Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220
- 239)
WEDNESDAY 18 JULY 2007
Mr Alan Rusbridger
Q220 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Can we go back to your point about your readers broadly wanting
news and comment taken seriously and put in the paper seriously.
Does that inhibit the stuff that you want to do when there is
perhaps a feeling it is a bit too heavy?
Mr Rusbridger: You are reporting society as
it is. You always have to remember that as an editor. If you reported
purely the world of social policy, international politics, high
politics, you would not be reporting the world as it is. If you
cover Big Brother, is that so trivial for the pages of the Guardian
or is the fact that Big Brother is a huge cultural phenomenon
and, if you do not report it, in some ways you are engineering
the world to suit the Guardian view of the world rather
than actually what has happened in the world? So you have to be
careful about producing a paper that is an unreal reflection of
the world as well as one, frankly, that would be terrifically
worthy and quite difficult to get through.
Q221 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
There are going to be occasions, or are there, when you feel there
are two rapping good international foreign news stories but it
is a bit too much in the context of what else is in the paper?
Do you get into that?
Mr Rusbridger: Not on the front. As you then
lay out the pages and the running order a bit, you do look try
to get some light and shade and you do not want too many crime
stories or political stories or science stories. That is more
to do with the natural flow of the pages. On the front you try
to go for what is significant.
Q222 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
I wanted to ask in terms of this issue of serious coverage about
the use you make of specialists in your paper. Do you use fewer
of them now than previously?
Mr Rusbridger: Yes.
Q223 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
Where are you getting the expertise from? Is it through agencies?
Mr Rusbridger: Our newsroom is about 50 domestically,
of which, from memory, 37 are specialists, so it is a very specialist-led
paper and I think they are good. Three or four years ago I thought
we should really be doing much more on science and we now have
a science team of four, all of whom have post-doctoral degrees
so they know what they are writing about. We have a political
staff of seven people, we have four or five people covering education.
So it is quite deep resources that you can draw on.
Q224 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
What about your use of news agencies that are more generalist?
Mr Rusbridger: As feed we get in the office
PA, AP, Reuters, New York Times, Bloomberg, Washington Post. We
do not use much raw agency in the paper. We would use it mainly
on foreign, some domestic—court reports that we would not
want to send a reporter to and on some breaking stories where
we do not happen to have a reporter there.
Q225 Chairman:
How many foreign correspondents do you employ overseas?
Mr Rusbridger: On staff we have about 25 and
then we would have about the same again on some form of contract.
Q226 Chairman:
So 50 which you have call on?
Mr Rusbridger: Twenty-five exclusive call on
and 25 you would share with other people.
Q227 Chairman:
Do still have a correspondent in Iraq?
Mr Rusbridger: No. After our reporter was kidnapped
about a year ago, we have had nobody permanently based there.
Q228 Chairman:
So how do you manage?
Mr Rusbridger: We do use a lot of agency there
and we have reporters who go in, and we have a very remarkable
brave Iraqi reporter, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, who goes in and spends
time there and can move more freely than western correspondents
can.
Q229 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Having a look at your revenue side, what is the situation as far
as advertising, what part of that forms your revenue versus the
sales and other forms of income?
Mr Rusbridger: It is very roughly 60% advertising
and 40% cover sales.
Q230 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Has that changed a lot in the last 10 years?
Mr Rusbridger: Yes, it would have been nearer
70/30 ten years ago and advertising, display advertising, is slipping
away gradually. Classified advertising is slipping away faster,
about 10% a year.
Q231 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
If you were looking ahead ten years, what would you see then?
What is your prediction?
Mr Rusbridger: My assumption is that the overwhelming
majority of classified advertising is going to go on to the Internet
and may well therefore be lost to newspapers. All the newspapers
will try to devise strategies to try and keep it but that is my
assumption, and so therefore newspapers have a rather urgent problem
of trying to fill that hole.
Q232 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Do you have any ideas on that from your own viewpoint? If you
are really saying that that is going to be a major problem, what
about your own survival?
Mr Rusbridger: Yes, of course. We think about
little else. We are in the position that all media organisations
are in at the moment where sales and revenue are in gentle decline.
The Internet is taking off in a remarkable way. Advertising on
the Internet is increasing by about 50% a year from a very low
base. So it seems to me all you can do is to plan to expand aggressively
on the Internet in the expectation that advertising will follow,
and I think that is a reasonable expectation.
Q233 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I find it very odd that, as all this is happening, the papers
in their packages seem to be getting bigger and bigger, the point
made earlier. Would you expect to see them slimming down at some
stage?
Mr Rusbridger: I think there are two answers
to that, maybe three. One is economic. There may come a point
at which in our market it is simply uneconomic to keep producing
the kind of size newspapers that we do at the moment. The second
will be in the choice of the reader. If the next generation of
readers prefer to read their news on-line, there is no way on
earth that we can persuade them to read something in print. You
will just have to go with the market. The third one is technological,
that there is an awful lot of money going into portable devices,
whether it is electronic ink or palm readers or whatever, and
you and I might not like to read our Guardian editorials
on a mobile phone but there is a generation coming up that finds
that quite natural. Some of the latest experiments in electronic
paper are really quite interesting. They are very good screens.
So it might be that there will be an iPod moment in newspapers
where a device comes along that is so portable and easy that the
print version will become increasingly a thing of the past.
Q234 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
So no papers perhaps?
Mr Rusbridger: A possible alternative is that
you will print it yourself. We will send it to you in a version
you can print. That is why I am not too gloomy about the future.
A lot of it is out of our hands and, as an editor, all you can
do is to make sure that the digital version of your product is
as good, if not better than your print version so that it is ready
for whatever technological or economic changes await round the
corner.
Q235 Baroness Thornton:
Following on from that, you led the way with Guardian Unlimited.
I would be interested to know whether you still claim a place
as being the most popular newspaper website. You have a reputation
for the excellence of your journalism in terms of both news and
commentary. I would like you to explain the economics of the growth
of online, the thing you have been describing, how you will be
able to sustain that moving forward, because I think you are right
that you have to be as excellent online as you are in print. How
is that going to work?
Mr Rusbridger: The truth about our market at
the moment is that, with the exception of the Daily Telegraph,
we all exist on some form of subsidy, so you are not talking economic
businesses. I think that the news groups that are struggling most
are the ones that are the conventional market organisations, so
the big newspaper chains that are being forced to react very quickly
to a drop in revenue and circulation and they react by cutting
back on journalism and not investing sufficiently, in my view,
in the digital world, the ones that are in a conventional commercial
operation. The British broadsheet market is unusual in that we
are all owned by people who have different kinds of motivations
or structures by which we are sustained. I think that we are going
through a period in which, for at least ten years, we are going
to have to have an act of faith in which we pump an awful lot
of money into this digital world with not a sufficient return;
these are not going to be profitable businesses. We will do that
in the expectation that things will change and I think that out
of some sense of public service duty, we are there to perform
this function.
Q236 Baroness Thornton:
How integrated are your online and news teams?
Mr Rusbridger: Increasingly so and I think my
expectation is that, within two to five years, it will be a very
blended operation, so that you will have people who will be completely
interchangeable across print and online and there are geographical
reasons why. At the moment we are on different floors; we are
moving to a new building in 18 months where we will all be on
the same floor. You have to be careful about too much integration
in my view because they are different things: one is working 24/7
reliant on feed and so on and so forth; the paper relies on context
analysis, a bit of thought, reflection and making phone calls,
and that is once a day and this is all the time.
Q237 Baroness Thornton:
Do you see your job as editor to make sure that that second thing
continues to happen?
Mr Rusbridger: Yes and you have to of course
then work out how, within the same staff, you can do both.
Q238 Bishop of Manchester:
I want to follow on from what Lady Howe was saying earlier looking
ten years ahead. I came across your speech to the Organisation
of News Ombudsman which you gave in May and in that you were saying,
"The very nature of journalism is being challenged in fundamental
ways that have yet to filter back into more conventional print
focused newsrooms. Everything we do will be more contestable,
more open to challenge and alternative interpretation" and
in many respects you filled that out further in what you have
been saying to us this morning. You then went on to make a point
to which you did allude much earlier in our session together which
was about opinion polls revealing little confidence in mainstream
media. If we project to ten years ahead, how do you think that
kind of public confidence in the media and, in particular, in
newspapers is going to be? Do you see it going in an improving
direction or is it going to be a pattern of decline? Related to
that, do you feel that the ownership and, in particular, a cross-media
ownership is a factor in the undermining of people's trust?
Mr Rusbridger: What I mean by contestability
is that every day and increasingly all day we are putting material
into the public domain which, even if we do not have mechanisms
internally to correct, clarify or amplify, is happening on the
Internet. So, if you get anything wrong now, even if you do not
want to discuss it in your own space, it will be discussed out
there and you have a choice as to whether you want to allow that
discussion into what you are doing or whether you are going to
allow your paper to be picked apart elsewhere, and I think that
that will have an interesting effect. That is bound to wash back
into news organisations and I think will be positive and I think
it will be impossible to ignore that response to what you are
writing. Since the only thing that we have going for us in a world
in which everybody has a voice is that we have to be completely
trusted—trust is the only thing that we have going for us—I
think that there will be a commercial as well as an editorial
imperative to get things right and, when you get things wrong,
to correct them. I think that this will have a beneficial impact
on what we do.
Q239 Bishop of Manchester:
Talking about the editorial power and you have described your
own role which is, I suspect, quite different from most other
editors of national newspapers, if the trust is going to depend
to a significant extent on how the editor and his staff operate,
how detrimental is it going to be to that to have owners who may
actually wish to interfere in a way which clearly does not happen
in the Guardian? In other words, for all the good practice
that you are describing, will there be a much larger factor in
the background of ownership which will continue to destroy trust?
Mr Rusbridger: I think that we have to accept
the widespread scepticism and sometimes cynicism about what we
are doing. These figures of trust are difficult to interpret because
the papers that are trusted the least in any survey are the ones
that sell the most. The red tops get 8 or 9% in any survey but
they outsell the Guardian by a factor of eight or nine.
If you ask Guardian readers you read the Guardian,
they really trust it. If you ask people more generally who do
not read the Guardian, that dips. These are slippery things.
I do think that the way in which the Internet is working in terms
of the fragmentation of news, every little bit of a newspaper
is now minutely dissected before I get to work by some special
interest group somewhere and, if you get stuff wrong, you know
about it soon enough. I think that no matter how elevated you
are as a proprietor or how powerful, ultimately the readers are
in a much more powerful position than yourself.
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