Arise Sir Will! Graydon Carter pays tribute to Telegraph editor over MPs' expenses scoop

Good stuff from Graydon Carter in his editor's letter in the July issue of Vanity Fair which highlights the impact of the Daily Telegraph's MPs' expenses story as showing the way newspapers can survive.
Carter starts: "Goodness knows, I’m not one to complain, and I’m sure you’re not the sort to, either, but aren’t you growing just a bit tired of reading about the demise of newspapers—in the papers themselves? It’s no wonder readership is down. Who has the patience to hear endless whining about someone else’s misfortune when your own fortunes are rickety? "
He adds: "My suggestion to newspapers everywhere is to give the public a reason to read them again. So here’s an idea: get on a big story with widespread public appeal, devote your best resources to it, say a quiet prayer, and swing for the fences."
Then he turns to the Telegraph and editor Will Lewis. "Three years ago, they installed Will Lewis, then 37 and the youngest editor in the paper’s history. Lewis was a star at the Financial Times and The Sunday Times. He was also a technophile who believed that news was not just something you read the next morning. He revamped the paper’s Web site and got the reporters to blog, produce Webcasts, and even Twitter to bring in a broader (and younger) audience. To many in the business, it seemed the Telegraph had fallen prey to the same near-lunatic fascination with its Web site that has been bedeviling American papers."
Carter then turns to the MPs' expenses story: "Lewis didn’t merely print the details of the M.P.’s expenses, as so many in these straitened times might have. In what became the paper’s biggest investigation in its 154-year history, 45 staff members and numerous lawyers spent two months in a secured area of the paper’s offices, secretly preparing an epic series for publication.
"Not surprisingly, the British public has been in a fevered uproar. The government—and the House of Commons in particular—is now held in such contempt that years might pass before it regains its standing...As this column goes to press, the Telegraph had already devoted 120 broadsheet pages to the story, in a little more than two weeks. And although the paper broke the stories on its Web site, then fed them into the next morning’s print edition, sales of the actual paper exploded... The story was so compelling that competing papers were grudgingly forced to illustrate their reports on the affair with shots of the Telegraph’s banner headlines. There is now talk of a knighthood for Lewis for his part in uncovering the scandal.
And they say newspapers are dead."
Story via the Newspaper Project