Examination of Witnesses (Questions 201
- 219)
WEDNESDAY 18 JULY 2007
Mr Alan Rusbridger
Q201 Chairman:
Good morning. Thank you very much for coming in and I know it
has been at some inconvenience and there has been some discussion
about who comes first, you or the Times. I am glad to see
Fleet Street, if I can refer to it in that way, still has this
brotherly co-operation. You know what we are doing. The Select
Committee, which was set up in May, is doing an inquiry into media
ownership and news. We are looking at a whole range of things.
I suppose at the centre is what is the impact of the concentration
of media ownership on the balance and diversity of opinion seen
in the news and we will be looking, both here and in the United
States, at that position. We also want to look at the agendas
of news providers, how they have changed, how the way people are
accessing the news is changing and how the process of news gathering
itself is changing. So it is a very wide inquiry and very ambitious.
I wonder if I can start by asking you this. You are the Editor
of the Guardian. What was the process by which you were
appointed?
Mr Rusbridger: It is an unusual if not unique
process. I had to stand for—"election" is not
quite the right word. I had to stand for selection and the first
stage was a vote of the journalists themselves. There were four
of us, all internal, who stood. We did hustings, we set out a
manifesto and there was an indicative vote conducted by the Electoral
Reform Society, which went to the Scott Trust. I then went through
the same process with the Scott Trust along with the other candidates.
They saw the vote from the journalists but said they would not
consider themselves bound by that and I was appointed by the Scott
Trust.
Q202 Chairman:
Tell us about the Scott Trust.
Mr Rusbridger: The Scott Trust was set up in
1936 after the death of C P Scott and his son in very short order.
The family that owns both the Manchester Guardian and the
Manchester Evening News were faced by a potential set of
double death duties that could have scuppered the paper, so the
Scott family at that point gave away their financial interest
in the paper and set up a trust to preserve the Guardian
in the spirit and on the lines as heretofore, and when you become
Editor, that is all you are told: that you are to edit the paper
as heretofore.
Q203 Chairman:
You are responsible as Editor for the editorial policy of the
newspaper.
Mr Rusbridger: Yes.
Q204 Chairman:
That independence is guarded by the Trust?
Mr Rusbridger: Yes.
Q205 Chairman:
On your policy, does the famous C P Scott quote "Comment
is free, the facts are sacred" still apply?
Mr Rusbridger: We do our best. In devising the
Berliner format, which we went to a couple of years ago, and in
deciding not to go tabloid, that was a big decision about the
style of journalism that we wanted to do and we spent a lot of
time with the staff talking about that. In the face of a market
that increasingly, I think, tends to blur comment and fact we
decided it was important to try keep fact and comment as separate
as you can. You can spend all day talking about whether objectivity
and subjectivity are positives or possible and so on and so forth
but that is our intention.
Q206 Chairman:
I did notice a rather more modern quote by David Hencke, one of
your correspondents, who said "The Editor", who I assume
was you, "actually says to me that he likes reporters who
cause trouble. He thinks reporters who have never caused any trouble
can't be very good reporters because they have not unearthed anything
that has annoyed people." Is that a slightly more modern
way of putting it?
Mr Rusbridger: I think causing trouble can do
good but you can cause trouble without injecting your own thesis.
Q207 Chairman:
You prefer—I will not put words into your mouth but causing
trouble is not actually one of the aims of the reporter.
Mr Rusbridger: It is an incidental.
Q208 Chairman:
What is beyond doubt in the newspaper ownership generally is that
there are now a few big groups who have quite a lot of power.
How are the interests of the citizen protected against abuse of
power? How do you actually protect the citizen against intrusion
and abuse of power in your own paper?
Mr Rusbridger: The longer I have done this job—and
I have done it for 12 years now—I do become troubled by
the power that the mainstream media has and I think that is probably
a perception that is fairly widely shared in society itself. I
think that potential exists for individuals who are in control,
effectively sole control, of everything that goes on within their
newspapers do exert a very great degree of power in that mediation
process between civic life and the citizen. There are two things
about the Guardian that are unusual in that respect. One
is that the absence of any kind of higher authority—there
is no board or proprietor or publisher who can tell me what to
say, so the Scott Trust has no say over the day-to-day editorial
policy of the paper—does mean a different kind of editorial
process I think. It means that your relationship is purely on
a horizontal level with your colleagues and your readers and I
think that makes you more conscious and possibly more accountable
to your readers. The second is that about ten years ago I appointed
an independent readers' editor because it seems to me odd in the
context of any other organisation in public life today that if
you want to complain about the contents of a newspaper you have
to go through the person who was responsible for it in the first
place. That seems to me some not something that exists in other
areas of life. So I created an independent readers' editor, who
is unsackable by me and has written into her contract that I cannot
alter a word she writes and is appointed and fired by the Scott
Trust. So I have no control over her at all and we advertise her
presence in the paper every day and she can write a column every
week. She corrects anything we write in the paper independently
of me and I think that is me giving away power in a sense, because
I thought it was wrong for the Editor to be judge and jury on
the journalism that we produce.
Q209 Chairman:
Last question from me: if I am the citizen, I feel that I have
been unfairly treated, I suppose I could go to law but that is
an expensive, not to say uncertain business. I can then go to
the Press Complaints Commission. Is the Press Complaints Commission
in your view an adequate safeguard for the public?
Mr Rusbridger: I think broadly the PCC does
a good job of mediation, which is what it now regards itself as
mainly doing, and I think newspapers take note of that and do
care about it. The quibble I have always had, or area of concern
about the PCC is whether it is a regulator in the sense of the
term that is commonly understood in other walks of life. Because
it very rarely intervenes and does not use its powers to instigate
inquiries or to punish journalists, it is effectively a regulator
rather than something like OFCOM or the GMC or the Law Society,
which have more interventionist powers of inquiry.
Q210 Lord Maxton:
The Guardian readership has declined slightly over the
last 15 years—not as much as the red tops, shall we say,
which have declined much more, except for the Daily Mail.
Can you explain why you think your readership has gone down? It
has gone down marginally compared to some of the others.
Mr Rusbridger: Readership has actually gone
up, though circulation has gone down, but I think the general
trend is down for all of us. I think there are a number of factors.
One of them is clearly the Internet. If you are giving away your
product in a very convenient form, completely free of charge,
and in some respects a superior form because it is continually
updated, there is more of it, it is all free, it is all there,
it is not surprising that the bit that you charge for is going
to fall off. I think there are aspects of life outside our control
which have come through focus groups, like the sheer unpleasantness
of trying to read a newspaper on most forms of public transport,
so I think buying a newspaper and reading it on the way to work
has become a much rarer thing, and that in turn feeds into the
retail chain so that you get a lot of travel-point newsagents
closing or no longer stocking newspapers, so you get into a spiral
of decline. I think there is a broader point which I think links
newspapers with the political process—I cannot prove this
but I believe it—that as you get disengagement from the
political process, you get disengagement from people reading about
the political process, so that feeling that you have to read a
newspaper in order to be a better citizen, in order to make better
democratically informed votes, that link is more difficult to
make nowadays.
Q211 Lord Maxton:
Therefore does this mean that to try and stop the decline you
go for stories now which you would not have gone for in the past
or that you have changed the nature of them? Are there certain
stories you think will bring in more readers?
Mr Rusbridger: That is the clear temptation.
When you go to work in the morning there is a clear fork in the
road: are you going to produce a newspaper that sells itself on
front page in order to sell more newspapers, or do you say "I
am going to produce a newspaper that is going to deal with things
which that are important", which might not sell? In Britain
there is an unusual situation that, generally speaking, there
is very little subscription. In America and a lot of continental
Europe anything from 70% to 90% of sale can be subscription. In
Britain it is mostly retail, which means there is a very high
premium on designing a front page that will sell copies because
people hover and look to see what is on sale. I think that has
led to a new kind of emphasis on front page design classically
in tabloid form where you try and produce something that will
seek attention.
Q212 Lord Maxton:
You raise a point there. You say it is retail, that is, people
buying it directly from the shop. What about delivery? I get my
daily newspaper delivered to my house every morning.
Mr Rusbridger: Fewer and fewer people do. There
is much more promiscuous buying, and that is partly because it
is increasingly hard, if not illegal, to get ten-year-old boys
out of bed at six o'clock in the morning to do the newspaper rounds.
I moved house about five years ago and it took a quite search
to find a newsagent who was prepared to deliver in the mornings.
Q213 Lord Maxton:
You must have other strategies to boost sales. What are they and
which are the most effective ones?
Mr Rusbridger: In what used to be called the
broadsheet market, the quality market for shorthand, the only
strategy that has been a sure-fire winner was the Times's
decision to cut price, which was spectacularly successful in terms
of sale though I am not so sure it was spectacularly successful
in financial terms but it did see a 50 to 60% increase in sales.
We spend a lot of money on marketing, brand marketing. We have
tried DVDs, which are great on the day that you sell them but
sale tends to fall afterwards. More recently we have tried add-ons
like "Great Speeches of the 20th century" or wall charts
that have wonderful trees or animals and people like that kind
of thing.
Q214 Lord Maxton:
But they are a one-off.
Mr Rusbridger: Circulation goes up while you
do them and you hope that enough people will like the product
but what tends to happen with all these promotions is that it
sinks back afterwards. I think probably the inevitable truth is
that the newspaper is in gentle decline in terms of our market.
I think the real problem is in local newspapers, which I think
are in rather sharp decline.
Q215 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Before free CDs and so on, one of the things that has happened
in my lifetime is the increasing bulk of newspapers and the supplements
and so on. G2 I think was the first of its type and was successful.
Is there not a contradiction in this? As you said earlier, accessing
things on the Internet is easy, public transport is not very conducive
to reading a newspaper, yet newspapers get bigger and bigger.
That seems to me to be a slight contradiction in an attempt to
keep a reading public.
Mr Rusbridger: They get physically smaller and
more and more convenient. Some of that is due to crude things
like advertising shapes. If you look at American newspapers, you
have these enormous adverts with little strips of editorial going
with them. We are not quite at that stage in this country, though
increasingly so. Obviously, if you have all that advertising,
which pays for the editorial, you end up with thicker newspapers
as you try to get the editorial around it. Then there are these
feature sections, which are a kind of rest from the serious business
of news, which are popular elements of the newspaper. Whether
or not people read it all—they probably do not read all
of it.
Q216 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
What you think sells the Guardian?
Mr Rusbridger: I think the core readership want
us to be serious. They want news about social policy, international
affairs, culture and politics that they can trust and that is
serious.
Q217 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
So it is news?
Mr Rusbridger: News and comment.
Q218 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
The question which I am interested in—I do not know if you
can answer it—in designing the front page, for example,
I understand what you say about the importance of that, and so
there is news selection going on and you have to make a judgement
or your colleagues have to make judgements about the strength
of likelihood of interest of, say, a strong domestic news story
competing perhaps with a strong foreign story, Iraq or Washington
or whatever. How do you make those judgements?
Mr Rusbridger: There are several factors in
play. One is the cycle of news. You are trying to put something
that is fresh before the public, because increasingly we put a
lot of stories up on the Web first and if a story has been seen
for 12 or 16 or 18 hours it is not going to be terribly fresh,
so freshness is undeniably one subject. We do try to gives some
sense of significance or importance. Today's "Public Sector
Targets to be Scrapped" is not going to cause the Guardian
to walk off the newsstands this morning. It is quite serious,
but that we thought was the most important story of the day when
there was not anything immensely significant happening. It sounds
an odd thing to say if I say there was not anything tremendously
significant happening in the world yesterday. Actually, if you
look at our foreign pages today there is nothing that leaps out
and there would have been a decision process to try and weigh
that up, but we do not inevitably lead on foreign or home. There
is no rule of thumb.
Q219 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Presumably, the criteria for your online service can be broader.
Do you use that to test reaction from the users of the online
service?
Mr Rusbridger: No. Of course, you can do. You
can measure exactly who is reading what on the Web and it is like
all reader research: I never know quite what that tells you. There
was a time when we employed both Hugo Young and Julie Burchill
and Julie Burchill was a thousand times more popular in terms
of traffic than Hugo Young but as Editor of the Guardian,
if you then decided that you would have ten Julie Burchill columns
and one Hugo Young, you would be failing in duty. So there is
a limit to what reader research can tell you. In the end you have
to use your own judgement.
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