Examination of Witnesses (Questions 2580
- 2599)
TUESDAY 20 MAY 2008
Lord Rothermere, Mr Charles Sinclair and Mr Kevin
Beatty
Q2580 Lord Inglewood:
Firstly, may I apologise for not being here when you arrived;
I have come a long way to listen to you so I hope that is some
consolation. What I was not clear about and what I have heard
is whether your organisation is especially concerned about the
content of the newspapers, provided it keeps you out of the courts
and it keeps the circulation up. Are you a newspaper business
that is trying to make money, or a business that is trying to
make money that happens to run newspapers?
Lord Rothermere: We are a business which is
trying to make money, but also tries to make money out of newspapers.
We are concerned about the content; that is why we choose the
best editors that we can find.
Q2581 Lord Inglewood:
I did not say that. What I was concerned about in asking the question
was, do you mind what the content is provided it keeps circulation
up?
Lord Rothermere: I think our view is that, in
order to hire the best people—and it is the same with executives—you
have to give them a lot of discretion, particularly in the editorial
area. As journalism is a skill—Paul Dacre and other editors
have dedicated their lives to learning that skill—I think
it would be arrogant of a Board to think that it could second-guess
those people, and quite destructive to their authority. That is
the convention of our company and that is what I believe in personally.
It gives our readers the best return for their money when they
buy the paper, and gives the company the best return for its money
and investing in journalism in our newspapers.
Q2582 Lord Inglewood:
You do not see that the newspaper has any kind of campaigning
role?
Lord Rothermere: We feel that the newspaper
should campaign as parts of its idea and its identity; but we
leave the campaigns and what they are to the editors.
Q2583 Lord Inglewood:
I could summarise it by saying, you believe in campaigning but
you are not really bothered as a Board about what?
Lord Rothermere: As long as the campaigns themselves
are not ridiculous or dangerous then I think the editors are sufficiently
capable to be able to decide on what those campaigns should be
about.
Q2584 Chairman:
This is dramatically different, is it not, from the traditional
view of the proprietor, the Beaverbrooks, the Rothermeres and
the Northcliffes? This is a dramatically different concept?
Lord Rothermere: I certainly have grown up with
this concept. My father fervently believed in it, and I believe
that his father did.
Q2585 Lord King of Bridgwater:
I am looking at your Board and you have got one or two fairly
powerful figures. You have recruited some very eminent and successful
people onto your Board. I would have thought it was inconceivable
that they do not get got-at occasionally because you do not flee
controversy on various issues and you run quite vigorous campaigns
on various things. I am amazed that they do not get got-at by
some group or another and do not make their views known. Is that
really right, or are they taken on the Board on the condition
they never speak about what is in the newspaper?
Lord Rothermere: I cannot speak for other people
and what their private views are. However, I fervently believe
in the independence and the strength of character of my directors.
They understand the convention of our company is to allow editors
to edit; and, whatever their personal opinions, I think they respect
that, otherwise they would be disingenuous by being a member of
our Board.
Q2586 Lord Maxton:
No-one has resigned from your Board as a result of disagreement
with the editorial policy?
Lord Rothermere: No.
Q2587 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I find this a fascinating discussion but what I would like to
concentrate on a little bit is how you actually measure success.
We know that it is a very competitive world which you are in at
the moment and, indeed, Mr Sinclair in his brief has made that
quite clear. Indeed, we have heard one very good example, and
have heard from other people if not from you, that journalism
as such, and the training of journalism and employment of journalism,
is going down too. These are some of the signs of competition.
How do you measure success? Profits, yes, presumably? Circulation?
Influence? Where does it all sort of come in? For example, let
us take a political situation—there are some polls around
the place and we seem to have them reported the whole time—would
you do a poll yourself to see whether, as it were, the readership,
of the papers whose lines have been rather politically indicated,
are roughly in line with that? How would you measure success under
these sorts of circumstances, given that you have got a whole
range of attitudes, views and independence among all your papers?
Lord Rothermere: In my capacity as Chairman
I view circulation as being the best guide to success of a newspaper;
because it is normally on the back of that circulation—and
60% of the Daily Mail's revenue comes from cover price,
but also the higher the circulation, within the right demographic—that
you get more advertising, so it is a virtuous circle. If I may,
I would like to hear Mr Sinclair's answer to that question.
Q2588 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Could I also stress, I think advertising seems to be dropping
quite significantly too, so perhaps you could address that one?
Mr Sinclair: I think if you look across the
industry advertising is dropping to some degree, but much more
in the case of some titles than others. Just to amplify what Lord
Rothermere has said, the success is a combination of circulation
and the nature of the readership, because advertisers will not
buy circulation alone; it is the people they want to address their
products and information to that matter. It is the combination
of circulation numbers and who constitutes the readership that
is ultimately the determinant of success.
Q2589 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Your readership as such is obviously different in all these different
areas and different papers; but the readership, you say, you pay
a great deal of attention to that, in how the whole paper is framed.
How dominant would that be as far as your success rating for yourselves
is concerned?
Mr Sinclair: How dominant as a factor in our
consideration?
Q2590 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Yes.
Mr Sinclair: It is a factor. One thing
we will not do is go out and buy circulation at any price- in
that route lies commercial perdition. You can have a huge circulation
and it might be extremely unprofitable, and a paper run that way
does not last long.
Q2591 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
On the question I was posing about a political measurement, as
it were, it would not occur to you to take a test of where the
political scene is, compared with your readership?
Mr Sinclair: Our approach in all my time is
of course to read, like everybody else does, those polls that
are available to the public, but we do not go in much for polling
ourselves. We have been very lucky in having editors who have
a good feel for the interests of their readership and edit their
papers accordingly.
Q2592 Chairman:
You said a very interesting thing about the readership. Presumably
you put a high premium on young readers—25-55 I think is
the American way of putting it? Would that be true with you?
Mr Sinclair: We service a spectrum of readers.
If you look at the Metro that has garnered a very strong
circulation among much younger age groups who would not perhaps
otherwise regularly read a newspaper, but the style of the paper
and its availability gets to that particular audience. That I
think is a good thing.
Q2593 Chairman:
It does not worry you that the Metro being given away free
on the Underground—we all wade through them—actually
affects the sale of your paper or titles?
Mr Sinclair: The distribution of the Metro
does affect the sale of the Daily Mail a little. It is
a real effect, but not that great, mainly because it affects all
the daily papers, and there are more than ten of them; they are
all competing for space every day and the Metro touches
them all.
Q2594 Lord Inglewood:
When Mr William Laws of The Daily Telegraph was giving
evidence to us he described the constituency that his paper served
rather quaintly but quite vividly as "Daily Telegraph
folk". I would like to ask you who you think the "Daily
Mail folk" might be?
Mr Beatty: We actually invest a lot in understanding
who actually are our readers and what our readers' aspirations
are. We have just, as a matter of public record, launched a major
study on what constitutes the Daily Mail's franchise and
the The Mail on Sunday's franchise, and we call it "modern
middle Britain"; which is an update from something that we
used to refer to as "middle England". There are copious
amounts of information on modern middle Britain, and it is something
that we have put together over a long period of time. We continually
invest in trying to know more about them, and know exactly what
they expect from us, and what they expect from their lives in
general.
Q2595 Chairman:
It does not sound much different from what I quoted you from David
English back in 1971?
Mr Beatty: I think that is fair.
Lord Inglewood: Are we members of modern
middle England!
Q2596 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
I just wanted to move away from the Daily Mail because
you are a multimedia company, and I wanted to broach the subject
of consolidation. What have you found to be to be the positive
effects of the fact that you as a company own companies across
media platforms?
Mr Sinclair: I would say down the years when
we have owned a variety of media assets in television, radio,
newspapers and magazines, in the way we run things we have been
rather disappointed in the cross-media benefits. They have been
notably absent in any type of editorial synergy. Our television
assets, when we owned them, never had anything to do with our
papers. Even our national papers editorially are very separate,
and all they really share are printing presses and distribution
systems. They even have separate advertising sales forces and
completely separate editorial groups. We do share printing with
the regional newspapers, but that is about as far as it gets.
We never got anything out of our very limited ownership of local
radio. So cross-media I would say was an aspiration which broadly,
in our case, did not deliver much in terms of commercial benefit.
Q2597 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
You said they shared distribution—has that meant (which
we have heard from other witnesses, I think) that in the regions
certain newspapers have been forced to come out at times that
were not possibly beneficial to them; in other words, morning
papers were distributed the day before?
Mr Sinclair: I think there are some cases in
the regional press where printing times have been moved around
to match printing capacity and the distribution time that that
title requires; but I think as far as our readers are concerned—which
is what matters—I do not think that has had any adverse
impact at all.
Q2598 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
On a wider sense, there has been general consolidation. In your
evidence you say "rather than experiencing an overall increase
in concentration of ownership, the news environment is in fact
diversifying at an ever-increasing pace". I think here you
are talking about the internet; you are talking about digital
etc. Is it not the fact that, although there are many new ways
to access news, at the professional level news-gathering organisations
are very few and have not increased? Is this not a matter for
concern? I just wonder why you think that is the present state
of affairs.
Mr Sinclair: I would say that the professional
news-gathering organisations have not diminished.
Q2599 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
They have not diminished but they have not increased, have they?
Mr Sinclair: No.
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