Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1362
- 1379)
WEDNESDAY 9 JANUARY 2008
Mr William Lewis
Q1362 Chairman:
Mr Lewis, welcome, I am sorry we have kept you waiting a few minutes.
As you know, what we are doing is looking at the concentration
of media ownership, the impact that that can have in terms of
range of news and the range of views that can be expressed and
appear and whether the public interest is being best protected.
That is the overall arching purpose of what we are about, and
obviously one part of that includes an examination of how important
and how influential the media are. I am going to ask you a number
of general questions, but could I just begin with a specific question:
could you explain the role of the editor-in-chief at the Telegraph?
You have, as I understand it, responsibility both on the daily
side and on the Sunday side.
Mr Lewis: Yes, I was appointed editor a bit
more than a year ago and in the course of that year it became
apparent that the next step in trying to serve our readers, both
of the papers and on-line—we knew we were getting on-line
readers both in the UK, in America and elsewhere—was that
we needed to try and find new ways of making use of our resource,
the people we employ and so on, without diluting the independent
approach of each of the products that we have, The Daily Telegraph,
The Sunday Telegraph, the website and so on. It kind of emerged
that probably the best way to do that was to have an editor-in-chief
structure so that if any disputes arose about who should do what
and what went where, we would have a structure where that could
be decided. In other places it is driven by something else, but
at our place it has been driven by the need to make better use
of what we have, to service not just our current readers but also
these new ones that we have attracted over the last year to 18
months.
Q1363 Chairman:
We will come back to that in a moment. Let me just ask you a general
question about the state of the newspaper industry. You may have
seen the evidence that we received from the National Readership
Survey—they did a survey for us which basically showed that
since 1992 readership of national dailies was down by about 20%,
and that the biggest fall has been in younger readers, 15 to 24
and 25 to 34, who are down by something like 40%. In that context
how do you see the future of newspapers?
Mr Lewis: I and we are remarkably optimistic,
because actually that is just a snapshot of what we at the Telegraph
and others in the industry are and should be about. For us the
most important moment was when we got over ourselves and began
to realise that it was not that people did not want to continue
to read Telegraph words and look at Telegraph pictures,
join in our debates, be stimulated by our comment, it was just
that some of them wanted to access it in different ways and we
were making it incredibly difficult, particularly for younger
people, to experience Telegraph material. You had to not
only get up in the morning and buy a paper, with paper boys and
girls increasingly disappearing, but if your corner shop had been
shut down you had to then drive to Tesco to get it; it was quite
difficult to buy a newspaper, and so people, not surprisingly,
began to get their stuff from elsewhere. Our biggest moment of
change—we have been through quite a substantial change process,
as you may know—was recognising that it was not the quality
of what we were producing that was inappropriate—you can
always get better by the way—it was the fact that we were
not in a way letting people get it when they wanted it, how they
wanted it, in the form they wanted it. It was talking to and persuading
the journalists to say it is okay if it is not in the newspaper
but is on the website only, millions of people read it and that
is okay, it is still Telegraph stuff to our standards and
our stamp. If it appears on your Blackberry under our brand, that
is okay. We do not mind how you get our stuff, we hope you get
it in the paper but if you want to get it elsewhere then that
is fine, in fact we embrace that. For us, therefore, and I suspect
for one or two others who may have been before you, it is about
understanding that you really have to go with it, you have to
go from being a producer, interest-led organisation where it was
really, I suspect, quite nice just worrying about a newspaper
at five o'clock in the afternoon and not having to worry about
the customer in another part of the day, but we now worry about
serving the customer all day long. If you want to know about the
latest development in the caucus in the States, I cannot hand
on heart really say "Wait until the morning, we will give
it our best shot then", you presumably want it now or at
least at lunchtime. We have to do that and the process has been
about working substantially harder for our customers, our users
and our readers really. That gives me and us great hope that there
is a really big future for a newspaper industry more broadly defined.
Q1364 Chairman:
Exactly. The fact therefore that the actual readership of The
Daily Telegraph in print is down by 15% over the last 14 or
15 years, The Sunday Telegraph is up by 6% according to
the figures we have been provided with, but that does ignore on-line
and other ways of Telegraph news reaching the public, that
is what you regard as important.
Mr Lewis: Absolutely. Those figures that you
had are 2006, are they not?
Q1365 Chairman:
Yes.
Mr Lewis: I took over around that time—
Q1366 Chairman:
It is nothing to do with you.
Mr Lewis: There has been a robust performance
since then. Do not get me wrong, we would like readership to go
up in the paper—and it will, we feel absolutely certain
about that as we reinvigorate our newspapers through this process—but
it is exactly that point, our on-line traffic—and these
are enormous figures, they are so large that they do not really
mean anything I suspect—is up 100% year on year in terms
of our website, the amount of people who come under this phrase
"unique users", and a large part of that is UK people
but we have also got people around the world who, for the first
time, are getting Telegraph stuff as a regular part of
their day, in the States, in Australia. I do not know if you have
had a chance to look at the debates we have on-line, there are
vigorous, intellectually-driven debates about key political issues
all day long, from around the world, so it is in our minds a changed
world. The big moment was getting our head out of the sand and
recognising it is a changed world. We kept saying you have to
buy the paper, just buy the paper. Please do buy the paper, but
if you want it elsewhere you can have it elsewhere.
Q1367 Chairman:
There is one problem, is there not? We went to the United States
and looked at what was happening there and no one yet seems to
have been able to manage the revenue on-line equalling the revenue
being lost by print journalism.
Mr Lewis: We are indeed at that point where,
in the industry as a whole, the revenues are ticking down from
advertising, as you would rationally expect as there is new media
developing, but at the same time revenues are growing very fast
on-line, but from a reasonably small base. We are probably at
the heart of the beast right now actually; these are the defining
hours where the future of the industry will be set in the next
year or so. In terms of our commercial model, it is slightly different
from others, I suspect, in that we have lots of subscribers, people
who pay an annual season ticket, if you like, to get the Telegraph,
340,000 of them. We also sell lots of goods and services to those
people and to other Telegraph folk and customers who may not even
read the Telegraph, so our revenue base is slightly more
diverse than most other papers, which again gives us the ability
to be much more aggressive and radical in how we are pursuing
this multimedia future.
Q1368 Chairman:
Just let me ask this: how many hits do you have or how do you
actually evaluate the numbers who are going into the Telegraph
on-line?
Mr Lewis: There are various ways, are there
not, and it can be a bit confusing. The number that people are
sort of coalescing around is global unique users, which others
have talked to you about. In November, which is the last time
we had audited figures—the December ones are soon to be
out—we had around 12½ million, of which more than four
million were Brits and around four million Americans. If I can
categorise the others as "other"—not that they
are not as precious to us as the rest—you know you can get
wonderful data now about who is reading what, and we have that
up on our newsroom wall so that journalists know what is hot and
what is not. Whenever we write about Arsenal Football Club it
goes down a storm with our African readers actually, so we tend
to write more about Arsenal than would otherwise be the case.
You now through this data do not just have an overall figure,
but you get to understand your readers and your users in a much
better way. Allied with that, we have worked very hard at setting
up a television operation—I do not know if you have had
a chance to see that—where working with our partners ITN
we have quite bite-sized news with Telegraph reporters
appearing on it to give their take on the news. Again, in November,
the latest figures we have, we did more than three million individual
plays of that, so television via the internet, from what was traditionally
just a newspaper, is something that we are very proud of actually,
we think it has a very exciting future and is attracting advertising.
Q1369 Chairman:
To sum up, do you still regard newspapers like your own as being
immensely influential so to that extent, therefore, ownership
of them matters. Looking ahead, do you expect the on-line newspapers
to be the established titles, the Telegraph On-line, Times on-line,
Guardian on-line, it is those who are going to dominate the public
area?
Mr Lewis: We try and look as far forward as
ten years and I suspect that beyond that is somewhat irrational,
in our minds anyway, and we expect that where we will be then
is certainly in this great platform agnostic, so customer-obsessive,
you have it how you want it, and we will be led by the customers.
What we do know is that our readership is very different from
other newspapers' readership. They are very loyal, they view it—rightly—as
their paper, not least because, as already stated, large numbers
of them pay for it in advance and they like it in its broadsheet
format. There is absolutely zero chance of us, therefore, changing
it and they will get it to the best of our ability in the way
they want it every single day. At the same time we are going to
continue to develop a range of other products and services which
we hope will one day be equally as popular, but in ten years we
see a range of products and services that we are delivering, of
which the two newspapers are a core part still, very much so.
Q1370 Chairman:
And the central point, influential, you expect to remain a very
influential player.
Mr Lewis: I certainly hope so. Again, going
back to the readers, the Telegraph is different from other
papers in that we have very demanding (in a good way) readers.
They are also very bright people and care passionately about issues,
Britain and so on. I am not sure I would continue to attract them
to read the Telegraph if it was not influential.
Chairman: I am going to bring in Lady Thornton,
but first of all Lady Bonham-Carter.
Q1371 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Do you have any evidence that the people you have attracted to
your website then start migrating to your newspaper and if you
do or you do not, how do you encourage that?
Mr Lewis: That is a very interesting question
because we did a similar tour to you actually, back in 2006. We
went around the world and went to Chile and various—
Q1372 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
It sounds more interesting than us.
Mr Lewis: Chile was very interesting actually;
it is worth going to Chile.
Q1373 Baroness Thornton:
We have taxpayers to contend with in terms of where we can go.
Mr Lewis: Oh, really. We stumbled across one
or two businesses there that were traditional media groups and
they were just publishing a magazine that was running out of steam.
Through launching a vigorous new website that almost had the same
title but different brand values from the core magazine, it quite
quickly became the main way that the magazine got new readers,
and we thought we are on to something here. There is a virtuous
circle, you are correct. The old fear was if people are reading
me on-line they are not going to read me in the paper, it is a
kind of one for one, but what we are finding—and it is early
days—is that particularly in sport there is the ability
to attract people, particularly younger people, to pick up our
sports section as a result of having come through our sports website
where you can do all sorts of fancy stuff: you can put your teams
in different order, look at data, compare players from around
the world, so it is really great. They think, that is all right,
it is not the fuddy-duddy old Telegraph that only my grandfather
reads, it is actually all right, I am now prepared to read your
sports section. What we have not got to yet is any concrete evidence
that they are then going to buy the paper, but we are not expecting
that at this stage; we are engaged in a long term battle to re-engage
with readers who we left behind and have become accustomed to
getting their news, comment and features in a completely different
way that we did not try to attract. We are now vigorously trying
to attract these people, and that is one of the ways, so yes it
is beginning to happen.
Q1374 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
And it is part of your plan as it were.
Mr Lewis: Yes, it is.
Q1375 Baroness Thornton:
What might be useful for us is if you could talk to us about how
you are integrating the staff of The Daily Telegraph and
The Sunday Telegraph and telegraph.co.uk and the implications
that has for your journalists (the number) and your journalism.
All of us have read the thing in The Guardian and other
media about your hub and how that has been described—I do
not know if you have seen that.
Mr Lewis: Yes, I did see that actually.
Q1376 Baroness Thornton:
Most of it complimentary.
Mr Lewis: Yes, I liked that.
Q1377 Baroness Thornton:
And your two screens and all of that. We also know from our work
that you have shed people in the process of doing this, notably
for instance Patience Wheatcroft who resigned as editor of The
Sunday Telegraph and who was quite honest that she did not
like the road you have been describing to us. Can you talk to
us about how that is going to work and, also, what implications
it has for the number of journalists you employ?
Mr Lewis: Absolutely. The question we are trying
to answer—and we were set on this mission back in January
2006 really—was very simple, it was how can you continue
to produce both newspapers to the same or higher quality and,
at the same time, confidently march into the digital arena where
there are all these fantastic opportunities and people waiting
for us to provide Telegraph content to them there? Could
you pull it off and could you do it with broadly the same resource,
because our editorial resource is broadly the same, we have about
460 journalists all round, or a few more than that. It has not
been an easy task and we have learnt along the way, but we have
been out to see others do it and we have experimented ourselves,
trained journalists in a phenomenal way—we spend a large
amount of money, about £200,000 a year, on training journalists,
which was sort of unheard of in the old days of the Telegraph.
We have been through a proper process, launched new stuff and
got a real feel that this is working, and so the next step in
trying to make best use of our wonderful journalistic resource
is to try and bring individual departments a bit closer together.
The first one we have done is the Business Department, under the
leadership of Damien Rees. He is responsible for the creation
of all the business words, pictures, commentary, TV—
Q1378 Baroness Thornton:
Across all three.
Mr Lewis: Across all three, but he has working
to him and to the editors of the title people responsible for
the specific products. You know this horrible word "matrix",
it is a bit like that. It is the first one we have tried, it has
worked really well so far, they are just a few weeks in, it means
that some of the favourite voices and faces that have only appeared
in the Monday to Saturday Telegraph are now appearing on a Sunday—someone
like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is now being made available to The
Sunday Telegraph. It requires sophisticated resource allocation
to make sure that journalists are given the time to investigate
and to probe in the way that we require and need on behalf of
the readers, but I would say that the early indications are really
quite good. We would envisage, if that continues to be the case,
that we would also seek to ask the question of other departments,
say how can you work a little bit more closely together for one
real reason: that we need to continue to produce both papers absolutely
brilliantly, as we do, but we have got so much to do on-line,
it is fantastically exciting and how can we square that circle.
Q1379 Baroness Thornton:
Have you shifted the types of journalists that you are employing?
Have you got more people producing on-line than foreign?
Mr Lewis: When we turned up it was rather odd
because there were lots of people in certain areas where we did
not really need lots of people and there were very few people
in areas where we needed lots of people. If you take, for example,
Telegraph TV, it is a boom area for us, it is very high quality,
it is very customer-orientated and the evidence is that it is—
|
