Examination of Witnesses (Questions 500
- 519)
WEDNESDAY 10 OCTOBER 2007
Mr Peter Wright and Mr John Wellington
Q500 Chairman:
Welcome, I think you know what we are about. I know you were listening
to the end of our questioning with the Editor of The Mirror.
Basically what we are about is we are looking into the question
of media ownership and the news, what impact concentration of
media ownership has on balance of opinion, but also what we want
to know at the same time is what is actually happening in newspapers
at this moment. Mr Wright, you have brought with you Mr Wellington.
We know who you are, Mr Wright, because you are the Editor and
Mr Wellington, you are?
Mr Wright: He is our Managing Editor.
Q501 Chairman:
Just let us be absolutely clear what the difference is; what do
you both do?
Mr Wright: If you would like me to explain,
I am the Editor, I am in charge of the newspaper. John Wellington
as Managing Editor is in charge of administration and looking
after the staff and he has a head for figures, which probably
most journalists do not, but I will be answering the questions
unless you particularly want to ask Mr Wellington.
Q502 Chairman:
Fine, thank you very much. When did the Mail on Sunday
actually start?
Mr Wright: It was May 1982.
Q503 Chairman:
And so financially it is probably the most successful new start
of a newspaper in recent years, is it not? You started absolutely
from scratch, there was not a Mail on Sunday before that?
Mr Wright: That is correct and we have been
making a profit for the last 15 years or so, which I do not believe
any of the other new starts do.
Q504 Chairman:
And what is the secret of your success?
Mr Wright: In 1982 there was a gap in the market
for a newspaper that appealed strongly to women, that was a careful
blend of the serious and the popular, and that was modern in a
way that the Sunday Express, which was then the only paper
in the middle market, was not.
Q505 Chairman:
Is there another factor as well? You had the backing of a committed
proprietor and a proprietor with deep pockets. Is it really only
that kind of proprietor—because we have got Rupert Murdoch
with The Sun or Fox News in the United States—is
it only the Murdochs and the Rothermeres that realistically can
start these new ventures? No standard PLC is ever going to do
this, is it?
Mr Wright: I do not think that is entirely true.
The Daily Mail was nearly sold in the early 1970s because
it was not making any money. It is true that Lord Rothermere and
his son, who is now Chairman of the company, take a long view
and they are prepared to invest over long periods of time in something
in which they believe, and it is the case that some PLC companies
are looking for short-term return, and you do not necessarily
get that in the newspaper industry.
Q506 Chairman:
Do you regard Lord Rothermere as a proprietor?
Mr Wright: Well, he is the biggest shareholder
in the company which owns the Mail on Sunday and in that
respect he is, but the editors in our group all have independence
in what they do.
Q507 Chairman:
So you have total independence on elections, what your view is
on European policy, the Iraq war, things of that kind?
Mr Wright: Yes, completely.
Q508 Chairman:
And there is no reason why the Mail on Sunday should not
take a different view from the Daily Mail?
Mr Wright: Yes, and sometimes it does. At the
last election the Evening Standard, which is also part
of our group, supported the Labour Party. We take a different
view on all sorts of things but, you know, we are not obliged
to take a different view, we are not obliged to take the same
view.
Q509 Chairman:
And there is no corporate discussion of these points?
Mr Wright: No.
Q510 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Just pursuing Lord Fowler's point, what is the benefit to you
of being part of a much larger group? We were just talking about
the question as to whether you share journalists, whether you
can get a particular story running, whether you are bound to have
your own journalists pursuing that quite separately from the Daily
Mail or the Evening Standard or any other paper.
Mr Wright: We run in competition with the other
papers in the group journalistically. Clearly we share printing
presses, and we have very good printing presses, and that is a
great advantage. We have in the past shared promotions. We do
less of that now because we found actually that the interests
of the Mail on Sunday and Daily Mail are slightly
different promotionally but as far as pursuing stories are concerned,
we operate completely independently.
Q511 Lord King of Bridgwater:
And websites?
Mr Wright: No, the website is a joint operation.
I am afraid, much as I would like it to be the case, Sunday newspapers
on their own cannot really sustain it.
Q512 Lord King of Bridgwater:
There must be continuity from stories on the website through to
the paper, surely?
Mr Wright: Yes, on a Saturday our content goes
onto the website. If you look at the website on a Sunday it will
be Mail on Sunday content, but on a Monday it will be Daily
Mail content.
Q513 Lord Maxton:
But you can still read the Mail on Sunday content?
Mr Wright: I am sorry, I am not quite with you.
Q514 Lord Maxton:
Presumably if it is a website it is still there.
Mr Wright: Yes, our content remains there but
the home page is devoted to breaking news, and on a Sunday the
breaking news will come from our newspaper, topped up by events
and news that breaks during the day, and the rest of the week
it comes from the Daily Mail.
Q515 Bishop of Manchester:
I gather, Mr Wright, that in August this year the Mail on
Sunday circulation was up 1% year-on-year and I think I
may know a reason for that and would like to return to that later.
First, I wondered if you could help us by giving an indication
of the longer trends of circulation figures, let us say, over
the last 10 years to the Mail on Sunday?
Mr Wright: Well, our circulation has remained
broadly stable over the last 10 years. Clearly, there have been
periods when it has dipped a bit and periods when it has been
ahead a bit. Over the last year we are ahead a little bit. That,
however, is in a market which has dropped by about 5 or 6%, so
I am pleased that we are in that position.
Q516 Bishop of Manchester:
What are the kind of stories that from your experience over quite
a long period are the ones that attract people to the Mail
on Sunday? What are the headlines that are going to grab extra
readers?
Mr Wright: Sunday papers are rather different
to daily newspapers in that daily newspapers are affected by running
stories. Some papers during August and September saw the Madeleine
McCann story increase their circulation. It has less effect for
us but, nevertheless, we had a very good sales last weekend. We
had a free Pavarotti CD which will have accounted for quite a
large part of that, but there was also a big political story.
People tend to turn to us when there is a big story of that nature.
And there was also a rather spectacular win in the Rugby World
Cup and people, oddly enough, like to buy newspapers to see news
that they already know but they want to see it in print.
Q517 Bishop of Manchester:
Just adding to the Pavarotti point, I gather that one of the reasons
for your increase of 1% was probably the Prince DVD. What evidence
have you got that what must be quite a significant input financially
that you have to spend on that increases readership in any kind
of long-term way? Are you drawing in people attracted by those
offers who are then still with the Mail on Sunday the following
week and the week after?
Mr Wright: The answer is yes and no. They clearly
attract a lot of people who come for the disc and are not there
the next week. At the same time, we pioneered the use of CDs and
DVDs as a promotional tool. We have tried very hard to maintain
quality and to come up with new ideas and new approaches and our
circulation over the last year is up a little bit. Other people
are down 5 or 6% . The Sunday Times, which has done very
little promotion of that nature over the last 18 months or so,
has been looking at falls of 10% year-on-year. So there are people
staying and I am afraid it is in the nature of the newspaper industry
at the moment that a lot of them are compensating for people who
are leaving, but there is a residue who stay with us, and more
so in recent months than there have been over the last two or
three years, so we think it has paid off.
Q518 Chairman:
When you say paid off, financially it sounds a very expensive
thing to do. Does it pay off at the bottom line?
Mr Wright: Well, it is an expensive thing to
do but the paper is profitable overall. We have a budget to do
this sort of thing and you do put on readers. Advertising is sold
on the circulation figure, and in the case of the Prince CD we
took quite a lot of extra advertising because advertisers wanted
to be associated with what they thought was an exciting venture.
Q519 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
We have just heard from the Editor of the Daily Mirror
that he has taken his newspaper down a more magazine-orientated
style, which I think it would be true to say was pioneered really
by The Mail, and you said earlier on that one of your agendas
was appealing to women. Is there a problem in this meaning that
news is squeezed out, and it is more diets than investigation?
Mr Wright: No, I do not think so. We happen
to produce an extremely good magazine which is aimed at women
and which is where most of that sort of content goes, but we do
more news as well. When I became Editor, the maximum pagination
of the newspaper, as opposed to the supplements, was 104 pages;
it is now 160. There is room for an awful lot of material in there.
The other thing is, as I said earlier, Sunday papers are different
to daily papers. Generally speaking, very little happens on a
Saturday that is breaking news—last Saturday was a rather
glorious exception—so inevitably on a Sunday newspaper even
your news stories are slightly more magaziney than was traditional
in daily newspapers.
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