Examination of Witnesses (Questions 2700
- 2715)
TUESDAY 20 MAY 2008
Ms Sly Bailey and Mr Paul Vickers
Q2700 Lord Inglewood:
In terms of the readership of the non-advertising text—
Ms Bailey: They are consuming eyeballs, which
is driving fragmentation. There are only so many hours in the
day and so many things that an individual can do. If they are
looking at Google they are not reading The Daily Mirror.
Q2701 Lord Inglewood:
Yes, but they may be going into The Mirror through Google.
Ms Bailey: They might.
Q2702 Lord Inglewood:
If you have a really good story you may get more—that is
their argument—hits than you would if they were just sort
of surfing about.
Ms Bailey: There is certainly some truth to
that.
Chairman: Lady Eccles, I think we may have interrupted
you!
Q2703 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
It was a very interesting line and one we have not heard exactly
like that before, so it was well worth the interruption. I think
I am going to leave looking at the consolidation question as far
as the industry-wide point is concerned because I think we are
going to run out of time. I just wanted to go back for a minute
to the quality of journalism. You have talked quite a lot about
content (and it is both digital and print content) and the extent
to which consolidation within your group has made it possible
for some of the regional titles to benefit. However, what has
the effect been on the quality of journalism—bearing in
mind the NUJ's comments? Has it been beneficial?
Ms Bailey: We are continuing to invest in journalism
in new titles, in new products. We are very proud of our track
record of innovation. At the end of the day, your readers and
advertisers are voting with either the cover price or through
their interaction with your sites. If they are not good enough
people do not come to them. A very important part of what we do
is ensuring that if The Liverpool Echo is online then those
standards of journalism and the quality is absolutely upheld;
they are not inferior products in any way, shape or form.
Q2704 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Would you say you have been able to enhance the quality of the
journalism?
Ms Bailey: We are continuing to invest in training
and development, and I think it is very important, if we want
to recruit the brightest and the best journalists, that they absolutely
expect now to come and work across—as is their training—a
range of products and platforms. If we did not have that and we
did not give our journalists those opportunities then they would
find someone else that did, and we would not attract the right
kind of talent.
Q2705 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
So the best journalists are now automatically multi-skilled?
Ms Bailey: I think, increasingly, they absolutely
need to be, but that is a very good thing.
Q2706 Chairman:
I think you have now put the point on how The Mail on Sunday
was reporting you this Sunday: "Bailey wants competition
rules relaxed". I think you have put that point to us, and
it is in that particular market that you want it relaxed—in
the local market.
Ms Bailey: Indeed.
Q2707 Chairman:
Can I just ask one last question? We obviously did a readership
survey for our report, and one of the results of that was that
the readership of two of your Sunday titles, The People
and The Sunday Mirror, had fairly dramatically reduced
over the last ten years. Is there a place for both The People
and The Sunday Mirror?
Ms Bailey: We think there is, absolutely. We
are doing a lot of work right now thinking about future positioning.
The Sunday market is fiercely competitive; it is a very challenging
market. If we think about going back to some of those data points
that you would have looked at when we and, indeed, the market
were selling a lot more copies, we only have to think about what
our Sundays, as consumers, were like and what we did and did not
do on a Sunday. Many of our readers went to the pub, came home,
had lunch, had a snooze and read the paper. Life is not like that
on a Sunday now. Changing consumer habits have driven changing
readership.
Q2708 Chairman:
Yet, as you heard from the previous people giving evidence, Lord
Rothermere, the Mail Group have actually launched from nothing
The Mail on Sunday and it is now one of the most successful
Sunday newspapers in the country.
Ms Bailey: By what measure?
Q2709 Chairman:
By profit measure. Are you challenging that?
Ms Bailey: I do not know that to be true. Maybe
you do.
Q2710 Chairman:
Certainly by readership.
Ms Bailey: Which is not profit.
Q2711 Chairman:
It may not be profit but I think they would claim profit and they
would also, certainly, claim readership. I think by most objective
standards—let's not mess about—The Mail on Sunday
has been a great success and The Sunday Mirror and The
People have been great disasters.
Ms Bailey: I would not accept that at all, in
the fact that we have two newspapers which are making money on
a Sunday.
Q2712 Chairman:
You are making money on both?
Ms Bailey: Yes, absolutely, we are.
Q2713 Chairman:
You are happy with the profit?
Ms Bailey: I am never happy with profit; I am
always looking for more. That is my job. The Sunday Mirror
actually out-performed the circulation market last year. So they
are not disasters; they are good newspapers that are working hard
to be successful in a difficult environment. Again, I could spend
whatever it would be buying Paul McCartney's CD and sticking it
on the front, and it would be a very different level of readership
and circulation. It would not necessarily mean success. So it
depends on how you define success.
Q2714 Lord Inglewood:
Would you like to own The Mail on Sunday in your portfolio?
Ms Bailey: No.
Q2715 Chairman:
That might come back to your political stance, perhaps! You have
been very patient and I thank you not only for coming to give
evidence but, also, sitting through the previous session as well.
Ms Bailey: We are delighted to have done
it. We think it was useful.
Chairman: We are very impressed by that.
We are extremely grateful to you for taking the time and for the
impressive way that you gave the evidence. Thank you very much.
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