Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360
- 379)
WEDNESDAY 25 JULY 2007
Ms Helen Boaden, Mr Nigel Chapman and Ms Sian Kevill
Q360 Chairman:
Okay; I am going to cut it off there before you get into too deep
a theological debate—
Ms Boaden: Bring it on!
Chairman:— and move on to the more
general questions that we are interested in.
Q361 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
This is very straightforward by comparison. Can I just ask you,
going back to an earlier point you made about your researcher,
for instance, in Blue Peter, amongst the people who are
involved in news output what is the average length of contract
that most of them have?
Ms Boaden: Long. BBC News has a very low turnover,
so an awful lot of people are, as we call them, lifers. They are
on ongoing staff contracts. Journalism is probably the most stable
part of the BBC. People come and they stay a long time.
Q362 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
And within the wider—
Ms Boaden: BBC?
Q363 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
No, the area which is not news but is current affairs, people
like researchers.
Ms Boaden: They will be much shorter.
Q364 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
So if you are a researcher on, let us not say Blue Peter;
let us say Panorama, what is your average age likely to
be?
Ms Boaden: I do not know the average age but,
from looking around, you are probably likely to be in your early
thirties.
Q365 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
And what is the average length of contract that you are likely
to be on?
Ms Boaden: I can find that out for you but it
will depend on what kind of programme you are working on and what
kind of track record you have. Some researchers will be staff
researchers, ie, they are absolutely permanent, and some will
come in and do specialist work. I can certainly find out the average
length of contract.
Q366 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I think it would be quite helpful to know, particularly in relation
to training issues and other things.
Ms Boaden: Absolutely. I think you are getting
to a very interesting issue, which is where journalism meets,
as it were, the fluidity of the rest of the television industry.
Q367 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Yes, which you have referred to.
Ms Boaden: It is something we are acutely aware
of because for those difficult programmes that we often do—Panorama,
This World—it is incredibly important that anyone
who works in them understands what is and is not acceptable. We
are acutely aware of that.
Q368 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I will now ask you the less controversial question. Can you tell
us as briefly as you can what the structure of BBC News output
is, what it provides and on how many different platforms does
it do it?
Ms Boaden: It is quite a long answer, actually.
Q369 Chairman:
If you want to we can have some of this in writing.
Ms Boaden: I will do a quick précis and
I do have a document that we give to people who do our impartiality
reviews in the Trust which you might find interesting.
Q370 Chairman:
That would be much better.
Ms Boaden: The key thing is that you have the
Trust at the top and then the executive and then you have the
journalism board which involves nations and regions, global, which
my colleagues here are part of, news which I run, and sport, and
they all work to Mark Byford who is the head of journalism. I
have a team—a head of radio, a head of television, a head
of interactive, a head of Millbank, a head of news-gathering and
then HR and those people. They are responsible for great chunks
of output but the thing you have to remember about the BBC is
that the scale is enormous. For every hour of the day there are
four and a half hours of news and current affairs. The only way
you can possibly run something like that is by what the army calls
mission command. You set the strategy, you set the values, you
set and regulate quality control and you appoint the right people
who you think understand those values inside out, and then you
have to let them get on with it with their objectives, which obviously
connect to our statement of programme policies and those kinds
of things. You have a series of meetings, which is the document
we can give you, which are about quality control, so I have an
8.50 meeting with my team every morning where we go through the
key programmes—what worked, what did not, is that a bit
biased, do we need to make sure we cover that angle, and then
those people continue those kinds of meetings with their teams
and then the editors continue with their teams. In the programme
teams they will have two meetings a day which are both looking
forward and reviewing. That does not mean to say that things do
not go wrong, it does not mean to say things do not slip through
the net, but when you are looking at that kind of scale—and
again I can send you the information specifically but we have
output on BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, Radio 1, Radio
1 Extra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, Radio 5 Live, we have the
online site, we have BBC Parliament, we have News 24, we have
the World Service and we have BBC World—we have an extraordinary
mix and range. In a sense it is a bit like the army in the sense
that you have to be able to rely on the editors to hold the values
for you in that kind of structure.
Q371 Bishop of Manchester:
In the section on the media in The Guardian on 5 July there
was an interesting article which was exploring some of the issues
that the Ofcom report had raised about "firm evidence of
disengagement from mainstream news sources, in particular by 16-24
year olds, who say they follow news only when something important
is happening", and that that has risen from 33% to 50% in
five years, which is really quite a serious change. You were referring
earlier to some of the data that you keep about news stories and
I wondered whether you were able to give any indication about
what you perceive to be important, particularly by that age group
but not only by that age group, and whether you could see a shift
from interest in international and traditional news stories towards
something of the more celebrity, softer type.
Ms Boaden: One of our big challenges is how
we keep that audience engaged. We have to be slightly realistic
about this. Young people have never been deeply engaged in news
but the Ofcom finding was interesting because they are using television
news in particular much less. We have got quite a scary graph
which I can again give you which says that in terms of television
news even big stories like the Suffolk murders, which you remember,
that awful story last year which did grip the country for a period,
that age group did not go to television news, not us or anybody,
for information about that. They often get their information in
different ways. They get it online and they get it from radio.
Newsbeat on Radio 1 is critical for us in engaging that
audience. Newsbeat, I think, is a very good model for understanding
how as a public service broadcaster you can try and have the best
of both world because undoubtedly they do far more stories on
celebrities and brands than anywhere else in BBC News but they
also do the European Union. They do the elections in Turkey, they
certainly do the big stories. They are a classic Reithian concept.
They do a lot on Iraq and Afghanistan, because, of course, a lot
of their listeners are the young men who go and fight there or
their friends and family, so that is a very important part of
the BBC's portfolio and we learn from them how to engage audiences
in that kind of age group. It is genuinely very interesting. The
pattern has always been that young people were not terribly engaged
with news and then if they got a mortgage and families they suddenly
became much more interested because that is the moment when you
grow up and you have to engage with how the outer world has an
impact on the little protected world which teenagers tend to live
in. It will be fascinating as we go forward to see, in an age
of YouTube and Facebook and all those very introverted (one could
argue) connections that young people have if they are going to
connect with the wider world. In terms of international stories
they do not talk about being gripped by them but then they go
off and do gap years and come back and find it much more interesting.
Very often you have to get into those stories in a slightly different
way. As I said, the Newsbeat audience is quite interested
in Afghanistan and Iraq for the very specific reason of their
constituency. We have a generation of young people who are more
interested in celebrity, they are more interested in branding,
they are more interested in business very often and personal finance,
and they are fascinated by relationships. We are clearly not going
to move our news to absorb all of those things because all of
us would be driven completely mad by it, would we not, and we
are called consumers, but we have to acknowledge that in some
of the things we are doing, and, of course, we are moving to a
broadband world where eventually you will be able to personalise
your news so you can get the news that you want. That has in many
ways great strengths. If you are passionate about Africa you will
be able to find out a lot more about Africa than you can at the
moment just by watching or listening because it will all be there
on the web, but if you are not at all interested in Africa you
will be able to avoid those stories altogether and for the public
body that is a real challenge for all of us.
Q372 Bishop of Manchester:
Do you see any discernible shift in the kinds of things which
define BBC News in the various areas that we have talked about,
and indeed the way in which news is covered by other companies?
Would you accede, for example, to the BBC at any stage going nearer
to the way in which Fox News will produce a much more opinionated
kind of news coverage?
Ms Boaden: Nigel might want to talk about impartiality
but no, I do not see that at all. First of all, in a regulatory
framework we are not allowed to be anything other than impartial,
and that for me and for the BBC is absolutely core. Free, fair,
independent information for a liberal democracy is one of the
reasons we are here.
Mr Chapman: The evidence I have got on the international
news is that they are really quite hungry to understand the connectivity,
if you like, between various forces in the world. There is a great
opportunity now for international news broadcasting in the World
Service and BBC World too to connect up around issues like terrorism,
climate change and so on. There is a big appetite for that. I
think it is one of the reasons why the World Service has been
successful over the last few years, because it has focused an
awful lot of attention and energy in its news agenda on doing
it now. In terms of that, for instance, when Paris Hilton is released
from jail in California it has got to be legitimate that that
is part of the mix but it is not the lead story by any stretch
of the imagination. I think that gives you an example of the range
of what you need to cover because if you slam the door on curiosity
and only go for significance it becomes a very lopsided world.
You definitely need significance. Journalism is meant to be the
first draft of history. You do need significance, but you also
occasionally need to satisfy the curiosity of the wide range of
interests of the listener and the user, and those are judgments
that good and experienced people make in the overall mix of what
are many hours of output.
Ms Boaden: I always say to my people, "You
cannot sack the audience". You might like to on occasion
but they have a huge number of choices and if we are going to
keep them with the BBC for all the good things that we think are
very important we have to respect their curiosity for the things
that some audiences do not find very palatable at all.
Q373 Chairman:
Except that I do notice from the report From Seesaw to Wagon
Wheel Jeff Randall, who was a very successful business editor
of the BBC, doing something that the BBC do not do very much of,
saying of the BBC, "It is a bit like walking into a Sunday
meeting of the Flat Earth Society", and on impartiality he
said, "That's what it's like for someone with my right-of-centre
views working inside the BBC".
Ms Boaden: Bless him! That is just a view. I
could argue point for point with Jeff on that. He feels very strongly
about it and he also enjoyed working with us enormously and went
away to a great job that he wanted to do but he keeps in touch
and he still has a programme on Radio 5 Live every Sunday.
Ms Kevill: I wanted to pick up on that because
BBC World has a slightly different audience in that it is quite
cosmopolitan and aimed in cities but what is quite interesting
about the research we have done on the audience is that it is
quite young; it is between 30 and 40. What is emerging is that
globally there is quite a young generation which is much more
connected through the internet, through the work that they do,
through the ability to travel in a way that previous generations
have not done, and we are finding that they are our core viewers.
Domestic viewers tend to be a lot older than that so for us it
is a comparatively young audience which is, as Nigel has said,
interested in the connectivity of the world and how events in
the world relate to and affect them. We have done some research
recently which puts them at about a quarter of a billion, this
particular group around the world, and in a sense that is what
BBC World is aiming to do. The other interesting thing is that
that group is very interested in business and on BBC World we
do far more business, including company business, which is something
which often is not covered as much on domestic television, so
I think that again when you get a different audience, as Helen
was saying, with Newsbeat, you understand what that audience
wants and our audience does want more business coverage so we
do a lot more and we have teams based in New York, India, Singapore.
We have a global news-gathering team connected with business.
Q374 Bishop of Manchester:
Can I ask one final question following that up because you have
a massive amount going on in the background? I go into Oxford
Road occasionally to pick up Ariel, and earlier in the year I
see Helen Boaden was quoted as saying that she is aware that some
of the news staff feel "knackered and frustrated because
of their workload", and then a journalist from The Guardian
was quoted as saying "News 24 has always been a high
pressure place but it has now become relentless", and Bob
Sheenan on Radio 5 Live saying it was "hard making rolling
news with fewer staff".
Ms Boaden: It is; it is very tough. We went
through a value-for-money process pre-charter, and we will be
doing more value for money over the next five years because, as
you will be aware, our licence fee is not just not pegged to inflation;
it is going down, so we are currently working on plans to rationalise
further, to streamline things so that ideally what we want to
do is be able to deliver the same quality with fewer people but
without quite as much relentlessness, which means that some of
the duplication that I still think we have too much of in BBC
News will be eliminated, without, I hope, losing the originality
and bespoke qualities that all of us like in the output. This
is stuff that most of these organisations have to go through once
in a while. CNN, for example, have had to do it. We talk to ITN
and they have had an incredibly tough time. Even though it is
a big challenge I do not think it is right for the BBC to moan
about their financial situation when we do get guaranteed income.
I have worked in the commercial sector and, believe me, it is
different.
Q375 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Presumably it is the core values that you absolutely have to hang
on to through thick and thin because otherwise you will have to
let some values go perhaps.
Ms Boaden: I so totally agree with you. Impartiality,
fairness, accuracy, honesty, transparency, trust—frankly,
if we let those go, which is why we are taking so seriously what
has happened recently, there is no point to us.
Q376 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
So the economies will have to come in other areas?
Ms Boaden: The economies do not necessarily
undermine your values. Your values are something different from
the economies but clearly you have to make sure that you do not
get yourself into a situation where you are so tight that you
are undermining the ability to act on those values. We do not
know in the six cases that we were talking about quite what the
dynamics were of what was going on, and culture is not just about
finance; it is also about group expectations. The interesting
thing about Nigel's case is the desperation to appear to be interactive.
This is a new world for us. We are learning about interactivity
and one of the things we might discover is that the audience out
there likes it and quite understands that it does not always work.
How many of us have had broadband go down or the phone line go
whizzy or on the mobile it suddenly cuts out?
Q377 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
It could be that the question I am meant to be asking you is not
at all unconnected with this, which is about media ownership's
influence on news values, and it is whether or not you think that
the BBC has more or less editorial freedom as a result of being
funded by the licence fee and not having to answer to shareholders.
Ms Boaden: It is not so much editorial freedom
because I think it would be extremely unfair, particularly on
our colleagues at ITN and Sky, to give the impression that they
are less editorially vigorous than we are, but I do think we can
make different decisions about where we invest our money which
do help with editorial processes. For example, we are the only
British broadcaster to have a permanent base in Iraq and Kabul
and Gaza. Even though Alan is not there we still have Palestinians
there. Those are extremely costly in terms of just security, enormously
expensive, but we think those stories are so important that that
is an investment we can afford to make, and that gives us an editorial
freedom. It is not about bias or pressure. It is about what we
can do in terms of reporting the world. We have 40 bureaux. Seven
of those are hub bureaux, which are big bureaux, but we have bureaux
around the world which provide, particularly for the World Service,
regular information from often quite obscure places about stories
that are important to be reported both online and on radio because
we have the licence fee and that allows us that freedom.
Mr Chapman: Can I make one observation about
the quote from Ariel? In the end it comes down to management making
a judgment about the extent of the activities they want to do
and what they can afford, and I do not think it is a bad thing
sometimes to say, "We are doing too much. We want to stop
something". I know we often get criticised for that. I as
the Director of the World Service closed ten language services,
not an easy thing to do, but that was the right thing to do and
is the right thing to do. What we cannot let happen is that the
values get stretched and break because the staff get to the point
where they just cannot have enough time to do things properly
and they feel under pressure to start cutting corners to get things
to happen. That is an awful vicious circle that we can never allow
to undermine the core values of the BBC. I suppose I ask for some
understanding sometimes from people that we sometimes have to
make difficult choices and say, "We are not going to do that
any more because we want to focus our energy more intensely in
this area at the expense of this and please will you come with
us on that journey?". We say it to staff, we say it to the
public, we say it to our stakeholders and that is the kind of
intelligent conversation to have and the right conversation to
have rather than just pressing blindly on thinking that with 10
or 20% less resources, however efficient and clever you are, you
can always carry on doing 100% of what you did before.
Q378 Chairman:
You have been very helpful in offering to set out the number of
overseas bureaux you have at some stage.
Ms Boaden: Yes, we have got all of that.
Chairman: That would be very interesting
to us.
Q379 Lord King of Bridgwater:
And how much common working there is between all of you in sharing
resources?
Ms Boaden: Yes, we can do that.
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