he question is: “Will it make?” A nice murder will make. A crime involving a celebrity will make. Make the papers, Guy Toyn meant. Toyn is the co-owner of the news agency Court News UK, which reports the stories emerging from London’s criminal courts. In the mix this week wasmake. But the gang murders that routinely fill the Old Bailey, where Court News is based, rarely make. No, a nice murder would be a woman killing a man, ideally a middle-class white woman killing a man.
Opportunities to be theatrical are rarely missed. Wilford, the lugubrious bassist to Toyn’s frontman, sits at the adjacent desk to Toyn, and Toyn often insists on addressing him as “Mr Wilford”, as if they were in a period drama about an old Fleet Street paper, presses clanking beneath them. While Toyn strides around, Wilford rarely moves from his chair, simultaneously managing reporters, editing copy and processing invoices. Wilford talks in a quiet patter.
As we walked between the courts, Toyn ran into one of his favourite criminal barristers – an ebullient, passionate character, one of the old school – who was on a break from a gang murder trial. On seeing Toyn, the barrister ran back into court and re-emerged with a taped-up box, marked “Evidence”, which contained a 2ft-long knife that looked so unreal in its design – blood-red, with baroque, curling, lethal edges – that it resembled a theatrical prop more than a murder weapon.
Years ago, Toyn and Wilford used to write campaigning articles about the chaos in the courts, but they had to stop, not having the time or resources to write stories that didn’t sell. Now, said Toyn, there was only one court reporter left in the UK with a conscience: Tristan Kirk at the Evening Standard.
The chances of selling the story were slim. “Back in the day, this is the kind of thing that would have got an order from the Wembley Observer,” Wilford said. “Who’s going to use it? No one, now.” Still, after a quick edit on their ancient, pre-Word software, which requires them to do a manual spellcheck, they would post it on the Court News website. Even if it wasn’t picked up, it would at least enter their archive of court reports going back to the mid-1980s.
For now, Court News has a YouTube channel , a decent following on X , a Substack newsletter and two podcasts. One, Fresh From the Old Bailey, is made with a freelance producer, Gavin Haynes, who winkles the best stories of the week out of the team. The podcast hadn’t quite become the hit they had hoped for – especially frustrating given the success of the Daily Mail’s podcast The Trial,
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