Examination of Witnesses (Questions 680
- 699)
WEDNESDAY 17 OCTOBER 2007
Mr Simon Kelner and Ms Imogen Haddon
Q680 Chairman:
Can you just be a bit clearer about this, the question that Lord
Hastings put to you about viewspaper against newspaper? There
is a case to be argued for what you often do with a front page,
you use it as a poster as it were and I see that as part of the
marketing strategy. I know you reacted very violently when Tony
Blair suggested this.
Mr Kelner: No, I did not react very violently;
it was the best bit of marketing we had had for a long time. I
would be grateful if you could explain to me exactly what Tony
Blair was saying, what the core of his point was.
Q681 Chairman:
I think the core of what he was saying was that there is a blurring
across the press generally—and you are a good example of
this—between news and comment.
Mr Kelner: We will come onto the newspaper/views
paper thing because there are interesting issues and I am quite
happy to go there. I just want to stick to the issue of our front
page today.
Q682 Chairman:
I think you took Tony Blair's comment as a criticism and what
I am saying to you is that it was not necessarily a criticism.
Mr Kelner: I do not regard it as a criticism
but he meant it as a criticism. I think to say that he did not
mean it as a criticism is wrong. He singled us out and he used
the "feral beast" phrase and then said that the newspaper
which most shows this up is the Independent because he
was scared to take on Associated Newspapers and he was too busy
going on holiday with Rupert Murdoch.
Q683 Chairman:
Just sticking to this point of newspaper/viewspaper, are you saying
you do not accept that description?
Mr Kelner: We have to be clear what that means.
It comes from an interview that I did some time ago—a couple
of years ago—when we were talking about the future of newspapers.
My belief is that newspapers still do have a future role to play
in a modern democracy. The idea that a newspaper is the notice
board of what happened the previous day is so outdated and is
signing our own death warrant. Therefore the newspaper has to
fulfil a completely different function in our lives, given that
so much information is freely and instantly available. There is
so much media that comes at us from all different directions—screens,
televisions, radios, free newspapers, this thing and that thing,
everything is coming towards us—I think the role for a newspaper
is to make sense of that, to make sense of this great weight of
information which is not necessarily helpful to us. A newspaper's
role would be to interpret, to analyse, to comment on but, if
you like, to provide the views beneath the news. We know what
the news headlines are; what we want to know is what X thinks
of it or what is the real issue behind that or what are the unanswered
questions here, what do I need to know; I have seen the headlines
and I have seen the sound bytes on TV news I want to know a bit
more about this. A newspaper has an authority, has a tradition,
has a history, has a trust and a bond with its readers that makes
it uniquely qualified to fulfil that role. I am convinced that
if we had not heard of newspapers and the only way of getting
all our information was from the internet and someone walked into
our office and said, "I've just had a fantastic idea. You
know all these millions and millions of pages out there on the
internet I will get together a group of really clever people and
we'll go through it and get all the really important pieces and
we will get really clever people to comment on them. Then what
we'll do is we'll print them in a really portable, digestible
way and we'll deliver it to your house in the morning before you
leave for work." They would think you were a genius.
Q684 Lord Maxton:
The fact is that for every person who bought the Independent
this morning and actually read that story, there are 10 who walked
past a news stand and the only thing they saw was that front page.
They walk away with the idea, rightly or wrongly—wrongly
as it so happens if you read the story—that the Independent
is basically saying that Africans are less intelligent than Westerners
because that is the bit they read, it is the headline. A lot of
people who are racist will think the Independent is supporting
their view. Most people do not read your newspaper, they see your
headline.
Mr Kelner: I can only wish that more people
would buy our newspaper.
Q685 Lord Maxton:
That may be, but they do not.
Mr Kelner: I cannot force them to buy the paper
unfortunately.
Chairman: I think we will move on. Lady
Eccles?
Q686 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Your circulation figures over the last 10 years, have they gone
up and down or steadily down?
Mr Kelner: Our circulation this month in 1997—our
ABC audited circulation of this month in 1997—was 253,000.
Our circulation this month is 251,000. Within that it has gone
up and down and we pioneered the move to compact newspapers in
2003 and we had an enormous spike then which we are still seeing
the benefit of. Our circulation has not nosedived in those 10
years but there have been periods when it has been going down.
Of course the trend is downwards.
Q687 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
To what extent are you really concentrating on producing an absolutely
first class website which could support your theory that one of
the strengths of your newspaper is in its analysis and getting
behind the sound byte stories? It has been said that this is actually
going to be one of the great strengths of the website where you
get the website and then you can drill down and down and down
and get further and further into the details of something you
are really interested in. Are you concentrating on that?
Mr Kelner: Yes. We are in the process of remodelling
our website. We have made a huge investment this year in personnel
and in the technological support. We are going to soft launch
it soon. We are very happy with, if you like, the brand extension
of the paper that will be available on the website and we see
them very much working together.
Q688 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
What percentage of your revenue comes from advertising and what
percentage from sales?
Mr Kelner: It varies.
Q689 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Roughly, on average.
Mr Kelner: It is about fifty fifty.
Q690 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Do you see your advertising revenue actually declining as the
advertisers are turning more and more to the website where you
simply do not get the same revenue?
Mr Kelner: No, we have had a good year this
year in advertising.
Q691 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Some of the newspapers we have spoken to are multi-skilling their
journalists, in other words those who work on the print edition
do so on the internet. You have just said you have invested a
lot and employed a lot of new staff, are you going down that route
or are they separate?
Ms Haddon: I think we are going to look at having
an integrated process between the paper and the website so multi-skilling
is something we are looking at but I do not think we have definitely
decided the way yet. We will see how it goes.
Mr Kelner: We are not rushing headlong into
podcasts, vodcasts, multi-media and all that. We are doing podcasts
and we are doing some vodcasts, but we are not going full tilt
at that yet because we want to see how the future pans out.
Q692 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
I am seeking an indication that you are hoping that the newspaper
will grow which of course depends very much on your appeal to
readership and websiteship in general, but I have not quite detected
it. I just get the sense that growth is not really a deep-seated
part of your philosophy.
Mr Kelner: I am sorry if I gave that impression;
it is very much part of it. Because I am an advocate for newspapers—it
is not just self-interest—I believe that newspapers do have
a future and I would say I am more quizzical than sceptical about
some of the investments that other people have made on-line. I
am characterised as some sort of Luddite. I think there is a huge
horrible phrase multi-platform future waiting out there for us,
but I think that for the foreseeable future the newspaper, as
guardian of the brand—brand is going to be very, very important,
particularly as far as advertising is concerned on the internet—will
still be central to that whole offering that a journalistic organisation
can give.
Q693 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Can I just go a bit further on that because what you are saying
actually in the end is directed towards who your readership is.
Linking it back to the question of your front pages and the kind
of way that you sell your newspaper by using often a campaigning
or certainly on this occasion controversial poster-like front
page, who are you addressing and is it your view that those kinds
of stories actually boost your circulation or are you simply speaking
to the readership you know you have and whom you believe respond
to that kind of story?
Mr Kelner: That is an interesting question.
We have such an eclectic readership. One of the great strengths
of the Daily Mail and one of the great strengths of Paul
Dacre's editorship is that Paul has such a clear finely tuned,
well-honed view of who his reader is—where they live, what
sort of house they have, what their concerns are about their future
and their children's future, where they buy their furniture, which
TV personalities they like, which celebrities they hate—and
that is brilliant in many ways. I have a far looser view of who
our reader is because we have quite a big student readership but
we also have retired school teachers, retired civil servants,
we have a huge age range and the only thing that unifies them
is their intelligence. I am pitching for anyone who might buy
our newspaper.
Q694 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Anyone who might buy your newspaper on any given day or anyone
who might buy your newspaper today and go on buying it tomorrow
and for the rest of their lives?
Mr Kelner: That is the dream. The great issue,
beyond all the other issues, that all newspapers have is the gathering
in frequency of purchase. I meet people who will say, "I
love your paper" (not many of them, obviously), "I think
your stand on pro-immigration or anti-war or whatever is brilliant,
I am a passionate fan of your newspapers" and I say, "How
often do you buy it?" They say, "Once a week, maybe
once a fortnight". They will not buy anything else and if
you ask them what newspaper they read they will say the Independent.
The same is true for the Guardian but less so for the Telegraph
because they have this base of subscriptions. It is a very pertinent
question that you ask because if I could convert the people who
buy our paper from once a week to twice a week it would be great
all round.
Q695 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
So what strategies are you employing to try to create that kind
of loyalty and consistency in your readership?
Mr Kelner: We have a promotional tool for that
which is in the paper this morning which is a series that runs
over two weeks, rather like the Guardian does with their
posters and we pioneered the promotion posters; by producing journalism
that is so excellent that people will want to come back the next
day for another superb instalment. It is not any more complicated
than that. I go into work at nine o'clock in the morning with
the sole aim of producing a newspaper that people will find attractive,
that is what I am paid for.
Q696 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I think it would be fair to say, Mr Kelner, that most of your
colleagues do the same.
Mr Kelner: Yes, of course.
Q697 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Or they believe themselves to be doing the same.
Mr Kelner: Of course.
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: The pitch
the Independent makes is that it is distinctive and different
from everybody else and I was just trying to get at where that
leaves you in terms of who your readership is, but I think you
have answered the question.
Q698 Bishop of Manchester:
Unfortunately a lot of people, as you yourself have said, pick
up an Independent are not coming back the next day to buy
it, so in what sense can you say that your paper in financial
terms is profitable? Is it?
Mr Kelner: No, it is not profitable.
Q699 Bishop of Manchester:
Is there any chance that it will ever become profitable?
Mr Kelner: That is our aim. For a paper such
as ours—for any paper really—the only safe harbour
is to break even, to not lose money. All our efforts are directed
to that.
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