Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1140
- 1159)
WEDNESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2007
Ms Jenny Abramsky, Mr Mark Damazer and Mr Stephen
Mitchell
Q1140 Chairman:
How many journalists do you employ?
Mr Mitchell: Overall?
Q1141 Chairman:
Yes.
Mr Mitchell: There are about 500/550 journalists
doing radio news domestically and another 150-or-so doing the
international services for world service radio.
Q1142 Chairman:
Are those 150 based abroad or is there a mixture?
Mr Mitchell: The World Service is the operation
in Bush House, that is the production arm. All those 600 people
overall are based in the UK but, behind them, we draw upon BBC
news gathering which is running a large number of reporters, correspondents
and foreign bureaux, and that is a separate part of BBC News but
we have access to it for radio.
Q1143 Chairman:
This must be by far the biggest centre of radio journalism certainly
in this country by a mile but perhaps anywhere in the world.
Mr Mitchell: In the world, yes. We are members
of the EBU Journalism Group and we have relationships with North
American broadcasters in radio and they look to us because we
are the leaders in terms of, I would like to think, quality but
certainly in terms of size and resources.
Ms Abramsky: It is also the volume of output
that we also do. If you take the range of programming that you
have on Radio 4, it is also current affairs and in-depth programming
that we do and we also have a good bespoke news service for Radio
1 and for Radio 1 Extra and that was a really important initiative
because we felt that it was really necessary to have a bespoke
team to be relevant and actually to create in some ways a different
news agenda for those audience when appropriate.
Q1144 Chairman:
What are the audience figures? When we talk about the Today programme,
what are we talking about there? Is it eight million?
Mr Damazer: The standard radio measurement is
the number of people who listen to at least 15 minutes of a particular
programme or a particular network per week. The Today programme
fluctuates around six million people per week. The peak would
be between ten to eight and ten past eight and would be significantly
north of two million. The daily reach is probably around 4 million.
Ms Abramsky: I would like to give you the figures
for news across the stations. In the course of a week, 9.6 million
people will listen to news on Radio 1.
Q1145 Chairman:
Is that again defined in the same way?
Ms Abramsky: Yes.
Q1146 Chairman:
Fifteen minutes?
Ms Abramsky: Yes. On Radio 2 it will be 10.3
million. Do not forget that they have news going 24 hours. Across
the whole of Radio 4, it will be 8.6 million, but that shows you
just how powerful the Today programme is. The six million who
listen to Today will also be listening to the other programmes.
On Radio 5 Live it is 4.6 million. I would like to break it down
in one or two other programmes. Jeremy Vine is the second most
listened news and current affairs programme that we do. His latest
figures are 5.4 million but it fluctuates between about 4.8 and
5.4 million for a programme like Jeremy Vine. Newsbeat: it is
3.1 million for the two 15 minute Newsbeats. In the course, for
instance, of a week, over 40% of the Radio 1 audience would have
heard a Newsbeat programme.
Q1147 Chairman:
I suppose that it is not possible—nothing is simple with
these figures—to add them altogether and say that is how
many people actually listen to the radio because I assume that
there is quite a lot of double counting in all that.
Ms Abramsky: It would be very dangerous to add
them all together. These figures are the radio figures; they are
the figures of a particular measurement. What they do not include
is the on-demand and the online figures and what the overlap is
between them and the traditional audience, I am afraid to say
that the moment neither the television nor the radio broadcasting
industries have been able to actually find out a measurement that
can work out what is unique and what is an overlap.
Q1148 Chairman:
Is there a figure on the proportion of the country that regard
radio news as being their main source of news?
Ms Abramsky: I think there might be but we will
have to come back to you on that.
Q1149 Lord Maxton:
There is a whole series of problems them. I am not sure whether
people listen to Jeremy Vine for the discussions or whether they
listen for the music that he plays in between. I would like to
ask about the national and regional figures. How much of the figures
you are giving on staff include your regional news staff? Do your
figures on listening say to the Today programme take into account
that, in Scotland, large numbers of people will listen to Good
Morning Scotland? My wife does because she says that it puts her
back to sleep but that is another matter! What are the breakdowns
in terms of the differences between the regional and what overlap
do you have? If you have a story in Manchester, do you send someone
up to Manchester rather than using the staff that is already employed
in Manchester?
Mr Mitchell: The staff numbers that I gave are
production base staff. Most of those staff are based in London
though we have a production base for the Asian network in Leicester.
In terms of journalism on the ground, we have a regional network
who are employed by Network News. In other words their management
is in London. Their role is to serve Network News whether it be
radio or television. That includes people in Manchester, people
in Leeds and people in Newcastle.
Q1150 Lord Maxton:
These are separate people from the regional network?
Mr Mitchell: On top of that, we have the local
radio and regional television staff whose job is to deliver a
news service to those—
Q1151 Lord Maxton:
If there is a story in Scotland that is of national importance,
in other words it is something that you are going to put out in
your programmes, do you employ BBC Scotland staff to cover that
news or do you have someone separate up there to do it?
Mr Mitchell: Our first recourse would be to
BBC Scotland staff. If you take the recent travails of the Labour
Party in Scotland and funding, most of that has been led by staff
working for BBC Scotland and they have appeared both on the Today
programme and on the ten o'clock news. If the story begins to
grow in scope, so the demand on them from Scottish output is such
that they cannot cope with all the network complications, at that
point we will send people from London or from one of our northern
offices.
Q1152 Chairman:
In those listening figures that you gave, are your audiences going
up or are they going down at the moment?
Ms Abramsky: They are broadly stable. If you
look over the last few years, the audiences are broadly stable.
For televisions news, the audiences have been declining.
Mr Mitchell: Perhaps a 2% margin increase over
the last five years for radio and in television a decline.
Q1153 Bishop of Manchester:
Would that be similar in all the radio stations?
Mr Damazer: I would like to add one point there.
There was a terrifically obvious spike in listening figures particularly
for radio news programmes on Radio 4 after 9/11 and then in the
first quarter of 2003 in the run-up to the war with Iraq. In both
cases, that had a knock-on effect to the rest of the network.
So, a rising tide carries all the ships and the increased performance
of the Today programme PM, The World at One and The World Tonight
led to an echo around the network and gave us figures of 10 million
per week listening to at least 15 minutes. It very rapidly subsided
after that and it will be difficult to get back to those figures.
If you leave aside 9/11 and the first quarter of 2003, the position
is very stable.
Q1154 Bishop of Manchester:
May I have an answer to my question? Is that true over the different
stations or is it Radio 4 which is the one you are talking about?
Ms Abramsky: No. The stations vary quarter by
quarter and, if you go back five years, for instance, Radio 1
was not doing as well as Radio 1 is doing today. So, we have actually
got an improvement in terms of perhaps a combination of both Radio
1 and also that we now have Radio 1 Extra and the Asian network
that are targeting young people. So, in that sense, we have managed
to certainly maintain that kind of reach. It does fluctuate but
overall—and it is working as a portfolio—we are delivering
the news with a slight increase, but it does go up quarter by
quarter.
Q1155 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I was thinking about your comment right at the beginning about
radio and certainly, among this audience, I would have thought
that most of us are avid BBC and radio general news listeners.
You said quite a lot about news content, what is available and
how it differs across the stations, and I wondered if you wanted
to add any more on that.
Ms Abramsky: I will add a little more because
I would also like to respond to the remark about Jeremy Vine,
if you do not object. If you take Radio 1, clearly Radio 1 is
trying to understand the issues and concerns of young people.
So, you are more likely to get stories that deal with, for instance,
bullying—Radio 1 has done a huge amount about bullying and
how you deal with bullying—on Radio 1 than you might get
on the other networks. In terms of the Jeremy Vine Show, music
is not the dominant element of Jeremy Vine. He is an incredibly
successful broadcaster and people are coming because they are
coming to hear and also take part and debate many of the topics
that he is discussing. I can tell you that all the research we
do shows that they are listening to Jeremy Vine to hear the kind
of interviews that he does and the topics that he discusses. If
you look at Radio 2, Radio 2 will clearly, for instance, be interested
in what might be happening to somebody of the stature of Quincy
Jones in a way that maybe somebody on Radio 4 is not that interested
in. Radio 5 Live's approach is about covering news that is live.
So, 5 Live will be covering Parliament in a way that Radio 4 does
not cover. It is here for Prime Minister's Questions, it is here
for every major statement, it goes to press conferences, and what
it is basically doing is saying to its audience, "We are
giving you the opportunity to actually hear news as it unfolds",
whereas Radio 4 is taking a step back and trying to kind of set
it in a context. That does not mean to say that Radio 5 Live does
not also do that but it does it in a more discursive way and that
is very much how it is approaching.
Q1156 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
As I hear what you are saying, what you are doing is assessing
the audience and then you are deciding what it really wants and
what will help it to participate and react to that.
Ms Abramsky: Yes, but there are certain stories
that you know must be on every station.
Mr Mitchell: There are two elements to this
really.
Q1157 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
It is how the agendas differ.
Mr Mitchell: There is a core news agenda which,
as a public service broadcaster, we think we have to address on
all these networks for all these audiences. You could say a story
like the hostage in Sudan or you could take the issue over party
funding. I would expect all of those sorts of stories to be reported
on all of these networks. What we would look at was to try to
find the right approach to those stories, the right format and
the right contributors to work for the different audiences, but
the stories themselves have to be covered. On top of that, you
identify a range of stories which are of particular interest to
particular audiences. Whether it is a rather esoteric discussion
this morning on the Today programme about history or whether it
is, as Jenny has alluded to, an issue about young girls being
traded and turned into prostitutes, those stories have different
appeals for different audiences and, when you get down the road
of looking at street crime or education, that works for younger
audiences and clearly a business agenda is much more relevant
first thing in the morning to a Radio 4 and 5 Live audiences than
to Radio 2 and Radio 1. It is that second area where you vary
the agenda.
Q1158 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
The third point I wanted to raise was that there has been some
criticism about Radio 5 Live—you have already mentioned
it—that it is a little downmarket and perhaps you are being
a little condescending in your approach to that. What is your
reaction to that? I think I saw it on your face!
Ms Abramsky: I really do not believe that Radio
5 Live has dumbed down news. I think what it has done is made
news more accessible. I think what it showed was that you can
do news seriously in a different way. There is not one way of
doing news and Radio 4 is not the only way that you can do news.
What it has also done is given space for stories to breathe. John
Simpson comes back from Iraq and he will do a very short interview
on the Today programme but he could actually be in the studio
for over an hour and also answering questions from the audience,
and what Radio 5 Live has done is create a dialogue with its audience
which I think is really important and it is different and I think
what it does is complement the way we do things on Radio 4.
Mr Mitchell: Just to make a journalistic point,
we absolutely would expect to be doing high planes journalism
on 5 Live and therefore we have done co-presentations from both
Afghanistan and Iraq this year with senior 5 Live presenters and
teams. Because of our relationship with the audience, we find
that they are informing our agenda in a way that is quite novel
for us. So, we have created an audience editor on 5 Live whose
job is to tap into concerns of the audience. Towards the end of
last month, we were getting texts from paramedics working on ambulances—it
was off the back of a story about hospital infections—who
were expressing concerns about the state of English ambulances.
Because of two or three texts, they were able to put their reporter
and a producer on to that story to follow that story through.
That then turned into a network news story that no one else had
access to because it was something that those two or three paramedics
listening to 5 Live had told us about and we followed up. That
does not mean that we put the audience stories on, as it were,
unmediated, we brought our own journalism into those stories and
behind those stories. It is a relationship like that that informs
the network agenda.
Lord Inglewood: I ought to declare an
interest expressly in front of this question that I am Chairman
of the CN Group which owns a few local radio stations.
Chairman: I should mention, as you have
mentioned it, that there is a pile of copies of our declarations
of interest on the table in the room.
Q1159 Lord Inglewood:
Ofcom has stated that, in the late 1990s, in terms of listening,
commercial radio and BBC were running more or less even Stevens.
Since then, it seems that you have overhauled, if I may put it
that way. To what do you ascribe that particular achievement?
Ms Abramsky: The first thing I would ascribe
it to is the fact that one of the things we did was to look at
what we saw as the role of our radio networks—I talk initially
about supply of analogue radio networks, Radios 1 to 5 Live—and
we looked to identify what really made them distinctive and then
emphasised that and make sure that we delivered against that.
Taking you through, we developed a policy to do with music which
was that we were about supporting the new, breaking UK artists,
giving people access to live because live performance has a uniqueness
about it, it has a danger, it has a risk; that we were about breadth,
we were about depth and we were about the best of heritage. If
you look at a station like Radio 2 which is a station that has
grown considerably—ironically, Terry Wogan was there before
1999 and Ken Bruce was there before 1999; they are the two biggest
audience shows on Radio 2—over 50% of Radio 2 is speech.
It is not all about music. We have put religion in prime time;
there is religion on the Terry Wogan Show. We put comedy on Radio
2. We have readings on Radio 2. We invest in music documentaries
on Radio 2. We also have the broadest range of music that you
will hear played on any radio station and the overlap of the music
played on Radio 2 with commercial radio is very, very small. It
really is very, very small and we do a regular monitoring exercise.
I think that that approach in terms of Radio 2 or Radio 1 with
its real support of new British artists—we break many new
British artists every single year; KT Tunstall, Katie Melua and
James Blunt would all say that they were given their break on
either Radio 1 or Radio 2—has happened at a time—and
I think that commercial radio are learning—when commercial
radio were fighting for a particular audience and ended up fighting
themselves. I think that across the rest of our portfolio, Radio
4 commissions more new writing than any other institution in the
world and its investment in drama and new writing is one of the
things that clearly distinguishes it from everywhere else in commercial
radio. Channel 4 is about to come into the market and I think
that we will have for the first time for many years a competition
in speech radio, which can only be healthy. Even without that
competition, we have invested a significant amount of money and
Radio 4 is the best and most well funded station that we do in
the range of programming which is also in original journalism
and you cannot do original journalism cheaply. If you want to
make sure that people properly research and properly find out
stories, you need to invest in it and there is a significant investment
in journalism there.
Chairman: I am going to do a John Humphrys
and say that we only have a few minutes!
| 
