Appendix 1
London Assembly Economy Committee – 21 March 2017
Transcript of Item 6 – Local News Provision
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): That brings us to today’s main item, a discussion on local news provision in London. Firstly, can I ask Members to agree the terms of reference for the discussion? They are: to examine how local news provision in London has changed over the past decade and what is driving that change and to consider the impact of these changes on the ability of Londoners to remain reliably informed on key issues in their local areas.
I would now like to welcome our guests. We do have slightly more guests than we normally would, but there were a whole range of different angles on this and so thank you, everybody, for coming along. We have Laura Davison, who is National Organiser from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ); Hannah Walker, who is London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief of the London Weekly News; Ceri Gould, Editor-in-Chief of the Trinity Mirror; and Professor Angela Phillips from Goldsmiths, University of London. Michael MacFarlane [Head of BBC London & BBC South East] is going to join us at about 11.00 am. Eric Gordon is here; he is Editor of the Camden New Journal (CNJ) group. Martin Hoscik is a journalist and commentator, notably of MayorWatch. We are also expecting Linda Quinn, Editor-in-Chief of the Brixton Bugle, who, again, is expected at about 11.00 am.
That brings us to the start of the questioning and to one of the most topical questions in London around media at the moment: will the appointment of a serving politician as editor of the [London] Evening Standard affect the news coverage in London? Would anybody like to start?
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): I am happy to kick off.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): OK, Laura. Do you want to begin?
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): Yes. There has been a huge amount of shock at the announcement and, as the news has settled in, that has perhaps increased.
From the NUJ’s point of view, the appointment sends all of the wrong signals. London needs a newspaper and not a propaganda vehicle. It demeans journalism when someone with no experience can be parachuted into a job and at the same time retain other roles, which raises questions of conflict. It raises questions about the vision for the Standard and their long-term plans. As it stands at the moment, the journalists there, who are proud of the newspaper’s tradition and their place in the life of the city, are facing cuts to their pay and their hours because the second edition of the paper has been scrapped without consultation. There are concerns about the impact that that is going to have in terms of coverage of day-to-day news in the capital.
The post of editor requires a range of skills and talents and experience and I have no doubt that there are many journalists out there who would have aspired to that position, which Mr Osborne [George Osborne, MP for Tatton] has been gifted. We would like to invite him to withdraw from the post and to apply in the normal way, taking part in an open competition with other journalists who are qualified for the position.
We would absolutely welcome the intervention of the Committee in terms of convening some kind of follow-up meeting with the management of the Standard because this raises lots of questions and the issues that were raised about what is happening internally as well. We would be very happy to take part in that follow-up session because they are not represented today.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Angela, would you like to comment as well?
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): Yes, I have commented on this quite a lot already. It raises issues that have been there for a very long time but have been hidden.
Goldsmiths did analysis of the coverage of the last mayoral election and it was very clear from that the degree to which the Evening Standard is biased in one direction. It was biased in favour of Zac Goldsmith [Conservative candidate, 2016 mayoral election]. It is a testament to the people of London that things did not quite turn out the way they had hoped. However, all this does really is to make absolutely clear that the Evening Standard is a Conservative newspaper.
This should raise issues for the relationship between Transport for London (TfL) and the Evening Standard. We are in a situation in this city where the only newspaper for London is allowed a monopoly of our transport system. Given what we know about the way in which people access news now - and there is now huge amounts of data about this - for a very large number, particularly of young people, particularly of people who are not very engaged with news, the London Evening Standard is going to be their only access to any information about what is happening in London. Already, particularly in the youngest age groups, we are seeing the numbers of people watching television dropping and so simply having a newspaper available to you on the Tube network means that this is your access to London news. I do not know what is possible and I do not know what is practicable but it is time that once again TfL looked at whether it is appropriate for a newspaper that makes no pretence at being even-handed to be given a monopoly of our transport system.
I know that this is an issue that has been discussed in the past and Ken Livingstone [former Mayor of London] had to deal with it in past eras and did not get anywhere and so I am not suggesting that it is an easy problem to solve, but it is something that really does need to be looked at. We cannot even begin to pretend that the London media is serving democracy if now we are being told that, basically, the London Evening Standard is going to be a pulpit through which two wings of the Conservative Party can debate the future of Brexit between them. That does not strike me as the best role for London’s only newspaper.
This is something that London’s politicians should be taking up across the different parties and it should not be taken up as simple a single-party problem. It is a problem for democracy.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): The issue of the transport system is quite an interesting one and we maybe can come back to that and think about that one a bit more.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): It is on my list of questions. It is something that I want to talk about. Thank you for raising that, Angela.
This is, for me, quite a controversial topic and I have already had emails back and forth with the Chair and so on because, of course, today’s meeting is supposed to be about the contribution of local newspapers to London’s economy and their role in connecting local communities and businesses together. I am very concerned about the decline. I understand that George Osborne’s appointment is very topical and is fun to discuss, but let us be frank: it is not within the remit of this Committee to invite a private company to ask its
editor to step down. This is something that we had a discussion about and I appreciate everyone making their views known, but that is not what we are supposed to be discussing today.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Kemi, I need to ask you to explain. If you are going to state that you do not think this is part of the remit of this meeting --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): It is most certainly not.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): -- I would like you to explain how it does not fit within the terms of reference of this meeting.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): For the simple reason that press neutrality, as Angela [Phillips] has indicated, is not something that has ever existed. We are not talking about broadcast media here. This is not the BBC or any other radio or television network. We all know who the Daily Mail and Telegraph support. We all know who the Morning Star and the [Daily] Mirror support. The Evening Standard seems to jump between different places. Today it seems to be more right-leaning. It has been bought by a new Russian person, who is pushing things that way. That is not something that we can do anything about. We would not be having a meeting here saying that we do not like the Daily Mail. It is not within the terms of reference of this meeting. I strongly disagree and I am sad to find that you have decided to continue doing this because I expressed my reservations and we agreed that we were not going to do this.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Kemi, I am going to have to ask you to wait one moment while I reread the terms of reference for this discussion and then restate the question I asked. The terms of reference for the discussion are: to examine how local news provision in London has changed over the past decade and what is driving that change and to consider the impact of these changes on the ability of Londoners to remain reliably informed on key issues in their local areas. The question I then asked was: will the appointment of a serving politician affect news coverage in London? I fail to understand how that does not come within --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): The question also had a word about the “neutrality”. You took that word out.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): No, Kemi, I did take the word out --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Yes, you took the word out, but that was --
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): -- but you cannot say that I asked a question that I patently did not ask in the meeting. Andrew?
Andrew Dismore AM: Yes, you are the Chair --
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): I have ruled this line of questioning out of order --
Andrew Dismore AM: -- and we should respect that. All I would simply say is that if a Labour politician had been appointed to this job and was serving, Kemi would be the first to be jumping up and down about it.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): No, I would not.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Can we both stop this? Martin [Hoscik] has indicated he wants to come in.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): It is the remit of a private company to hire whoever it likes.
Andrew Dismore AM: I have something to add to that.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Excuse me. We are putting this meeting on a very slippery course if you two are going to just argue --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): You chose to do that by making this the first line of questioning.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Apologies to guests. Kemi, I am going to have to ask you --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): There are so many important things that we need to talk about it and you are wasting time. It is very sad, Fiona, and I am glad that this is your last meeting chairing.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): The only person who is drawing out this line of questioning is not me and so I would just like to say, Martin, would you like to comment on this, please?
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): Sure. There is a problem with George Osborne’s appointment. It impacts on the Evening Standard’s credibility or at least whether it is seen to be credible. We hear about ‘fake news’, but whilst fake news is a real thing, the problem is that people bandy the phrase around for any news coverage that they do not like as well, perfectly factual coverage. The danger with George Osborne’s appointment is that it gives people who are already mistrustful of the Standard for the reasons that Professor Phillips raised earlier it gives them an extra plank with which to dismiss the Standard’s factual reporting.
If we look at a number of issues, there is the coverage of Brexit. The former Mayor occupies the Foreign Office, which is a job that George Osborne was apparently rumoured to be interested in if he remained in Cabinet. If there is a bit of gossip that finds its way into the Standard about Boris Johnson [Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and former Mayor of London], is that because it is a legitimate journalistic revelation or is it because George Osborne is sulking because Boris Johnson is Foreign Secretary and George Osborne is not? If there is a story about Theresa May [Prime Minister] and splits in Cabinet or lack of support, is that because George Osborne would like to leverage her out of Downing Street because he is still a sitting Member of Parliament (MP) and has a path to power, or is it because it is a fair journalistic story?
People can dismiss stories about the mayoralty, TfL and the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). George Osborne pushed an economic policy that took £1 billion over the last four years and the next four years out of the MPS. It is very difficult to see how the Evening Standard says to the Government, “You must invest more in public services”, when it is edited by a man who says, “You can take £600 million out of the MPS over a four-year period and I want you to make savings in the Fire Brigade and I am going to cut money for healthcare provision”.
It makes a mockery of the paper’s mission to speak up for London and it undermines the work of the journalists who work at the paper. It is implausible to say that it does not have any impact on the wider trust in the media landscape in London.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Andrew, would you like to come in on this?
Andrew Dismore AM: Yes. Martin has raised an important point, particularly about the fake news issue, because the Brexit referendum debate was full of allegations about fake news from everybody and there is a risk, from what Martin said, about continuing post Article 50 notification, which we understand is going to be next week. That is an important issue.
The other concern I have about a different conflict of interest is about representing London to the Government as editor of the Evening Standard yet at the same time being a northern MP when the north has very different interests from the Government compared to London. Personally, having been an MP, I do not see how he could possibly do both jobs properly anyway. It was a full-time job as far as I was concerned; in fact, more than fulltime. Whether or not he is representing his constituency in the north properly is a matter for them, but I am concerned that there is a potential conflict of interest. If he is not standing up for London, say, is that because he has his eye over his shoulder to the interests of his constituency up north or is it for legitimate reasons? That is developing your argument, Martin, about where the Standard is going and second-guessing the Standard’s stories.
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): That is the danger. People are going to be needing to look at the Standard and constantly assess, “What is the motivation for this story?” You might say that we should always question the motivation for stories wherever they appear and maybe that is true, but most people read news in a fairly passive sense and yet to fully understand why the Standard is running any individual story.
If we were talking about somebody who was standing down at the next election and we were eight or 12 months away, you might say, “Fair enough. It is perfectly fine for him to remain in post. We do not want to incur the costs of a by-election”. If you were looking at somebody who had previously been an MP, like Tessa Jowell [DBE PC, former MP for Dulwich and West Norwood] or Michael Portillo [PC, former MP for Kensington and Chelsea], people who have largely stepped beyond partisan politics and can bring extra experience in, you might say again, “Fair enough. They have a known political viewpoint, but they cannot directly benefit from any individual story”.
However, when you are a putative leadership candidate and when you are somebody who would like to be back in Cabinet, you clearly have a horse in every race that the paper is going to cover. It is undeniable that it will impact on how people read the Standard and interpret its views. It chips away at the credibility.
That is a bad thing for London because the paper is a good paper with some fantastic journalists in there. They are going to be undermined every single day. What happens when it is a story about, let us say, the Government bringing forward plans to further cut the Housing Benefit. The editor votes for the proposal. Does the editor get named and shamed on the front page or does he magically get left out of the list of MPs who voted against. These are the decisions that journalists inside the paper are going to have to make and there is no transparency about why those decisions have been made.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): I am going to bring Hannah in now because she has indicated she would like to add to this.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): Thank you. In terms of covering local news, which is what we do, I edit - and I happen to own as well - the South London Press, the London Weekly News and the Mercury newspapers and so we cover half of London. The Evening
Standard is a fantastic newspaper but I am not going to talk too much about George Osborne because I agree with most of what has already been said.
However, talking about local news provision, I have always thought that as a local newspaper we should be independent and offer a fair and balanced coverage in our newspapers and let readers make up their own minds. The South London Press has had a few owners. I have been editing it for the last 17-and-a-bit years and in that time we have been owned by a couple of companies. Our job is to cover the main boroughs - Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark, Merton - in as fair and balanced a way as possible.
It has become, without a doubt, like most local newspapers, it’s been a struggle over the last few years for a number of reasons. Making sure that we cover the ground thoroughly has always been a struggle, making sure our reporters are at the right council meetings, scrutinising public authorities, making sure we are out and about at the right public meetings, coverage of libraries, all of these local issues that are really important to our readers. I keep going back to how we serve our readers. That is the very most important thing: our readers. Our staff are important but our first priority is our readers.
We have always been looking at tightening up resources. When I joined the South London Press 17 years ago, we were in a meeting and I was told, “Plan for decline”, because that was where we were in local news. Today, we are still out there covering and we have a fantastic advertising department bringing in revenue, but I think it is a real problem for local newspapers now because it is fast-tracked with changes in social media and a lot of us have lost our way and have not had a great sense of direction in terms of what we are doing.
However, we still have some very precious local newspapers and titles. The South London Press, since 1865, and the Mercury, since 1833, are very much part of their communities and are very much part of the wealth and richness. I am quite lucky because I get to go out and about a lot. I go into schools. I talk to the Streatham Society or whichever society. I try to get out as much as I can. People love their local newspapers, but we are being stretched further and further. That is no fault of anyone’s, actually; it is just changing times. It is just about how we broaden our approach and try to get more people looking at more newspapers.
The Evening Standard is a great paper but I would hope that people have a choice and continue to have a choice of what they read and that they can have their own opinion and make up their own minds about issues. The way is independence. I would rather be part of a group and a newspaper that is independent. With politics, you should not know. If we support any party, a reader should not be able to tell that. Of course, we need local newspapers to stand up for people. The Evening Standard, to be fair, has run a great campaign on homelessness and other campaigns and we have also run campaigns. We have to be strong enough to shout out for our readers on all of these really important issues, now more than ever. That is what concerns me and that is what concerns me when I talk to my kids and I say, “Who is going to speak out for you when you have a problem with your housing? Who is going to tell the story about your school?”
We should refocus on looking at how we are going to help engage people back into local news. Social media is fantastic and we need to be using that a lot more, but how do we get people interested? I know people are. We have tight-knit communities across south London, but we have to get people re-engaged back so that they can play a part in their communities in making a difference. It is part of the role of a local newspaper to help people do that.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Thank you. That has drawn us back to local newspapers and the role of --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): That is what we are supposed to be talking about. Thank you.
Andrew Dismore AM: The Standard is the local newspaper for London.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): It is a London newspaper. Kemi we are not reopening this discussion.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): The funny thing is that I actually agree with everything that Martin [Hoscik] said, even Andrew [Dismore AM]. It is just not within the remit of this Committee --
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Kemi, it is. Kemi --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): -- to decide who a private company should pick as its editor.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Kemi, could you just --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): The idea that we are going to invite them in and ask them to sack him --
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): We have not --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Let us move on. We are not going to agree to disagree. It is disappointing that we had a conversation and you chose to do something else in the meeting, but let us move on. We are wasting time. We have spent 25 minutes on this. Let us move on. We are wasting time.
Andrew Dismore AM: You are the one who is wasting time.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): No, I am not.
Andrew Dismore AM: It is ridiculous.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Can we just move on from this?
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Yes, I agree.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): I was very grateful to Hannah [Walker] for bringing it back to local newspapers and the role local newspapers play in communities. One of the things we are interested in – and actually the point was made about cuts at the Standard as well and this is an issue for all printed media at the moment if we just look at newspapers like the Guardian – there is a broader issue around news provision.
I just wondered whether guests could comment on how the landscape of local newspapers across the United Kingdom (UK) has changed in the last decade. Hannah set the scene very nicely, but what the picture has been like in London? Also, maybe comment a bit on what factors have driven this change.
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): A lot of the information in the briefing notes and a lot of the discussion so far has used the word ‘newspapers’. I am from Trinity Mirror. I have been with Trinity Mirror all my career. I started off at my local weekly, which is the best start in journalism because, if you report on the local amateur dramatic society, then you have to go up and see them, you need to choose your words carefully and it really is the best drill ever in valuing your words.
The Trinity Mirror way of looking at it is that we look at news brands. When I restructured the southeast, when I moved from Wales last year, all the editors are called the ‘brand editors’ and the strategy is that you grow the key brands. That is all down to what Hannah [Walker] talked about because we need to engage the audience. This is not something that we are doing that is trailblazing; we are following our audience. The disruption to our industry has happened because our audience is digesting news elsewhere. What we are trying to do, albeit belatedly in some cases, is follow that audience and engage with them and that is really important.
The challenge is that increasingly our readers are brand-blind. They do not really mind where they get their news from and so it is our duty to tell the most important stories that are very local in the most engaging ways. That is using all of the skills that we have across all of our platforms. Print is very important. Print is extremely challenged but there is a lot of life left in print. We have to be engaging with our audience where they are. We have to be telling the stories that they want to read when they need to read them. We are lucky enough to be able to do that with very multi-skilled teams across the southeast of London and Croydon as well. Newspapers are a part of the picture; it is the news brands that will be delivering and safeguarding local journalism for as long as we need, forever.
Eric Gordon (Editor, Camden New Journal Group): I do not want to appear at the outset as being too contentious, but in view of the fact that [George] Osborne’s appointment was brought up today, what is wrong with the appointment and the newspaper is the fact that it leaves London without a choice. What, in effect, we will have is a monopoly form of journalism, which is to be abhorred and not to be in any way applauded. The politics of Mr Osborne are less important than the fact that we will have this monopoly in journalism.
I helped to found the (County New Journal) CNJ in 1982 and so it does go back more than a decade. To look at the decline in journalism, both national and local, you really have to go back to 35 or more years. If you do, you will see that there has been a steady decline in advertising revenue, which has become speeded up in the past five to eight years since the crash of 2007. This has forced companies to either shut titles, to cut staff, to disappear or to indulge in make-believe journalism or make-believe ownership. All of which, if you were to look at newspapers, you will begin to see what I mean.
We founded the CNJ with commonly owned ownership. There are only two such newspapers in the UK. There are, roughly, about 1,500 weekly papers in the UK and there are two out of 1,500, unlike the Continent where you find a higher degree of co-operatives in ownership of companies, including newspapers. There is a really successful one in Berlin. In England, it has been shunned and so we have two in the whole of the UK, the CNJ and the valiant West Highland Free Press, a Scottish paper founded in the 1970s partly by Brian Wilson [former Minister of State and MP for Cunninghame North]. There are only two commonly owned.
Only these two, in fact means that this is something that the Government and local government agencies should look at when they place advertising. I do not believe in any form of state-subsidised control or influence on newspapers, not at all. You can help by placing adverts in such a manner that they go to the best sort of newspapers.
We have this umbilical cord connecting ourselves to our readers so if you look at the CNJ, you can see at a glance that it has reader empowerment. We have four pages of letters. Show me one weekly newspaper in London that has so many letters sent by readers. We circulate 42,000 copies of the newspaper and we have this close living relationship with our readers, which is quite unique but which is what you would expect of a commonly owned company. You would expect no less, in fact.
You can look at a newspaper and judge is really being read, not by journalists who make a living by looking at newspapers, but by readers. Is it really being read by them? You can look at the letters pages and see at a glance whether it is. You do not need to be an expert on journalism to see all of that. As far as the CNJ is concerned, I admire a paper like the South London Press as it used to be. I knew it when it had a circulation of 30,000-odd. What you find now with London weeklies is that their circulations have plummeted to, really, a few thousand.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): If I can interrupt you and bring Angela in, then Laura [Davison] and Shaun [Bailey AM] wanted to ask follow-ups. There should be an opportunity to come in a bit later, but we are keen to get the views from the whole panel. Given the number of people, if people can be quite concise and we will try to be concise with our questioning as well.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): OK. It is important to diagnose the problem very clearly and people tend not to look at it in an international perspective.
If you look at the American local press, the British local press and the Irish local press, they have common problems in that they were all overleveraged at the end of the 1990s and ended up, just at the moment when everything began to plummet, with huge debts. They were overleveraged with huge debts because they were making so much money. Even though their circulations were dropping, they still had a monopoly of local advertising and were making huge amounts of money. This constant buying and selling meant that the debts went up. Then along came the internet and Google in particular. Google is able to target advertising to individuals so that the advertising, the funding base for the local press, just plummeted.
The problem with a lot of our press in this country is that it is owned by big chains who are mainly responsible to their shareholders. We have a situation where the press made decisions that were all about keeping their profit margins up. That meant that the only way they could do that was to sack staff. That meant that the quality began to plummet and it was not terribly good. I would say that it was not as good as perhaps other places in the world, even at that point. Newspapers are very expensive things to produce because they depend on human beings, who need to eat and who need somewhere to live. Rather like the National Health Service, producing a news service is an extremely expensive enterprise if you are going to do it properly. The way forward, unfortunately, for the big chains has been to cut, cut, cut, so that we end up with chains across south London with practically no journalists. I am sure that Laura [Davison] will be picking this up. If you start reducing the quality of your product, you will lose your audience. If you lose your audience, you fall or go into an immediate death spiral.
There is no way, even with the best will in the world, that you are going to be able to put that back with digital because we know that digital is simply not delivering in terms of income. Most organisations that have both digital and print are completely dependent on their print product to pay for their digital product. Digital product may bring in lots of clicks but, as we are beginning to understand as with a lot of stuff in the press at the moment about programmatic advertising, advertising online is basically a way of creaming off profit and sending it to Google, Facebook and the other platforms.
The news industry has totally failed as an industry to find a new revenue stream. This is not a failure of journalism, which it is often described as being. It is a business failure. It is a failure of technology. Yes, there probably are ways of solving it, but we are nowhere near finding them.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): That was helpful. I have a huge number of people who have indicated they want to come in and two Assembly Members who have indicated they want to ask questions. It is partly in response to your comments, Angela [Phillips], which is helpful to prompt the debate.
We have Laura [Davison], Hannah [Walker], Martin [Hoscik] and Ceri [Gould] who have indicated and my colleagues Shaun [Bailey AM] and Joanne [McCartney AM]. Was there anything that you wanted to ask specifically on points that had come up so far?
Shaun Bailey AM: I just wanted to ask something about brand and how you monetise that brand and also to your point about failure. I am a youth worker. I work with young people. I do not think that they even know about newspapers in the way that maybe slightly older people do. Is there a connection there? Is there a connection between how you build the brand, monetise the brand and inform them about papers? My generation and certainly Generation Y will not pay for anything online. We do not pay for things online. If it is online, we expect it to be free.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): In other places in the world, they are beginning to do so. We just give up, we give up. We do not look anywhere else. We are almost the least likely to pay for news online, but in other countries they do.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Shall we take my two colleagues because Jo wanted to make a point and then Caroline [Russell AM]? Why do we not take these three points and then people can address them all.
Joanne McCartney AM: Yes, I wanted to go back to coverage in London because we have seen the number of titles go down but, also, circulation has reduced. I know that in my local area, for example, some postcodes no longer get their local paper delivered. I moved house last year from one postcode where I did not get it delivered to one where I now get my local news. Is that advertiser-driven? Is it the case that there are parts of London even where there is a paper in the borough that certain communities will just not get a local paper? Is it directly to do with postcodes so that some communities may not get any paper?
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): Yes. Angela [Phillips] has described very clearly an industry that has been totally disrupted and it has been disrupted by the audience moving and digesting news in a different way. However, unlike Angela, who foresees a doomsday scenario where there is no answer, the Trinity Mirror approach is different to that. We believe in growth. Our strategy is to grow our audience online and to couple that very successful audience growth online to match that with our digital revenue so that we reach a point where the digital revenue outweighs the print decline.
If we simply talk about newspapers, we will be talking about a permanent decline. Shaun [Bailey AM], if we are talking about your question about engaging the next generation, my children, for example, are on tablets; they are digital natives. We need to be preparing our news brands to be essential reading for the people who are now on their phones. We cannot survive just on the print brands. It is a disrupted industry, as Angela described.
In terms of audience, though, the picture is actually very very rosy. In terms of audience for the Croydon Advertiser and for the Get West London titles, which are in Uxbridge, Ealing and Fulham, we have an audience now that we have not had since the early 1970s. This is not a time for total handwringing. I would be very combative to anyone who would suggest that that is built upon poor journalism or a standard of journalism that is below par.
The Croydon Advertiser, for example, if we do a snapshot of that, it excelled during the recent tram disaster coverage and it was able to do so because we had moved the newsroom so that it was digital first. On the day that that happened, we published 47 stories. We were on Facebook. Our Facebook likes increased on that day by 1,700. In terms of engaging people and being relevant and local and essential, which is what our growth is based on, it is an eloquent answer. We published 130 stories on it that week. The key thing that sets us apart is that we do not then go away and so we are still there. We were invited to the funerals. No other big media was. There was the day of Trump’s [Donald Trump, President of the United States] inauguration and very few other media were interested. From the beginning we started at 6.00am and we went on through the night. Our growth is based on that type of journalism. Nothing grows our audience stronger than relevant news done brilliantly and delivered to readers where they now expect it. That is not, I am afraid, waiting until the Croydon Advertiser comes out on a Thursday. Our coverage in print was brilliant, but it was all fed by everything we had done from the moment we heard of that terrible event.
It is not a gloomy story. We are back in the audience figures of the 1970s. Our reporters are multi-skilled and are thriving.
Andrew Dismore AM: Can I ask something about advertising?
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Yes, very briefly, please.
Andrew Dismore AM: Yes. Angela [Phillips] made the point about Google advertising and the revenue not going into the newspapers, but when I click onto the online editions of the local newspapers in my area, there is advertising in the print as I turn the pages over. Who gets the money from that advertising? Presumably it stays with the paper, but is that monetised?
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): I think Hannah is wanting to answer this, yes.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): Do you mind if I just answer the question about advertising? I agree with everything that Angela [Phillips] has said and everything that Ceri [Gould] has said. It is not a gloomy picture. At the South London Press, we sit between Eric [Gordon] and Trinity Mirror. Trinity Mirror has fantastic people and resources. I know that they will develop the social media and it will work perfectly.
We are a much smaller business and so I see our local newspaper business pretty much as it started in 1865 by one man. It is a local family newspaper business that needs money. It needs cash flow. It needs money coming in and out. Angela is absolutely correct in that newspapers is a really expensive business. I am now dealing with all of the commercial side. I am not a commercial person. I am editorial. For 14 years I have been in newsrooms and so I am an editorial person, but I understand the business like the back of my hand. Newspapers is a very expensive business and so we deal with print. Paper prices have gone up 8% last year and another 8% after Brexit. Paper has gone up, which has not helped, and distribution. We use Johnston Press’s fantastic, state-of-the-art presses and various distribution companies to get our papers out. Some go door-to-door. We have various ways of distributing our newspapers. Some are free. Some of it is pick up. Some are paid for. There is a mix with the South London Press. We have various models. It is really expensive to do. There is no cheap way. This is a hugely expensive business. It is not that we rely on any natural materials. We are not in a coffee shop where we can use hot water. It is all expensive. We rely on talent. We rely on journalism. We rely on fantastic ad reps. We rely on production people, all the way through to the people putting the bills out in the streets.
Our problem is that, yes, it has moved and - it was our fault - people expect their news for free. My kids, just like Ceri’s [Gould] kids and most probably everybody else’s, are on their tablets and they want it instantly and they want it for free. Then of course we still have a wonderful readership, a fantastic, precious readership. Yes, they are dwindling, but they are still here and they want the papers, as do the advertisers. It is the balance that we have to find between the newsprint and the social media. We have websites and we do Twitter, Facebook, etc, but it is not bringing in the revenue. For us, it is not going to pay for a journalist. It is not going to pay for anyone’s job. I do have figures. The amount that our website raised last year to contribute to our business was minor in comparison to the advertising that we put on the pages but, again, that is very expensive all the way through. We are constantly looking at it and I hear the accountants say, “Is there anybody in your business not contributing to revenue?” In theory, journalists are not going out and selling the revenue but people are not going to buy the newspaper unless there is something really great in it and we are covering local community news.
It is a very expensive business. The answer to why your newspaper probably came through your door a few years ago and perhaps does not come through now when you have moved is because that is the first area you look at. You look at distribution. You look at your print copies. You look at where you are targeting. Then you try to work out where your audience is. For us, supermarket pickups - dare I say; I know it is bread-and- butter housekeeping - are 100% pickup. I know that people love the papers and they will pick it up, but to get people now - and it is really hard and it is a challenge - to pay for it is hard. Our newspaper is only 50 pence. It has not gone up for 10 or 12 years and that is the price, but online people expect it for free and that is our huge challenge. We - personally, people like me - are not going to beat the online. That is up to people like Trinity, who have far better and greater resource than we have. However, in terms of covering local news in London, it is a mixture for us and it is all kinds of models - paid for, pickups, social media, website - but it is the combination.
Yes, Angela [Phillips] is absolutely right. That is where we have gone wrong. We thought there was money in websites and there is not as much to keep our businesses going. Newspapers have built these empires. I inherited a business over a year-and-a-half ago that is quite heavy, really, and is quite an expensive business to run because we have experienced, good people. As Angela said, in London particularly, they are having to live and pay rent and huge mortgages. It does not compare. The salaries are not fantastic salaries but you have to pay a rate so that people can live for the experience they have and the education.
It is a battle. I see it as a small business. We will absolutely survive. We will absolutely get through. I have spoken to a lot of independent groups in the last year, small groups, not Johnston or Trinity or Newsquest, but small independents and there are still quite a few of them in our country. They are all looking at alternative ways of raising revenue because they are absolutely committed that newspapers - newsprint - will get through and serving the community in the way that we do will get through, but we do have to look at alternative ways of raising money and be open-minded about that.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Thank you. That was helpful. Laura has been very patiently waiting. She indicated some time ago and so I am going to ask for a comment from you, Laura, and then apologies to anybody else who has indicated but we will then move on to the next area of questioning. Laura?
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): Thank you. I support a lot of what Hannah [Walker] was saying there. I am pleased to hear her recognising the importance of the journalists and the people who produce the content that the paper can then go out and sell to people. I really welcome the opportunity to speak to the Committee today about these issues. It is very timely for the NUJ because we are
launching a campaign later this week called Local News Matters, which is absolutely focusing on the pressures that the local press is under and the importance of the work that journalists do.
It is disappointing not to see Newsquest here today as part of the panel because this session has arisen specifically out of motions that were passed by the Assembly about cuts to journalism in south London. Just to give the Committee some examples, since the last motion was passed by the Assembly, the picture has got worse in those titles in south London. By the end of this month, because of vacancies on those titles, there will be just seven reporters covering the south London boroughs and that compares to, where the company said, that 12 were needed in the summer of last year [2016] and where a year ago there were 22. There is a really massive dent in the numbers of journalists who will be producing those titles and it is not a sustainable situation.
That picture is replicated in many parts of the capital where we have seen over the last few years that drastic reduction in staff numbers. Your briefing paper talks about there being new titles that have launched and that is true, but I think it masks the real story behind that. There has been a significant reduction in the numbers of journalists who are producing those titles and they are taking on additional kinds of work: the social media work that we have been talking about, using new tools like video, for example, and so on. At the same time, we have seen specialist roles being cut. For example, staff photographers have been reduced and specialist reporting roles have been reduced. Subs have been cut and merged into hubs, which have not proved to have worked, either.
The picture from the journalists’ point of view is really one of being overstretched in, out of goodwill and love of journalism, trying to plug these gaps where they have emerged. We have seen staff who have experienced stress and have been unwell as a result of the pressures that they are facing at work and at the same time, as Hannah [Walker] alluded to, they are struggling because pay is low and the cost of living in the capital are high. As you will know, we have seen journalists who have had to go on strike in order to be able to achieve the London Living Wage in order to be able to try to live and continue to do these very important jobs in the capital.
Just to pick up on the point that Ceri [Gould] was making about brands, the brands do not exist in isolation. They exist because of the people on the ground whom produce the material. There is a risk that if you aggressively cut these roles, you damage the brands and you turn readers away. It is quite difficult then to bring them back. That is something that needs to be considered.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Thank you. That is an area that will probably come up in the next area of questioning, which is over to you, Kemi.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you. I am continuing on the theme of the decline of local newspapers. The questions I have are related to the consolidation of newspaper ownership, investment and business decisions, which is something that Angela [Phillips] talked about, and then on demand for local news and finally on competition where I want to talk about the distribution issue in London specifically.
My first question is about consolidation of newspaper ownership. National newspapers all seem to be big companies or have very wealthy people supporting them. This is happening regionally. Have there been any advantages that have come out it - economies of skill - where there has actually been a business benefit to the consolidation for local news, not just in London but elsewhere? Laura?
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): Yes, I am happy to answer that. It is an area of concern because, if you look at what has happened in terms of consolidation, what has happened on the back of that is that we have seen further reductions in staffing numbers.
There has been research carried out in the last year or so which has looked at choice and plurality across the country for readers and, in London specifically, of the 32 boroughs that there are served by local newspapers, there are 20 local authority districts with a publisher that has a greater than 70% share of the market and 13 have monopoly publishers and so just one publisher. That is a reduction in choice for readers, which goes to some of the points that we were making at the start of the session.
One of the concerns that we have been raising is the fact that, as it stands, if a company announces that it is closing a title, there is no opportunity for others to come forward and say, “We want to look at this. Can we take this on? Can we look at alternative ways of running it?” The title is shut down and locked away and nobody can access it. One of the things that we have been arguing and campaigning for is for local newspaper titles to be designated as community assets, which would mean there would be time for local communities to do something about that and to try to see if they could come forward with proposals to retain titles and protect them so that there are not these losses that we are seeing.
We are really concerned that there is a real risk that there will be other titles that go, which is why this inquiry is so important --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Can I stop you there? That links quite well with the question about demand. In London specifically, a lot of our news is covered in national newspapers. I am on the Police and Crime Committee, for example, and a lot of the news about the police is really about the London police, to the extent that many people think that the Met (Metropolitan Police) is the national police.
Do you feel that the demand for local news in London has dropped? Do people feel that it is already covered elsewhere and so they do not need a separate local newspaper?
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): Working in my newsroom and judging by the number of calls we get from local people wanting to either give us stories or ring up and have an issue with some service or whatever their issue is, no, we are still busy in terms of the number of calls we get. We still have a very loyal readership who keep in regular contact. From a work perspective, no, people still come to us and consider it a joy, actually, to have their story published in the newspaper, whether it is an issue about policing, schools, education. There are a lot of changes in education at the moment and a lot of changes in health. We still run campaigns. We had a mental health campaign just recently. We are still able to bring a lot of people together. In London particularly - only because this is where I live and work - the communities are very tight-knit, very tight-knit and people are very interested in what is happening on their doorsteps, more so now than ever with - as I mentioned - library closures and now changes in education. There is a huge demand for news on people’s doorsteps, absolutely. People are as proactive as ever.
It is a different story for the younger generation. They have a slightly different focus, but I do go into a lot of schools and they are interested as well. They are taught. They have citizenship classes in schools. My kids have citizenship classes. They are taught to play a part in their communities and so they are going to need a voice and their voice is the local newspaper. There is as ever and as much interest --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): That is not for certain parts of London. Do you think that maybe this area has a more close-knit community than other areas, where people are more transient or just feel that they are part of a bigger London?
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): South Londoners are a very special breed. We are very close-knit. South Londoners are particularly vocal. Eric [Gordon] will speak about Camden, which is a different area, but there is definitely a need and an interest in news on people’s doorsteps.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Ceri [Gould], sorry, just before I bring you in, I have some numbers here about newspapers that are launched. I have always lived in south London --
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): Good.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): -- and so I have always seen the South London Press. I wanted to clarify. When I see a new titles being launched, like the Brixton and South London Press, is it a genuine launch with a new audience or is it just a rebrand?
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): That was actually a product. We were part of Trinity and then we were part of Tindle newspapers, a big newspaper group, very successful with a great belief in the hyperlocal. Under Tindle, we launched a Deptford edition, a Brixton edition, a Forest Hill edition, etc. The idea behind that was that we would have more hyperlocal newspapers. They were not all changed pages; we had a few - I think three - changed pages, 1, 2 and 3. That model got a little bit confusing to our readers. It did get confusing and so we had to really refocus it back onto south London.
South London is a hard area, like London generally. It is not like covering one small village. We have about 11 to 13 MPs. We have huge numbers of councillors. We cover big councils like Lambeth and Southwark. It is a vast area to cover and it is very strange. It is not usual. It is not like covering one town. We have to try. Maybe we have spread ourselves too thinly by trying to be all things to all people.
The news is still being covered but it has gone within the paper because we should be covering all of those areas anyway. Brixton is a very important area for us. It is all in there, but it just does not have its own front page.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you. Ceri?
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): Kemi asked about the demand for news and whether there is an appetite there for it. Just to give you an example that backs up the statistics, we launched the Get West London app in October [2016] - please download it - and it was done brilliantly. We launched it and it had 1,000 page views a day and now it has 15,000-plus page views a day. Better than that, really, is that once they have the app on their phone, the local person reads 13 pages every day whereas, if they go onto a desktop, it is one or two. That is the key to us being an essential part of everyone’s everyday lives in those areas. That demonstrates (a) that there is an appetite and (b) that we can be where people need us when they need us.
Also, our best performing stories, and by ‘best-performing’ that means best-read. I hate the use of ‘click’. The click does not mean anything other than someone has read your story. “You will get an extra click.” Do you
mean that you want someone to read another one of the stories that you bothered to write? If we could not use that vocabulary, it would be very helpful and more respectful to my colleagues. That is really important, that uptake, and all of those stories are about crime. We cover that live. There are police appeals for missing boys and then also transport and travel, which is a part of almost everyone’s everyday life in London. Yes, the demand is there and we are serving it.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): I would just say that it is the demand but, also, local newspapers do tell stories and we tell people’s stories, but people have always come to us because they want us to help them in an issue they have. Sometimes it is not a story. In our newsroom, I still get calls from people who just need a bit of help. Whether it is housing. It usually is housing in our area, actually. They just want someone to put in a phone call to the local authority. Local newspapers have always had a great deal of influence by ringing the MP up and saying, “Look, off the record, what do you think about this? Is there anything you can do?” Our job is to get the stories in the newspaper, but there is a greater social role that local newspapers have always had.
Eric Gordon (Editor, Camden New Journal Group): Yes, Hannah is quite right. There is a certain amount of social work, you could almost say, that local newspapers do. Before I go, I did want to emphasise that if you have a commonly-owned newspaper, the rate of profit, which is most important, can be kept low and you can still survive. If you are snapped at the heels by shareholders and so on, they will - understandably - want high dividends, but you can survive with a lower net return. It is quite important that this is seen by your colleagues.
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): It is important that we make the profit, though, because we invest. What Trinity Mirror does is it invests massively in the training of our journalism, whether it is legal training, whether it is Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) training. We have now invested in video, which is where there is more revenue. We do not make profit for profit’s sake. It is invested in our journalists and especially in their skills, yes.
Andrew Dismore AM: Just a quick one to Eric following on from what Laura [Davison] said about assets of community value when a paper closes down. Could one way be taking up the funding model that Eric described for the CNJ? If it is going to be an asset of community value, then presumably it would be taken over on a not-for-profit basis by a local community. Eric’s model would probably suit that.
Eric Gordon (Editor, Camden New Journal Group): Yes, I am quite keen on that. I have a clear belief that it is the reader who should be the owner of the newspaper. I know that it is not looked upon by other people in that manner, but I really do believe that. Yes, I have no objection at all. This particular Berlin daily newspaper has a reader club association, which is what we need and will start on the CNJ so that the readers play a part. They do not edit the paper - that would be impossible - but they play a part in the ethos of the paper.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): That brings us very nicely to my next question about competition and I am going to ask about the distribution of newspapers and what we can do about that specifically for London because that is a monopoly situation at the moment. Why is it that no other people have come in with alternatives? If you feel that Newsquest or whatever is not doing a good enough job and the quality is going down. It is easier than ever to publish online, why have we not seen lots of --
Eric Gordon (Editor, Camden New Journal Group): It is very expensive to start a newspaper.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): The reason I am asking this question is because I come from a slight media background. Just before I was working here, I was part of the management team on The Spectator, looking at the commercial side, not editorial. This is one of the issues that we dealt with a lot and so I have a good --
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): -- we are going to cover blogging with Joanne’s [McCartney AM] question later.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Is that coming in?
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Yes.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Really? OK. I did not think so. I thought that it was slightly different because with blogging I think of niche, singular topics, whereas regional newspapers cover a whole breadth of issues. Do you disagree, Martin?
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): I would think that setting up a wholly online newspaper from scratch without any kind of pedigree would be --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Not from scratch, but why have the journalists who work there not left to start up their own things, not like just random people setting up something?
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): No, but in terms of a brand, you would be coming in from scratch, unless you had a particularly well-known or celebrated local journalist who left in a well-publicised fit of pique and said, “All right, I am going to go off and do my own thing”.
You are already competing for small amounts of advertising revenue. Then what is it different that you are going to add that is going to bring people to you that the established papers either are not already doing or cannot copy quite quickly to kill off your chances? You are looking at establishing a new brand, establishing your credibility, drawing in enough money to pay your upfront costs and sustaining that. It is quite a big ask. Unless you had just won the lottery or you had a deep-pocketed financial backer, I do not see a path for you to do that. The publication you worked for was a historic title.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): I am not saying that it would be easy, but it sounds like from what Laura and saying is so on that, there is a gap somewhere that could be filled.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): Just look internationally again. There are no examples anywhere of newspapers simply springing up online and being financially viable. People are constantly researching this and trying to find those little golden shiny examples of where it has actually been possible.
The reality is that if you have Trinity Mirror behind you, there is a huge business infrastructure, which collects advertising. If you are two or three journalists in a local area who think, “This is a jolly good idea”, you have to build it up from scratch and you have no knowledge at all. What you then have to do is you have to pay for somebody who understands the business and advertising side of it and you will have to pay them at the rate for the job and you will have to have people who are really experienced and then you will have to have coders. By the time you get around to paying for the journalism, how do you do that?
The only way that could be done would be through the ideas that Eric Gordon has come up with. It might be possible for a critical mass of communally run, small, local newspapers to create an infrastructure between them, but that would be very expensive to do and would need completely different expertise. Hannah [Walker] is in a situation where she is a journalist and now she has had to learn how to be a manager. That is what has happened in journalism, by and large, but actually you need completely different skillsets to build something big enough to sustain journalism, which is in itself expensive.
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed do very well. The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed have been set up from nothing and they make an enormous amount of money out of --
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): BuzzFeed is set up entirely as a clickbait organisation. It is not that now, I will give it that, but --
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): BuzzFeed News is, yes.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): -- BuzzFeed started off entirely by gaming Google, by getting everything through gaming Google, through collecting --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Sorry, I know that the others have similar questions on this area and I am not trying to cover it all.
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): Ceri, just in relation to that point, there are examples of alternative types of models that are working. There are different examples in London, but in other cities like Bristol, for example, there are other models that journalists have set up. They are trying to make things work and in some cases are proving quite successful. There is an opportunity for coming out of this inquiry and for the Committee to look at this in more detail and see what can be done to look at some kind of economic stimulus package or some kind of support to organisations that are trying to set up in this way, to support them in doing that and to see what can bloom from that.
Andrew Dismore AM: Can I just say? Eric, you got a loan from the old Greater London Council (GLC), did you not, to get going?
Eric Gordon (Editor, Camden New Journal Group): No, we started with a loan from the Midland Bank, the predecessor of HSBC. It was a loan guaranteed by the Government and that is how we started.
Andrew Dismore AM: Somebody else guaranteed a loan for you?
Eric Gordon (Editor, Camden New Journal Group): Yes, the Government did, in fact, oddly enough, for me.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): I do want to talk about the distribution because that is something that is really important, the relationship between TfL, Metro, the Evening Standard and other newspapers. Firstly, I do not understand why this is the case and whether anyone else can shed some light on how it has come to be. There is stuff that we could probably do about that, but how has it come to be? Anyone? No one knows?
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): It started when the Standard was at a crossroads. It had a decline in leadership, in common with the industry at the time, and they made a very bold and brave move to
turn it free. At the time nobody knew whether it would work or not and it has been phenomenally successful. I do not know the intricacies of how they negotiated the deal, but they took a brave step forward at a time when nobody else was prepared to do it. It has proved very successful. Online they are doing well as well.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): Just in terms of distribution, they are in all the major outlets, not just the train stations. They are in council buildings. I do not know if you have a pile here. Do you have a bucket here?
Shaun Bailey AM: I would not be surprised.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): You might do. Do you not?
Shaun Bailey AM: Do they pay for it?
Female Speaker: I think it is a contract.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Staff bring it in.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): Again, that is an added expense. We, as one example, at the South London Press obviously do not print as many copies as the Evening Standard. If we put a few copies of the South London Press next to the Evening Standard, our papers would disappear in minutes. The Evening Standard has huge bundles, which also disappear like hotcakes, but they have volume. They have this glorious volume. I have no doubt that we would be picked up like hotcakes in the same way.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): You had the Brixton South London Press, just looking at that as an example, by the Brixton Rail Station or something like that. That is something that would --
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): Yes.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): OK. We can probably explore that as a Committee. Something else that has changed is that those newspapers used to come through my front door, the Newsquest ones in particular, and now they do not. They were free and they would just be posted through. I never had to look for the Wimbledon Guardian. It came to me and now it does not. That is another distribution issue that has changed. To me, if the people are not reading them, why has that happened?
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): The question is whether you cut staff or whether you cut the points of distribution. Do you turn it from door-to-door distribution, which is very expensive, to an active pickup one, where you put them in a place and encourage people to pick them up? Then you would save costs and so it is better and in many cases people will change the distribution model rather than go for staff cuts.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): The reason I am asking is because, for me, that is an obvious reason for the decline. If it used to come to me and now I do not know where to get it from --
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Yes, this is the same question that Joanne had earlier.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Joanne has already raised this earlier in the meeting. If we can move on to Andrew’s area --
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Sorry, Joanne. I honestly did not hear that.
Andrew Dismore AM: Yes, I want to talk about journalism, really, rather than business. I suppose they are linked, from what we have heard already. This is probably for Ceri [Gould] and Hannah [Walker] in particular and probably Angela [Phillips]. How has the role of the journalist changed over the years? Are we seeing less investigative journalism and more being fed by press releases from people like me and the other people around this table? Are journalists sufficiently quick to be able to do the job like they used to be able to do?
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): What is brilliant about being a journalist now is that you get so much more information about what your readers are reading, when they are reading it, what they are reading next and what they are sharing. In order for us to decide what we cover and how we cover it, we have so much more information than we ever had before. Eric [Gordon] mentioned that his four pages of letters are one indication that he can see that people are responding and engaging and that is brilliant, but we can see it almost in real time and where people go next. We can also look at a story if it is doing very well and do more on that, whereas perhaps we would not have the information to enable us to make those decisions. We can then add video to it, we can ask questions and we can turn the readers’ responses to those stories into another story so that the engagement is circular. It is a great time to be a journalist and we know more about our readers than ever.
In terms of the press releases, they are less likely to be turned around and put up because we can see that unless there is a great line and unless we work very hard to sell that story to the readers, it is not going to be read. Therefore, when we have fewer resources, we put the resources where the audience is going to be. That does not mean that difficult stories or stories that we think are very important are disregarded. It means we have to work harder. Working online means that we have so many other ways to try to tell that story than 800 words with maybe a chatty headline.
Andrew Dismore AM: Is what you are saying that journalism has become more reactive rather than proactive in going out and hunting for stories? Are people now more desk-based in front of computers rather than going out, pounding the streets and looking for stories like they used to?
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): We have to pick and choose. We do not have as many reporters as we used to have and so it is not as easy to say, “All right, I am just going off to this committee meeting at this council”, or, “I am just going to nip down to see that person”, because the beauty of a local newspaper is that you should be on the ground and you should have an idea. Hopefully, you are also living in your community and so you are picking up stories on the way to work, for example, on the bus journey or whatever.
However, we do have to pick and choose the stories. Investigative journalism, no, we are still able to do that, but we have to be choosier about it and I suppose we discuss it a bit more. As Ceri [Gould] said, we have to make more informed choices about whether it is worth going down that route. I cannot afford to lose a reporter for three days and not be productive. I need some copy because we have deadlines and we need to get papers out.
Yes, they are not out and about as much. I know that when I was a reporter I was out all the time. I hated being in the office all the time. Now it is less out of the office, that is true, but there is still a lot going on in
the evenings that they get to, within reason. Yes, we just pick and choose, I guess. We can still react to the people who ring up and say, “There is something going on here. Can you look into it?”
In terms of press releases, yes, contributed copy is important. It should not be a bad word, ‘contributed’ copy. We welcome reports and stories and colour about people’s lives from our readers. People love to see their stories in the papers. People love to see their pictures in the papers. In terms of press releases that you might write or our councils provide, it is true. A lot of my former wonderful reporters, news editors and deputies are working for local councils in public relations (PR) roles. They are. They have either gone to the nationals or gone into PR and so they know what we are after. It makes that element easier, actually, because they know what we are after.
Yes, we pick and choose. It is a balance. It is making sure that we get the right balance so that we are covering our area, doing the investigations that we need to, scrutinising, whether it is the issues regarding Millwall, etc. We are still looking at all of that and the land around that area. We have not closed any doors. At no point have I had to say, “I am sorry. I cannot do this”.
Andrew Dismore AM: Yes, but the reduction in the number of journalists on local papers presumably has meant that you have to cut your cloth according to your means?
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): We do, yes.
Andrew Dismore AM: That means, presumably, you do not have the same personnel who can go out and cover every council committee meeting or every magistrate’s court hearing?
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): No, we do not. We cover the main council meetings. Yes, in terms of coverage, we cover the main council meetings, the full council meetings, which we get our reporters to cover, but we do not go to all of the council meetings as we used to. I know that there is a project in hand regarding the BBC and funding for reporters covering local councils.
Andrew Dismore AM: We will bring that up later on.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): No, you are right that we are not there all the time. Just like courts, we rely on agency copy. We always have at South London Press since the day I started.
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): The reality is that we have always been selective.
Eric Gordon (Editor, Camden New Journal Group): Journalists cost money. You cannot completely divorce the business side, as one would like to, from the more creative journalistic side. The fact is that over the years there are fewer journalists and therefore, of course, what you call investigative reporting is now much less done than it used to be years ago. There is little doubt about that. There is not much point in being deceptive or pretending that things are not what they are.
Andrew Dismore AM: The other thing I picked up from local journalism - we deal with them all the time and I have been in politics an awful long time now - is the very rapid turnover of journalists now compared to what it used to be. All the time you are having to re-educate people about who is who and what is what. Eric, your paper is an exception to that because your journalistic team has been relatively stable --
Eric Gordon (Editor, Camden New Journal Group): We had better not talk about it here!
Andrew Dismore AM: -- certainly in the time that I have been dealing with the CNJ over the last few years. Certainly if I look at the Newsquest editions in my area, it seems to be a different person virtually every week and sometimes it is a trainee that I am dealing with.
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): Nearly always a trainee, as it stands.
Andrew Dismore AM: I do not know if Laura wants to comment on that as well.
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): Yes. Journalists on those titles and elsewhere are very often voting with their feet and taking jobs that are better paid in other organisations because the pay is very difficult to survive on and the pressures that they are under in terms of their working life are not what they came into journalism for. Feeling hamstrung in terms of being able to cover the public bodies - courts, for example, and so on - is very frustrating. If you are a young person who comes into the job aspiring to be a journalist in all of the ways that it should be, and you find the reality is that your local office has been shut, you are in a centralised hub somewhere miles away from the area that you should be covering and you cannot get out and about, it is not surprising that some people are choosing to leave journalism and go on to other jobs.
That is, again, why this inquiry is so important. How can we change things so that people will be able to stay in these jobs, make it affordable for people to be able to do them and support them with training and development? We should particularly look at the question of diversity because that is something else that has suffered very much in the industry and is something where the Committee and the Mayor could play an important role, trying to encourage people and supporting them into those careers and trying to transform the industry from that point of view.
Andrew Dismore AM: There certainly seem to be a lot of aspiring journalists, judging by the questions I get - and I think we all get - from the City University journalism school after every Assembly meeting asking for interviews and things. I do not know how many of them get a job at the end of it that is worthwhile.
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): They can become burnt out.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): We train journalists at Goldsmiths and we also run our own local news organisation, which is the East London Lines news website. One of the things that I am very conscious of is that practically none of our journalists go to local papers. They would love to do work experience there and they would love to work for local newspapers but they cannot afford to do so. It is not just that; it is also the question of progression. If you want to have young people who are of a really high calibre, who already have a degree and are probably doing a postgraduate or have done a degree with journalism included in it, and you are only offering salaries that make it impossible for them to live independently, the situation is pretty untenable.
I would say pretty much all the students who come through Goldsmiths go into jobs in journalism but they do not go into local news. That is a real problem for news as a whole because news is an ecosystem. The national newspapers need the local newspapers because that is where the stories get dug up. National newspapers do not know what is happening in a planning dispute on a housing estate in Hackney. Why would they know?
You need local people. You need local journalists to be looking for that and seeing where the stories are. If the bottom of the ecosystem is starving, I do not know how we are going to continue in the future. We are going to get people like George Osborne MP, who has never been trained as a journalist and is simply using newspapers for propaganda purposes.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): Basic information: when I started as a journalist, as a trainee, I started on £9,000. I am a Londoner but I started in Birmingham because I could not afford to live in London. I had to move out of London to be able to start my traineeship in Birmingham, where I stayed on £9,000 for a few years and moved on because that is what you do. That is what you would expect young journalists to do after their apprenticeships. They do two years and you kind of expect them to move on. After two or three years, you do. You want them to move on.
In London, it is different. A trainee starts on around £19,000 and then they probably progress to about £23,000 or £23,500. They are coming to work and they are seeing a lot of other wonderful jobs that are available in PR and other organisations. They start to build their lives, their families, and they need to earn more income. I am very lucky because the people at South London Press are fantastic and I have worked with most of them for years. They do it because they are passionate, they love it and they are part of the community. Young journalists you would expect to move on, to be fair, after a couple of years or three years.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): We want to welcome Linda Quinn to the meeting, from the Brixton Bugle. She has been trying very hard to come in on this point for some time.
Linda Quinn (Editor-in-Chief, Brixton Bugle): Thank you. I started in journalism and national papers rather a long time ago now. I probably now do the job of 27 to 30 people and that is before you take into account social media, if you think about the [Association of the] Correctors of the Press, the Society of Lithographic Artists, Designers and Engravers (SLADE), the [Society of] Compositors and so on and so forth. The problem, it seems to me, is that youngsters coming into journalism now find it very difficult to do so. I train local journalists from three colleges around the Brixton area and I am finding that the diversity of people who want to move into journalism is really narrowing. That is partly as a result of what is rather low pay for a professional job in inner London. They find it very difficult to survive on it.
The thing that bothers me most is the real potential for a democratic deficit as a result of a lack of local community reporting. I say that as often the only journalist on a hyperlocal to attend full council meetings of Lambeth Council and indeed often the only person at cabinet meetings and in the planning committee rotation. That is a real problem because if individuals in the community and the electorate do not know what is happening in their name, it is very difficult to form a judgment to hold the council to account or even to know whether one ought to hold the council to account.
One of the real difficulties - and it has been alluded to by others - is the financial model to enable that kind of real local accountability and hyperlocal reporting to happen. Eric [Gordon] and others hit upon the fact that digital on its own will not do it. Nobody has, as yet, found the means to monetise digital alone. With our paper, which has 12,000 circulation, 27,000 Twitter followers and 16,000 on Facebook, the only way we can survive is through sponsorship and advertorial of the printed paper, which still has a deeper reach even though it has less followers than Twitter at the moment. What we are looking at is becoming a community interest company, having our readers as co-operative supporters, as probably the only model that would allow a local paper to survive.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Thank you. We were planning to come on to hyperlocal later but your point about council meetings brings us quite neatly on to Caroline’s area of questioning. If we can move on to that, that would be great. Thank you.
Caroline Russell AM: Definitely. Picking up from where Andrew [Dismore AM] started on that issue of local scrutiny, I absolutely recognise the lack of any journalists in scrutiny meetings on local council meetings. There is just no one there and if the meetings are not live-cast there is no way for the local paper to know what has happened apart from through what they get told by the press office from the local council.
My first question is about boroughs producing their own newspapers and whether that is providing competition for local press. In particular, we have seen the example of Hackney Council, which has a publication that takes in about £150,000 of advertising each year. It is produced fortnightly. Is this issue of local authorities producing their own newspapers a problem for local papers? Martin?
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): It is a problem for people’s understanding, we heard it earlier: people read news relatively passively. They do not sit there always interrogating, “What is the motive for this?” Particularly previously, some of these papers were dressed up as if they were proper newspapers. I say “proper newspapers” because they are not, are they? They are propaganda rags. They are campaigning on the rates, in many cases. This building used to produce one under Ken Livingstone [former Mayor of London]. They are dressed up to look like a newspaper. People will get this through the door. It has a lovely picture people of the council leader and no mention of the opposition.
Often what you see is those tied to councils and to council press offices which repel actual journalists, which is why, of course, Eric Pickles [MP, former Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government] had to change the law to give local bloggers, local campaigners and journalists the absolute right to go in and cover meetings. Think about it. In London in this century, central Government had to change the law to say people have the right to cover things and they have the right to tweet from a meeting. Yet I know local journalists and local activists who were threatened with eviction from council chambers because they were daring to tweet what was going on or daring to record what was going on.
Combine that silencing effect with those very one-sided, glossy newspapers. Indeed these people do not need to make a return at the end of the day because it is coming out of the council’s PR budget and they are often pet projects by the executive. If you combine the effect of the two they are very damaging to democratic accountability because what people is getting is a very sugared, polished council propaganda rag, and local journalists, would-be journalists, bloggers, activists and campaigners being excluded. That produces a very narrow and highly positive spin on what the council is doing and that is very very bad. It is sometimes in councils like yours, where you have very little political opposition in the chamber. The combined effect of all those three things - major long-term local domination by one local party, council rags and aggressive reaction to the media - is very damaging for accountability.
This building is the absolute opposite of that. It is a good chance to say that if any journalist, whatever the scale of the publication that they work for, approaches the Mayor’s press office or if you go to the City Hall website, there is a nice big link to the media. There is not just a catch-all press office. There is a separate contact for every single person who works in the Mayor’s press office and the Assembly’s press office. There are phone numbers and email addresses. You can contact TfL. You can contact the Met. They will always come back to you in a way that some councils will not and even the national Government does not.
In fact, if you are not a recognised newspaper and you contact a lot of central Government departments, as soon as they hear that you are a small publication, an online publication, you can hear their interest in helping you audibly disappearing down the other end of the phone. The exception would be the Department for Transport (DfT), possibly because it knows of me or knows the publication. When I contacted the Cabinet Office last June, they said, “Who are you from? Some bloke from a website?” You can hear the attitude. The Government Press Office is the last place where you do not get put on hold while they speak to a colleague. “There is just some bloke from a website who wants to know” -- “Tell him we cannot help”, or, “Are you an NUJ member?” “I am, actually.” “Could you send us through a copy of your NUJ badge or your press badge before we give you the answer?” You get that. That is right. If you combine those approaches and perceptions of people who are not ‘proper journalists’ with those council newspapers, what you have is an insidious assault on democratic accountability.
Caroline Russell AM: Does anyone else want to come in on that?
Eric Gordon (Editor, Camden New Journal Group): Yes. These publications which are subsidised by local councils in fact you will find if you look at the advertisements they publish that they probably cheaply sold, but of course because of the economy of scale and the fact that it is being subsidised by the ratepayer, you can absorb that low price. That is what about these things because it is taking advertising away from other legitimate newspapers.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): All the public announcements that councils are under an obligation to make, they used to make via local newspapers and pay for them. If all councils just started doing that again rather than, using their own publications to get the material out, they would begin to put a bit of life back into the local press. No matter where any of us stand, any journalist from any part of the spectrum would say so-called newspapers produced by councils are a really bad idea.
Councils should stop being afraid of their critics and be prepared to do what the Americans did 150 years ago. The American press 150 years ago was practically supported by government advertising, cheap transport costs and things like that. This incredibly vibrant press that we all look back at and think was somehow emerged out of capitalism was very heavily subsidised by governments who believed in democracy and thought that plurality was important. They found every possible way they could to support the enterprise of people who wanted to produce news. We do not.
Caroline Russell AM: Even if it was critical of the administration?
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): Exactly, which is what the value-added tax (VAT) subsidy does in this country, but it does not apply to online. There are no subsidies.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): It comes down to trust between politicians and the press. We have quite good relationships, I would like to think, with most of our politicians. It is the ability to have an off-the-record conversation with them but also for them to take the hit when they have done something wrong, not to get on to us and start acting like a spoiled child when they get bad publicity for something. It is quite a brave politician who says, “I am open and I will say sorry when I have to”, because they should, as we do when we get things wrong. It is that relationship of trust. I am grownup enough to know that I can have good relationships with politicians and we can go ahead and do stories. If they do not like something they will say, “Hannah, I did not like that”, but tough. If it is wrong, tell me about it. Otherwise, as long as it is fair and it is balanced, it is right and it is truthful. Politicians are, like a lot of us, quite sensitive and they do not like to be exposed but it is our job to do that.
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): There are stories I hear from local journalists, whether they are on newspapers or online. I have covered three different Mayors, all big, forceful personalities. I have made swinging attacks on all of them. I have never had any kind of backlash from the Mayors or their teams, and yet I hear from people who have run fairly innocuous, mildly critical stories about local councils where they are treated like pariahs. There is a very sensitive group of politicians on some local councils, particularly, ones who are not used to rigorous local political scrutiny or where they have had a long-term domination.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): Yes. They want to control it.
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): They want to control it. As I say, this building has always been very different from that. If you apply for a job as a press officer here and if you look into one of the staff handbooks, there is a line in there that says, “We have a diverse media. It is online, it is radio and it is broadcast, and we expect for you to treat them equally”. That is basically what it boils down to. That is best practice.
One of the things that the Mayor could look at doing is following on from the TfL transparency strategy, which has become a gold standard in local authority transparency, crystallising City Hall’s and the functional bodies’ approach to democratic accountability, and working with London Councils to get that adopted as the standard for London so that whichever local authority you deal with you know you are going to have the same kind of reaction: a positive one.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): If we can draw other people’s comments on what the Mayor should be doing to their final point that would be helpful, but it is a valid point in this context. Caroline, do you want to continue?
Caroline Russell AM: Chair, are you asking me to move on? Yes. We have heard a lot about amateur content appearing in the media and papers using local people to feed them stories. Is this just a cover for there not being enough money to pay journalists? How can we use that kind of citizen journalism to help with that scrutiny? I think it was Newsquest that was inviting readers to send them articles as close to the style of a news story as they possibly could. That seems to be doing journalists out of a job, but also using volunteers unfairly to deliver journalism without being paid. Maybe Laura?
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): Can I come in on that? There has been quite a big focus around this idea of user-generated content as a potential fig leaf or solution for the fact that so many staff have gone from the industry, but actually it is not a solution. Of course there have always been contributions from people, letters, pages and what have you and that is a normal part of things, but in terms of asking people to submit news stories in the way that you describe, it is ludicrous.
We have seen it particularly with photographers. There has been a huge loss of staff photographers across the industry and looking for submitted content to replace that is just not a solution. Often the quality of material that is submitted is not good enough or it still needs to be edited so it is not saving time. In some cases it is generating work for the fewer number of journalists who remain in the offices dealing with it. It seems particularly strange at a time when there is a lot of effort going into trying to build the digital side of things to be dispensing with photographers, when pictures and video are so important to that.
Also, if you are a member of the public and you are being asked to do these things, you are in a very strange position where you might come forward with your material, you submit it for free and then suddenly you are being asked to buy it back again. It is just a ridiculous situation.
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): Caroline, can I come in on that? When I was on my weekly newspaper, The Glamorgan Gazette, in Maesteg, which is where I am from, there was a lovely old man called Vernon who used to drive down in his tiny car every Sunday and bring me a piece of paper that he had written the local news on. That was user-generated content and in no way was that a fig leaf for anything. That was very important. What Vernon said mattered to the people of Maesteg. Laura dismisses it with, “Of course people send in letters. Of course they do that”, but that is user-generated content and that is very important.
In Croydon recently, far from it being something that replaces something else, I brought in letters. I brought in two pages of community news. I brought in local nostalgia. Most of this is submitted by the readers, and I have not stopped doing anything else. It is because this is important to a local newspaper as part of that engagement that Eric [Gordon] was talking about. It is essential. It is core.
The idea that readers can write in a news story is nonsense, in my view. That is a million miles away from user-generated content. If it is properly curated, if it is well used, it is - in my experience - incredibly valuable for readers to develop a sense of place and a sense of ownership, and is crucial to the success of the print titles in particular. It is almost niche to those titles. It does not do that well online but it is something that nourishes the print titles and that is really what we are about: growing an online audience and protecting print as long as possible.
Caroline Russell AM: It is a question of making sure that it is not journalism on the cheap but that it is about a relationship with what someone called the ‘precious readership’. If people are engaged --
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): Yes. It is another investment, it is another way that people can feel that they take ownership of it as part of their community, it is more local faces and, as Ceri said, we have always used --
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): It is nothing new.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): It is nothing new. We have always used unpaid contributors in the regions to write columns. No newspaper is ever going to be able to cover --
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): Politicians.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): It is all the local people. That is not new. It obviously does have to be subbed and edited and we have to carefully watch it for any legal issues and so on, but it is valued and it is very important. We should not be snooty. Sometimes as journalists we can be a bit snooty about copy, but it is part of our readership.
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): It is interesting because it harks back to the point that Andrew [Dismore AM] was making to you about exclusives. The digital revolution has not just changed the business models; it has changed journalism. People no longer expect to be told and to be directed. There is a much more participatory air in everything from papers to broadcasting to online. The
whole model has changed and is changing. We cannot hark back to some sort of model that worked in the 1950s and 1960s. The whole landscape has completely changed.
Caroline Russell AM: We cannot hark back but we do need to make sure there is still scrutiny.
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): We do, but if you target one or two elements we fail to understand just how much everything is changing and the pace of change around us.
Caroline Russell AM: I know that Fiona [Twycross AM] is very keen for me to finish. On the issue of digitisation and how this is changing journalism, does this mean some groups, particularly marginalised - for instance, older people and people with disabilities - can have less online access? That perhaps suggests the importance of maintaining a paper-based model for local papers. Does anyone have anything they want to say about those marginalised groups?
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): It is right that older groups do tend to be among those who are marginalised but low-income younger people are also among those who are digitally excluded. The Mayor has just announced - and some people will be surprised to hear me advocating - a trial of a tablet lending scheme through local libraries targeting specifically older groups and those who are socially disadvantaged in younger age groups. That is the right kind of approach.
People say that older people are more likely, but that is not entirely true. There are people through income levels, education or simply family opportunity who are digitally excluded. You need to be wary of assuming it is just older people who are being done a disservice that way. If you want younger people interested in news and it is the case that they get it online, you need to make sure all young people have the opportunity to go online. Lots of them do not. It is not all skewed towards the older age group.
Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. Anyone else on digital exclusion?
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): You are right in terms of your point about print. It is another example of where there is a unique selling point that newspapers have. It is not under-estimating the importance of print in terms of access. Because we are also seeing, for example, libraries closing, it is more difficult for people to access the digital editions of things. Having that printed product and the opportunity to present the printed product in that way is something that these organisations have as a unique selling point.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): Newspapers are, ironically, particularly important for young people. The reason for this is that they are digitally excluded in a way that we do not really think about very much. Successive research looking at people’s use of news has shown that the more choice available of things to do online, the less likely certain groups of people are to find news at all. Younger people are the least likely to find news. We used to depend on the fact that everybody watched television and therefore they bumped into the news. It was referred to as the ‘trapping effect’ of news. There is absolutely overwhelming evidence that the diversity of opportunities for entertainment online and the lack of any particular one thing that everybody does means that we have a growing group of news-excluded people.
News-excluded is not the same as digitally excluded. These are people whom it does not occur to them to look at news. From my home in Stamford Hill to Dalston, you will probably pass two newsagents if you walk the entire way. We no longer even have the placards that we used to see. You could not have walked through
London 10 or 15 years ago without knowing what the headlines were. It would have been impossible. It is now perfectly possible for groups of news-excluded - and we need to use that term - people to have absolutely no idea what is going on around them. None. We think that social media is doing it for them and indeed I interviewed students who thought, “If anything is really important enough, it is going to come up at the top of YouTube”. Actually, the stuff that is happening around you does not come to you via YouTube, which is why, going back to the Evening Standard, having the Evening Standard on the public transport system, I have seen kids just pick it up and read it for something to do, who would probably, in their daily lives, not encounter news at all. There are now schools projects trying to bring news into schools. Perhaps that is something else that you could be picking up on. I do have an interest here; there is a project called The Student View, which is trying to put journalism into schools through journalism clubs, but I know there are other ways of doing this. I am really interested that you go to visit schools. In Norway, the press organisation regularly goes into all the schools to talk about the importance of journalism, and it is not incidental that --
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): We get such a good reception at schools. There is so much interest. Yes.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): -- Norway has the highest news readership in the world. They still think it is important enough. Now that the rates are going down by a few percentages, they are beginning to go into schools to talk about news. This is something we could be doing.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): Schools want their news in our newspapers. They want it in the newspapers. They do not want it online. They ask for it in the newspapers. They want to see it in the Friday or the Tuesday edition.
Apologies, but I will just say one thing. We talk about how we gather news and we want to do this and we want to do that, and we need to keep going, but it is a business as well. The most important thing is we do need to make money because we do need to pay people to provide this vital service, and it is a public service. It is a public service to local people to keep them informed and, hopefully, independently informed so they can make up their own minds, but it has to make money. That is where we are all struggling: revenue. It is no good without that.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Thank you. Before we move on to Jo [McCartney AM], very quickly Kemi had a question on diversity, which is what Laura [Davison] said earlier and which it would be important to cover.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): Yes, I did. It was about the figures you quoted for the newspaper industry being 94% white. I seem to remember you asking if the Mayor could do something about getting more ethnic minority students and presumably a more diverse population into journalism schools. Is that what you were asking?
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): One suggestion that we were putting forward in the paper that we chaired with the committee was about funding and championing bursaries to help people access the industry, and to grow that so-needed diversity. In the NUJ we have a mechanism by which we support journalists into the industry and it would be something that would be very constructive for the Committee to look at and see if that is something that the Mayor could look at taking forward to help.
Kemi Badenoch AM (Deputy Chair): That is a good idea. I would not, on the other hand, support getting more people into journalism schools if they were not going to get the jobs afterwards and then they incur the
debt. That is what I thought you were proposing, but if it is to support people who are starting off in the industry, then that is a good idea.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Thank you. We will move on to Jo. Over to you, Joanne.
Joanne McCartney AM: I want to ask about the future, and particularly Michael and the BBC scheme, but then come to the hyperlocal and blogging.
Michael, if I can start with you, the BBC is investing in local journalism and you have an £8 million scheme where you are going to put local reporters across the country, 12 in London, and their aim is to generate local news stories that then other publications and media can use free of charge. On the face of it that looks like a really good scheme and really welcome, but I am just wondering if there are some unintended consequences around that.
I would like to ask you a little bit about the purposes behind your scheme. One of the main ones is that we have heard about the cuts to local newspapers today. Will this scheme not exacerbate that? If you are creating local content, why does Hannah [Walker] need to employ all the journalists she has, for example, if she can get news directly from you?
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): If you look at the context of how that came about, it was at a national level, at a Government level, really, with concerns about some of the things you have been talking about - a local democracy deficit, and particularly about whether council meetings were being covered, that sort of thing - and came out of concerns that were expressed to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in its consultations about the charter renewal.
If I can go into some detail of how the scheme works, there is funding for 150 reporters around the country, and there is quite a tight specific remit on how these reporters will work. They will be employed by the newspapers, and not by us. We are funding them. There is quite a strict agreement that is just about sorted now, is it not? There has been quite a long process about agreement on how they will work, but in the end they will be employed by the individual newspaper groups, who will win the contracts, a bit like how we work with independent companies in making television now. It is not dissimilar in that sort of way. There will be very specific rules concerning councils and one or two other public institutions. They will supply material that will be available not just to the individual newspaper groups but to the BBC and in fact to any other relevant and approved users. It is a way of trying to help, because I do not think the BBC is the solution to lots of the issues that we have been talking about today, but it was a way of trying to help the industry as a whole address some of the concerns there were about a local democracy deficit.
Joanne McCartney AM: Is it fair to say that, therefore, you are subsidising the costs of local newspapers?
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): We recruit them alongside the BBC. They are with us for two years and so it is like recruiting a reporter. They are with us for two years. There is a bundle of 12 of them in London and you basically bid for the contracts. We could bid for a contract. We could have two or three reporters, and their job will be to scrutinise the councils. That is their only job. I believe it is not to do all the human interest stories.
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): Absolutely not.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): It is purely local --
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): Yes. There is also a clause in the agreement that the companies are not allowed to remove someone from a post for that to be replaced. I cannot go into a lot of the detail now until we have agreed it, but there are some quite strict criteria about how this is going to work.
Joanne McCartney AM: Will your 12 in London cover all of London? If Hannah [Walker] employs one, is your reporter only going to cover the boroughs that she particularly covers?
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): No. There is a bidding process for the newspaper industry and other approved bidders to bid for the contracts. Clearly, you could have an infinite number of journalists in London to try to tackle this, as you could in much of the rest of the country. We will have to come up with a system that as fairly as possible distributes some around London.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): I would say it is embellishing what we do. Our reporters do not get around to all the meetings, so they would do all the other --
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): Hundreds of companies bid.
Joanne McCartney AM: What salary will they be on? Will the terms and conditions be akin to or will they be like super-reporters? They will be the ones that are paid a better wage?
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): There is an agreement with the newspaper industry. Off the top of my head, it is £24,000 and £26,000 in London, if I remember rightly, something like that. I would have to check back on the precise amount, but it is at about that sort of level.
Joanne McCartney AM: I am going to open it up because people might have some comments. Laura?
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): Yes. Thank you for your questions.
It is very interesting to hear the responses on this particular scheme. The NUJ members who work on both the newspaper side of things and in the BBC have serious concerns about this scheme and do not think it will address the problem that has been identified, which is this question of the democratic deficit. You hit the nail on the head with the questions that you were asking because there is not any guarantee and there is not any control that the BBC can have over whether or not, if people are appointed into these positions, the newspaper organisations will not see that as a reason or an opportunity to further cut their own staff. There have certainly been concerns raised to deal with the low-key trials that there have been about the fact that work that would have been done by specific reporters at a specific site is being covered by somebody else.
I know that people are making reassuring noises around the fact that people will not be diverted into doing other things if they take on these roles, but we have seen this a lot that there is ‘mission creep’ in terms of particular roles that people have. Where there are gaps emerging, where there is short staffing, people are often asked, “Can you just do this? Can you just cover this?” There is a danger that people will be drawn into that situation and would not be able to concentrate on these specific roles.
Joanne McCartney AM: How are you going to monitor it? I suppose that is my third question.
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): I cannot and the BBC cannot tell Trinity Mirror or anyone else how many people they should employ. If we had come up with a scheme where there were those sorts of concerns, there would be rightly some concern about, “What is the BBC doing meddling in other people’s businesses in this sort of way?”
The way that the contracts are drawn up and the specific roles are very clear about what these people will be doing. We will be monitoring those contracts in the exact same way we would if we had an independent contract with a TV company to make sure that those criteria are met, and there will be positions in place that if it is being abused, the contract will end. I genuinely think this is an additional investment for the whole industry to tackle particular areas where there has been concern that the coverage is no longer there or has never been there to a certain extent.
In London, I run a political team of essentially three reporting staff, which gives quite a lot of coverage to obviously what goes on in this building, but those three staff are also supposed to do all of the MPs in London and the particular London issues around MPs, long before you ever get to the 32 boroughs. From my point of view, we are going to get a lot of good, new material that will be extremely useful to us. That will be extremely useful to my colleagues in the local papers, with whom, to be absolutely frank, we do not really compete at that level in that sort of way. This scheme will provide a lot more journalism, a lot more scrutiny and a lot more content, to be honest.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): The stories that they will be covering are just local authorities, so they do not even do the follow-ups to the local authority stories. They go to a meeting, and they are making cuts to social care, and it outrages our readers. It is up to our reporters, other reporters, to do the follow-ups and do the interviews. I do not think there are any negatives, because they are doing something that we are not really doing properly at the moment. If I can have two or three more people going up to Lambeth, Southwark, Lewisham, etc, covering that, it gives my other reporters a chance to do the work that they are currently doing now, but - better - with the relief that they are not torn to have to go to a meeting or do something they cannot do at the moment.
Joanne McCartney AM: Martin, you are itching to get in.
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): It is a positive. I do share some of the concerns. The onus ultimately comes down to the BBC managing the contracts and scrutinising them properly. That seems slightly administratively heavy and you might think that it would be better for the BBC to employ people and then second them, and if they were being asked to do jobs that they did not like, they could phone up the BBC or human resources (HR) and say, “I am being asked to do stories that I am not supposed to do”. Personally, I think that might have been a better approach, but so long as the safeguards are in place, as long as they are managed properly, it has the potential to do firstly what the BBC is really there for, which is to help, under its own brand and others, to fill in the gaps that the commercial sector cannot do, but also to do what Michael’s [MacFarlane] team does on BBC Radio and TV, which is to bring in extra voices.
I benefit from that: I go on BBC Radio, I go on Sunday Politics London, I go on BBC TV. They are very good at BBC London at bringing other people from outside the organisation in and giving them access to their viewers or their listeners and giving them a chance to bring their extra scrutiny or their different takes on things. If this brings that down to borough level, then that is a win for everybody. It all hinges on how well the BBC manages the contracts, and that is going to be the key part.
That is why I wonder whether it might have been better if they had adopted the approach of the BBC employs 12 journalists and seconds them to local papers, and then the protection is they are BBC employees and there are stricter controls on what people can do because their line manager is outside. There are obviously practical problems if you have a line manager who is outside the organisation you are working in. The danger sometimes is, particularly in the public sector, you have a contract that is there. The contract has been breached. We should pull it. What often happens is people do not want the headline that it has failed. We all get this as journalists. There is a private conversation, and people agree not to do things, but actually the creep becomes embedded, and that is the danger.
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): The points that Martin is making are really important because this is licence fee-payers’ money and it is effectively passing from licence fee- payers into private organisations, so the questions of transparency and how that money will be used are very important questions. There needs to be absolute scrutiny of that.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): I have three questions. We know that most of the local press are fairly neutral in their coverage and therefore the BBC requirement for balance is not something they are going to find too much of a problem. I am assuming the Evening Standard is not one of the organisations that is able to bid for these reporters and, if it is, are there special controls being put in place? For a start, is the Evening Standard going to be able to bid?
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): I am not certain we are at a point where we have decided who is a qualifying organisation or not.
Joanne McCartney AM: Is neutrality built in?
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): Yes, the neutrality of the people and the way that they work is built in, but it is an understanding that in the end these people will be supplying content. Hannah [Walker] made the point that in the end the paper’s journalists will still be following up stories, will still be doing angles and will still be developing stories in the way that works for their readers and their paper. It is much more about things just being covered. Yes, there will be strict interpretation of how that will work and those criteria will be published. They will be in the public domain.
In fact, I was in a union meeting yesterday with Laura’s [Davison] colleagues where we were running through the process as at the point we are at now and so the transparency levels will be very open.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): The other question was whether people who are currently doing the political beat on a newspaper will be able to apply for these positions.
Hannah Walker (London Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, London Weekly News): They are two-year contracts. They are two-year contracts and so they just run and they expire after two years.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): We are looking at a situation where, if somebody is currently doing the political coverage on a newspaper that gets in one of these BBC- funded reporters, the person who is currently doing the job as a political reporter will no longer be able to do that because they would be doubling up.
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): Yes, but there is a specific clause about if a person comes from a specific position in the newspapers now that that has to be replaced.
The job of a political reporter on a local newspaper has a pretty wide remit. The limitations around what this person would be expected to do are not going to be a substitute in that way.
Joanne McCartney AM: You are having discussions with the NUJ about how it will work?
Michael MacFarlane (Head of BBC London & BBC South East): Yes.
Joanne McCartney AM: Yes. That is helpful. Can I turn then to Martin and Linda [Quinn] about the role of the hyperlocals, in terms of Linda, but also blogs? Martin, in terms of news coverage, in the future, do you see yours as being a model that is going to work? Is it going to be sustainable? Can you make a living at it?
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): There is an idea out there that somehow sites like mine can replace local newspapers, and that is not possible. It is not desirable, either. Traditional papers with longstanding connections to areas are essential, and I do not think that the purely online publications that we produce should be seeking to replace them. In any event, all we would be doing is bringing the same structural problems that they have in terms of monetising the content, producing the content and just transporting it online, where it is already harder to make money anyway.
What you can provide is a different kind of journalism and a different kind of coverage and maybe, in my case, a form of topic specialism that you can explore at a different length and in a different way than maybe you can do in a newspaper. A lot of the stories that I cover are not the same kind of stories that the Standard or the local papers would cover, or even London Live. Sometimes Michael’s [MacFarlane] team picks up stories that I have run and sometimes I work in conjunction with people like Tim at the BBC and others, but the catalyst for them maybe comes from a different take from where the BBC or ITV or the Standard would start from. They should be seen as a complementary form of outlet and form of journalism, rather than as a replacement.
In terms of money, it is very difficult to make money as a journalist. Laura [Davison] probably has the figures, but I have read - it was in the Press Gazette - that a third of people who bill themselves as journalists are on some form of state benefit. These are not high-income roles, particularly for freelancers. The idea that people sometimes have is, “I could give up my job and go and write about something that I care about and the money will come rolling in”. That is fantasy land. That does not work. It is a lot of work. It is not chucking out 400 words a day and going off and playing with your PlayStation. It is a big job and you need to be persistent.
There is also a credibility issue. We were talking about earlier the attitudes to press officers and politicians and other public bodies. You will not always, although you feel that you should, get the access that you want. You will not always get treated the way that you want. Particularly when you are dealing with local councils, particularly those that are not as welcoming to scrutiny, newspapers, print newspapers, with a long pedigree and a legal team, will be much more able in many cases to persist and to push and assert their rights, than some guy working on their own. People will not always be sure how far can I push this before they simply say, “Go away”, or, “You cannot come into the meeting”.
I do not have that problem covering City Hall and I do not have that problem covering the Mayor, but I recognise also that I am in a different place from a lot of other local publications. If you spoke to some of them about the difficulty they have trying to get into some London boroughs or to get taken seriously or even to just be treated with respect as individuals, rather than being bullied or shouted down or berated for running
perfectly fair stories, you do not have to delve too deep on Twitter to find individual councillors gunning after local journalists or local campaign groups, and these things turn very ugly. They would not do it with a journalist who works for one of the papers represented here, but they will do it online. I do know people who have stepped back from doing some of that work because of the reaction they have had.
Politics can sometimes be very brutal and partisan. You guys are obviously elected politicians; you understand that. If you are a small publisher or an individual journalist or somebody who would like to be a journalist and you find yourself in the firing line from half a dozen local councils because you have dared to write something critical about a planning decision, it can be very off-putting and not everybody is robust enough to just push back. Sit alongside, replace, absolutely not, and in terms of funding, most people probably do something else. I do content writing and copywriting and have other publications. Making enough money from a single publication to pay all your bills and to feed yourself and to pay for a mortgage: some people can do it, but it is very rare.
Joanne McCartney AM: Linda, you really are hyperlocal, are you not? You were talking about your circulation figures earlier. What role do you see that you play that is different from the others?
Linda Quinn (Editor-in-Chief, Brixton Bugle): We are hyperlocal in the sense that we see Brixton as our catchment area, although we have a very loose definition these days of where Brixton begins and ends. That is partly in response to our readers, who are asking us to cover things that are as far away as Clapham or Tulse Hill, within the actual borough. Where Martin [Hoscik] and I differ is we do have a publication and, as I said, the circulation is 12,000. They go within a week. We could do many more, but it is the financial model that is our problem. We are also almost a traditional local paper in the sense of what we cover. We have the same pace as a local paper; we have sports, we have news features and so on and so forth. Where we are different is that we do drill down to really hyperlocal, particularly when we are looking for Brixton heroes, local stories, but we still look for those big issues that we feel should concern the general population: the school pollution along the high streets was our story last time; library closures; planning assents. We are no different in some senses from a local paper, but the difference is we do not have a financial model that would sustain paid employees in the same way.
Joanne McCartney AM: It is really you, is it? It is not sustainable for anything other than a --
Linda Quinn (Editor-in-Chief, Brixton Bugle): It is sustainable in the sense that it is a community paper staffed by volunteers, but all the volunteers are journalists or trainee journalists who are freelance or who are doing it in semi-retirement as a hobby. We have aspirations to move that model so that we can take on youngsters on living wage and pay them, and I think we could do that by a combination of advertising sponsorship - some of our biggest advertisers do it as a corporate social responsibility - and community input. For instance, the Business Improvement District (BID) is our biggest advertiser and schools because they want to relate to parents in terms of what has changed and whether they are good schools or not. There is a way to do it, but it cannot be advertising alone. We have crowdfunded. We crowdfunded for a news reporter, and that worked, but that is time-limited. One could do that for a revamp of the website but not for long-term employment.
The other model we are looking at with community and business groups in the area is whether we could have a subscription co-operative model that would then enable us to employ young journalists and make it a viable concern. That is maybe the slight difference, and it cannot be done online.
Joanne McCartney AM: It is a community interest company that you are thinking of?
Linda Quinn (Editor-in-Chief, Brixton Bugle): Yes.
Joanne McCartney AM: Are you aware of that happening anywhere else at the moment?
Linda Quinn (Editor-in-Chief, Brixton Bugle): Bristol.
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): We have been focusing of course on effectively print or digital, written journalism, but the other thing that is happening in London is community radio stations. I contribute to one. I cannot talk about the business model because I am not involved in the management, but in Wandsworth we have Wandsworth Radio, which was set up by a journalist and produces original news bulletins and carries out interviews. The local MP and Assembly Member (AM) [Leonie] Cooper, who is the local AM, comes in and she and I had been inside the studio doing political discussion programmes during the mayoral election. The local MP, Sadiq’s [Khan, Mayor of London] successor down in Tooting, will phone in. There are other forms of journalism emerging as those costs come down too but, in all of them, while the costs are coming down, making the money in order to cover the cost is a lot of hard work for people.
There is a big difference - and this is the bit that is really crucial for people to understand and what Eric [Gordon] was saying - between making enough money to cover your costs because you are not having to deliver for shareholders, which is a perfectly fine approach, and a different thing if you are needing to make money for a parent company or a shareholder. The business models are different, and they are both perfectly valid forms of ownership, but the idea of some friends setting up a radio station or a local news site is very different from something that has to create long-term employment and deliver on contracted advertising commitments. They are different things, and too often people think you can just do these things online and it is cheap and the money will come in. They are not the same; they are not replacements for each other.
An example of that is if you see London Live, which has had to cut its commitment to original journalism and its original content virtually every year since it got its licence. If you look back at the original conditions under which it was granted its licence from Ofcom, the output and the commitments have been cut so many times that they do not really bear any relation to the station. Of course, it has found competing with ITV London and BBC London is much harder than saying, “We will do it without having all the historic costs that come with it”. It is much more difficult to make money from this content than people think.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Thank you very much. We are drawing to the end. Thank you very much to everybody for bearing with us, but I would like to pass on to Shaun.
Shaun Bailey AM: I will try to be brief, Chair.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): That would be helpful. Thank you. Thanks for bearing with us to the end.
Shaun Bailey AM: Given the dominance of Google and Facebook with advertising, is there any way that they could be supporting a revenue of local newspapers? There is a report by the Media Standards Trust in [the United States of] America that looked at providing public funds for journalism that did work around public engagement. We have talked briefly about this democratic deficit and how the BBC is involved in helping that. Ultimately, that is public funds. Is there some way we could be speaking to the likes of Google to help with that?
Martin Hoscik (Journalist and commentator, MayorWatch): People have talked about how many Facebook likes they get. One of the big problems - I wanted to say this earlier - is that in a rush to move online without really knowing what online meant, people were happy to subsume their brands on to Facebook and all that happened was that they made Mark Zuckerberg [Chief Executive Officer, Facebook] even richer. They have lost control of their brands because it has now just become a page within Facebook. If you want to make money online, you need to assume people like Facebook. You need to say, “We might post a link to what we have written”, but posting whole articles or entire content or spending money creating content that you then give away to Facebook’s readers so that Facebook can sell more advertising, personally, I find that a nonsense of a business model.
I have a Facebook page. I do nothing to promote it. It is just there to stop anybody else taking the site name because it is a registered trademark and the site automatically posts a link to everything that goes up and that is all that happens. I do not even know how many followers it gets me. It could be one or 60. I really could not care because I have no interest in being on Facebook.
These companies have for a long time masqueraded as journalism’s friends: “We will help you get your content out there”. Actually, they are not journalism’s friends. Last week we had Google, which owns YouTube, and its reaction when it was shown some of the extremist content that was online. It does not want to take any responsibility for the content that is on its platform.
It is different for Michael [MacFarlane] and the BBC because they are publicly funded. They have an obligation to get their content out as widely as possible and so they are platform-neutral and it is different for them. If you are trying to make money from your content, effectively giving it away to Facebook’s readers is the wrong approach. They are not going to want to fund content that they do not get to benefit from the audience of. The idea that they are going to generously give 0.5% or 1% of their advertising revenue to local media in the UK is not going to happen, but also the media needs to become much more sceptical about what the endgame for them is. We have seen the fake news content in America with [Donald] Trump [President of the United States], but Facebook does not accept responsibility for stuff that is posted on there. Whether you are an extremist Trump fan or whether you are an extremist Jeremy Corbyn [Leader, Labour Party] supporter, ithey are happy to take whatever content brings you to their site but a lot of that stuff is intellectually pretty shaky. It would not make it into the pages of most newspapers or reputable news sites. People need to stop treating those companies as the solution to problems with the trade.
Ceri Gould (Editor-in-Chief, Trinity Mirror): We have a working relationship, as anyone as a credible modern journalist has, with Facebook and Google and there is no doubt that they have been hoovering up all the digital revenue that is out there without investing in the expensive practice that is journalism. We would be very keen to rebalance our relationship with them but, that said, they are not the only ones in the marketplace. The traditional pillars that local newspapers used to cleave to for their revenue - property - has gone to Rightmove, motors has gone to Auto Trader and 95% of our jobs revenue has gone to a local jobs board. Google and Facebook, yes, but in terms of where we used to get our revenue from advertising, that has also been disrupted with these very big players in the market.
Professor Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths College, University of London): Again, that is an opportunity completely missed by the British media organisations. In Norway, the biggest publisher also runs the advertising platforms, which is why they are not in quite so much trouble as they are here.
Having said that, one of the most interesting things that have happened over the last week or two weeks is that the big brand advertisers are beginning to withdraw from Google mainly because they do not understand
how programmatic advertising works. They went in because they did not understand how programmatic advertising works and they are running scared because they do not understand how programmatic advertising works. What will happen is that as they come out, Google is going to have to think about its own revenue and how it is going to change things. That might turn out to be quite good for publishers because if you are advertising via a publisher, you know where your advertising is, and in the current climate we might see two things happening. We might see a shift back to what advertisers see as being reliable advertising, and we might also see Google having to raise the cost of advertising, which, ironically, might be a good thing. At the moment, one of the reasons why the news media has lost out so badly is that the cost of advertising through Google is so cheap. As Google starts to lose the big players, it is not going to be able to clean up its act just by flicking a few switches. It is a much bigger issue than that because of the whole way in which programmatic actually works.
I hope that we might find ourselves in a situation where some of that advertising starts coming back but frankly - and it is not something that we can do here - the big platforms should, as they have been asked to do in France, give money back to a pool. In France what they have done is they are collecting money from Google and Facebook and they are using it as an innovation fund, which is sort of helpful. There is one news website that has started in France that is successful. Innovation is --
Shaun Bailey AM: Chair, in the interests of time I am going to jump straight to my last question. Is there anything in particular you think the Mayor could be doing to support the development and survival of local media? Is there something that you are aware of that the Mayor from this board can do to help that situation?
Laura Davison (National Organiser, National Union of Journalists): Yes. I flagged at the start of the session that the NUJ has a week of action around local press coming up from the end of this week. It would be great to have the Mayor’s support in that and to use that as a real platform for trying to engage on some of these issues, and to talk to organisations about proper pay and staffing levels in the capital’s newspaper offices.
There is a huge opportunity, partly to what Angela [Phillips] was saying, to really focus on quality journalism and to use that to combat the so-called fake news phenomena by having properly staffed, properly trained journalists who are producing relevant, local content for their communities and really standing up for their communities. There is a massive opportunity there, and it would be fantastic to have the Mayor’s support in doing some of that. We have some other practical suggestions that we can share with the Committee around diversity, as we talked about. Those are some of the other things that we could take forward from today.
Shaun Bailey AM: If you have something in detail, I am sure the Chair would love some written content.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): If you send it in to Matt [Bailey, Assistant Scrutiny Manager, Greater London Authority], it would be really helpful, please.
Shaun Bailey AM: I am going to stop there, Chair.
Fiona Twycross AM (Chair): Thank you. If anybody has any burning issues that have not come up through the discussion, please do send them in and we will get them circulated around Committee members.
Bearing in mind that we have run over time, I would like to now thank guests for their contribution. I would stress we do not normally have quite so many people on a panel, but it was really helpful today to have such a wide range of views on an issue. It was pointed out by Laura [Davison] at the beginning that this is something
that the whole Assembly has debated and had a consensus around our concerns around the future of local media at our Plenary Sessions on at least two occasions when I have been here. It is something we are concerned about and today’s discussion has given us a huge amount to think about.