Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 253)
WEDNESDAY 18 JULY 2007
Mr Alan Rusbridger
Q240 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Going back to the connection between online and an actual newspaper,
I have been a loyal read of the Guardian since my student
days but I have noticed recently that your headlines are slightly
less obvious news driven headlines and it was suggested to me
by one of your journalists in fact that this was to do with catering
to the online readership as well. I do not know if you would agree
with that.
Mr Rusbridger: I do not think that. In fact,
one of the interesting things is, if you look at any web page,
web design is highly understated and actually people writing headlines
for web design for technical reasons to do with tagging and searchability
tend to write much more literal headlines because they will get
the key words in which will be found by Google and actually the
design of most web pages looks more like broadsheet newspaper
design of 20 years ago.
Q241 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
I really mean the story section rather than the design.
Mr Rusbridger: If that is happening, it is not
by design.
Q242 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
I have always been very impressed with your annual social environmental
report which says at the beginning of it that it is a reflection
of the purposes of the Scott Trust and you are the only newspaper
that produces a separate social environmental report which speaks
about the basis under which your philosophy is. Could you unpack
a little of that philosophy for us in the context of, for example,
the BBC now has laid on it a duty to "enhance citizenship
and support civil society", that is its number one purpose.
Does the Scott Trust give you a purpose other than just a structure
for financing?
Mr Rusbridger: We recently discussed this with
the Scott Trust and it comes around this notion of what liberal
journalism means and what liberal journalism means now that the
Guardian is now available and widely read around the world;
we have a much bigger readership in America now than the LA
Times and this has happened in the last five years. It clearly
is to do with partly a smaller liberal progressive perspective
but I think there is something in the way that you conduct journalism
which is to do with accuracy, it is to do with fairness, it is
to do with allowing diversity of voice and it is to do with contestability,
allowing minority voices and all that kind of stuff. The John
Stuart Mill definition of liberalness is at the heart of what
we are trying to do as we acquire this audience around the world.
Q243 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Would you say that you are also now a major campaigning newspaper
in taking your stance, for example, on climate change, the minority
voices are to an extent not heard? That may well be the right
thing to do but do you see yourself as a campaigner and is that
because the Scott Trust wants you to do that?
Mr Rusbridger: Campaigning, yes, in terms of
thinking that this is one of the most, if not the most important
issues facing any of us, so you choose it seriously and give it
lots of space and keep thinking how to reinvigorate it because,
in a sense, it is one story that everyone is familiar with. That
is what I mean by campaigning. On most issues, it is very important
in campaigning, not to do what you are suggesting which is to
ignore the ... The classic thing was GM foods; I thought it was
more valuable to present the arguments on both sides than run
a campaign saying that GM foods are terrible because there clearly
are arguments on both sides and it is more important to present
the evidence for readers to make up their own minds.
Q244 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Does that set of purposes come to you every day from the Trust?
Who is the determinant of those purposes?
Mr Rusbridger: It is sometimes those two words
"as heretofore". As an editor, you have to understand
the traditions of the paper and reinterpret them for the present
age. Yes, the whole thing is informed by the Trust membership
and the Trust purpose but adapted to things including market conditions.
Q245 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
May I take you back to something you said much earlier about the
way that your readers' editor operates whom you described—and
I think it is a she now—as somebody who operates in an entirely
independent way from you and that that independence is protected.
I would like to ask you two things that arise from that. One is
about standards of journalism generally. Do you have any observations
about the way in which journalism is practised both on your newspaper
and elsewhere and whether standards have declined or not and should
we be in a moral panic about it as it were? More specifically
in relation to your own newspaper and the preservation of journalistic
independence, do you have any way of writing that into the way
that your relationships with your journalists are managed? You
have given us one example where you do. Are there any others and
can you tell us about them?
Mr Rusbridger: For the reasons I was suggesting
to the Bishop of Manchester, the standards cannot help but rise
because the scrutiny we are now under must wash back to the journalists
and that is certainly true with the readers' editor. If you speak
to any Guardian report, they will say that they will think
twice before they write any sentence now because everything that
they write will be contestable and, if they get it wrong, it will
be corrected the next day and they do not like that. Having this
independent mechanism within the paper absolutely affects the
standard of journalism which I think is getting better.
Q246 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Has that been picked up by anybody else? I ought to know the answer
but I do not.
Mr Rusbridger: No, almost nobody. The Observer
has it and I conclude that is for the reason that it is actually
quite threatening to the editorial process of having an independent
mechanism.
Q247 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Do you imagine that it would it be threatening to the editorial
process including the interests of the owner in some situations?
Mr Rusbridger: My view is that an enlightened
owner would see how that is working and that it is entirely beneficial
because it increases trust. It does not decrease trust if you
keep admitting to your mistakes because—
Q248 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
But, as a matter of fact, it has not been taken up?
Mr Rusbridger: No.
Q249 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I am sorry, I interrupted you.
Mr Rusbridger: Of course, we lay down ground
rules about the way in which we behave and it is my job as editor
to set down those parameters. If I were to say the most single
significant thing, it would be having this independent mechanism
which works two ways, so she will sometimes ask whether it was
the right decision to carry a certain picture or a certain headline
and whether our coverage of x was balanced or not balanced and
she will publish all that and there are no problems, and that
can be quite uncomfortable as an editor because there is this
dialogue going on behind your back. Inevitably, that is happening
out there and is completely unmediated upon the Internet anyway.
So, it is in a way absolutely right and you either welcome it
in or you say that it is taking place but you ignore it.
Q250 Lord King of Bridgwater:
From what you have told us, you might be thought to be the freeist
editor in British journalism in terms of freedom of interference
and have a particularly enlightened owner in the Scott Trust.
You said in response to previous questions that enlightened owners
should follow, but do you think there are any other enlightened
owners of British newspapers?
Mr Rusbridger: I do not think that there is
any clear answer to that. I think that Pearson has been a model
owner of the Financial Times. You could make an argument—and
people do—that Conrad Black was a good owner of Daily
Telegraph in that, although he was a man of strong political
views, he did not ever seek to impose those on the paper that
I know of and he wrote letters to his own editor when he disagreed.
I think that there are some good local newspapers but I think
that it is increasingly difficult in the commercial times that
we live in to probably have dependence of the public service view
of local journalism that existed 20 or 30 years ago; I think that
is more worrying in a way than what you have at national level.
Q251 Lord Inglewood:
A point arising out of your remarks to Lord King and also to get
back to something you said right at the beginning because I think
you said at the start that you felt that the future of local newspapers
was much more questionable and problematic than the kind of newspaper
that you edit. I have an involvement with local newspapers and
I wonder if you could briefly touch on that.
Mr Rusbridger: I think that it is primarily
an economic one in that the circulations of particularly evening
papers have been in very sharp decline or consistent decline for
20 or 30 years, so your cover price revenue is disappearing.
Q252 Lord Inglewood:
Is this based on your experience of the Manchester Evening
News?
Mr Rusbridger: I think that it is universal
now. Google is killing off classified advertising. The property,
cars and job ads are all going, so your two main sources of revenue
are disappearing and the response of virtually all the newspapers'
owners is to then cut back on the editorial costs. So, there is
less to read and you get into a spiral of decline and competition
then comes in from free sheets which then further erode your revenue.
I think that is going to be extremely tough. As societies need
news, web-based models will spring up and are springing up in
most countries including America which are interesting; they are
much more local; they originate from citizens and there are really
interesting things happening there which actually may be more
reflective of communities than newspapers were. I think that something
will always replace it but I do not think that the printed local
paid-for newspaper has a very optimistic future.
Q253 Chairman:
I have one last question on cross-media ownership. Your company
owns a number of other things apart from the Guardian but, when
it comes to a newspaper reporting on those other companies, going
soft on it or puffing them in one way or another, do you see that
as a danger in the modern media?
Mr Rusbridger: Slightly, yes. It comes back
to where we started, that there is a danger of concentration of
power. You want diversity of ownership and you want diversity
of types of ownerships and I think it is good in Britain that
you have a highly-regulated BBC at the heart of broadcasting industry
and a fairly regularly broadcasting industry which can be set
against the more wild west of the printed word. That tension is
good and I think that it is good to have contestability within
the media, so that papers can critique each other and pick up
on each other from broadcasting to print and so forth. I think
that it would be unhealthy if there were ever a feeling that newspaper
was the cosy world in which that did not happen.
Chairman: You have been very patient.
Thank you very much, indeed. We are very, very grateful. Perhaps
if we have any other questions, we can write to you about them.
Thank you so much.
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