Examination of Witnesses (Questions 760
- 779)
WEDNESDAY 24 OCTOBER 2007
Mr Jeremy Dear, Professor Julian Petley, Mr Tim Gopsill
and Dr Martin Moore
Q760 Lord King of Bridgwater:
A core area being ... ?
Mr Dear: Broadcasting and newspaper industry.
Q761 Lord King of Bridgwater:
You think there are about how much?
Mr Dear: About three-quarters.
Q762 Lord King of Bridgwater:
And you think that you have a good handle on the over 25 in numbers?
Mr Dear: I think absolutely. All I am saying
is that we cannot say for every weekly newspaper around the country
whether or not it has the number of staff that it had 10 years
ago. What we can say across the big groups is where we know there
have been substantial cuts in the numbers of journalists.
Q763 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Did you give us the figure for the overall number of journalists
in the country?
Mr Dear: That is a question that no-one can
answer. If you look at the Government's labour force survey, they
have one figure. If you look at figures produced by the National
Council for the Training of Journalists and others, they have
others because of the definition of what a journalist is. Do you
count people who work on blogs? Do you count people who work on
their own individual Internet publications? Do you count people
in public relations? The estimates vary between 70,000 and 100,000
but I do not think that anyone can authoritatively say.
Q764 Lord King of Bridgwater:
As against 20 years ago?
Mr Dear: No. The point I am making is that there
are more journalists today but they are not working in local and
regional newspapers. There are a lot more journalists today working
in a lot more media and certainly broadcasting has grown substantially
over the years, the magazine industry has grown substantially
over the years and of course Internet and online journalism has
grown substantially. What the Newspaper Society said is that there
were more journalists working in local newspapers and that is
not the case and that is where the real damage is being done,
it is to coverage of local communities.
Mr Gopsill: It may be helpful to explain that
a lot of the information we are putting comes from surveys of
the offices. We are currently in the process of compiling a major
report on the effect on news provision and indeed on working conditions
and so on of the multi-skilling work that we heard you discussing
in the last session covering the points that Professor Curran
was talking about, the drawbacks that online news is introducing.
We will be producing this report at the end of November and I
think it will be of great interest and we would be quite happy
to send it to the Committee. It is based on surveys of our offices
and the experience of journalists around the country.
Q765 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
You say that the overall number of journalists has increased over
the last X years although decreased in some areas. That inevitably
presumes an increase in revenue coming into the industry as a
whole because journalists are paid. We understand that advertising
revenue, which is one of the main sources, is shrinking in the
traditional media and that the advertising is being to some extent
replaced by online advertising which is not as lucrative as the
other sort. How has it come about that the number of people employed
has gone up when it seems to be quite difficult to see how the
revenue would have equally increased to the industry as a whole?
Mr Gopsill: It is actually related to the last
answer and this is why I think that the Committee's inquiry is
so timely. There was a huge change behind the industry and a turbulent
change going on at the moment and one of the changes is caused
by the concern of publishers at the loss of advertising revenue
from newspapers which they cannot duplicate online because people
are migrating from newspapers not to news websites but to commercial
websites. If you want to book a holiday or buy a house and you
used to look at an advert in a newspaper and that newspaper now
has a website, you do not look at that newspaper's website, you
go to a travel website or a buy a property website. The great
concern of publishers is that they cannot therefore replicate
that advertising which is the reason why they are making all these
cuts in spending. The new work is in online and, as Jeremy said,
in broadcasting but also there is a huge degree of casualisation
of the industry. There has been a huge increase in the number
of freelance journalists. Colleges are now producing large numbers
of young, enthusiastic journalists with no jobs to go to and the
whole industry is being destabilised by an oversupply of labour.
There are tens of thousands of people who call themselves journalists
who come out of college and work as freelances and it is very
hard for us to be in touch with them, which is the reason why
the answers have to be a little vague.
Mr Dear: This is the front page of the trade
publication the Press Gazette (to be clear not the NUJ Magazine)
this week where the three leading regional newspaper publishers
say that they are invoicing for the largest ever advertising revenue
this week. All those people who say that newspapers and their
industry are doomed are wrong. It is only when they come to negotiate
pay with us that there is a crisis in advertising. Online advertising
revenue is significantly up. Trinity Mirror last year: a 100%
increase in their online advertising revenue. It is a shift sometimes
from their newspaper to their online, it is not that these companies
themselves are losing money. They are still making profits of
between 30 and 35%, more than twice what Tesco achieves as one
of the leading British companies, and our complaint is that they
are excessively profiteering at the expense of local democracy
and local coverage and local communities, whether it is online
or in their newspaper. These companies are certainly not poor.
Trinity Mirror made a £400,000 profit every single day last
year.
Chairman: You have however suggested
that there ought to be more regulation and perhaps Baroness Howe
could ask some questions on that issue.
Q766 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
On regulation, certainly the NUJ seems to be pointing very hard
for further action and the fact that the PCC has not really delivered
on all things that it was meant to be able to maintain. Clearly
you have a number of areas: editors to be protected, journalists
if they refuse to breach professional codes and so on. Could you
identify one area where you think it would be most important to
preserve the high quality and diversity of news media?
Professor Petley: I think again it depends on
whether we are talking about broadcasting or whether we are talking
about newspapers. If we are talking about newspapers, I think
that to have a PCC which had some form of teeth would be a very
good idea. If we are talking about broadcasting, I think that
rather than perhaps looking for new forms of regulation, if we
are talking about Ofcom here, it would be a very good idea if
Ofcom would use some of the powers which it does already possess.
Ofcom does seem to be a rather odd regulator, in my view, in that
it seems to be a regulator that does not want to regulate, or
indeed a regulator that wants to see the abolition of certain
kinds of regulation. I know that is one of the questions you may
come on to later, but I personally would argue and have argued
in my response to the Ofcom document New News, Future News
that to abolish the impartiality regulations would be an absolute
catastrophe, in my view, and would do immeasurable harm to the
positive values of broadcast journalism. In fact, what I would
argue and have argued is that the first thing that should be done
is that Fox News should be made to abide by the impartiality regulations
and, if not, should be delicensed in exactly the same way that
Med TV was delicensed by the predecessor body, the ITC. Frankly,
I find it incomprehensible that Fox News can enjoy the imprimatur
of Ofcom licensing when it is flagrantly in breach of the impartiality
regulations and I think that weaselling about with words like
"due" is exactly that, a use of weasel words. I do really
think that if you allow certain broadcasters to get away with
not having to obey the impartiality regulations, you will very,
very shortly end up with a situation where other broadcasters
say, "Well, why should we?"
Q767 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I would like to press you all a little further on this. The first
thing is, is that the view of all of you? The second thing is,
can you really talk about broadcast and other forms of media when
everything is going to be blurring on every platform you could
think of?
Dr Moore: May I jump in there on behalf of especially
the Media Standards Trust because I think that is exactly the
point I was going to make on what Julian said about the PCC. I
think that there is an urgent need to think an awful lot harder
about the area of both self-regulation and regulation. Traditionally,
the PCC, as was said by the previous witnesses, has been able
to get away with very lax self-regulation by the very fact that
there was a limited market. We have seen in the last year the
PCC significantly increase its remit by taking on audiovisual
material on the net, yet not have either the resources or the
experience to do it. We have seen Ofcom desperately trying to
avoiding stepping into the whole area of the Internet. That is
where all the important and interesting questions are developing.
So, where you have essentially broadcast television on the net
on 18 Doughty Street which is openly right wing politically—it
calls itself "Politics for Adults"—and broadcasting
on the net because it is not covered by any existing guidelines,
at the same time we have this curious melding of newspapers with
broadcasters, so you have broadcast content on The Telegraph's
website and you have emerging collaborations between broadcast
content and both newspapers on the web and other websites but
no-one willing to step in and think about if it ought to be regulated,
how it ought to be regulated and the degree to which self-regulation
can provide the answer. Because there is this gaping hole at the
moment in terms of thought, discussion and debate, it is a gap
that the PCC is stepping into and I think is incapable of filling,
although it says that it can.
Q768 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Surely, to some extent, it is not Ofcom's fault that it is not
as involved as maybe by now we all think it perhaps should be
because the Communications Act should give it specifically a limited
area in education and so on where it could become involved. Maybe
that is an area where new powers are needed for Ofcom quite specifically.
I would like to move on to the last part of this particular question
which I think you know about. Given the Murdoch empire and its
latest acquisition, what are your views on the structures that
Mr Murdoch has in place to achieve editors' autonomy at The
Times and now The Wall Street Journal?
Mr Gopsill: Over the last few decades, there
have been quite a number of places where independent directors
have been installed over a takeover supposedly to protect the
editorial independence and you have to say that it has been a
complete failure in every instance and the reason is that they
can only be invoked by the editors themselves. The Observer
has the same thing and The Times and The Sunday Times
do as well. The independent directors meet at the invitation of
the editor when the editor believes that he or she is being interfered
with by the proprietor. The problem is that, when things go wrong,
it is usually the editor's decision and they do not call them
in. I can give you a very clear example of not Murdoch but when
The Observer was owned by Lonrho. It was shamelessly used
to pursue his vendetta with Mohammed Al Fayed over the ownership
of Harrods which was a matter of no interest to anybody except
those two, but you might remember that, on one occasion, a Department
of Trade and Industry report came out condemning Al Fayed and
The Observer produced a mid-week edition on a Wednesday,
unknown before or since, solely to gratify the vanity of Tiny
Rowlands. The editor at the time, who is now a Professor, was
Donald Trelford—I remember very well writing about it myself—and
there was a board of independent directors that was set up when
Lonrho took over The Observer and I spoke to the Chairman
of the Board and I asked him, "What are you doing about this?"
and he said, "We haven't been called to meet by the editor
and there is nothing that we can do". I notice that there
is another point in the question here about establishing the independence
of editors from proprietors, then just the setting up of independent
directors will not have any effect.
Q769 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I have one further point on this. Given the comments about the
PCC which of course has moved towards more independent members
but nevertheless is very much involved with the existing newspaper
proprietors, newspaper owners and editors, should any future body
with more power perhaps that you are suggesting be composed of
people who no longer had—you need the experience of the
past—direct interest?
Dr Moore: On the PCC, I think that it is astonishing
how anachronistic the governing structures of the PCC are. All
you need to do is look at the membership of the different committees
within the PCC. That would not be accepted in virtually any other
industry. You have someone who is the Executive Editor at News
International sitting on both the funding committee and the editorial
committee. You have an editor of the Daily Mail sitting
both on the editorial code committee and on the PCC. In other
words, they are both setting the rules and policing the rules
themselves and then monitoring themselves. The whole thing is
slightly absurd in a way which I think is why there is an urgent
need to review it and to undertake an independent review of the
self-regulation particularly as it expands.
Q770 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I am glad that you came back to that point because I wanted to
ask whether any of you heard the evidence that Professor Collins
gave us a short while ago in which he, quite provocatively, referred
to the possibility that perhaps some irresponsibility was quite
a good thing in journalism and that over-regulation, by implication,
therefore might be not always a good thing. What I would say,
with respect, none of you has yet answered is what you think a
differently regulated environment would look like and what the
outcomes might be from such regulation as compared with what you
clearly regard as unsatisfactory now. We might all agree with
you about that but there is an issue here about the relationship
between regulation and what one might loosely call free speech,
is there not?
Professor Petley: I heard Professor Collins's
remarks and largely agreed with them. I think that irresponsible
journalism is often a very good thing, but it seems to me that
there is "irresponsible" journalism in the public interest
which I think is a good thing and there is "irresponsible"
journalism which is simply in the interests of making money which
is not a particularly good thing. I think that in particular in
recent years the Law Lords have made some very, very interesting
analyses of what does actually constitute journalism "in
the public interest" and I think that that kind of journalism
most certainly needs to be protected. It needs to be protected
first of all from oppressive laws and also it needs to be protected
from the kinds of economic pressures which discourage this kind
of journalism, which is expensive. I am all in favour of "irresponsible"
journalism if it is journalism in the public interest. Unfortunately,
I think that there are not only oppressive laws which stop that
kind of high quality investigative journalism but also the kinds
of pressures that Jeremy has talked about, with newspapers in
particular finding it simply not possible to put in that amount
of resources and money. I would cite as an example of good journalism,
which I dare say the Government does regard as irresponsible,
the journalism carried by David Leigh at The Guardian on
BAE, but, believe you me, that cost an awful lot of money.
Dr Moore: To come back to the point that Professor
Collins was making before, I think it would be King Canute-like
to think that one can regulate or even self-regulate the emerging
market because of the explosion in the ability to self-publish
and a very good thing that is too, but, to reiterate the point
I heard him making towards the end of the session, having self-consciousness
about the journalism in this country such that you have a body
which is not only upholding the rights of editors and proprietors
to print what they like but is actually doing reviews and taking
the initiative to understand what standards in journalism are,
which is trying to build up public interest in journalism but
also to distinguish it from poor journalism, none of which the
PCC does or indeed anyone does at the moment.
Q771 Chairman:
There always seems to be much of the irresponsible journalism
that is not about making profit but satisfying the interest of
the public which is a slightly different thing to public interest.
Professor Petley: Absolutely. I would like to
come back on a point which Martin made. Before the not greatly
lamented Press Council was wound up, when Louis Blom Cooper was
chair of it, it did begin to move towards the kind of activities
which Martin has just spoken about, in particular commissioning
research which is something that the PCC does not do and should
do. But I do know from talking to him that as the Press Council
became more proactive, so the newspaper industry was less prepared
to finance it.
Chairman: I would like to switch to the
local regional news and local radio.
Q772 Bishop of Manchester:
I note that there is an NUJ protect in Manchester on 5 November
entitled Stand up for Journalists and I gather from the
publicity that I have received about this that it is to do with
journalistic quality, standards and, in particular, opposing job
cuts. It is being held up there in the north in Manchester where
we are very proud of our local and regional media and I note from
the evidence that you have given us in writing the anecdotal aspects
of the Walsall newspaper and the effects that that had on jobs,
but I am also aware from the publicity about the protest that
it is apparently part of a European-wide protest movement. So,
my question about this is to what extent the issues about regional
and local press to which you have already referred in earlier
answers apply across Europe. Are we in a very different position
in terms of our local and regional newspapers than the situation
currently on the rest of the continent?
Mr Dear: We are not in a different situation,
we are in a more extreme situation. I do have to pick up one point
you made about 5 November. It is actually called Stand up for
Journalism, not Stand up for Journalists, and that
is a very important distinction because you would expect the NUJ
to be standing up for journalists. What we are saying in this
case is that actually the situation in some sections of the industry
is so severe that we need to highlight the damage that is being
done, not just on pay or hours or those traditional trade union
issues but to the very fundamentals of journalism. For example,
we have done studies about whether papers are still covering council
meetings. There are dozens and dozens of newspapers that do not
send reporters, as I used to get sent as a young reporter, to
cover every council and sub-committee of a council and pore over
the papers. They ring the council press office the day after the
meeting and say, "What went on last night at the council
meeting?" That is fantastic if you are the party in power,
it is not so good if you are the party in opposition or if you
have a different view from that. I think that Peter Wright from
The Mail on Sunday in giving evidence to you gave
the case about people not being able to send reporters out any
more to cover some story. That situation is happening across Europe
but it is happening in a much more extreme way here and, when
we talk to our colleagues in Europe about the profit levels that
are expected, the returns that are expected in the UK media compared
to others in Europe, which we believe are driving this de-peopling
of journalism and this lack of resources, then they are bemused
at how some of these newspapers can actually continue to publish
and have any news in them. It is the same problem but a more extreme
variant.
Chairman: I turn to the whole concept
of press releases.
Q773 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
It really does follow on very much from what you have just said.
We have heard a lot of people say that journalists are increasingly
reliant on outputs of the kind you have just described: press
releases from councils, from corporations or whatever. Are there
any benefits to journalism from the growth of the PR industry
in the way that we have seen or is it a net downside?
Professor Petley: I think that there can be
benefits. There is our old friend the information subsidy. If
you are given good press releases, dossiers or whatever and you
are a journalist, that can be very helpful. I think what we have
seen is a development of two tendencies at the same time which
actually result in a very negative and destructive consequence
for journalism. One is that we have seen a massive growth of PR.
There is nothing new in PR obviously, but what we have seen is
a huge growth in PR, and PR coming into areas where it has not
necessarily exercised itself very much before: politics would
be a good example of that. So, on the one hand is the huge growth
of PR. On the other hand, as Jeremy and Tim eloquently talked
about, there has been a declining number of journalists and a
declining skill of journalists, so that you have an enormous increase
in the information subsidy and, at the same time, you have a decreasing
number of journalists and a decrease in the amount of skill in
journalists. Under those circumstances, it is very easy simply
to recycle the press release.
Q774 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I am puzzled by this question of numbers. I know that we should
not get hung on them. We have talked about increasing numbers
of journalists and decreasing numbers of journalists. We have
talked about increased resources and diminished resources. It
feels to me as though what you are pointing to is a kind of journalism
which is in a decline rather than simply the width of it. Can
you talk a little about standards.
Dr Moore: I think you are right; I think it
is important to be clear about what we mean by journalists. I
think the reporters and reporting and particularly reporting in
the public interest is what is most seriously under threat and
what we need to think about particularly. To build on Julian's
point about public relations, the important aspect about public
relations is that it enhances and accelerates a shift that is
happening as well from the public interest to the private interest
and from both the idea of the public interest and also the actuality
of the public interest. For example, if you take something like
the extremely successful PR company Bell Pottinger, they represent
a significant number of clients including people like Boris Berezovsy,
BAE and others and control the flow of information from those
individuals and companies in such a way that is absolutely in
the private interest of those companies and those individuals
and not in the public interest more generally.
Q775 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
May I pursue this point. Lady McIntosh was talking about PR but
there is also the existence of the Internet. We all agree that
it is not a good thing for journalists to get their information
just from the Internet, they should be out there et cetera, et
cetera. Having said that, the Internet does provide access to
information more quickly and in some cases in greater detail than
existed when I started out, for instance. Also, there are lots
of people who are working as journalists on the Internet, but
am I right in thinking that you are ignoring them as journalists?
Mr Dear: Absolutely not. We have hundreds if
not thousands of them in membership of our union, so to ignore
them would be foolhardy in the extreme, and some of the best journalism
that is happening very often is happening online as well or the
use of online means to back up journalism. Someone mentioned the
BAE inquiry, the David Leigh/Rob Evans work that was done at The
Guardian. If you look at the online version of that, there
is significant extra material and maps and all kinds of information
that is absolutely fantastic use of it. The Internet can be an
amazing tool for journalists to be able to use. User-generated
content or citizen journalism or however you want to dub it can
help journalists to do their job as well, but it should not be
a replacement for going out and asking questions, the going out
investigating for yourself and the talking to people, and it is
this kind of de-peopling that we are concerned about because it
affects the quality in that you are stuck at your desk and the
only way you have to research a story is to use Google.
On the question of whether we are talking about more or less,
what we are talking about is significantly more media, significantly
more media platforms and therefore more journalists but a spreading
of journalists thinner over those more platforms. So, while there
are more journalists in individual newspapers or individual TV—take
ITV—there are significantly lesser numbers of journalists
who cover each of those media.
Q776 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Mr Gopsill said earlier that people are pouring out of media study
courses and have nowhere to go and I do not know whether that
is the case or not but, in your written evidence, you say that
there is not a good enough training scheme in place for journalists
and that this should be put in place. That seems to me to be a
slight contradiction there.
Mr Dear: It is not that there is not a good
enough scheme. There are lots of good schemes with different standards
and different requirements. What we have long argued for is given
that journalists are increasingly multi-skilled across different
environments, there should be a common set of standards across
all different forms of journalism training. The kind of deregulation
to some extent of journalism training has also opened up a lot
of private colleges which offer at huge expense so-called journalism
courses from which the vast majority of people who come out do
not get jobs in the industry. There are two types of journalism
training. There is excellent journalism training that goes on
that we very much support but there needs to be a common set of
standards across all the different media in those.
Q777 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
In fact, what you are talking about here is protecting the student,
as it were, rather than—
Mr Dear: Absolutely. It is very confusing if
you are a student wanting to go into journalism to understand
all these different qualifications and different types of courses.
Q778 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Your concern is not that there are no good courses for training
journalists?
Mr Dear: No, there are good courses.
Mr Gopsill: The concern is actually for the
public because even public colleges and universities have journalism
training of variable questionable quality in some cases because
the whole training of journalists is in colleges now rather than
in house and on the job as it used to be. There are journalists
who are coming into the industry working online with whom who
we do not necessarily have contact and the concern is very much
linked with technology and the effect on the job. The dangers
with using the Internet—and you have mentioned the advantages—is
the unreliability of information on the Internet if this is the
only way you are reporting and also often the inability to work
out the original problems of material because the whole business
of highlighting, copying and pasting has transformed the practice
of journalism and it is so easy to do and stuff gets into print
and on air when nobody actually knows where it comes from. Just
as an example of how serious this can be, we have noticed a huge
increase in the number of hoaxes and fake stories that are getting
published now because they come from an Internet source and nobody
knows where they originated.
Mr Dear: Or the number of times a factual inaccuracy
in a story gets repeated in the next one and the next one as well.
Q779 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
May I pin you down on one thing. I think it is the case that there
are fewer and fewer training schemes that are financed by newspapers
and broadcasters.
Mr Dear: The broadcasting industry is slightly
different in this respect in that there is a sector Skills Council
skillset and there is effectively a levy from the broadcasters
that helps to train lots of the freelancers. BBC, for example,
still has proper training schemes, as do others.
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