Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1580
- 1599)
WEDNESDAY 16 JANUARY 2008
Mr David Schlesinger, Mr Pierre Lesourd and Mr Tony
Watson
Q1580 Chairman:
The Press Association and the PA reports are absolutely crucial,
are they not, for many newspapers in the country?
Mr Watson: Yes, depending on what customer group
you look at, people use us in different ways. Obviously the regional
newspapers rely on the Press Association for covering national
events on their behalf. The national newspapers will tend to use
us as a raw material to fashion their own reports and also as
a backstop, particularly in things like the coverage of Parliament.
The broadcasters will use us a sort of breaking-news alert and
also for background material.
Q1581 Baroness Thornton:
What about AFP?
Mr Lesourd: Yes, it is the same commercial and
economic model on our side. Sometimes we have clients buying piece
by piece on the photo side because we have a huge databank, so
the main newspapers have subscriptions, but sometimes individuals
or some companies, for some advertising needs or editing needs,
they will pick up only one, two or three pictures and then they
will pay for what they need.
Q1582 Baroness Thornton:
Who are your biggest UK customers and has that changed over, say,
the last 15 years? Has the nature of your customer base changed?
Mr Schlesinger: For Reuters, I think it is what
you would expect, the BBC, News International, ITN, Sky, the Telegraph
Group, the Guardian Group, all the major newspaper groups and
broadcasters. I think the list is probably very similar to what
it was. There was a period in the late-1990s when the first internet
boom developed when there were some start-up companies which jumped
into the top-ten list and then disappeared very quickly, but the
ones that survived are basically the same ones.
Mr Watson: It is still the main regional newspaper
groups, the national newspapers and the major broadcasters which
form the bulk of our customer base. I think what is beginning
to show is that there is no real growth in that market now and
where we are beginning to see growth is in the digital market,
either through some of those traditional customers starting to
transition their brands on-line or also to the major portals and
websites and even the mobile market.
Q1583 Baroness Thornton:
What would your relationship be with Google News? Do you have
one?
Mr Watson: Yes, we do, we have a commercial
relationship with Google News as a supplier of content.
Mr Lesourd: The biggest clients are about the
same, BBC, Sky, the main national newspapers. The BBC is a particularly
big client because now we are producing in many languages and
it needs products also in other languages for BBC World and all
their radio programmes outside the UK. The evolution is that as
we are producing more and more, what we call, `multimedia products',
so some clients, like Yahoo UK or Lycos are becoming very important
and very large clients for us which was not the case, say, ten
years ago. With Google, as you probably know, AFP was instrumental
and we sued Google because they were using our content without
respecting the copyright and the rights on property and things
like that, so we managed to get an agreement with them after two
years of battle in the US and the European courts, so now our
relationship is, let us say, legally established and Google is
a client, as are other sites.
Q1584 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Mr Watson, I feel I should apologise because you probably know
that the most important person in this building is not the Prime
Minister, it is Chris Moncrieff, a very fine and trustworthy journalist,
if I may so. I think, between you, you have answered the question
about how many journalists you each employ and I think each of
you said it is far more than ten or 15 years ago. Is that right?
Mr Watson: I have not answered that question,
no. In terms of numbers of journalists, if you look at the agency
as a whole, which would encompass news, sport and entertainment,
within the news area we would have around 170 journalists around
the UK and Ireland. Of that, there would be about 125 reporters
in the field, about 30 journalists involved in gathering video
and the rest would be desk staff. On the sports side, we have
just over 40 people working on the sports main wire and another
15 concentrating on features just for the main wire, and we do
features away from the agency products and we have 35 photographers
around the UK, so in total we have around 260 editorial staff
working purely for the agency products.
Q1585 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Is that up or down from five or ten years ago?
Mr Watson: It is up and the main drivers have
been regional coverage, and that is in terms of fulfilling some
specific contracts, and I think it has also been driven by the
devolution agenda and there is just more interest in regional
coverage generally. The other area is multimedia and the thing
that we have developed at the PA over the last three years is
a video-gathering capability in recognition of the fact that particularly
on-line now will support rich media and our customers' customers
are expecting that.
Q1586 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Do you wish to add anything, Mr Lesourd?
Mr Lesourd: Yes. If we take our English service,
the development has been considerable and very important over
the last years. We are now employing a lot of British journalists,
for example. The English writers in the company are mostly British
and then you have a lot of Australians, New Zealanders and Americans,
but the main group are British journalists. An interesting example
which I was looking at yesterday, for example, as you may know,
is that no British newspaper has a correspondent in Iran now because
the last one, The Guardian correspondent has been expelled,
so you have only three British journalists in Tehran these days.
One is working for the BBC, one is working for Reuters and the
other one is with AFP because our Bureau Chief in Tehran is a
British journalist. Here, obviously in London, we have 38 people
and most of them are British, so we are a big employer of British
press journalists.
Q1587 Chairman:
It is a very interesting point you make there. Is it true that
British newspapers, and we are concentrating on British newspapers
at the moment rather than European newspapers generally, are now
having far fewer permanent foreign correspondents than they had
ten, 20 or 30 years ago?
Mr Schlesinger: It is not just British newspapers,
but I think that is a worldwide fact.
Q1588 Chairman:
People are just cutting back?
Mr Lesourd: Yes, so it is why the news services
are more and more important.
Q1589 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Which leads me on to the next question I wanted to ask. What demand
do you get for investigative journalism? I can understand that
perhaps it is easier more in the financial services area and you
might be asked to do specialist stuff there.
Mr Schlesinger: It depends on how you define
`investigative journalism'. We do not have an investigative team
in the way some newspapers do where people go away for eight months
collecting information and then hopefully send somebody off to
prison; we do not do that. If there is a story that we feel needs
more attention, we will put a team on to it, but they tend to
publish as they find out. The news agency ethos is so much about
getting the news out quickly that we tend to report episodically
as we have it, whereas the typical investigative journalist hoards
information until he or she can release it in a big bang, so that
is not really the way that we are set up.
Q1590 Chairman:
Is that the same with PA?
Mr Watson: Yes.
Q1591 Chairman:
And AFP?
Mr Lesourd: Yes, the same thing. We have a new
era. We were not maybe covering as much a few years ago, but it
changed. For example, we have people specialising in following
all stories on terrorism which is pretty new. For the last three
or four years now, we have specialists working on that, but this
is not per se investigative reporters.
Q1592 Chairman:
So we are really relying, particularly on the foreign side, on
the news agencies to do the old foreign correspondent job really,
are we not?
Mr Schlesinger: I think if I were starting out
in the business wanting to be a foreign correspondent, the only
places I would look would be to AFP, Reuters, the BBC and maybe
one or two others, but it has really shrunk down.
Mr Lesourd: Partly the reason is when we are
looking to our people, for example, English writers mostly, we
do it in London mostly and we have a lot of candidates because,
for these people, we offer them the world if they want it. If
they want to work some day in North America, in Asia or in some
other place in Europe, the best chance for them is to work for
a news service like us.
Q1593 Chairman:
So in a rough world for journalists, you are in a rather saviour
position?
Mr Schlesinger: We are one of the few who have
been hiring actually. When others have been hiring, we have been
firing.
Q1594 Lord Maxton:
You are hiring, but are you involved in the training of those
journalists? Do you actually do training courses or, if you do
not, do you recruit from these universities and schools of journalism
and do you help finance them in any way?
Mr Schlesinger: We do internal training at Reuters.
We have a graduate recruitment programme where we take in about
a dozen people per year without journalism experience, but who
have languages or have an expertise in finance and we train them
to be journalists, and we train our internal staff. It is very
important because I imagine we have close to 2,400 journalists
around the world and these are people from 85 different nationalities,
so having internal training is absolutely vital to make sure that
you have a common language around ethics, a common language around
standards, and that there is a common understanding about what
you do and what you do not do.
Q1595 Lord Maxton:
So how long does this course last, roughly?
Mr Schlesinger: The graduate training programme,
the actual classroom part is about half a year and then they are
supervised for another half a year and then they are sent out
on assignment. Then we run short programmes throughout the year
for established staff both in person and on-line.
Q1596 Lord Maxton:
Is that true of the others?
Mr Watson: Yes, at the Press Association we
recruit from a mixture of postgraduate courses from the universities
and the regional press, typically. We have our own internal training
programme which we have run now for over ten years and it has
been very successful. We have the trainees running on a programme
for two years which gives them a very, very broad spectrum of
journalistic skills, and many of those journalists go on to senior
positions within the PA or are recruited by national media.
Mr Lesourd: It is about the same. I would just
add that, just like for Reuters and the PA, we do focus a lot
on languages because we need people and generally we need people
with at least three languages, their first language, the one they
will work in, for example, English, and then they will need at
least two other languages and hopefully one rare language, like
Chinese or Japanese. In Beijing, China, we have a lot of limitations
to working in China and the Chinese authorities forbid us to hire
Chinese journalists, so that means that all the people doing really
a journalist job in Beijing, China, has to be an expatriates and
that means non-Chinese, so we have to find people with a perfect
knowledge of this language.
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: On this subject
of training, there is such a wide range of information available
now from various mediated and unmediated sources that journalists
can go to, along with the rest of us, but when you are training
your journalists, how do you advise them and direct them in terms
of the sources that they should be relying upon? For instance,
there was an example this morning on the radio, a very trivial
one, of a journalist who admitted casually that she had checked
out one of her guests on Wikipedia and the information was not
right. How do you help your journalists to negotiate all of that?
Q1597 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
Perhaps I could also ask my question because it is very similar
and it is specifically about the role of PR companies because
we have seen an enormous rise in them. Now, clearly their clients
would not be paying them if they did not think it was effective
and that they were, therefore, effective in getting their story
across, so how do you view the rise of PR companies and how do
you ensure that it is not used as a shortcut for journalists who
are under pressure in whatever way?
Mr Schlesinger: They are excellent questions
and they apply beyond just the world of journalism. I was amused
that one of the clerks of the Committee had a picture purportedly
of me that she had downloaded from the internet and it was the
wrong person, so it can happen even in the most august circles!
Q1598 Chairman:
I think, to be fair, that it should be said that that does not
apply to the Clerk of the Committee here.
Mr Schlesinger: It was one of the staff of the
Committee, but it was the wrong David Schlesinger.
Q1599 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
There is no such thing surely!
Mr Schlesinger: Basically the rules have not
changed. You go to sources who have standing, who know what they
are talking about, you go to not just one source, but you check
out everything and you do not take shortcuts, but the role of
the PR companies is very interesting because sometimes it is a
shortcut and sometimes it is simply the necessary way to get information,
so, as a journalist, you always evaluate whether the person you
are talking to has standing to know what they are talking about,
whether they have a particular axe to grind and, in the case of
a PR company, of course they have a certain reason for wanting
to speak to you or wanting to present you with information, so
knowing that helps you evaluate what that information is and evaluate
what else you have to do to check out the story. I think that,
if you stick to the basic rules which have always been enforced
in journalism, you can deal with the new media as effectively
as you can with the old media.
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