Examination of Witnesses (Questions 840
- 856)
WEDNESDAY 14 NOVEMBER 2007
Mr Tim Bowdler and Mr Mike Gilson
Q840 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
The amount of information coming out of the local courts that
you have access to, therefore, is not as sufficient as it used
to be?
Mr Gilson: If you are talking about local courts,
obviously there has been some consolidation of local courts, where
it has become less the case that the reporter has to get his notebook,
go down the road or just round the corner, and get all the stuff
that is happening in most courts—as I did when I started.
There is a lot of regionalisation, which has made it quite hard,
logistically hard, for newspapers to go out and, with the same
amount of resource, have someone in the court, where there might
be a lot of stuff from an area that they are not covering. What
you have to have is better intelligence; work harder at that,
and go at the times when you know you will get the response. So,
yes, courts are a bit of a problem; but, having said that, local
people getting up to no good is still a diet of local newspapers,
and editors are very keen to make sure that continues.
Q841 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
In your evidence you have talked about how you have used modern
IT systems to enable journalists to take control of the whole
production, and you see this as a good thing and more satisfying.
Presumably, however, unless you are working them harder, they
have less time for newsgathering. Certainly the evidence from
the NUJ was expressing some concerns about journalists spending
much less time in the business of gathering news. In the light
of the comments you have just made about data protection, councils
managing news, regionalisation of services, it would suggest to
me that you need journalists to spend more time hunting out stories;
whereas is it possible that you are actually giving them less?
Mr Gilson: No, I would fundamentally disagree
with the supposition there. In terms of the percentage of time
local journalists are spending—and my journalists indeed—on
fact-gathering and lifting rocks to find out what is under them,
I do not perceive any less time spent on that. If you are talking
about digital and how much time they are devoting to that, clearly
as technology moves forward that will become easier, because it
will be streamlined and, effectively, one button will do many
things. I think that will take us to that world. However, are
we still at the coalface, looking out, digging up stories? Absolutely.
Sometimes I do not recognise the picture that is painted of local
journalists not being out and about in their community. Priorities?
Yes, of course, there have to be priorities. That is the day-to-day
job of editing newspapers. If we are now in a multi-media world,
as I say, the technology will catch up with us on that, I believe;
but we have so much more in our resource—and that is a really
good thing for journalists. Their influence is wider than it ever
was before. Journalists on The Scotsman get responses from
all over the world to their reports. Their reach and their influence
are growing all the time. That is an enormous challenge for journalists.
I do not see any journalists ducking that or thinking that it
is anything other than a real opportunity. To answer your questions
in a straight way, I do not see a decline in the amount of time
that people are out, looking for facts. Whether that be then put
online or put in ink, obviously that is a day-to-day decision.
Q842 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
In terms of the comments from the NUJ which say, "It is slow
and takes journalists away from their existing work", that
is something you would refute from the perspective of your—
Mr Gilson: Is what slow? I am sorry?
Mr Bowdler: The process of putting copy onto
the website?
Baroness Scott of Needham Market: Yes.
They are saying, "Journalists on regional papers are being
switched from print operation to video/podcast/web content, or
having to juggle the two. It is slow and takes journalists away
from their existing work".
Q843 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Multi-skilling.
Mr Gilson: We are in the very early days with
this. We are finding our way to a certain extent. There is no
doubt about that. Newsrooms are adapting and I think that JP,
certainly with its newsroom of the future in Preston, is leading
the way in this. Obviously we will make as many mistakes as we
will successes, and that is the great thing about newspapers.
The good thing is that you can do it all again tomorrow. However,
there will be times when, if readers demand it and if we perceive
that demand for video is strong and it is growing traffic and
growing advertising, which means we can invest again, then it
would be a fairly Luddite editor who would say, "That's not
a good priority and a good use of resource". I do say also,
however, that the journalists are largely up for it. These are
intelligent people who can see the way things are going and they
want some of it. They want to be trained on it, in my experience.
But, yes, there are always things that we must be aware of in
terms of workload and priority.
Q844 Lord Inglewood:
You have told us, and it is obvious, that local newspapers, while
they remain a leading channel for local news, information and
advertising, face a lot of competition for that. Ofcom have told
us that between 2001 and 2005 the percentage of people whose local
newspaper was their main source of local news fell from 46 to
29%, which, on the face of it, is a very big drop. Do you believe
that, and what should newspapers be doing in the face of that
kind of challenge?
Mr Bowdler: I do not know where Ofcom got that
figure from but, if you take a recent survey by YouGov, it said
that, in response to the question to people—and I think
it was a sample of about 3,000 people—"What is your
primary source of local news?", 52% said "the local
newspaper", 13% said "the BBC", 7% said "ITV".
I think that one again has to be very careful with definitions.
If you are talking about local news, looking at it through the
eyes of the people of Pocklington, then certainly local print
has to be the best way of finding out what is going on in the
local area. If you are talking about regional news, yes, for some
people regional TV may well suffice; but, in terms of depth of
content, the amount of coverage given in print, it far outweighs
what is available elsewhere.
Q845 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
This question is about how you determine the stories that you
run. You told us in your evidence that you do a lot of scrutinising
of the response you get on your website; you do reader research;
you try to understand what your readers want to read about. How
do you balance the need to respond to what you think your readers
want to read with your responsibilities, as you perceive them,
as a leader of opinion rather than a follower of it? How is that
different as between a newspaper like The Scotsman, which
sees itself as having a national and indeed an international remit,
and much more locally driven newspapers where the catchment is
tiny?
Mr Gilson: It is a very good question. Again,
through my experience in the Editorial Review Group with JP, I
think that there are absolutely two things. In the past, we used
to hand news down to the readers on tablets of stone and say,
"There you are. Take it or leave it". In fact, they
were great days when you were selling what you were selling and
readers would just accept it. Now a lot of them have pushed down
the front door and have said, "I want to be involved in this
story. We want to be involved. We have views. We can be useful
to you". Some of them; not all of them. So there is a balance
to be had between user-generated content—there are all kinds
of terms that you will have heard, such as "crowd-sourcing",
"citizen journalism", and all these buzzwords that we
have. They have a very important place, but so too does the fundamental
definition of what is news. News is not people talking to each
other, telling each other the things that they already know: it
is about saying to people, "I didn't know that. That surprised
me. That's useful to me". I think that any editor who loses
sight of that balance will be in trouble. I take your point as
to whether it is the same for The Scotsman as it is for—and
we keep using "Pocklington" and so I will continue to
use it. I think that fundamentally it is. Actually, in Pocklington,
the chances of telling people things that they did not know are
stronger than they are in The Scotsman, because news in
Scotland is around and about and 24-hour news. The closer to the
grass-roots you get, the investment in journalists getting out
there, finding out, and giving people things that they did not
know, will pay more dividends; because no one else is in there
like newspaper groups such as ourselves are. No one else will
invest in that grass-roots journalism. People might be tempted
to steal it, but certainly no one will invest in the journalism—getting
your notepad out, getting your shorthand up to 100 wpm, going
out and getting, whether it be the results of the flower show
or whether it be the results in the council of the pelican-crossing
campaign. That kind of stuff still has to play a part—the
stuff that people did not know—as well as the balance of
getting people to help us. For example, in The Scotsman
we have just worked together with the Wildlife Trust of Scotland
to do a Wildlife Watch—long before Bill Oddie was in that
area, I should say. We produced an enormous amount of information:
pictures and information about what was in Scotland on one particular
weekend, in terms of the wildlife that was about. The Scottish
Wildlife Trust was enormously grateful to us, and readers responded
in their thousands to what they saw out there. A few years ago,
we would never have had the chance to do that. That therefore
makes our journalism much better. At the same time, we also want
to tell those people things that they did not know, and that investment
is vital. It is a day-to-day balance.
Q846 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Apologies if this question was asked, but I do not think that
it was. How many of your editors edit multiple titles?
Mr Bowdler: We have 183 editors and 318 newspapers,
so the majority are editing only one or two. Typically, the second
newspaper will be the free newspaper in the same marketplace as
the paid-for, although very often there will be a senior journalist
who has de facto editorial responsibility for it. Largely speaking,
therefore, we have an editor per newspaper.
Q847 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
In the cases where you do not, presumably that does have an effect
on how local the news in the papers is. Do you version? That is
what I am trying to get at. Where you have an editor who edits
more than one title, is the newspaper versioned with a couple
of local stories?
Mr Bowdler: A typical example is where we have
a free newspaper in Portsmouth, which carries a fraction of the
news of the daily paid-for title in the same market. Mike had
responsibility for the free newspaper in Portsmouth, but you would
not regard that as a strongly editorially led product; it was
much more about advertising. It does not reduce diversity.
Q848 Lord King of Bridgwater:
There is one wonderful line in your evidence, and you will understand
why I picked it up, where you said that you respect the "central
importance of editorial independence and the avoidance of sustained
political bias ...", which you then go on to recognise, or
appear to recognise, exists in the Belfast News Letter.
Mr Bowdler: Yes.
Q849 Lord King of Bridgwater:
You said "such as", but are there any other titles?
Mr Bowdler: Yes. Essentially, we have three:
the News Letter in Northern Ireland; The Scotsman,
which clearly has a political position in a very broad sense—
Q850 Lord King of Bridgwater:
A sustained political bias?
Mr Bowdler: No, I would not call it a sustained
political bias.
Q851 Lord King of Bridgwater:
I certainly recognise it in respect of the News Letter.
Mr Bowdler: A third, I would say, is the Yorkshire
Post, which has a political position. It is not a Labour-supporting
newspaper. That is what we mean by "a sustained political
bias".
Q852 Chairman:
I think that at one stage it used to be described as Yorkshire
Conservative Newspapers, was it not?
Mr Bowdler: Yes.
Q853 Chairman:
One last question on The Scotsman. You have explained how
editorial freedom works on The Scotsman. Just as a piece
of history, you are saying that that was a distinct change from
the position before Johnston Press took it over?
Mr Gilson: I think that what I am saying is
that The Scotsman came with a world view, and lots of what
it had done was "prismed" through that, if you like.
It had a view that the Scottish institutions should be rigorously
challenged; it had a very political view about the size of the
public sector in Scotland, for example. What we have done since
then—
Chairman: Was that necessarily the view
of the editor?
Q854 Lord Maxton:
It was the view of the managing editor, I think.
Mr Gilson: Yes, I think that is what I am trying
to say.
Q855 Chairman:
You are saying that is the view of the managing editor?
Mr Bowdler: When we acquired The Scotsman,
I talked to a number of leading politicians and businesspeople.
The overwhelming view was that The Scotsman had an agenda
which ran through the newspaper and affected the way in which
they reported all sorts of things; skewed the coverage with a
theme which was consistent with that overarching view of the world
in Scotland and actually, most people would have said, gave it
a negative tone. We have taken the view that we should not have
a consistently negative tone; that we should not have an overarching
view which comes from management. It is for the editor to edit
the newspaper, being sensitive to what is happening in that community,
what the views in Scotland are. I would say that today people
would regard The Scotsman as being a newspaper which is
more in tune with the community it is endeavouring to reach.
Mr Gilson: But still not afraid to lift those
rocks and find out what is underneath. That balance, as the previous
questioner said, is very important.
Q856 Chairman:
And still not able to persuade Lord Maxton to come back into readership!
Mr Bowdler: I hope that today we have succeeded!
Lord Maxton: I am in readership, but
I am not in purchase!
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed
and thank you also for your written evidence, which was very clear
and complete. I am extremely grateful for the evidence you have
given this morning.
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