Examination of Witnesses (Questions 2640
- 2659)
TUESDAY 20 MAY 2008
Ms Sly Bailey and Mr Paul Vickers
Q2640 Chairman:
However, you would also look for someone with a particular political
stance?
Ms Bailey: It is not a personal political stance;
it is an understanding of the paper, its voice and its readers.
So, again, that is not something that we would get into from a
personal discussion perspective. Obviously, through the process,
it is very clear for me to be to evaluate and understand whether
or not they have that understanding or whether or not they have
that vision and they can take the paper and develop it as the
readership changes and as the media is changing very fast around
us.
Q2641 Lord Inglewood:
If we can go back for a moment to the earlier evidence, Mr Sinclair
said, in response to a question from Lord Corbett, that the readership
of The Daily Mail and the readership of The Daily Mirror
seem to be quite similar in some respects. If the editor of The
Daily Mirror suddenly decided that he would make a lot more
money for your business by shifting the emphasis so that it then
aspires the enthusiasm (shall I put it that way) of The Daily
Mail, is that something which you and the board would think:
"Well, we are going to make more money, it's a good thing
to do"?
Ms Bailey: Newspapers are very broad churches
and I think you can analyse the statistics, you can analyse the
numbers (and you heard Richard Wallace talk about this as editor
of The Daily Mirror when he came and gave his evidence),
but something that we feel very strongly is that our readers increasingly
are interested in issues, and are interested in the issues that
affect their lives and their communities. Whether that is crime
at the school gates, whether it is drugs, whether it is obesity,
whether it is the fact that mother cannot get her operation—all
of these are deeply political issues but they are covered in a
way that are issues about the community as opposed to, necessarily,
political policies increasingly. That is why I think that you
should not be surprised, therefore, that the readership tells
you something that you might not have envisaged. Do we have any
Daily Mirror readers around the table? Correct.
Q2642 Lord Maxton:
The Daily Record.
Ms Bailey: Okay, great, thank you. We could
be readers of the same newspaper but come into that newspaper
every day for very different reasons: I could love the sport,
you could love the showbiz, you could love a particular columnist,
and therefore we are coming in for different reasons. Therefore
newspapers are, as you know, a very broad church.
Chairman: Lord Corbett—one of your
readers.
Q2643 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
I should also confess I used to work for The Daily Mirror
one hundred years ago! Currently, my daughter is one of your columnists
on a Thursday. However, I wanted to get into this area about your
relationship with editors. Let us take Richard Wallace, for example.
The Mirror, in my view, wholly commendably, has been running
a campaign called Can it! to try to counter binge-drinking, and
a few pages on it is offering packs of lager if you present a
coupon somewhere. Did you discuss this with Mr Wallace at all?
Ms Bailey: No.
Q2644 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
It jarred on me. Am I being sort of old-fashioned and puritanical,
being a dedicated Mirror reader?
Ms Bailey: You are certainly entitled to your
view, Lord Corbett, but no, to the question: Did I discuss that
with Richard?—no, I did not.
Q2645 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Just in a broader way, then, if you thought there was a campaign
either being planned or running that was not quite right, would
you feel a responsibility there? You have said your job is not
to hang about with politicians but to help the share price. If
you felt that was going to hit circulation and, therefore, the
share price, would you say something?
Ms Bailey: We have a very close relationship
in that we talk all the time about the paper directionally.
Q2646 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
So you could make that kind of comment?
Ms Bailey: I could make any comment that I wanted
to. Again, it is really down to the editors in terms of the content
in their newspaper, and I have never attempted, pre-publication,
to influence or to stop any piece or any kind of campaign.
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: Thank you.
Q2647 Lord Maxton:
Can I just ask you, briefly, to say something about the Scottish
market? You are in a slightly different position, vis-a"-vis
The Daily Mirror/The Daily Record, to any other
newspaper, because The Daily Record, I think, is
still just about the biggest single tabloid seller in Scotland,
and The Daily Mirror figures, I assume, are very
low. You do not produce a Scottish edition. The Sun produces
a Scottish edition, and so do the heavies as well—they produce
Scottish editions. You do not do that.
Ms Bailey: We do, actually.
Q2648 Lord Maxton:
You did say something about the appointment of the editors of
The Record you did in consultation with the managing director
of—
Ms Bailey: Of the Scottish business.
Q2649 Lord Maxton:
There is a separate Scottish business, is there?
Ms Bailey: Yes. All of our businesses have a
managing director, who report to me. If you think about running
and managing a business of this size and the number of people—11,000
people and a vast array of brands across print and digital—like
most companies we would think about the best way organisationally
to divide that and structure it. We have a managing director that
runs each of those businesses. So, yes, we have a managing director
in Scotland.
Q2650 Lord Maxton:
In terms of The Mirror in Scotland, do you ever run a separate
Scottish edition?
Ms Bailey: We do.
Q2651 Lord Maxton:
Do you sell advertising for The Mirror as well as separately
for The Record?
Ms Bailey: Yes.
Q2652 Lord Maxton:
Do you find that difficult?
Ms Bailey: We are in a difficult business. I
could talk for hours about all the difficulties in our business.
The Daily Record has been "Scottish newspaper
of the year" for the last two years, but we have been up
against a relentless campaign by The Sun to take circulation
by cutting price, and we have been up against, originally, a 10p
Sun. As a result of that price, they have overtaken The
Record. We took a decision, which was one which was discussed
with the managing director, with the editor and, essentially,
us as a team, in terms of what was right for The Record
and what was right for the company, and we have chosen not to
cut the price of The Daily Record. We think it is the wrong
thing to do. The reason The Sun had done that is to try
and take our advertising share, which they are being very unsuccessful
in doing, but that has been a key dynamic of the Scottish market
for the last couple of years.
Q2653 Chairman:
Just going back to the view on the possible intervention of the
board, Piers Morgan used to be your editor. He was dismissed.
Do you want to take us into that? How did that come about? What
was the process?
Ms Bailey: In the same way that appointments
would be approved by the board, then so would dismissals. So I
recommended to the board that Piers, unfortunately, should be
dismissed, with which they agreed, and he was.
Q2654 Chairman:
And he was dismissed on grounds of?
Ms Bailey: He was dismissed on grounds of publishing
photographs which were not what they purported to be. I do not
think for one moment he set out to publish fake photographs. It
was a very unfortunate incident and we dealt with it as a company
in the way that we felt was appropriate, and that was the dismissal
of the editor.
Q2655 Chairman:
You felt that someone should take responsibility, basically, for
that. Was he culpable in not making the checks on the photographs?
Ms Bailey: It was his decision to publish those
photographs.
Q2656 Chairman:
Therefore he had to pay the price for that.
Ms Bailey: Yes.
Q2657 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
You have said often, Ms Bailey, today how close you are to your
editors, and that they talk to you frequently, but that the content
is down to them. Of course, content is also down to the number
and types of journalists you have. I think Richard Wallace did
say to us that increasingly comment was filling newspapers, and
there is possibly less investigative journalism, and so on. Is
that partly down to reduced journalistic budgets for titles, and
do you have involvement in those journalistic budgets and where
the money goes?
Ms Bailey: I am responsible for taking the overall
budget of the company to the board in any given financial year,
and we go through the normal budgeting process, which is both
top-down in our aspirations for the Group and what we are trying
to achieve, but it is also driven bottom-up in terms of the resources,
the areas for development, the new product development—digital,
or whatever it might be—from the businesses in terms of
the resources that they need to do the job. Like any company,
that is an iterative process until we get to where we think we
should be. As far as journalistic budgets themselves are concerned,
no, I would not tell Richard how many sports journalists he needed
to have, or how many showbiz reporters he needed to have. If he
is making changes to the balance of those, as indeed he does,
then that is his decision. We would certainly talk about if we
felt that the environment around us was changing and that we needed
to serve a market better, with better quality. If we felt that
we were being out-published by somebody else because we were not
devoting enough resources, then that is something that he would
talk to me about, but it is very much his decision. In the same
way, I would not tell the managing director of The Liverpool
Echo how many sales people they needed on the ground to sell
classified recruitment advertising. A big part of my job is finding
and hiring the right people and then making sure we have the frameworks
in which any good executive needs to operate so they can go away
and do their job.
Q2658 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Would you be concerned, in principle, if you felt that The
Mirror was becoming a "viewspaper" more than a newspaper—the
trend towards comment and, maybe, away from original news-gathering?
Ms Bailey: That is probably less prevalent in
the tabloid market, actually. If you look at The Mirror—and
it is a fantastic newspaper—you will see that the balance
in terms of the editor is very much getting that right.
Q2659 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
You are happy that there are enough resources for correspondents
on investigative work?
Ms Bailey: Yes. Certainly my editors are not
backward in coming forward if they feel that they need more resources.
We have a great reputation for, particularly, bringing on young
journalists, and for training and developing.
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: Indeed!
Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: It sounds
like she writes a column.
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