Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
WEDNESDAY 4 JULY 2007
Mr Mark Wood and Mr Jonathan Munro
Q20 Chairman:
The contract and the regulation generally protect it.
Mr Wood: Yes, we have that as well. The OFCOM
regulation is very important here too. There are two robust areas
here which ensure that the news remains independent.
Chairman: Can I just take us back a little
and Lord Maxton might like to take this up. The 10 and 10.30 News,
Lord Maxton I think you were on the Committee at the time in the
Commons.
Lord Maxton: That makes me feel very old, but
yes, I was.
Q21 Chairman:
How has that worked out?
Mr Wood: I would quote Michael Grade who, as
new Executive Chairman of ITV, says that it was the biggest mistake
ITV ever made moving the news from 10 o'clock, losing that 10
o'clock slot. The audience at 10.30 is nowhere near as big. We
are trying to build that audience but people go to bed and it
is difficult having that slightly later slot. We do very well
in it but it is sad that it changed. I think ITV at the time thought
it had convincing arguments—we thought they had convincing
arguments—but those arguments turned out to be wrong.
Q22 Lord Maxton:
You did go along with it, but privately were you going along with
it or did you actually argue that you ought to keep it at 10?
Mr Wood: The ITN management at the time did
a lot of research and presented a lot of data to ITV suggesting
that it would be a major mistake in terms of audience share and
that data was not given as much weight as the internal data suggesting
that in fact the stronger audience would support a strong news
audience later in the schedule. It is difficult for ITN. ITN is
a supplier. Our position always has to be, "We supply the
news to you, the customer; you, the customer, has to decide when
you want to broadcast it". If ITV wants to change the times
then we have to live with that but we do have an interest in building
an audience and retaining an audience and serving them properly.
I think the ITN management did a very good job at the time in
presenting persuasive data but that persuasive data did not persuade.
Q23 Lord Maxton:
I have to say that I do not remember you saying this to the Committee.
Mr Wood: I did not at the time, no. I think
at the time the position we were in was having to behave as good
suppliers to a customer. They had robust arguments about how they
were going to build the audience to support a later news programme.
Q24 Lord Maxton:
They failed to do that.
Mr Wood: Yes, they failed to deliver the audience
that they said they would. They did not have the content, as it
turned out.
Q25 Lord Maxton:
Does that in any way impact on what you get paid for providing
the service? If you have a smaller audience do they then turn
round and say, "Sorry, we are not going to give you so much
money".
Mr Wood: No, that is not one of the ways it
is calibrated.
Mr Munro: I think that universally the view
in the newsroom was that the decision by ITV was a very bad decision
and it was a view at the time, not retrospectively. We were very
encouraged by Michael Grade's comments recently that he rather
supported the line that we had taken all along.
Q26 Lord Maxton:
Could you move back? Given that you would then be competing face
to face with the BBC's Ten O'clock News.
Mr Wood: We would love to if we could but schedule
management is a very complicated science and that is where we
were 10 years ago as well. The ability to manage an audience through
a schedule and retain audience attention is a challenging one
and to generate returns on the advertising. The challenge for
ITV is how do you retain your audience and for them the tricky
thing is whether they go up against the BBC with the news Do you
have programmes in the pipeline which go through the 10 o'clock
break and so on? It is their decision. If they decided to move
the news back to 10 o'clock of course we would be extremely enthusiastic
and would build a programme which was successful, but we are building
a successful programme at 10.30 and doing it very well. It is
for the channels ultimately to manage their schedules; we have
to fit in with them.
Q27 Chairman:
Basically that decision was to BBC's benefit.
Mr Wood: At the time I do not recall that anybody
in ITV anticipated that the BBC would move their news to 10 because
their news was at nine o'clock and the assumption was that it
would be a clear sweep through and what the BBC did was quite
a masterstroke.
Q28 Chairman:
From ITV's point of view it was done for entirely commercial reasons.
Mr Wood: Yes.
Q29 Chairman:
They would get more revenue out of that 10 o'clock slot.
Mr Wood: That is correct. They had concerns
about losing audience for programmes which over-ran, which were
split around the news bulletin like films and so on.
Q30 Lord Inglewood:
You said quite clearly that there was no day to day direction
from ITV on what you are doing. At the same time there must be
some form of ex post facto de-briefing. You cannot be in the position
where you are on your own until 2012. How does that work, the
debriefing side of all this? There must be a relationship between
you to ensure that the thing roughly satisfies all parties and
the customer is always right and that is the ITV.
Mr Wood: With ITV there is the Director of News
and Sport, Mark Sharman, who is the immediate customer in that
sense. For Channel 4 it is Dorothy Byrne who is Head of News and
Current Affairs and whom I think is coming to appear before this
Committee with the Editor of Channel 4 News. They can also explain
how that relationship works. There are different intensities of
dialogue but ultimately yes, ITV can pass comment on programmes,
particularly after they have gone out; or may say it likes that
kind of coverage or it thinks that kind of content is appealing
or is working well. That feedback is very welcome. Of course we
keep them informed about the kinds of coverage we are planning
if they are major event coverage and so on. We will talk to them
about major deployments such as we have on the floods or the terrorists
so that the network is up to speed. We also want to encourage
the network to promote and trail the news programmes and so we
try to give them as much information as possible so that they
can flag the up-coming news programmes to their viewers. In that
sense it is quite a lively relationship but everybody knows where
the border lines are and I cannot imagine somebody in ITV or Channel
4 saying, "What you have got to cover tonight is the following"
or "I would rather you led on this than led on that".
There are issues which do come up around compliance, legal cases
where we have to take account of the responsibilities of both
the Channel and ITN before we broadcast something which could
have legal repercussions for both of them. Then we will consult.
A classic case is the Attorney General's advice to the Government
on the Iraq war when Channel 4 got hold of the actual documentation.
That is an issue for both ITN and Channel 4 to discuss.
Q31 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Mr Wood, could you just say a little bit more about the revenue
assumptions about the move from 10 o'clock to 10.30? What do they
reckon that was worth?
Mr Wood: You had better ask them that. It was
around a different form of schedule. I think they moved the news
back to 11 o'clock initially and there was an assumption that
they would be able to carry an audience through with two hour
dramas and films and that would generate quite high advertising
revenue through the 10 to 11 slot. That did not work; the audience
fell away.
Q32 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
You were talking about the success of the programme, about where
it fits into ITV's context and how they measure the success of
news within that. How do you measure the success of your output
in your terms or do you rely on them for the feedback that tells
you whether the programme works or does not work?
Mr Wood: We get ratings every day, that is the
most important way.
Q33 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
In terms of flexing the way that you manage your own output, where
does the independent feedback that you get fit into the overall
scheme of criteria that you use to judge it?
Mr Munro: Ratings is clearly one and you can
see when big stories are happening that ratings across the board
tend to rise. These are not in any order of importance but the
second that springs to my mind is viewer feedback. Viewers are
pretty good at ringing us up, e-mailing us, writing to us saying
that they appreciated this coverage, they hated that, they did
not like this, why are we not covering the cat stuck up the tree
in Norwich because it is a very important story? You get what
we call the usual suspects who are constantly on the phone and
typically they may be from a political lobby position, for example
about the Middle East, and you know when you do a story which
is about a Palestinian victim of an Israeli defence force mistake
or targeting—depending on which way you look at it—you
will a torrent of comment and criticism from one side of the divide
or other. Over the period of time, an extended period, as long
as that criticism is not specifically skewed one way you are reasonably
sure you are treading a proper line there. On issues like the
floods which have overtaken many people's lives in the north of
England and the West Midlands viewers are tremendously pro-active
about telling us that they want to see more and more and more.
That is a factor, not necessarily the decisive factor, in any
news agenda. Thirdly there is the customer and fourthly there
is the regulator but they are both, in a sense, after the event.
We are not told in advance what to put in the programmes, as we
said earlier. We are harvesting feedback from all of these different
sources and I do not think there is any one individual factor
which is more prominent than others. They can all come into play;
it depends on the scenario.
Q34 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Just to be clear, would you say that in assessing the success
of an individual programme or a strand of programming that your
measures of success are broadly similar to ITV's or are there
time when they are not quite the same?
Mr Munro: ITV would probably, like any channel,
put more emphasis on the ratings aspect of that than on the other
aspects I have discussed in the last few minutes. The ratings,
for example, on the evening news—which is the biggest mass
audience news programme on ITV—are things they would look
at pretty carefully in the same way that they would look at the
ratings for Coronation Street or Taggart or whatever other programmes
they are running in their schedule. I am happy to say the news
ratings have held up better than the overall performance of ITV1
which, like all terrestrial channels, has declined because as
we all know we have probably all got multi-channel television
at home and there is more and more choice out there. The news
performance has outstripped that of most of the programmes in
the schedule which is obviously a comfortable background to have
those conversations with.
Mr Wood: Part of the role of our editorial management
team and where I think they perform extraordinarily well is a
creative approach to news. Particularly in this current changing
environment, how do you retain interest in news programming? How
do you make it compelling and alive, particularly for younger
viewers? A lot of thought now goes into managing news coverage
in a way which draws people in and catches attention. There was
a classic case recently which I thought was very well done which
was the Falklands anniversary. Potentially it was a very dull
story for anybody who is under 30 but what ITV news did, for example,
was send Simon Weston, the injured veteran, down to the Falklands
and used him to anchor the stories and tell his story. It brought
the whole conflict alive. We are also trying to build new audiences
and build viewer loyalty and get people coming back again and
again, and not just regard it as, "Well, it's the news; I
can go to a news channel", rather "I like that news
and I know it is going to interest me". I think that is a
very important part of what we do in all our programming.
Q35 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Could you take us a little bit behind how you analyse the data
between yourselves and ITV. You have talked about ratings being
a continued measure of success which we could get, I imagine,
programme by programme. ITV must look also, probably as you look,
at the kind of stories as the news goes up and down by the ratings
through the half hour. Can you give us some sense of what works
and what does not work if ratings are the success factor?
Mr Munro: We do not calibrate ratings story
by story. We do not take two or three minute chunks of the programme.
The ratings for the whole previous evening's schedule are e-mailed
around to everybody who is interested the following morning and
ITV do take a particular interest. Last week they moved a prime
time show from its slot after two weeks because it was not performing
very well. There is no evidence that I am aware of—as far
as I know there is no evidence that exists—that a particular
structure to a running order drives ratings through a different
five minute or six minute chunk of a half hour. What will affect
audiences is the weight of a particular story. For example, audiences
went up when the flooding was a live, breaking story last week.
That does not mean that we skew the agenda to that but it is naturally
a good story and naturally a picture rich story. After all, we
are a picture medium so we strive to make the programmes as visually
engaging as possible and that plays to those criteria. In my experience
we have never looked at a programme and thought, "Gosh, there
was a lot on the Middle East last night; look at the ratings,
they have gone down" because it does not really function
in that way. We get an average rating across the half hour.
Q36 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Do you keep any form of sophisticated data that looks at different
kinds of themes as to whether they are successful in news terms
for the half an hour that you have?
Mr Munro: The answer is yes and no. On most
stories the answer is no, we do not. If we get a big project like
the Falklands that Mark has referred to or we did a week's live
reporting from Antarctica in January about melting ice, glaciers—climate
change is a very good example of a story where you have to work
hard to make it visually interesting and we did that and it paid
off—those are the sorts of stories where we will talk to
ITV in advance and saying that we are doing a themed week about
climate change, the Falklands or whatever, we want to get some
promotion time, we want to make sure that the whole ITV audience
is aware that we are doing that. We do look to see if audiences
in those weeks nudge up, nudge down, go sideways, do not move
at all; on both those occasions they moved up a little and that
is the power of the promotion getting behind the journalism. One
of the most challenges areas—if I may say so, sitting in
this venerable place—is politics because at general election
time, for example, audiences do not hold up well and we work very
hard at making the general elections a particularly interesting
format and making sure we hear from a lot of real people and not
just the politicians who are running for office. We did our very,
very best and our audience held up better than it had done in
previous elections last time round. They are very challenging
times.
Q37 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Would you still hold to the objectivity of your news or your editorial
news decision making but you did refer earlier to the criteria
that might apply, for example, to the earlier evening news being
more feminised and the later evening news being more masculine
in some way because the audiences are distinctly different. Would
that in any way affect the coverage of international news or "harder
stories"?
Mr Munro: International news I think by and
large no.
Q38 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Politics?
Mr Munro: The evening news audience is interested
in politics if we can and the politicians can make it interesting
subject matter. Politics itself is such a complex area. Later
this afternoon there is a statement in the House of Commons about
the National Health Service; is that a politics story or is it
a story about the Health Service that you use when you go to your
GP's surgery or your hospital? We think it is the latter because
that is the way that our viewers interact with the Health Service.
That is what we will try to do tonight, we will make that story
into a story about GP care or hospitals or whatever the pertinent
part of the statement is. Today is not a good example because
the Alan Johnston story is such an overwhelming story but if we
were doing a story about a Fatah/Hamas uprising in Gaza—nothing
to do with Alan Johnston—as we did, for example a couple
of months ago when power changed hands there, we would do the
story on both programmes. At 10.30 we would probably do a second
or third piece which analyses a little more deeply the reasons
behind the uprising. The reason we would want to do that is because
we think from audience research that the audience at that time
of night is ready for a slightly more contextualised report about
what is going on. It is not breaking news probably; the news has
probably been around since daylight in Gaza which, by definition,
is several hours before, so people have probably picked up already
the core of the news event story so for that programme we will
probably try to give them a little bit more depth and content,
perhaps a live interview, perhaps a debate-based piece or a history-based
piece to follow on from the news story. In that sense the programmes
can flex their different muscles across the schedules.
Q39 Baroness Bonham-Carter:
What would happen to ITN if you lost the ITV contract?
Mr Wood: It would be a heavy blow. It is 40%
of our business at the moment and it is the largest news gathering
infrastructure so it would be a challenge for the company to continue
providing services the way it does to Channel 4, for example.
I think we would survive and we would find different ways of doing
it. Part of the ITN model works on the basis that we have integrated
infrastructures for example for ITV News and Channel 4 News in
satellite trucks, satellite feeds production technology in our
building and studio management and so on so there are a lot of
shared costs. You would have to work that one out, but we would
survive.
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