eras to give context to their activities. But even though the dust jacket blurb says she sheds new light on Ezra’s life, I found Tabloid Man to be a touch on the lite side.

Perhaps it is because I know the story too well. As the final inheritor of the Norton legend through my co-ownership of the title in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I spent a lot of time researching John Norton’s life for Truth’s centenary in 1990. I could find little that was new in the book. The reason for this is that Ezra Norton was notoriously – and hypocritically – private.

He was willing to pry into other people’s lives, sometimes with vicious results, but he was not willing to share his life. He was not a memo writer or diary-keeper, denying biographers their raw material. No doubt this is because his father had based his life and fortune on stirring the pot, enmeshed in politics, using the pages of Truth as a personal pulpit and, as Hall says, “shamelessly appropriating them to pursue his causes and vendettas.”

In assiduously reporting every word of his celebrated divorce, he exposed Ezra to an awful public spotlight and it is little wonder that he did not share his father’s addiction to notoriety. That can be understood, but Ezra’s ultimate hypocrisy came on the eve of the publication of Cyril Pearl’s book The Wild Men of Sydney in 1958 when the NSW government rushed through parliament amendments to defamation law that made it possible to defame the dead.

Rumour was rife the law change was influenced by Ezra trying to protect his father’s – and his – name from what he saw as reptilian scandal mongering. It did him no good. The book was published and in December that year he sold his interest in Truth, living in isolation until his death in 1966. The law was finally abandoned last year.

Truth itself went through something of a revival after Rupert Murdoch took over ownership in 1960. I was its editor briefly in 1974-5, when circulation regularly exceeded 400,000.

I became its co-proprietor with the late Owen Thomson in 1980 and for a decade we kept it humming along on its tits-n-bums formula of scandal, racing and naughty advice to the lovelorn through the Heartbalm column. But changing times and changing tastes saw it become increasingly irrelevant into the 90s and it died in my unhappy arms in 1995, aged 105.

Tabloid Man: The Life and Times of Ezra Norton by Sandra Hall, published by HarperCollins, RRP $35

Mark Day is media columnist for The Australian and a former owner of Truth.