Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1400
- 1419)
WEDNESDAY 9 JANUARY 2008
Mr William Lewis
Q1400 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Before I ask my specific question I am so intrigued by this whole
business of goods. What criteria do you use to decide which particular
good you are going to discount; how is that arrived at?
Mr Lewis: What we are going to try and sell?
Q1401 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Yes, such as your armchair.
Mr Lewis: I would not like to give the impression
that it is my area; I think my wife would be having kittens at
this point if she thought that I would be advising on that. I
do the words bit and that sort of stuff, we have experts in the
area of customers and they spend their time, like any other business—
Q1402 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Chair-in-chief.
Mr Lewis: Yes, going out and saying that is
a nice new armchair, that could work for our customers.
Q1403 Lord Maxton:
Do you have quality controls?
Mr Lewis: We do. It is a serious point, we do
take this extremely seriously because if it went wrong—and
it does not go wrong—it would damage people's perceptions
of the core business, which is providing wonderful news, comment
and features, so in that way it is linked in and part of the reason
why we employ experts to do it is because it has to be really,
really good.
Q1404 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Fair enough. Back to the basic newspaper, the same question in
a way, what is the most important criteria that will decide what
stories get into your paper and how much prominence they are given?
Given all the international aspects that we have been talking
about, your global users, do these have any effect on the basic
paper we are buying today as to which stories and where they appear?
Mr Lewis: On the first bit, we are a broadsheet.
Our competitors tried to shrink in size and get a hit, which obviously
has not worked; we have stayed pure and will stay pure to our
broadsheet format.
Q1405 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
For how long, ten years?
Mr Lewis: As I say, we never look further forward
than ten years. We did look at it and we thought well actually
this is a bit weird because there are only three stories on here;
we are a broadsheet but we are trying to be a tabloid if you like
in terms of only doing one story on the front with two other little
ones. I dug out the Telegraphs of old and thought actually
our heritage is news, that is what we are really, really good
at, so why are we being shy about news, let us jam the front page
full of wonderful news stories. We have a brilliant foreign operation,
let us get the best foreign story today, let us get the best political
story, so often you will now see on our front page six or seven
stories, with a great image and the brilliant Matt cartoon at
the top right. The point is that we are able to do a lot more
with that front page than any other newspaper now. It can often
take someone 20 minutes simply to get through the front page;
it is a very great way to brief yourself about the main things
going on in the world that day, so our decision-making on what
should go where is therefore somewhat more complex and lengthy
than other newspapers, whereas I presume if you are a tabloid,
like the tabloid Times, presumably you say you want that,
it has to have a good headline. We do not have to play that dumbing-down,
unsophisticated game, we can say "Actually, I would like
to have the latest news from America there please, I would like
to have something that is quite witty over there, please",
and work with colleagues who are similarly expert in this area
to determine what goes where. The second part of your question
is how much is the on-line bit helping to change that? It is something
we have changed because, again, people said part of it is the
magic and the fear, and you kind of hope that is true, but I said
"We must know what people are reading, so let us get the
data from on-line and let us see, particularly in Britain, who
is reading what today, what is particularly of interest to people?"
It will be no surprise to you that the most interest shown yesterday
by Brits was in the Sarkozy press conference and what he said
about his potential marriage or not to his new girlfriend. That
is of real significant interest to British readers. Having known
that and seen that developed in a day, we placed the story on
page 3. It does not mean to say we would not have placed the story
on page 3 otherwise, but it gave me an additional level of certainty
that that was an appropriate decision to make, so we are making
much more use of data we can glean from particular types of readers
during the day to help drive, I would hope, more sensible decision-making
for the paper the next day.
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: I was going
to suggest, My Lord Chairman, that Mr Lewis has in fact answered
these questions; the question was really how the paper is different,
distinct, from when Conrad Black owned it, and you have explained
that.
Q1406 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Not really, sorry.
Mr Lewis: Time will tell I suppose.
Q1407 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I was quite interested in the Sarkozy thing because of course
the very fact that the French are now opening up this sort of
material may make it more difficult for my next question which
is, is it more difficult to cover serious issues than it was in
the past?
Mr Lewis: For us it is not at all, for us it
is actually easier in that most of our competitors have dumbed
down and we have stayed as obsessive about what you may wish to
term the serious issues in politics, overseas and business as
we ever were, so I would say that if you look at the year ahead
and say what are the main things that you are going to be seeing
in the Telegraph, the main drivers are China, particularly
around the Beijing Olympics but the China story writ large—and
we will be opening a bureau in Shanghai as well as our Beijing
bureau to help further improve our coverage from there—the
emergence of the Middle East as a real power centre, both in business
but also politically, which is absolutely fascinating, and one
would throw India in there as well, and then the US election is
going to be a wonderful story, is it not? It is already the story
of the year by a long distance, so those are two what one would
term "foreign stories" that we have to do better than
anyone else. If you also throw in a fascinating and renewed political
environment, where we do not ever have to write again, I hope—thank
goodness—about Brown-Blair splits and actually get on and
write about the detail of policy, about what is the best way to
implement an inheritance tax cut, what is the best way to reduce
the welfare bill—politics is fascinating, policy is fascinating
again and we intend and will be at the very heart of those issues
and stories.
Q1408 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Your enthusiasm is clear and quite infectious, but there is one
thing that has worried me about a lot of what you say—speaking
as a journalist—which is that I am concerned about the degree
to which your journalists get out and actually find their stories
and talk to people. It all seems to be looking at the wall and
the Africans like Arsenal so we are going to write about Arsenal,
or the readers you are linked into like Sarkozy and Carla Bruni
so that is what we are going to do, and indeed in the Roy Greenslade
piece there is all this thing about the double screen and they
are logged into their screen. I am just a little bit concerned
about where old-fashioned investigative journalism fits in this
new world.
Mr Lewis: I started life as an investigative
journalist actually because I was part of the FT's investigative
unit where I joined in 1994, so I have quite a bit of experience
of investigative journalism, and we could maybe talk about whether
that is a sensible way forward or not. Part of the reason we were
so pleased when the owners agreed to pay for the move from Canary
Wharf to Victoria was exactly that, because Canary Wharf, I am
sure, is a wonderful place, but it is a terrible place to have
a newspaper because everyone stays at their desk all day long,
because it is such a nightmare getting anywhere, unless you are
lucky enough to be going to interview someone working at Citigroup,
which is opposite you, and the idea of coming here and hanging
out in the House of Commons or the House of Lords to find out
stories and to deal with what the readers want was nigh impossible
actually. Now that we are in Victoria—we are literally above
Victoria Station—back in the heart of London, five or ten
minutes away from here, five or ten minutes away from the City,
there has been a really big change, enabling our journalists to
get out and meet people and do the basic point of journalism game.
Obviously you say how do they then file for on-line and so on;
it comes down to, hopefully, sensible and clever management of
that so you are able to get out and meet people or investigate
things for weeks at a time, while at the same time someone else
over here is doing the stories that need to be done on that day.
We are getting really quite good at—horrible phrase but
I will use it—sophisticated resource allocation. It is not
acceptable for someone to have been worked too hard, our managers
are very well trained in ensuring that that is not the case and
we stick rigorously to sensible and sophisticated use of their
time. I am really delighted at what the move to Victoria has done;
we kind of feel born again, we can actually get out and meet people.
Q1409 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Moving on to your relationship with your proprietors, can you
just tell us how much contact you have with them on a daily basis,
a weekly basis?
Mr Lewis: I would hear from Aidan Barclay—who
for the purpose of this I would term the proprietor, he is the
chairman of our company—about once a week.
Q1410 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Once a week?
Mr Lewis: About that on average.
Q1411 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
What is the nature of that?
Mr Lewis: It would be a phone call, how are
you, a chat, issues, he may have read a book, met someone recently
and so on. I really look forward to the call actually.
Q1412 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
It is a regular slot is it?
Mr Lewis: No, it is not, it could happen at
any time.
Q1413 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Does he give you particular guidance as to the types of stories
or the slant of the stories or the editorials?
Mr Lewis: No. Obviously, they own the company,
it is their company, we are implementing their strategy, it is
their belief that the future of Telegraph Media Group lies not
just in producing newspapers but also confidently marching into
the digital arena, and we are paid to implement their strategies.
So lots of our conversations, you would expect, would revolve
around how we are doing implementing that strategy. What they
are very clear about though, and I think this is quite important,
is he has never and would never ask what is in the paper the next
day and, even more clearly, owning a newspaper I suspect is quite
a tricky business at times because often you would find in your
own newspaper something written about an acquaintance or someone
you have worked with that may or may not be to their satisfaction,
and you might receive a complaint about that directly. What the
proprietor is very clear about is that he will always listen to
that from the person directly, but always point them my way so
that the editor function is the place where he goes to be dealt
with in compliance with codes and other things. That for me is
absolutely critical.
Q1414 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
So the strategy you talk about is not about content.
Mr Lewis: No, it would be about what we are
doing next to drive forward the television bit of the business,
what are our competitors doing that we are not doing that we should
be doing. They are very passionate owners, very energetic owners.
They have set us on a mission and a course which we intend to
deliver, and the calls would be around that.
Q1415 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
If you were to run a certain slant on the EU, for instance, that
would not be something that—
Mr Lewis: I think if I was to publish a leader
that called for Brussels to be more powerful, not less powerful,
it would not be the owners that would lynch me, it would be the
readers; I would last literally 20 minutes. The readers are hugely
involved. I have made a number of errors being a journalist and
one of the more recent ones, when I was made City editor when
I joined the paper, I decided to clean up the share price data
on the City pages and the funding array of the Canadian wood price
index—I am an expert in these things and even I do not know
what that is, just get rid of it—I could not have made a
more calamitous error. The phone started going, where has that
index gone, it is the only place I can get it, so I did what every
good journalist should do, I reverse edited and I changed my mind,
we had it back in the next day and I sent apology letters to every
single reader saying I am terribly sorry, it will not happen again.
Q1416 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
And now you are editor-in-chief.
Mr Lewis: Yes. I cannot stress enough that it
is different from the relationship with the readers of The
Sunday Times, the Financial Times, the Mail on Sunday,
all of where I have worked; they really and correctly believe
that it is their paper and it is their framework within which
I work.
Q1417 Lord Inglewood:
Is it the editor's job to pander to the prejudices of its readers?
Mr Lewis: No.
Q1418 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Can I take that question and put it slightly differently?
Mr Lewis: Yes.
Q1419 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
The conventional view of newspapers would be—perhaps it
is an old-fashioned one, but it is still there—that there
are powerful people called newspaper proprietors, they are mythic
figures in the history of newspapers, probably of broadcast media
as well. What you are describing is a very different environment
where you have proprietors who are, as you describe them, principally
interested in the business, in the commercial viability of the
business and in its strategy as far as that goes, but who appear
as you describe it to be, shall we say, neutral on the content
issues which actually are what make your newspaper distinctive.
What you appear to be saying to us is that the people who really
drive that are your readers. If what you say is true, then that
presents us—all of us, not just this Committee—with
a very different view of how newspapers determine their positions.
Going back to Lord Inglewood's question that makes you, if I can
put it rather rudely, a follower rather than a leader because
you are allowing, as you describe it—I am only trying to
hear what you are saying—your readers to set the agenda
to a very significant extent. I do not say that is a good or a
bad thing, but I am asking you whether that is indeed how you
see your role and, if it is, where do your politics come from?
Mr Lewis: I am going to try and answer that
question by firstly saying I did not say they set our agenda.
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