Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1500
- 1519)
WEDNESDAY 16 JANUARY 2008
Ms Rebekah Wade
Q1500 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Its main difference, if you will forgive my saying so, is that
it is free.
Ms Wade: What? thelondonpaper and The
Sun?
Q1501 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Yes.
Ms Wade: I think there are a lot more differences
than that, in terms of the editorial—
Q1502 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I would expect you to say that but, none the less, you have already
said that it is the same market, or certainly a very similar market,
that is being appealed to by those newspapers.
Ms Wade: I said if you look at the Daily
Mail/Sun territory—so, yes, they are in our market but
I think that thelondonpaper is very, very different to
The Sun.
Q1503 Chairman:
Did you see the report in the Financial Times this Saturday
which quoted one analyst as saying that, because of the reductions
in circulation, it accelerates the arrival of the day when either
the Mirror or The Sun, but probably The Sun,
will decide to go free themselves? Do you envisage that day?
Ms Wade: No.
Q1504 Chairman:
Absolutely no?
Ms Wade: Not for the foreseeable future, certainly
not.
Q1505 Chairman:
Not for the foreseeable future. You have no present plans?
Ms Wade: No.
Q1506 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Stephen Glover told us in the Independent on 14 January
that The Sun has been discounting 15p in London and Scotland—selling
under your normal price.
Ms Wade: Twenty pence.
Q1507 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
How does that fit with what I understood you to be saying about
free sheets damaging your circulation? You are using The Sun
in some circumstances as a free sheet, in that sense.
Ms Wade: No. It is still 20p; it is not free.
Q1508 Lord Inglewood:
My first question follows on from that. Quite a lot of your readership
is through bulks, and bulks are halfway to being free sheets too,
are they not?
Ms Wade: I am sorry, could you repeat the question?
Q1509 Lord Inglewood:
Talking about this move towards ever-cheaper newspapers—putting
it that way—is it not about a third of your total sales
that form bulks in one form or another? Have I got the wrong statistic?
Ms Wade: The Sun?
Q1510 Lord Inglewood:
Yes.
Ms Wade: We have never ever done bulks.
Q1511 Lord Inglewood:
You do not do any bulks at all?
Ms Wade: We never give The Sun away for
free.
Q1512 Lord Inglewood:
You just sell it cheap.
Ms Wade: Cheaper.
Q1513 Lord Inglewood:
Fair enough, cheaper.
Ms Wade: I do not think that there is anything
wrong with giving the readers the best deal.
Q1514 Lord Inglewood:
No, even if it is a free deal.
Ms Wade: It is not free; it is 20p. In the rarefied
world of the House of Lords, 20p might be "free", but
it is not out there.
Q1515 Lord Inglewood:
In the context that you have a declining readership and so on,
like everybody else, what is your definition of the Sun
reader? You talk a lot about your readers, and they are almost
being defined as the people who happen to read your newspaper;
but it cannot be as simple as that. What group of people out there,
men and women, do you think are what I call "the Sun
readership"? When we had William Lewis of the Telegraph,
he had a rather nice phrase: he talked about "Telegraph
folk". I do not suppose you would talk about "Sun
folk", but who are these people? What are their determining
characteristics?
Ms Wade: We have probably got quite a number
of Sun readers in this house, I would have thought. It
is very difficult actually, and this is a point that My Lord Chairman
made right at the beginning. When you are talking about a size
of 7.7 or eight million readers, it is very difficult to define
and have in your head one reader.
Q1516 Lord Inglewood:
But you have told us that you define a lot of what you put in
the newspaper by reference to what you think of as the best interests
of your readers; so you must have some idea about it.
Ms Wade: We have a very good idea, in general.
I am just saying that if you wanted me to describe "Mr Sun
reader", it could be you; it could be My Lord Chairman; it
could be half the people in this room. However, every year we
go on holiday with the readers, and have done since I was Editor
of the News of the World. We go away for three or four
days, usually somewhere in the UK. There are on average between
3,000 to 5,000 Sun/News of the World readers there
when we go on this holiday. First of all, we always have a fantastic
time with the readers, but we find it very useful to have that
one-to-one time with them about a whole range of issues. For example,
a lot of Sun readers wake up in the morning and are very
worried about MRSA and C. difficile at the moment. Every
time there is a situation where a Sun reader has to go
into hospital, or a relative or anything, they want to know. I
think that over the years The Sun has established itself
as being able to tell them the facts on these serious issues,
in a way that everybody can understand. Yes, we do know our readers,
because we spend a lot of time with them, but they also tell us
a lot of things. With these polls that we do, these "You
The Jury", you can get a very quick reaction from Sun
readers. With the advent of the internet and online, we were the
first newspaper to start something up called "My Sun".
It is a forum for the readers to debate anything that they have
seen in the newspaper. It is the modern equivalent of what the
old mailroom used to be. When I first started at News International,
the Sun's mailroom was full; now a lot of that has transferred
to email and onto the internet. Any one of you can go on to "My
Sun" after this session and see what some readers
are debating, and you can see the volume; so you understand what
the majority of Sun readers are interested in. Obviously,
in 7.7 million readers you do not please everybody every day,
and they often let us know.
Q1517 Baroness Thornton:
I want to ask you two questions. One is about why you think that,
proportionately, the "red tops" have lost more readership
than the so-called "quality" sector. For example, between
1992 and 2006 the quality sector lost 10% of its readership and
the red tops lost 34%, and it is really why you think that might
be the case. The second thing—and it is something we have
been interested in from all the newspapers and broadcasters we
have seen—is about young people and the news; what we are
going to do about the fact that young people do not seem to be
reading newspapers and where they are getting their news from.
It is about what you think might happen.
Ms Wade: The first question is very interesting—the
difference between the "quality" market, so to speak,
and the red tops. With a lot of the red top circulation decline—or
the popular newspaper decline, and putting the Mail and
the Express into that group—the issue is the way
we sell and the way we distribute, as opposed to the model of
the broadsheet which is subscription and home delivery. For example,
the popular newspapers' biggest issue is frequency. We sell to
the highest percentage of our readers in independent retailers.
If you look at the independent retailer sector, which I am sure
you are all very interested in doing, it is fascinating to see
that these shops are closing at an alarming rate and are being
overtaken by big supermarkets. No one goes to the supermarket
every day, in the way that they used to go to the corner shop
every day. I know that I am paraphrasing the last ten years, but
you have the broadsheets which can absolutely maintain a subscription
model directly with their readers or a home delivery model; most
of the popular papers, apart from the ones that do bulk, rely
on people getting up every day, going into that shop and paying
their 35p or, in Carlton, their 20p. We rely on that, and therefore
the frequency has gone. When we go on these holidays with the
readers—I think that we are going to Bognor this year with
the readers—one of the things that I want to explore with
them is where are they every day? Are we not getting to them?
That is the responsibility of newspaper groups, certainly in the
popular market, to get to the readers every day. At the moment,
we have Tesco and Asda being your single biggest retailer—where,
as I say, people do not go every day. I do think that is where
the issue is between the red tops and the broadsheets.
Q1518 Bishop of Manchester:
To pursue the issue of boosting sales and the content of the paper,
I wonder if you could tell me first of all what you feel the impact
is, in terms of importance of sales; and—in a way, to amend
a phrase, this invites you to give me an "as the editor said
to the bishop" kind of line—what about Page 3?
Ms Wade: You have stolen my line! Actually,
I hear Page 3 is very popular with bishops—which surprised
me!
Q1519 Bishop of Manchester:
But it was my colleagues "Wot told me about it"!
Ms Wade: If you want to meet Keeley, you only
have to ask!
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