Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540
- 551)
WEDNESDAY 10 OCTOBER 2007
Mr Peter Wright and Mr John Wellington
Q540 Baroness Howie of Idlicote:
But you still think there will be newspapers around in 10 years
and not just everything in a completely different form?
Mr Wright: I think there will. If the Mail
on Sunday had existed in the early 1960s I probably would
have been coming to committees like this and being asked whether
television was going to destroy newspapers, and it has not. However,
I cannot be sure because the digital revolution has happened at
an incredible pace. There are some fascinating things in the pipeline
including screens which will fold like a piece of paper, and it
is possible that people will not want a printed newspaper, but
it has not happened yet.
Q541 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Mr Wright, I want to turn to the question of journalism and the
journalists that you employ on the newspaper and to ask you the
extent to which this has changed over the last 10 years, and also
ask you a question about the investigative side of journalism
and also foreign news coverage.
Mr Wright: We employ roughly the same number
of journalists, more of them on full-time staff contracts, than
we did 10 years ago. We have pretty much the same sort of foreign
coverage that we did then. I do not think there has been any very
big change there. Some specialisms have died. We no longer have
an industrial correspondent, although postal workers may cause
us to re-think that, but we have a security correspondent, so
things change, but the overall journalistic resource available
to me is very similar to the resource available to me when I became
Editor in 1998.
Q542 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
So you do not see very much change in the quality of applicants
entering employment in your newspaper?
Mr Wright: Not in the quality. Their background
has changed. Traditionally a lot of journalists were people who
went to grammar schools, when they existed, did not go to university,
got jobs on local papers, and they would arrive in Fleet Street
in their mid-20s having seven, eight, nine years of experience
of covering magistrates' courts and council meetings. That sort
of journalist still exists but there are fewer of them. What we
now tend to get is people who have been to university and then
done a year's course at somewhere like the City University and
then, if we are lucky, they have done a couple of years on a provincial
newspaper, but you do tend to find that journalists coming into
Fleet Street have less practical experience than they used to.
I do not think that means they are worse journalists; they are
just different journalists.
Q543 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
And would you say that the extent of the investigative journalism
that you do has either changed in content or in amount?
Mr Wright: I do not think so really. On a Sunday
paper a lot of what you do would be regarded by a daily paper
as investigative because there is not much breaking news for us
to report. If the definition of investigative is "it is not
handed to you on a plate and you have to go and look for it and
it takes several days or several weeks" a lot of what we
do is of that nature, and it always has been.
Q544 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
I think my question was more or less covered because I was interested
in the way in which journalists operate differently now using
the Internet and using the telephone rather than being in the
office and whether that affects standards, but I guess being a
Sunday paper you operate differently in any event.
Mr Wright: Yes, we do. It is a valid question
because there are some newspapers that have slashed costs to the
point where their journalists do not leave the office. I can assure
you ours do. I do believe that you cannot report on something
properly unless you send someone there in person to go and see
what is happening. We had a big feature at the weekend by Peter
Hitchens who managed to get into North Korea and wrote about what
he saw there. A lot of our rivals would not be able to do that
because they do not have an editorial budget that would cover
the cost of sending someone to North Korea for a week, which I
think is very sad.
Q545 Chairman:
Just one last question, if a reader is concerned about the content
of one of your stories, he perhaps feels he has been unfairly
treated, what are the internal mechanisms whereby a complaint
of that kind would be dealt with?
Mr Wright: My friend Mr Wellington is the first
port of call.
Q546 Chairman:
Because a complaint would go to the management, would it?
Mr Wright: Yes, the term "managing"
does not mean he is a businessman; he is a journalist, and he
would look into it independently and if we have made a straightforward
error we will put it right, whether it is a matter of publishing
a correction or offering him a letter. Often people who take issue
with a story are taking issue with interpretation rather than
the facts. If they are not happy, we direct them to the Press
Complaints Commission who I believe are very effective, they work
quickly, and very often the Press Complaints Commission will say
to us, "We think you should carry a correction on this,"
and we do.
Q547 Chairman:
Do you get many complaints?
Mr Wright: I do not know how you define "many".
I think we get fewer than we used to and my aim is to keep it
as low as possible, but you are always going to get some complaints,
not least because you rely on people to give you an account of
events, you cannot always reach everybody who was involved and
sometimes there will be somebody who has got a different version
of the events.
Q548 Chairman:
In the United States we came across a newspaper—it was either
the Washington Post or New York Times—which
has a public editor where what happens is I think what your managing
editor is doing: the complaint is dealt with independently by
him and he looks at it totally independently of the editor. Would
that be how you would run yours?
Mr Wright: I am not familiar with the American
public editor system, but I am familiar with The Guardian's
reader editor system which I think is similar, which I am not
fantastically impressed with because, in my view, they bury the
complaints. We endeavour to carry ours in the place where the
original story was carried, which is more prominent.
Q549 Baroness Thornton:
My observation, reading your paper, is that you do do a lot of
personal stories about people, and sometimes in my view intrusive
stories. What is your view about the issue around privacy and
whether or not the Press Complaints Commission should be strengthened?
Mr Wright: This is a difficult area because
one person's freedom of expression is another person's intrusion
into privacy.
Q550 Baroness Thornton:
You have a newspaper; most people do not!
Mr Wright: Yes I know, but some of the stories
which you are probably referring to involve people who want to
give interviews about things that have happened to them but which
other people who are party to the same events, whether it is a
show business marriage or something, will regard as intrusion.
I think this is something that we all have to look at very carefully.
I have been giving a lot of thought over the last year to the
situation with Prince William and Kate Middleton and I think that
there is a strong case that photographers following somebody all
day every day whatever they are doing is not right. We do not
commission photographers to do that and we do not use pictures
taken in that way. However, if you are second in line to the Throne
and you go to a nightclub with your girlfriend where it is well-known
there are photographers and you come out and you are drunk and
your picture is taken, I think that might be a different matter.
These are always going to be difficult questions. I do think that
in some areas—and the PCC have been very important in this—privacy
is more respected than it used to be. For instance health matters,
I do not think any newspaper these days publishes a story about
somebody's health without them expressly approving it. That would
not have been the case 25 or 30 years ago.
Q551 Chairman:
I think we will leave it there. We could obviously go on all morning
in these areas, but we have got one further Editor to see. We
are enormously grateful, Mr Wright, both to you and to Mr Wellington
for coming and for answering our questions so frankly, and perhaps
if we have got other issues we could come back to you and follow
up these oral questions.
Mr Wright: You are very welcome.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
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