Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
WEDNESDAY 4 JULY 2007
Mr Mark Wood and Mr Jonathan Munro
Q40 Baroness Bonham-Carter:
Some years ago you were competing with Sky, as a result the budget
was quite seriously cut. You won the tender but at a much lower
budget. I know, having been an editor and a producer in current
affairs, that money is very tight at the best of times and this
must have affected the way in which you can provide the news for
your customers and indeed foreign news. I know nowadays in news
there are far more two-ways, fewer films, I would suggest fewer
reports from abroad. Did the very fact that you had to compete
and had to cut your costs not affect the quality of the news that
you are providing ultimately for the viewer?
Mr Wood: I think not. The evidence is there
on the screen and you can judge probably as well as I can. I think
our news has actually got better in the last few years. ITN is
fairly unique in many ways. We are probably the only truly commercial
news supplier in that sense. The BBC does not have to worry about
commercial pressures and Sky News is a subsidised part of Sky
and is a loss making business so they have different pressures.
ITN has to live within its agreed contract prices and generate
profits so we have become very adept at using new technology and
new working practices usually ahead of the competition. What we
have done is to become, I think, smarter and faster moving. We
are doing it again now, we are having a big technology change
now which will again reduce our operating costs and enable us
to put more money into coverage. What we have tried to do is take
money out of some costs—infrastructure and so on—and
keep the funding of the news coverage and the front line stuff
as high as we can. In fact we have been increasing our coverage
funding in the last couple of years for ITV news.
Q41 Baroness Bonham-Carter:
Mr Munro, I have a question about that. Cutting back on production
costs means fewer people working on one story I imagine, multi-skilling.
Mr Munro: It can mean that.
Q42 Baroness Bonham-Carter:
Does that not mean that you have fewer eyes on a story which affects
therefore the quality of the reports?
Mr Munro: It can if you are not careful. The
vast majority of the costs that came out when the ITV news contract
was re-negotiated last time round were in what you might call
back room areas, management, HR, admin, finance, that sort of
thing. There is a multi-skilled driver. That means that in the
days of film and in the early days of video deploying a camera
crew would have meant a cameraman, a soundman, probably a lighting
man as well and almost always on big stories even a runner to
physically take the tape back from where the film was being shot
to the nearest satellite feed point or even film processing depot
in some cases. I remember when I was cutting my teeth on the road
in Belfast it was unheard of to go on the road without that number
of people. We do not need to do that now because we can feed live
pictures from the back of the camera. You do not need a runner,
you do not need a sound man because the technology has improved
so much. Therefore those costs have come out. We are able to do
quite a lot more with the technology that is there. We talked
a little while ago about the global warming story we did from
Antarctica. I was in New York shortly after that story talking
to our American partners at NBC and we were discussing the number
of people who did that story. There were only four members of
staff from ITN in Antarctica doing that story all week, live transmissions,
reporting, the whole lot. They were astonished by that because
American television is very unionised still. They have very, very
heavy manpower deployments. We would not deploy a small team of
that sort into Baghdad because the extra eyes and ears that you
need or want for safety reasons are really important, they are
crucial.
Q43 Baroness Bonham-Carter:
Also for journalism reasons.
Mr Munro: It can be for journalism reasons but
in Baghdad operating with more white western journalists is not
necessarily helpful. In Zimbabwe—we have done a lot of reporting
from Zimbabwe in the last two or three years—I do challenge
your assertion that we do less foreign news. We have done more
work out of Zimbabwe, for example, than any other broadcaster;
we have won awards for it.
Q44 Chairman:
The BBC are banned.
Mr Munro: We are all banned.
Q45 Chairman:
You are banned as well, are you?
Mr Munro: We are all banned from Zimbabwe and
one of the things that constantly irritates is that other people
say they are banned from doing it; we are all banned. We get in
through routes that I will not put on record for obvious reasons.
We go very light weight and very discreet because it is the only
way to operate there. The technology allows us to do that. Had
the regime been in place in its current form 20 years ago we could
not have covered Zimbabwe in the way we did because we would have
needed too many people and we would have been too visible. Undeniably
costs have come down; undeniably revenue has gone down because
the contract is worth less money than it was. Our job as managers
is to try to make sure that what comes out of the screen at the
end of the day is not the place where the impact of that is felt.
Q46 Lord Maxton:
Do you think you do better with fewer staff than the BBC do with
a lot of staff?
Mr Munro: I think pound per pound we represent
much better value for money than anyone else. If you are asking
me whether I would like to have 20 more staff, of course I would.
Let me give you an example of where I think nimbleness and being
fleet of foot is more important than numbers. The example I have
in mind is the Virginia Tech massacre in the United States earlier
in the year. We have one Washington correspondent for ITV News
with a small support team. He was on the campus live from Virginia
Tech by the 10 o'clock news that night and the BBC were not. They
decided to keep all of their people back to service their multiple
outlets because that is what their Washington bureau does. We
think in a light weight way; we think in a fleet of foot way.
There is an old analogy which is probably tired and a bit of a
cliché but we are the little speed boat that zips around
the oil tanker; we can go faster, we are not as big, we cannot
carry as much cargo but we get there quicker.
Chairman: We will just cut in at the
end of that commercial! We will come back to the point on staffing.
Lord Corbett?
Q47 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Mr Wood, you said earlier that you feel your news has got better.
Audiences change and the world has changed tremendously over the
last 10 years at least. Can you just expand on that a little bit
and just explain some of the differences in the range of issues
which you cover and the depth in which you do them? I understand
about different things for different programmes, but just broad
brush stuff; what do you do more of and less of, for example?
Mr Wood: I think, as Jonathan says, if you look
across ITV News and Channel 4 News the management of foreign coverage
is impressive and has become quite creative. The reporting from
Antarctica was a classic case of again bringing the issue of global
warming to life for viewers. We do a lot of focus groups and have
regular feedback from customers and we know that worked very well,
we brought a theme alive which otherwise can be quite abstract.
Channel 4 News has introduced a regular pattern of anchoring the
7pm news programme from different locations once or twice a year.
A few months back we did a week of "News from Iran".
John Snow went out and anchored the evening news. That was at
a time of quite considerable tension with Iran and worked very
well. In terms of them being there they had people in front of
the cameras, they were able to have Iranians putting an Iranian
point of view on certain issues. It had a knock-on in that the
contacts made led to quite a breakthrough in the case of the marines
who had been taken prisoner when one of the senior Iranian officials
appeared on Channel 4 News live and said, "We'll negotiate
a settlement". You can see that kind of creative approach
is something that was not done in the same way before. I think
in foreign news, getting people off the main stories to tell the
other stories, tell the stories of what is happening in parts
of Africa—I am thinking back to reports we published about
slave mining in the Congo, for example, about treatment of malaria
in Uganda—those issues were brought alive by deploying people,
having the resources and the time to deploy people on non-urgent
stories. That has changed a lot. I think in domestic coverage
Jonathan put it very nicely, it is trying to get the viewers'
perspective on what is important to them. ITV News has been very
good at covering health service issues and crime issues. A while
back the ITV regions and the main ITN programme did a take out
on weekend drunkenness, the streets of Britain's provincial cities
at midnight and three o'clock on a Saturday morning and the number
of young people staggering round paralyticly drunk. It highlighted
again a major social problem. I think that is a creativity and
deployment of resources which is smart and is different to what
was happening before. We have been looking at news programmes
from 10 years ago recently and finding them rather boring because
they are just lists of news: this happened and then this happened.
You could not get away with it today because the audience would
desert. The audience's expectations are much higher but that is
good. I think we have a sophisticated public which wants to get
to grips with some key issues both domestically and internationally
and I think our news programmes deal with that.
Q48 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
It struck me while you were talking just now and you were stressing
the fact that you want to know what it is the public wants to
see, is there also an element in how you react to that in having
some wish perhaps to raise the standard of what the public wants
to see? I could say that as long as you are satisfying their enthusiasm
for sensational news perhaps that could be overdone and a bit
of trying to interest them in news that is not entirely based
on the sensational is an aim which you have which is not entirely
dictated by what you think the public would most like to see.
Mr Wood: I do not think that we do just go for
the sensational. Both in Channel 4 News and ITV News there is
a very, very strong focus on public interest coverage. It is getting
to grips with issues around changes in the Health Service, changes
in education and it is how they affect people. That is not sensational
stuff, that is good journalism. I think good journalism is presenting
coverage in a way which is compelling. We cover a range of subjects.
Jonathan, you should say something on this.
Mr Munro: I think the key to any story telling
in any media outlet—newspaper, broadcast or on line—is
to try to highlight those angles on any story which directly bring
it home to the viewer. There are some stories which do not really
affect the people very much, but there a lot that do. On the face
of it, for example, the increasing aggressive nature of the Chinese
economy is not a story that most people would look at and think,
"I will watch because it is going to affect me" but
if you ask the workers at Longbridge this has affected them very
directly. That is why we have a bureau in China and we are continually
reporting the growth of the Chinese economy. You can carry on
saying it affects you at home but I think after a while viewers
get that, they understand that this is a part of the world that
they need to know more about. There is no evidence that I have
ever seen that people do not want to have that sort of news; I
think people do. People want to sit and watch a news programme
and feel at the end of the show they have heard about what is
happening in the world that day and they have learnt of it too
and that is a good mix.
Q49 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Can I probe you a little bit further on the pressures that are
bearing down not just on you as management but as editorial leaders.
You talked a lot about how you have recently had to change the
news to reflect the different way in which people see and perceive
news to be today. There is an implication in that that the decisions
about news are not really made objectively but they are made subjectively
according to audience demand and desire. Is that a fair reflection?
Mr Munro: Any news organisation editor or a
programme editor or news editor I think the decisions they take
are, by definition, subjective. We are objective in the sense
that we are politically impartial and so on. I think that it is
more the treatment of stories, the way we tell a story than actually
the story selection itself which is the kernel of this. It comes
back to the Health Service example I was talking about earlier,
but it applies across the board to all sorts of stories, not just
what story are we going to tell but how are we going to tell it.
We should actively encourage viewers to stay with us through programmes
because the last thing we want is to produce a programme that
no-one is watching. It is in the public interest that people absorb
the news. People over the years are absorbing nuggets of news
from increasingly varied sources—it is on our mobile phones,
it is on our internet sites—and that is a real challenge
for the whole broadcast industry. Subjective, yes; I think that
is inevitably the case because they are human judgments.
Q50 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
The BBC said it always had the mission to explain in its news.
Do you hold to that mission to explain? If I may just illustrate
it by say, for example, today's news, Alan Johnston is free and
that is something over which we are all delighted but we have
seen acres of coverage of the Alan Johnston story and is there
a difference between what your viewers might perceive to be the
reality of Alan Johnston the journalist and the issues concerning
him as compared to the complexity of the Middle East dilemma that
brought him into that conflict.
Mr Munro: That is a very good example so today
let me tell you what we are planning to do with that story. We
will do a first report which is very much Alan Johnston's day
today, all of the various interviews he has given, the press conferences,
his movements and what we know about how the release happened.
That is a standalone story. We are not going to pollute that with
political content; that is his story. Separate to that in the
same programme there will be another piece which is about what
was Hamas's role? What role, if any, did the British Government
play? What do Hamas, who have been very much persona non grata
in the international community, expect or want to get from their
role in the release of Alan Johnston? That will give us the context
into the broader Middle East dimension of this. That is a really
important piece of television. I personally do not think it is
a mission to explain; I catch it more that we do not want people
to watch that programme and not understand the story. We seek
always to try to make stories explicable. In the case of that
story that will absorb something like half our programme tonight
so we have plenty of time, space, what we would call elbow room,
to make those explanations. If it was an incremental move in the
story as opposed to a defining move it is more difficult to find
the time in a half hour programme to bring all that context in
every time. Certainly on a big story of that sort we would always
strive to do that.
Q51 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I think you have done a pretty good promotional programme, as
it were, on how you have adapted to more challenges from the technical
world apart from other forms of reporting. Could you tell us if
there are extra pressures caused by the purely digital and Internet
media environment which is obviously much more competitive? Do
you have any thoughts on how further you can encourage high standards
coming out and giving you an even greater mark for independence
and impartiality?
Mr Munro: I think in an age where there are
so many outlets, so many people doing what they would describe
as journalism, particularly user generated content as it is now
called, people filming things on mobile phones and that sort of
thing, the unique selling point of terrestrial television news—whether
it is BBC or ITN products—our standards hurdles need to
be maintained at the very highest level on accuracy, on impartiality,
on sourcing and that will be the differential between what we
do and what is available at the click of a mouse on a website
as the years roll forward. That will be our unique selling point.
Our proposition to our viewers is one of trust: you need to give
us half an hour of your time, we in return will give you a robust,
truthful, honest, impartial, accurate account of the stories that
we are bringing you this evening. That is, in a sense, a bargain
with the viewer. We have to deliver on that and that is our primary
purpose in making television news programmes otherwise we will
end up—the whole industry, I am not talking specifically
about ITV—being pulled down into a user generated content
led world which is not where we want to be and I do not think
it is where any of the broadcasters want to be either.
Q52 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
If I may ask you a further question, thinking about the younger
generation, you made some comment about one of these programmes,
the later one, tending to attract a rather younger audience. Equally
there have been a lot of comments about how the really young generation
are not watching any news at all. I wondered what your thinking
is here and how you are going to try to attract them in. They
are maybe sending clips of what they are doing to one another
and so on.
Mr Wood: Part of our business is in producing
video news for mobile phones and for broadband sites and we do
stream news channels on mobile phones. An element of that is showbiz
coverage and celebrity coverage. The people who tend to watch
news on mobile phones tend to be under-25s and their primary interest
is in the showbiz coverage or the sports coverage, but through
those entrance doors they also watch the other bits of news. We
know that when there are major events the usage levels go up quite
sharply so they do watch breaking news. The same on broadband,
we feed news content and news clips into a range of different
broadband sites and we are working with people who will be producing
news with a flavour. The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Mirror,
The Mail, The Times are all developing their own broadband
and video propositions. Telegraph Television and Guardian Television
when they are here—and it will not be long—will have
their own flavour and their own slant. That is fine because you
know what the label is and you know what it stands for. In between
all that, anything which is labelled "ITV News" "Channel
4 News" has to be balanced and impartial and has to be trusted.
We give up trust at our peril. In a fragmenting world trust brands
will become more important.
Q53 Lord Inglewood:
We have so far looked at this from the viewers' perspective. I
am interested to go behind the scenes and probe a bit about the
way you do it. Presumably you do not have any golden rule about
how much domestic coverage and how much international news you
cover, but you must aim to get a balance on that I assume.
Mr Munro: Yes, we have a balance. There is no
golden rule because what you describe as a domestic and what you
describe as a foreign story is quite often not that easy to define.
A British soldier killed in Basra is both; Madeleine McCann's
parents are on foreign territory but it is essentially a domestic
story. We talk about global warming a lot, it is cause and effect;
what we do here has an effect elsewhere in the world and vice
versa. So there is not a quota but we usually try for a balance
in a programme. Ten days ago when Sheffield was under water the
whole programme was about the floods apart from a brief little
rap, which is three or four other stories that you need to know
about but everything else in the programme was the floods. That
is not balanced in that sense but within the floods coverage we
will make sure that there is one piece that is an overview piece,
there is an environmental causes piece, there is a piece that
is living the day with one family and so on so that the contents
themselves are not repetitive.
Q54 Lord Inglewood:
I think it was Mark Wood who said that you had five overseas permanent
correspondents and then you flew people in and out as the world
required. Presumably this is a reduction on what was the case
in the past.
Mr Munro: We used to have six at one stage.
We used to have a bureau in Moscow but that was in the days when
Moscow was incredibly difficult to get in and out of; visa issues
were a nightmare, it was almost impossible to react to a breaking
story from London in Russia. In the days of the Cold War obviously
that was a major issue. The Cold War is over; the visa issue is
over; we closed up the bureau and moved the money into what we
call variable coverage, that is to say spending more money on
putting people on airplanes to go to places where stories were
happening.
Mr Wood: We opened a reporting bureau for both
ITV News and Channel 4 News in China last year, a new bureau,
and that has been incredibly productive for both. It is not a
breaking news story because covering Chinese daily news is not
what interests our viewers but for Channel 4 News and ITV News
the whole range and series of reports on what is happening in
China and the changes in China has been incredibly watchable and
has gone down very well.
Q55 Lord Inglewood:
You must use, in one way and another, quite a lot of part time
people, stringers. Do you take information from the public as
if they were your people and use that? I am trying to get a picture
of how you get out there and do it.
Mr Munro: The answer to your question about
viewers is yes in the UK. We would not normally have direct contact
with members of the public on foreign news until we actually get
to the scene of the story. ITN is a domestic brand. The viewer
video issue in the UK is becoming a really big source of picture,
the source of picture that all broadcasters are making use of
increasingly. There are some very prominent examples of that.
Perhaps the most prominent that we have had recently was the arrest
of the men, the jury is still out in the trial of the 21/7 alleged
bomb plot when we had user generated content as we call it. It
was not actually filmed on a mobile phone but nonetheless it was
from a member of the public who contacted us. That is increasingly
important and we are about to launch a whole website called ITV
News Uploaded where people can upload that material and we will
only harvest the very best of it for terrestrial news programmes
but it will become a vehicle through which we can contact viewers
who have contacted us with events. The floods coverage last week
was full of pictures of water rushing down streets which had been
filmed by viewers.
Q56 Baroness Thornton:
Some of my questions have already been answered in the issues
earlier about your early news bulletins and the ratings and so
on so I will not ask you to repeat that. Since 1981 your overall
share of viewers for ITV News has dropped from 49% to 19%. What
has happened to the rest? How do audiences for news compare to
the overall decrease in your viewing figures? Has news fared better
or worse than other genres? You touched on this but perhaps you
can expand on it, what is the age and demographic profile of your
news viewers? My 19 year old daughter almost certainly accesses
some of your celebrity screening I am sure; I wait in expectation
of her watching the news. Can you give us some idea about what
trajectory you think you are on at the moment?
Mr Wood: Inevitably the viewer numbers to the
news programmes rest within the schedule and as the audiences
fragment the number of channels multiplies. The viewer numbers
for the mainstream networks have been in steady decline and therefore
viewer numbers for news programmes have. At key points, for example
at the 6.30 News on ITV, we outperform the average for that time.
We compete with the BBC, we have roughly the same sorts of audience
numbers. I think Channel 4 News, the performance of the News tends
to above the expectation of the schedule at that time so that
is quite encouraging. Channel 4 News has a very fast growing young
demographic which is very encouraging. In fact Channel 4 News
right now is getting the biggest audiences it has had for four
years which is quite an achievement given the decline otherwise.
The reality is that one would expect the network's viewing numbers
to continue to decline for a while but then probably bottom out.
If you look in other comparable countries where fragmentation
of the spectrum has happened earlier—Germany is a classic
case where there have been multiple news channels for a long time—the
big networks tended to then bottom out round about between 16
and 18%, sometimes up to 20%. It is quite likely we will see something
like that here. Then what you will have is the accessing news
on other platforms. People do watch news channels; they watch
news on demand on the Internet. Broadband has made news a more
enjoyable experience on the web. People do access news increasingly
on the web and look at both video news and straightforward text
news. Part of our business is to deliver news on multiple platforms,
in different ways and in different packages so that we can get
people interested in different places. There is a challenge in
getting younger people to look at news. Newspapers have the same
issues. We are all in the same boat, frankly, trying to find ways
to engage attention. I think showbiz coverage is a good way in
because you get attention and there is other stuff as well.
Q57 Lord Maxton:
At the moment you are quite right, more and more people go to
the computer for the news and your news is scheduled on television.
However, there are now on the market already machines actually
quite low bands which would allow you to watch your computer generated
news on your television and control it from your television. Does
that not begin to make the whole concept of news scheduling irrelevant
and in the long term mean that we will not have programme scheduling?
Mr Wood: It will be both and we want to be on
both sides of that divide and have strong multi-media offerings
on the web as well. Channel 4 News and ITV News will be available
on demand on the websites as they are now so we will continue
to make that easier to use. Recent history shows that when there
are big stories breaking people still like news programmes. They
like to go to an anchor and a pre-arranged, pre-organised running
order and a presentation and interpretation. I think, particularly
at times of crisis or major stories as we have had this week,
the audience numbers shoot up, even though you can go to Sky News
or BBC News 24 you can go on the web and get a news item.
Q58 Chairman:
How much do the rise by?
Mr Wood: Earlier this week they were up at the
weekend by about 25 to 30% on normal.
Q59 Chairman:
What does that mean in people?
Mr Wood: The weekend audiences are heavily dependent
on the schedules but there were probably about an extra million
viewers on Saturday night and I think about an extra one to two
million on Sunday night.
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