Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1200
- 1219)
WEDNESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2007
Mr John Perkins, Mr Jon Godel and Mr Peter Murphy
Q1200 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Trickled down out of your catchment area, as it were?
Mr Perkins: Yes.
Q1201 Lord Maxton:
Are both you and commercial radio suffering the same as newspapers
are from the movement of advertising away from your area into
online service and online advertising? Are you losing out or is
commercial radio losing out?
Mr Godel: Commercially you can speak but, in
terms of what we are doing as a strategy, we are looking at how
we can provide news to radio stations online. More and more radio
stations are coming to us and asking whether we can provide parts
of the content we send. So, gone are the days when we could send
10 seconds of Gordon Brown speaking at PMQs. We also would like
to see Gordon Brown or we would like to see that policeman make
that statement. We are able to do that with our ITN content and
we are now working on a proposition for our radio stations where
they are also able to take video content which then means that
we will be able to have an advertising proposition around that
sold in a similar way to the audio music advert that we have been
discussing.
Q1202 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
May I roll up two or three questions that I would put broadly
under the heading of what counts as news for you. Can you tell
us whether there are types of story which are more likely to be
commercially successful than others and how do you make those
judgments? For instance, you have said that you are not influenced
by your advertisers in terms of how you present news but who are
you influenced by and how do you find out what kind of news your
listeners want to hear? Also, of all the news that you supply,
what proportion of it would you categorise broadly as hard news,
for instance PMQ? When you do package it, it has been suggested
to us that there is a danger that in, as it were, digesting it
into a form that makes it appropriate for the listeners that you
are addressing, you might actually be significantly altering or
flexing the meaning of that content. Do you have a response to
that?
Mr Godel: I do, very much. Let us take the altering
first of all. It is harder to write the kind of bulletins that
we produce than it is to write the BBC bulletin because they have
a lot more time. Therefore, your explanation can be more detailed
and you do not have to be as smart with the language you are using.
We have to think about the kind of audience that is receiving
the information and generally, not always because we provide bulletins
for Classic FM right through to Kiss FM, that would be a good
example of the kind of scope of where we are trying to hit, in
the middle, our bulletins are aimed at 30 to 32 year olds and
18 to 30 year olds and we have to think about the language that
we are using. Just by changing the language that you would not
necessarily hear on the BBC does not mean to say that you are
changing the content of the story or indeed the meaning of the
story. You can take Newsround and the BBC is a good example of
this. Newsround does a great job but they are using language that
people feel is more accessible to them and I believe firmly that
we do that. Just because we have a shorter amount of time to present
our news does not mean to say that we are not getting the facts
in that are important and IRN has done that since the year dot,
for 30 years. IRN has only really worked around three-minute bulletins,
five including the bulletins. Now it is more three-minute bulletins.
That is why I believe that my radio journalists probably look
more savvy in being able to achieve that in a short amount of
time. What was your other question?
Q1203 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
It was about what sort of stories are viable commercially and
the difference between hard and soft.
Mr Godel: We do a great deal of research. We
do an annual research with our clients, our radio stations, to
understand how they receive our service, what they are using as
part of our service and what they would like us to do to enhance
the service. What always comes through there is the type of music
people are fond of or want to use. Although entertainment news
and showbiz news is very important for a commercial radio station
as well as sport, hugely important, there is no desire within
our client base of 250 stations for us not to be doing what you
term as hard news. What we provide is a social passport in the
morning. If you listen to one of our radio station clients and
you hear an eight o'clock bulletin, our job is to provide all
the information and all the news that you would hear pretty much
anywhere else, probably with less analysis. When you go to work
and you discuss the news and you happen to mention it, you do
not want your listener to be in a position where they have missed
a story. So, even if a story that you would perceive as hard news
needs to be covered, we would still cover it. We do a shorter
bulletin overnight, a 90-second bulletin, and all the research
into that reveals that they want exactly the same agenda that
we would do with the longer bulletin, although it is aimed at
young people, but they just want it done in a shorter way and
that is what we do. The last point to make on packaging news and
what stations want is, we speak to stations all the time. Every
morning, we have an editorial conference with our key stations
and they tell us the type of stories that work for them, that
are working for them and that are relevant to their listeners.
It would be ridiculous for us to not speak to our own regular
stations and ask them what they want from us. We are a service
ultimately; we provide a service to them and it is really up to
them as to the kind of news that they think will work on their
stations and we try and meet those demands. The last point is
about hard news. Your hard news might be another person's soft
news and another person's soft news might by your hard news. For
example, Kanye West, who, for the benefit of those who do not
know, is quite a popular R&B singer at the moment, lost his
mother and there was a story about losing his mother and crying.
On Kiss, that story would be a lead story because that is important
to that station's audience. On Classic, it would not be there
at all. We cater for both.
Q1204 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
You said at the beginning of this session that you have a small
core of journalists who are employed by IRN.
Mr Godel: Yes.
Q1205 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
They obviously have a great deal to do. Do they have the time
to actually generate their own stories?
Mr Godel: Yes, absolutely. IRN, by sheer culture,
is a 24-hour news service and, like any journalist, my team take
great pride in being able to get scoops and also to get exclusive
stories. We do have a team of journalists who are able to chase
stories. For example, if a story were to break, either we may
have sourced it ourselves or it is has come from an external source
like PA or ITN or someone else, they would be straight on the
phone, they would be straight on to the local station, they would
be endeavouring to get the latest information. There is a whole
list of exclusives that I could share with the Committee which
shows that IRN does very much do original journalism. Other examples
are that we may not be doing an original piece of journalism on,
I do not know, a social story in Leicestershire but we would probably
do a piece of original journalism on the Cannes Film Festival,
for example, which again is very target for us. We would spend
money sending someone to the Cannes Film Festival and they will
investigate what is happening in the film industry and what are
the trends within the film industry and that content is much more
relevant to radio stations we are catering for than other content.
So, we do pursue original journalism.
Q1206 Chairman:
What are these exclusive stories?
Mr Godel: I do not have them with me but I can
certainly provide them in written form to you. Yes, we do a lot
of exclusive stories. For example, what I term an exclusive is
if there has been a house fire in Leicestershire and our journalist
is able to speak to the family about that house fire, a doorstep
if you like, before anyone else. That is exclusive for us because
no one else has it. It is that kind of thing. There are endless
examples of where we have been able to gain information and speak
to people at the heart of the story as a result of our own network
of local radio stations because our 250 clients are also people
who are providing us with tips and helping us with our own pursuit
of original journalism.
Q1207 Chairman:
Peter Murphy, do you get lots of exclusive stories?
Mr Murphy: In politics, it is very rare that
you actually find exclusives. They occasionally break overnight
and we end up running after them, to be perfectly honest. We spend
a great deal of our time listening to your Lordships' House, the
House of Commons and talking to various people such as ministers
as they drop in of a morning. The way in which we work at Westminster
is that we are totally bi-media because I work with television
as well. So, most of the morning interviews which are done at
Westminster before 10 o'clock in the morning are done by me because
television of course does not wake up until about 10 o'clock in
the morning! They wait until the streets are aired!
Q1208 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
To what degree is newsworthiness to do with process? There is
a quote from some of your journalists that we should not underestimate
the way that process drives content. In other words, what they
are up against in producing—
Mr Godel: Of course, we all work within the
processes at all times. If the story breaks, then there is a process
around the breaking story and that is that we need to get someone
to speak about the story, we need to write a script and all that
is built into the process. I do not think that that dictates the
newsworthiness. Newsworthiness is dictated by the value of a story
and what it means to the audience.
Q1209 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
But there is not much opportunity for lengthy investigation.
Mr Godel: No and I have to say that there is
no appetite for that, sadly. I will cite an example. We did a
documentary to mark the resignation of the former Prime Minister;
that was a lengthy document because it was an hour long presented
by Peter and not used by one commercial radio station.
Q1210 Lord Maxton:
That sort of programme ought to be therefore directly online.
Do you have a direct online presence yourself?
Mr Godel: Not for programming, no.
Mr Perkins: We do for the news but not for programming.
Q1211 Lord Inglewood:
You said that newsworthiness was defined by its value to the audience.
Do you look at that objectively or subjectively?
Mr Godel: Probably a bit of both if the truth
be known. We base newsworthiness on the value of how important
it is. This is where it is difficult for a journalist, is it not,
because our job is to communicate news that is dictated by others.
The value of news for us is the value that it has on the audience
as in a need to know, what you need to know and what you should
know. On that basis, we do determine that when we are selecting
stories. We do a lot of stories especially at IRN on government
policies, health stories and education stories because, although
that may not set the world on fire some mornings, it is important
for people to know. Often, that story will then develop by the
stations themselves or ourselves into a story that is quite listener
friendly because we will go and talk to parents and talk to students
et cetera. I do not know whether that is an answer to your question.
Q1212 Lord Inglewood:
When you referred to the R&B singer story, I can see that
a lot of the audience might want to know it. I am not sure that
in any material sense it will affect their lives beyond that 24-hour
period.
Mr Godel: Well, you have to put yourself in
the shoes of a 16-year old in Brixton, I am afraid.
Q1213 Lord Inglewood:
I was trying to but I have failed, obviously!
Mr Godel: You have and I fail often too. The
point there is that we employ people who absolutely can do that
because I often fail too, to reassure you. My point about that
is that, to a 16-year old in Brixton, Kanye West's mother dying
is actually an important story. What we would do is explore that
story in a longer programme package—not only do we do bulletins
but we also do longer packages for stations to use in their longer
news formats—and we would probably talk to a bereavement
counsellor and we would talk about the issues around a close parent
dying. I think that that is relevant and I think that is what
we should be doing as a news organisation targeting younger people.
Q1214 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
Until a few years ago, if one wanted to keep up with the news
during the day, you turned on the radio and listened to the bulletins.
We are in a different world now. What do you think is the role
of a bulletin like yours when actually you could just turn on
Sky News or BBC News 24 or you can look at the Internet and how
do you as an organisation respond to the sort of challenge that
that kind of competition has brought in?
Mr Godel: IRN, although not broadcasting 24
hours, has always been a 24-hour news gathering organisation.
Before Sky existed, we were there and indeed we were turning stuff
around much faster than ITN and the BBC in some respects because
there was a demand for it back in those years. However, as you
say, life has changed. I think that the place for IRN now is all
about catch up news. Often as news beats, if you like, we consume
news and obviously you are involved in news and current affairs.
We put a lot of emphasis on 24-hour news channels but most people,
my 16-year old in Brixton, is not watching SKY and would very,
very rarely watch Sky News and would very rarely watch BBC News
24. Our remit is on catch-up news—has the world ended this
hour or is the world about to end this hour? In our three minutes
at the top of the hour we tell people that and it works. There
is still a place for someone who just wants three minutes—had
the world ended? What do I need to know? Thank you very much,
I am going back to my normal life now! That still works and that
is why that format is still successful on most radio stations,
not just in terms of commercial radio stations but within the
BBC as well.
Q1215 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
Given that sort of pressure, how do you ensure that, on an hour-by-hour
basis, you are maintaining the integrity of the news in terms
of its quality, accuracy and so on?
Mr Godel: That is at the heart of what we do
at IRN. That is absolutely our culture. What do we do? We have
news editors who are running the news desk and ensuring that that
integrity is there at all times. There are some news organisations
that will go unnamed that are much gung-ho in saying breaking
news and telling us about, I do not know, perhaps an example would
be a plane crash in Nairobi. I cite that because I remember it
quite well. That plane crash never happened. That news organisation
was seeing a wire feed from someone who was having a practice
for an emergency in a foreign country. That story never existed
but lots of people saw it flash. We would never do that. Everything
that we do is checked twice for sources, reliable sources that
we agree are reliable. We may not always be the first but we are
often right.
Chairman: Andrew Marr used exactly the
same expression and got into terrible trouble about it.
Q1216 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
I want to get on to the editorial relationship with your major
shareholders and I suppose probably particularly ITN although
it is not the major shareholder. Have any of them ever exerted
commercial or editorial pressure on you to alter or pull stories?
Mr Perkins: I can honestly say that that has
never actually happened. Our shareholding now over the years through
acquisition and merges is GCAP, which is Capital Radio, owning
over 50% and the other major shareholders are EMAP—or what
is currently EMAP, it may not be EMAP tomorrow—and ITN,
and then there is a small shareholding of about 3% with Ulster
Television that has a small stake. None of those has ever at any
time exerted any influence. Some people do make the observation
that, as Capital has over 50%, therefore effectively we are a
creature of Capital Radio, but I sit there at board meetings and,
if you ever see Capital Radio and EMAP on either sides of the
table, there is no way that EMAP are going to roll over like pussy
cats to do what GCAP wants them to do. It does not work like that
and it never has worked like that. As Jon alluded to earlier,
we have very, very close relations with all the stations, with
all the various companies that we deal with, and the only thing
at the end of the day that we produce is material that we think
their listeners will want to listen to because we are commercial.
Q1217 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
I think you have already partly answered this question and I do
not know if there is anything more that you would like to add
to it and that is the access to ITN facilities, technology and
correspondents that IRN has.
Mr Godel: I do have one other point to add to
that. Obviously, by IRN having a relationship with ITN, the figures
that we discussed at the top in the session today, commercial
radio in the UK is able to bat in a bigger way in news terms because
they are buying into the existing resource that is at ITN, so
commercial radio gets quite a fair chunk of prime news, if you
like, good, honest news for a reduced cost. Going forward, it
is going to be a challenge for IRN and for others because, as
all of these broads broaden to multi platforms, people are becoming
much more aware and much more protective over their own reporters
and correspondents. So, whereas IRN has in the past been able
to always use the ITN correspondent who had worked for ITV news,
going forward, I think that is going to be a difficulty that we
need to look at. At the moment, I think that the relationship
with ITN is a good one and it continues to be and it is for the
good of commercial radio that they are part of a larger news organisation.
Mr Perkins: On that point, the contract that
we negotiated and we have with ITN has in it a clause which insists
that there is an editorial committee which is made up of the representatives
from the network, from the stations, and that editorial committee
meets regularly and is able to comment and make recommendations
back to IRN about the standard of the service and the level of
the service if they feel that something is wrong. That is built
contractually into our relationship with ITN, so there is a sort
of quality threshold.
Q1218 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Who is on that committee?
Mr Perkins: It is representatives from all of
the groups, both large groups like EMAP and GCAP, or smaller groups,
individual stations, a cross-section.
Mr Godel: It would be programme controllers.
Mr Perkins: And it is a geographical section,
so we always have somebody from Northern Ireland and Scotland.
Mr Godel: One of the points on that is that,
although I am employed by ITN, I am actually appointed as Editor
of IRN by the IRN Board itself. So, my position is unique within
the ITN organisation. I am there as the guardian, if you like,
for IRN.
Q1219 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
It is all particularly clear to you exactly what the relationships
are?
Mr Godel: Absolutely.
Mr Perkins: It is very transparent.
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