WEDNESDAY 4 JULY

______

Present

Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury, B Corbett of Castle Vale, L Eccles of Moulton, B Fowler, L (Chairman) Hastings of Scarisbrick, L Howe of Idlicote, B Inglewood, L Maxton, L McIntosh of Hudnall, B Thornton, B ______

Witnesses: Mr Mark Wood, Chief Executive, ITN and Mr Jonathan Munro, Deputy

Editor, ITV News and Director of News Gathering, examined.

Q1 Chairman: I apologise to everyone for the slightly disrupted morning. As you obviously all know Alan Johnston has been released which we are all delighted about but it has had one disappointing effect so far as we are concerned, that Helen Boaden, who would have been giving evidence today for the BBC, is tied up with the effects of the release, liaising with the family and things of that kind and cannot be here. Although we are very disappointed we are obviously delighted that Alan Johnston has been released. There is no question that he is a very brave journalist and we are delighted that he is safe. We now have ITN. Just to introduce what we are doing, this is a new inquiry by the Communications Committee into media ownership and the news. We are looking at issues like how and why have the agendas of news providers changed; how is the way the way that people access the news changing; how has the process of news gathering changed and I suppose the link between this part and the next part of our inquiry is what is the impact of the concentration of media ownership on the balance and diversity of opinion seen in the news. Those are the kinds of areas that we are looking at. Mark Wood and Jonathan Munro, welcome. Perhaps you could just start very briefly by saying what you both do.

Mr Wood: Thank you Chairman. Thank you also for the time and attention this Committee is giving to this area which is an important one for us too. Before I do start could I also add our comments about the release of Alan Johnston because we are delighted too and I would like to pay tribute to the BBC for the way they have managed to keep his case in the spotlight over this long period and I think that has helped enormously in ensuring his freedom, so they really deserve credit for the attention they have kept focussed on him. We are all very pleased, particularly organisations like ours who send people into danger quite regularly. I am

Chairman and Chief Executive of ITN, in charge of the whole business therefore. Jonathan

Munro is Deputy Editor of ITV News and is Head of News Gathering for ITV News, made by

ITN.

Q2 Chairman: You say you send journalists into danger as well, how do you assess the danger? Obviously you want to have reports from these danger spots, how do you assess the danger to the journalist?

Mr Wood: I will say a word and I am sure Jonathan will. I think one of the things that we have done over many years – I know the BBC have done so as well – is to develop a cadre of journalists and camera people who are experienced, who build up their own experience and can therefore make their own assessments on the ground. That is a very important part of it but we constantly have to balance between getting the story and not putting people into unnecessary danger. ITN has a good track record over 50 years of keeping people out of danger but we did lose three people at the start of the Iraq war and that still pains us. We have examined our own processes and procedures since then. We do have a lot of procedures in place to monitor danger levels and to monitor deployment. Jonathan, do you want to add to that?

2 Mr Munro: The first thing to say is that nobody goes into a hostile environment against their will. Everybody who is sent on the staff is there because they want to be there. Everybody is trained to a very high level. There is quite an industry now in training journalists for hostile environments and indeed businessmen and interpreters as well who go into danger zones. All of our staff are put through those courses. They are very good courses; I was on one myself just a couple of weeks ago, they are very well done. We use Foreign Office advice; we contact embassies and high commissions in those parts of the world that we are deploying to.

We employ security advisers of our own in some parts of the world. In Baghdad, for example, if we are going in and out of the city (very often the most dangerous part of any assignment is the journey into the place you are trying to get to rather than the work once you get there) we use security advisers for that purpose. In a sense the most important insurance against things going wrong are the eyes and ears of our own people out there. That is why we do tend to prioritise despatching experienced people. Everybody at some stage has to do their first hostile environment so by definition not everybody on every single assignment is experienced but if somebody is going in for the first time they will always go with members of the team who have been in those circumstances before, are wise about the way to behave in there and have an exit strategy which we agree beforehand should they need to leave pretty promptly.

Q3 Chairman: Do you have anyone in Gaza yourself?

Mr Munro: We do not have anyone based in Gaza. Our correspondent in Jerusalem, Julian

Manyon, went to the Gaza border this morning and was actually in Gaza himself about two weeks ago. It is an interesting case study because under the Fatah regime we judged Gaza to be too dangerous to go to, prompted, for obvious reasons, because Alan Johnston had just been abducted. Under the Hamas regime things became rather more orderly for journalists and we did go in to coincide with Mr Johnston’s hundredth day in captivity about two weeks

3 ago. It was a successful assignment. We categorise those as high risks assignments. We use a traffic light system, so that was a red assignment. Every phone call in and out of the zone is logged and minuted. Every GPS coordinate position is minuted. All the information about where they are moving and why they are moving is written down so that we know exactly where people are. When shifts change, for example in the newsroom in London, there is no danger of information falling between the cracks. I have to report that they came out safely.

Q4 Chairman: Do you operate what I gather is called a fireman’s system, that you actually have someone like Julian Manyon based in Jerusalem and then you fly him into whatever danger spot is uppermost?

Mr Munro: Yes, we have five correspondents permanently based overseas. The nature of news is that they tend to be based in places which can be volatile, the Middle East being an obvious example. We also have a number of experienced correspondents in London who would go to all parts of the world at a moment’s notice if necessary, again taking into account all the safety precautions we would ask beforehand. If, for example, we needed to go to

Afghanistan on a facility with the Ministry of Defence that would typically be done from

London rather than a foreign bureau.

Q5 Chairman: It is a very dangerous business these days being a journalist in some of these places. The prospect of kidnapping is not new but it is much more prevalent than it ever has been in the recent past at any rate.

Mr Wood: I would agree with that. I was editor of Reuters for many years and responsible for deployments of a large number of staff around the world and I would say that the job has become much more dangerous in the last five or six years. As you say, kidnapping is in many ways a bigger danger now than the physical danger of being shot. However, there is also an

4 element of journalists and camera crews being targets in many areas in a way that did not happen in the past.

Q6 Chairman: In fact it was the opposite in a sense? You wanted the journalists on your side.

Mr Wood: Yes, and that degree of respect for the role of the journalist seems to have evaporated in a lot of war zones.

Mr Munro: I would totally agree with that. The issue of us being targets now is a very serious issue; it is a very difficult problem to solve. Nobody wants to be in a position where we are not reporting from the world’s trouble spots. It is important for the public interest that the public is informed about what is happening in Gaza, in Afghanistan, in Zimbabwe or wherever else in the world we feel the need to go from time to time. Being targets is a very uncomfortable position to be in and there is no denying that one of the effects of that is that the number of people who wish to go to these places clearly has diminished compared to the numbers five or six years ago who would have gone more readily.

Q7 Chairman: I am told that in places like Baghdad, for example, if you go outside the green zone you do your interviews pretty rapidly – ten minutes – and then move on before hostile forces can gather.

Mr Munro: We do exactly that. We also use local journalists and cameramen to operate outside the green zone for us because the prospect of a western looking/European looking journalist is a more valuable prize, so to speak, than a local journalist who will know the back street and the tribal rivalries in certain areas and is physically less of a prize anyway. There is an industry in Baghdad that thrives on that sort of sub-contracting. The issue of safety of sub- contractors is paramount as much as if it were one of our staff, it is just the risk levels for them are, by definition, a little lower.

5 Q8 Chairman: What about the cost of security for the journalists? It must be quite high I would have thought.

Mr Munro: It is huge. Probably the biggest single component cost in going to Baghdad for a period of time is the security but it is money you cannot afford not to spend so in a sense it is a given that when we go we go with security and they are with us throughout any of our news gather exercises.

Q9 Chairman: How do you operate? One car in front and one car behind sort of arrangement or is that too simplistic?

Mr Munro: It depends on the local security advice at the time. These situations are quite dynamic and the airport road from Baghdad, for example, is regarded as slightly less hazardous and vulnerable now than it was perhaps a year ago because the patrolling is better and the armaments on the road are better. We would operate in conveys. We tend to let other broadcasters and media organisations know when we are moving in and out of hostile environments. There is a good exchange of information - there is no rivalry about this sort of thing - therefore we can make longer conveys with more significant security around. If we are going to Baghdad we will let all other parties in the British media know that we are doing that and make them aware of our movements so that we can work together in that sort of hostile environment.

Q10 Chairman: That is a fascinating description and, as I say, we are all delighted that Alan

Johnston has been released and one hopes for the best for some of the other hostages, not necessarily journalists, who are still unreleased like the ones in Baghdad. Let us now go to

ITN itself. Can we first have a description about who actually owns ITN? How does this structure come about?

6 Mr Wood: You probably know us better from what we do and the core businesses are producing ITV News and Channel 4 News, although we have a range of other businesses around that, particularly developing new media businesses. Our ownership is 40 per cent

ITV, 20 per cent Reuters, 20 per cent Daily Mail Group and 20 per cent United Business

Media. That structure has been in place for several years. The ownership structure has changed. Under the Communications Act 1990 the ownership of ITN was regulated and there were ceilings put on shareholdings and there was a requirement for non-broadcast shareholders to become involved in the business. That was the time when Reuters became involved. Then there have been changes since, mostly thanks to the mergers of the ITV companies. In the last Communications Act the restrictions on ownership of shareholdings were lifted which had remained at 20 per cent up until two years ago. The background to it is regulatory change but now there is no regulatory ceiling on our shareholdings, there is regulation around the news we produce for ITV in that it is a regulated news service in more than just the normal ways of balance and impartiality. We could have any shareholders in other words.

Q11 Chairman: What effect do the shareholders that you have got at the moment actually have on the news?

Mr Wood: None. ITV is a major customer. ITV is our biggest customer and is currently nearly 40 per cent of our business in turnover terms. Channel 4 is also a very big customer and is not a shareholder. The shareholders behave like good shareholders. They regard themselves as owners of the business; they require the management to deliver good services to the customers but also to develop the business as a commercial business generating higher profits and better returns and value creation to the shareholders. ITV, as a major shareholder and a major customer treats us entirely properly with Chinese Walls within ITV between the shareholder directors and the customer departments. ITV, like other shareholders, has been

7 very supportive of ITN developing as a commercial business and treats us as an arm’s length supplier in terms of providing news. We have just signed a new long-term contract with ITV up to the end of 2012 and that is on the basis of us being a supplier of news to them.

Q12 Chairman: There is no reason now, because of the Communications Act, why someone should not take over ITV. There is no reason why, for example, an American company should not take over ITV. If it did take over ITV – Walt Disney or someone like that – would it be able to exert influence on ITN and the kind of news that it covers?

Mr Wood: No, is the short answer. The contract we have with our customers is always very clear. There is a dual relationship - I will let Jonathan say more about this in a second - where we provide a service to our customers around their requirements and we agree with them in quite intense coordination of what kind of news service they want. We produce three major programmes for ITV during the day - lunch time news, early evening news and evening news

– each of those is different in that it is calibrated for a different target audience, a different demographic. That is all agreed with ITV. In the same way we have a relationship with

Channel 4 in which we agree with Channel 4 what kind of news programme we want to develop at seven o'clock, what kind of programme More4 News should be, what kind of subjects we might cover. However, there is then a very clear dividing line, on the other side of which is editorial control. Editorial control is with the editorial management with ITN and is, if you like, sacrosanct. Customers never try to cross that line; they are very aware of it.

Q13 Chairman: Did you say that there is an agreement on the kinds of subjects that you might cover?

Mr Wood: There is a discussion around the kind of news coverage and the kind of news programme but not on specifics.

8 Mr Munro: I think the line we tread here is that they never know what is in our programmes until they see them. They never know what the running order is; they never know what the lead story is; they never know who is being interviewed live or not live. That discussion never happens. They never ask; we would not tell them if they did ask. It is a properly internal ITN decision about what is in those programmes. They give us information about the audience that their network is attracting at different times of day. For example, the evening news at 6.30 is a more female than male audience; it is a slightly older audience; it is also a family skewed audience. The 10.30 is a more male audience, a slightly younger audience.

One makes an assumption as a news programme maker that, for example, if you are running a sports story it is going to sit more comfortably with the audience that is available at 10.30 at night than on the evening news. All stories can work in all programmes, it depends how you tell them. If Tim Henman had made it through to a later stage at Wimbledon than he has that would be a news story for all our programmes. The fine tuning of what we call groin strain news - which premiership footballer has made the back pages because of injury – is not going to sit very comfortably on the evening news. Those are the sorts of parameters that we would know ITV feels about the way it wants its programmes to behave in the schedule. If we judge that a groin strain was a particularly big new story because it happened to be the England captain two days before a crucial World Cup qualifying match then that would get on the evening news out of news merits. The hurdle it has to cross would be higher than it would be for the later programmes. Equally, with an older audience in the day time, stories that are loosely bracketed as consumer news, medical news, that sort of thing would sit very comfortably in that programme and less comfortably on the later programmes.

Q14 Chairman: No-one would pressure on you – ITV or any of these other shareholders – to say, “Do this particular story” or that Big Brother is the story of the day or Paris Hilton is an even better example.

9 Mr Munro: I was personally delighted that we did not run Paris Hilton leaving jail on the evening news because some other major story of more importance broke. The answer to that is no.

Q15 Lord Maxton: On breakfast television on the morning that Paris Hilton was released you had a helicopter hovering above the dam that was about to break and suddenly the anchor woman said, “We’ll have to break off there because Paris Hilton is coming out of prison”!

That is beside the point, what I really want to ask you is, going back to the ownership, when you were set up ITV was a conglomerate of large numbers of companies. It now is essentially one company except for Scottish Television which is not part of the ITV Company. Are they still a shareholder in ITN.

Mr Wood: Scottish Television are not, no; they are just customers.

Q16 Lord Maxton: Presumably it was one of the ITV shareholders.

Mr Wood: It would have been, yes, under the old system.

Q17 Lord Maxton: Therefore it has no board member or anything like that.

Mr Wood: No.

Q18 Lord Maxton: It is simply a customer who purchases from you.

Mr Wood: Yes.

Q19 Lord Maxton: Do you provide the regional news for them as well?

Mr Wood: No. We do not for ITV either except for London. We do London regional news but the other regional news operations in ITV are managed by ITV. We have a very close relationship with them. Chairman, could I just respond to one point about the pressure because it is quite important, the “if an American took over ITV” scenario. We have never

10 faced any pressure from our customers on covering bad news about them, whether it was bad results for ITV, bad figures for Celebrity Love Island, the Jade Goody episode in Big Brother on Channel 4. They have always recognised that we cover those stories the way we need to cover them. I have never yet had a phone call from anybody asking me to lay off that one or could it be done differently. The scenario that somebody else comes in and buys ITV – which is of course quite plausible – the contract is very robust in these areas. The dividing lines area very, very well structured so any new owner coming in would have to deal with the same arrangements.

Q20 Chairman: The contract and the regulation generally protect it.

Mr Wood: Yes, we have that as well. The OFCOM regulation is very important here too.

There are two robust areas here which ensure that the news remains independent.

Chairman: Can I just take us back a little and Lord Maxton might like to take this up. The

10 and 10.30 News, Lord Maxton I think you were on the Committee at the time in the

Commons.

Lord Maxton: That makes me feel very old, but yes, I was.

Q21 Chairman: How has that worked out?

Mr Wood: I would quote Michael Grade who, as new Executive Chairman of ITV, says that it was the biggest mistake ITV ever made moving the news from ten o'clock, losing that ten o'clock slot. The audience at 10.30 is nowhere near as big. We are trying to build that audience but people go to bed and it is difficult having that slightly later slot. We do very well in it but it is sad that it changed. I think ITV at the time thought it had convincing arguments – we thought they had convincing arguments – but those arguments turned out to be wrong.

11 Q22 Lord Maxton: You did go along with it, but privately were you going along with it or did you actually argue that you ought to keep it at ten?

Mr Wood: The ITN management at the time did a lot of research and presented a lot of data to ITV suggesting that it would be a major mistake in terms of audience share and that data was not given as much weight as the internal data suggesting that in fact the stronger audience would support a strong news audience later in the schedule. It is difficult for ITN. ITN is a supplier. Our position always has to be, “We supply the news to you, the customer; you, the customer, has to decide when you want to broadcast it”. If ITV wants to change the times then we have to live with that but we do have an interest in building an audience and retaining an audience and serving them properly. I think the ITN management did a very good job at the time in presenting persuasive data but that persuasive data did not persuade.

Q23 Lord Maxton: I have to say that I do not remember you saying this to the Committee.

Mr Wood: I did not at the time, no. I think at the time the position we were in was having to behave as good suppliers to a customer. They had robust arguments about how they were going to build the audience to support a later news programme.

Q24 Lord Maxton: They failed to do that.

Mr Wood: Yes, they failed to deliver the audience that they said they would. They did not have the content, as it turned out.

Q25 Lord Maxton: Does that in any way impact on what you get paid for providing the service? If you have a smaller audience do they then turn round and say, “Sorry, we are not going to give you so much money”.

Mr Wood: No, that is not one of the ways it is calibrated.

12 Mr Munro: I think that universally the view in the newsroom was that the decision by ITV was a very bad decision and it was a view at the time, not retrospectively. We were very encouraged by Michael Grade’s comments recently that he rather supported the line that we had taken all along.

Q26 Lord Maxton: Could you move back? Given that you would then be competing face to face with the BBC’s Ten O'clock News.

Mr Wood: We would love to if we could but schedule management is a very complicated science and that is where we were ten years ago as well. The ability to manage an audience through a schedule and retain audience attention is a challenging one and to generate returns on the advertising. The challenge for ITV is how do you retain your audience and for them the tricky thing is whether they go up against the BBC with the news Do you have programmes in the pipeline which go through the ten o'clock break and so on? It is their decision. If they decided to move the news back to ten o'clock of course we would be extremely enthusiastic and would build a programme which was successful, but we are building a successful programme at 10.30 and doing it very well. It is for the channels ultimately to manage their schedules; we have to fit in with them.

Q27 Chairman: Basically that decision was to BBC’s benefit.

Mr Wood: At the time I do not recall that anybody in ITV anticipated that the BBC would move their news to ten because their news was at nine o'clock and the assumption was that it would be a clear sweep through and what the BBC did was quite a masterstroke.

Q28 Chairman: From ITV’s point of view it was done for entirely commercial reasons.

Mr Wood: Yes.

Q29 Chairman: They would get more revenue out of that ten o'clock slot.

13 Mr Wood: That is correct. They had concerns about losing audience for programmes which over-ran, which were split around the news bulletin like films and so on.

Q30 Lord Inglewood: You said quite clearly that there was no day to day direction from

ITV on what you are doing. At the same time there must be some form of ex post facto de- briefing. You cannot be in the position where you are on your own until 2012. How does that work, the debriefing side of all this? There must be a relationship between you to ensure that the thing roughly satisfies all parties and the customer is always right and that is the ITV.

Mr Wood: With ITV there is the Director of News and Sport, Mark Sharman, who is the immediate customer in that sense. For Channel 4 it is Dorothy Byrne who is Head of News and Current Affairs and whom I think is coming to appear before this Committee with the

Editor of Channel 4 News. They can also explain how that relationship works. There are different intensities of dialogue but ultimately yes, ITV can pass comment on programmes, particularly after they have gone out; or may say it likes that kind of coverage or it thinks that kind of content is appealing or is working well. That feedback is very welcome. Of course we keep them informed about the kinds of coverage we are planning if they are major event coverage and so on. We will talk to them about major deployments such as we have on the floods or the terrorists so that the network is up to speed. We also want to encourage the network to promote and trail the news programmes and so we try to give them as much information as possible so that they can flag the up-coming news programmes to their viewers. In that sense it is quite a lively relationship but everybody knows where the border lines are and I cannot imagine somebody in ITV or Channel 4 saying, “What you have got to cover tonight is the following” or “I would rather you led on this than led on that”. There are issues which do come up around compliance, legal cases where we have to take account of the responsibilities of both the Channel and ITN before we broadcast something which could have legal repercussions for both of them. Then we will consult. A classic case is the

14 Attorney General’s advice to the Government on the Iraq war when Channel 4 got hold of the actual documentation. That is an issue for both ITN and Channel 4 to discuss.

Q31 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: Mr Wood, could you just say a little bit more about the revenue assumptions about the move from 10 o'clock to 10.30? What do they reckon that was worth?

Mr Wood: You had better ask them that. It was around a different form of schedule. I think they moved the news back to 11 o'clock initially and there was an assumption that they would be able to carry an audience through with two hour dramas and films and that would generate quite high advertising revenue through the 10 to 11 slot. That did not work; the audience fell away.

Q32 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: You were talking about the success of the programme, about where it fits into ITV’s context and how they measure the success of news within that.

How do you measure the success of your output in your terms or do you rely on them for the feedback that tells you whether the programme works or does not work?

Mr Wood: We get ratings every day, that is the most important way.

Q33 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: In terms of flexing the way that you manage your own output, where does the independent feedback that you get fit into the overall scheme of criteria that you use to judge it?

Mr Munro: Ratings is clearly one and you can see when big stories are happening that ratings across the board tend to rise. These are not in any order of importance but the second that springs to my mind is viewer feedback. Viewers are pretty good at ringing us up, e-mailing us, writing to us saying that they appreciated this coverage, they hated that, they did not like this, why are we not covering the cat stuck up the tree in Norwich because it is a very

15 important story? You get what we call the usual suspects who are constantly on the phone and typically they may be from a political lobby position, for example about the Middle East, and you know when you do a story which is about a Palestinian victim of an Israeli defence force mistake or targeting – depending on which way you look at it – you will a torrent of comment and criticism from one side of the divide or other. Over the period of time, an extended period, as long as that criticism is not specifically skewed one way you are reasonably sure you are treading a proper line there. On issues like the floods which have overtaken many people’s lives in the north of England and the West Midlands viewers are tremendously pro-active about telling us that they want to see more and more and more. That is a factor, not necessarily the decisive factor, in any news agenda. Thirdly there is the customer and fourthly there is the regulator but they are both, in a sense, after the event. We are not told in advance what to put in the programmes, as we said earlier. We are harvesting feedback from all of these different sources and I do not think there is any one individual factor which is more prominent than others. They can all come into play; it depends on the scenario.

Q34 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: Just to be clear, would you say that in assessing the success of an individual programme or a strand of programming that your measures of success are broadly similar to ITV’s or are there time when they are not quite the same?

Mr Munro: ITV would probably, like any channel, put more emphasis on the ratings aspect of that than on the other aspects I have discussed in the last few minutes. The ratings, for example, on the evening news – which is the biggest mass audience news programme on ITV

– are things they would look at pretty carefully in the same way that they would look at the ratings for Coronation Street or Taggart or whatever other programmes they are running in their schedule. I am happy to say the news ratings have held up better than the overall performance of ITV1 which, like all terrestrial channels, has declined because as we all know

16 we have probably all got multi-channel television at home and there is more and more choice out there. The news performance has outstripped that of most of the programmes in the schedule which is obviously a comfortable background to have those conversations with.

Mr Wood: Part of the role of our editorial management team and where I think they perform extraordinarily well is a creative approach to news. Particularly in this current changing environment, how do you retain interest in news programming? How do you make it compelling and alive, particularly for younger viewers? A lot of thought now goes into managing news coverage in a way which draws people in and catches attention. There was a classic case recently which I thought was very well done which was the Falklands anniversary. Potentially it was a very dull story for anybody who is under 30 but what ITV news did, for example, was send Simon Weston, the injured veteran, down to the Falklands and used him to anchor the stories and tell his story. It brought the whole conflict alive. We are also trying to build new audiences and build viewer loyalty and get people coming back again and again, and not just regard it as, “Well, it’s the news; I can go to a news channel”, rather “I like that news and I know it is going to interest me”. I think that is a very important part of what we do in all our programming.

Q35 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick: Could you take us a little bit behind how you analyse the data between yourselves and ITV. You have talked about ratings being a continued measure of success which we could get, I imagine, programme by programme. ITV must look also, probably as you look, at the kind of stories as the news goes up and down by the ratings through the half hour. Can you give us some sense of what works and what does not work if ratings are the success factor?

Mr Munro: We do not calibrate ratings story by story. We do not take two or three minute chunks of the programme. The ratings for the whole previous evening’s schedule are e- mailed around to everybody who is interested the following morning and ITV do take a

17 particular interest. Last week they moved a prime time show from its slot after two weeks because it was not performing very well. There is no evidence that I am aware of – as far as I know there is no evidence that exists – that a particular structure to a running order drives ratings through a different five minute or six minute chunk of a half hour. What will affect audiences is the weight of a particular story. For example, audiences went up when the flooding was a live, breaking story last week. That does not mean that we skew the agenda to that but it is naturally a good story and naturally a picture rich story. After all, we are a picture medium so we strive to make the programmes as visually engaging as possible and that plays to those criteria. In my experience we have never looked at a programme and thought, “Gosh, there was a lot on the Middle East last night; look at the ratings, they have gone down” because it does not really function in that way. We get an average rating across the half hour.

Q36 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick: Do you keep any form of sophisticated data that looks at different kinds of themes as to whether they are successful in news terms for the half an hour that you have?

Mr Munro: The answer is yes and no. On most stories the answer is no, we do not. If we get a big project like the Falklands that Mark has referred to or we did a week’s live reporting from Antarctica in January about melting ice, glaciers - climate change is a very good example of a story where you have to work hard to make it visually interesting and we did that and it paid off - those are the sorts of stories where we will talk to ITV in advance and saying that we are doing a themed week about climate change, the Falklands or whatever, we want to get some promotion time, we want to make sure that the whole ITV audience is aware that we are doing that. We do look to see if audiences in those weeks nudge up, nudge down, go sideways, do not move at all; on both those occasions they moved up a little and that is the power of the promotion getting behind the journalism. One of the most challenges areas – if I

18 may say so, sitting in this venerable place – is politics because at general election time, for example, audiences do not hold up well and we work very hard at making the general elections a particularly interesting format and making sure we hear from a lot of real people and not just the politicians who are running for office. We did our very, very best and our audience held up better than it had done in previous elections last time round. They are very challenging times.

Q37 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick: Would you still hold to the objectivity of your news or your editorial news decision making but you did refer earlier to the criteria that might apply, for example, to the earlier evening news being more feminised and the later evening news being more masculine in some way because the audiences are distinctly different. Would that in any way affect the coverage of international news or “harder stories”?

Mr Munro: International news I think by and large no.

Q38 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick: Politics?

Mr Munro: The evening news audience is interested in politics if we can and the politicians can make it interesting subject matter. Politics itself is such a complex area. Later this afternoon there is a statement in the House of Commons about the National Health Service; is that a politics story or is it a story about the Health Service that you use when you go to your

GP’s surgery or your hospital? We think it is the latter because that is the way that our viewers interact with the Health Service. That is what we will try to do tonight, we will make that story into a story about GP care or hospitals or whatever the pertinent part of the statement is. Today is not a good example because the Alan Johnston story is such an overwhelming story but if we were doing a story about a Fatah/Hamas uprising in Gaza – nothing to do with Alan Johnston – as we did, for example a couple of months ago when power changed hands there, we would do the story on both programmes. At 10.30 we would

19 probably do a second or third piece which analyses a little more deeply the reasons behind the uprising. The reason we would want to do that is because we think from audience research that the audience at that time of night is ready for a slightly more contextualised report about what is going on. It is not breaking news probably; the news has probably been around since daylight in Gaza which, by definition, is several hours before, so people have probably picked up already the core of the news event story so for that programme we will probably try to give them a little bit more depth and content, perhaps a live interview, perhaps a debate-based piece or a history–based piece to follow on from the news story. In that sense the programmes can flex their different muscles across the schedules.

Q39 Baroness Bonham-Carter: What would happen to ITN if you lost the ITV contract?

Mr Wood: It would be a heavy blow. It is 40 per cent of our business at the moment and it is the largest news gathering infrastructure so it would be a challenge for the company to continue providing services the way it does to Channel 4, for example. I think we would survive and we would find different ways of doing it. Part of the ITN model works on the basis that we have integrated infrastructures for example for ITV News and Channel 4 News in satellite trucks, satellite feeds production technology in our building and studio management and so on so there are a lot of shared costs. You would have to work that one out, but we would survive.

Q40 Baroness Bonham-Carter: Some years ago you were competing with Sky, as a result the budget was quite seriously cut. You won the tender but at a much lower budget. I know, having been an editor and a producer in current affairs, that money is very tight at the best of times and this must have affected the way in which you can provide the news for your customers and indeed foreign news. I know nowadays in news there are far more two-ways, fewer films, I would suggest fewer reports from abroad. Did the very fact that you had to

20 compete and had to cut your costs not affect the quality of the news that you are providing ultimately for the viewer?

Mr Wood: I think not. The evidence is there on the screen and you can judge probably as well as I can. I think our news has actually got better in the last few years. ITN is fairly unique in many ways. We are probably the only truly commercial news supplier in that sense.

The BBC does not have to worry about commercial pressures and Sky News is a subsidised part of Sky and is a loss making business so they have different pressures. ITN has to live within its agreed contract prices and generate profits so we have become very adept at using new technology and new working practices usually ahead of the competition. What we have done is to become, I think, smarter and faster moving. We are doing it again now, we are having a big technology change now which will again reduce our operating costs and enable us to put more money into coverage. What we have tried to do is take money out of some costs – infrastructure and so on – and keep the funding of the news coverage and the front line stuff as high as we can. In fact we have been increasing our coverage funding in the last couple of years for ITV news.

Q41 Baroness Bonham-Carter: Mr Munro, I have a question about that. Cutting back on production costs means fewer people working on one story I imagine, multi-skilling.

Mr Munro: It can mean that.

Q42 Baroness Bonham-Carter: Does that not mean that you have fewer eyes on a story which affects therefore the quality of the reports?

Mr Munro: It can if you are not careful. The vast majority of the costs that came out when the ITV news contract was re-negotiated last time round were in what you might call back room areas, management, HR, admin, finance, that sort of thing. There is a multi-skilled driver. That means that in the days of film and in the early days of video deploying a camera

21 crew would have meant a cameraman, a soundman, probably a lighting man as well and almost always on big stories even a runner to physically take the tape back from where the film was being shot to the nearest satellite feed point or even film processing depot in some cases. I remember when I was cutting my teeth on the road in Belfast it was unheard of to go on the road without that number of people. We do not need to do that now because we can feed live pictures from the back of the camera. You do not need a runner, you do not need a sound man because the technology has improved so much. Therefore those costs have come out. We are able to do quite a lot more with the technology that is there. We talked a little while ago about the global warming story we did from Antarctica. I was in New York shortly after that story talking to our American partners at NBC and we were discussing the number of people who did that story. There were only four members of staff from ITN in Antarctica doing that story all week, live transmissions, reporting, the whole lot. They were astonished by that because American television is very unionised still. They have very, very heavy manpower deployments. We would not deploy a small team of that sort into Baghdad because the extra eyes and ears that you need or want for safety reasons are really important, they are crucial.

Q43 Baroness Bonham-Carter: Also for journalism reasons.

Mr Munro: It can be for journalism reasons but in Baghdad operating with more white western journalists is not necessarily helpful. In Zimbabwe - we have done a lot of reporting from Zimbabwe in the last two or three years – I do challenge your assertion that we do less foreign news. We have done more work out of Zimbabwe, for example, than any other broadcaster; we have won awards for it.

Q44 Chairman: The BBC are banned.

Mr Munro: We are all banned.

22 Q45 Chairman: You are banned as well, are you?

Mr Munro: We are all banned from Zimbabwe and one of the things that constantly irritates is that other people say they are banned from doing it; we are all banned. We get in through routes that I will not put on record for obvious reasons. We go very light weight and very discreet because it is the only way to operate there. The technology allows us to do that. Had the regime been in place in its current form 20 years ago we could not have covered

Zimbabwe in the way we did because we would have needed too many people and we would have been too visible. Undeniably costs have come down; undeniably revenue has gone down because the contract is worth less money than it was. Our job as managers is to try to make sure that what comes out of the screen at the end of the day is not the place where the impact of that is felt.

Q46 Lord Maxton: Do you think you do better with fewer staff than the BBC do with a lot of staff?

Mr Munro: I think pound per pound we represent much better value for money than anyone else. If you are asking me whether I would like to have 20 more staff, of course I would. Let me give you an example of where I think nimbleness and being fleet of foot is more important than numbers. The example I have in mind is the Virginia Tech massacre in the United States earlier in the year. We have one Washington correspondent for ITV News with a small support team. He was on the campus live from Virginia Tech by the ten o'clock news that night and the BBC were not. They decided to keep all of their people back to service their multiple outlets because that is what their Washington bureau does. We think in a light weight way; we think in a fleet of foot way. There is an old analogy which is probably tired and a bit of a cliché but we are the little speed boat that zips around the oil tanker; we can go faster, we are not as big, we cannot carry as much cargo but we get there quicker.

23 Chairman: We will just cut in at the end of that commercial! We will come back to the point on staffing. Lord Corbett?

Q47 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: Mr Wood, you said earlier that you feel your news has got better. Audiences change and the world has changed tremendously over the last ten years at least. Can you just expand on that a little bit and just explain some of the differences in the range of issues which you cover and the depth in which you do them? I understand about different things for different programmes, but just broad brush stuff; what do you do more of and less of, for example?

Mr Wood: I think, as Jonathan says, if you look across ITV News and Channel 4 News the management of foreign coverage is impressive and has become quite creative. The reporting from Antarctica was a classic case of again bringing the issue of global warming to life for viewers. We do a lot of focus groups and have regular feedback from customers and we know that worked very well, we brought a theme alive which otherwise can be quite abstract.

Channel 4 News has introduced a regular pattern of anchoring the 7pm news programme from different locations once or twice a year. A few months back we did a week of “News from

Iran”. John Snow went out and anchored the evening news. That was at a time of quite considerable tension with Iran and worked very well. In terms of them being there they had people in front of the cameras, they were able to have Iranians putting an Iranian point of view on certain issues. It had a knock-on in that the contacts made led to quite a breakthrough in the case of the marines who had been taken prisoner when one of the senior

Iranian officials appeared on Channel 4 News live and said, “We’ll negotiate a settlement”.

You can see that kind of creative approach is something that was not done in the same way before. I think in foreign news, getting people off the main stories to tell the other stories, tell the stories of what is happening in parts of Africa - I am thinking back to reports we published about slave mining in the Congo, for example, about treatment of malaria in Uganda - those

24 issues were brought alive by deploying people, having the resources and the time to deploy people on non-urgent stories. That has changed a lot. I think in domestic coverage Jonathan put it very nicely, it is trying to get the viewers’ perspective on what is important to them.

ITV News has been very good at covering health service issues and crime issues. A while back the ITV regions and the main ITN programme did a take out on weekend drunkenness, the streets of Britain’s provincial cities at midnight and three o'clock on a Saturday morning and the number of young people staggering round paralyticly drunk. It highlighted again a major social problem. I think that is a creativity and deployment of resources which is smart and is different to what was happening before. We have been looking at news programmes from ten years ago recently and finding them rather boring because they are just lists of news: this happened and then this happened. You could not get away with it today because the audience would desert. The audience’s expectations are much higher but that is good. I think we have a sophisticated public which wants to get to grips with some key issues both domestically and internationally and I think our news programmes deal with that.

Q48 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: It struck me while you were talking just now and you were stressing the fact that you want to know what it is the public wants to see, is there also an element in how you react to that in having some wish perhaps to raise the standard of what the public wants to see? I could say that as long as you are satisfying their enthusiasm for sensational news perhaps that could be overdone and a bit of trying to interest them in news that is not entirely based on the sensational is an aim which you have which is not entirely dictated by what you think the public would most like to see.

Mr Wood: I do not think that we do just go for the sensational. Both in Channel 4 News and

ITV News there is a very, very strong focus on public interest coverage. It is getting to grips with issues around changes in the Health Service, changes in education and it is how they affect people. That is not sensational stuff, that is good journalism. I think good journalism is

25 presenting coverage in a way which is compelling. We cover a range of subjects. Jonathan, you should say something on this.

Mr Munro: I think the key to any story telling in any media outlet – newspaper, broadcast or on line – is to try to highlight those angles on any story which directly bring it home to the viewer. There are some stories which do not really affect the people very much, but there a lot that do. On the face of it, for example, the increasing aggressive nature of the Chinese economy is not a story that most people would look at and think, “I will watch because it is going to affect me” but if you ask the workers at Longbridge this has affected them very directly. That is why we have a bureau in China and we are continually reporting the growth of the Chinese economy. You can carry on saying it affects you at home but I think after a while viewers get that, they understand that this is a part of the world that they need to know more about. There is no evidence that I have ever seen that people do not want to have that sort of news; I think people do. People want to sit and watch a news programme and feel at the end of the show they have heard about what is happening in the world that day and they have learnt of it too and that is a good mix.

Q49 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick: Can I probe you a little bit further on the pressures that are bearing down not just on you as management but as editorial leaders. You talked a lot about how you have recently had to change the news to reflect the different way in which people see and perceive news to be today. There is an implication in that that the decisions about news are not really made objectively but they are made subjectively according to audience demand and desire. Is that a fair reflection?

Mr Munro: Any news organisation editor or a programme editor or news editor I think the decisions they take are, by definition, subjective. We are objective in the sense that we are politically impartial and so on. I think that it is more the treatment of stories, the way we tell a story than actually the story selection itself which is the kernel of this. It comes back to the

26 Health Service example I was talking about earlier, but it applies across the board to all sorts of stories, not just what story are we going to tell but how are we going to tell it. We should actively encourage viewers to stay with us through programmes because the last thing we want is to produce a programme that no-one is watching. It is in the public interest that people absorb the news. People over the years are absorbing nuggets of news from increasingly varied sources - it is on our mobile phones, it is on our internet sites – and that is a real challenge for the whole broadcast industry. Subjective, yes; I think that is inevitably the case because they are human judgments.

Q50 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick: The BBC said it always had the mission to explain in its news. Do you hold to that mission to explain? If I may just illustrate it by say, for example, today’s news, Alan Johnston is free and that is something over which we are all delighted but we have seen acres of coverage of the Alan Johnston story and is there a difference between what your viewers might perceive to be the reality of Alan Johnston the journalist and the issues concerning him as compared to the complexity of the Middle East dilemma that brought him into that conflict.

Mr Munro: That is a very good example so today let me tell you what we are planning to do with that story. We will do a first report which is very much Alan Johnston’s day today, all of the various interviews he has given, the press conferences, his movements and what we know about how the release happened. That is a standalone story. We are not going to pollute that with political content; that is his story. Separate to that in the same programme there will be another piece which is about what was Hamas’s role? What role, if any, did the British

Government play? What do Hamas, who have been very much persona non grata in the international community, expect or want to get from their role in the release of Alan

Johnston? That will give us the context into the broader Middle East dimension of this. That is a really important piece of television. I personally do not think it is a mission to explain; I

27 catch it more that we do not want people to watch that programme and not understand the story. We seek always to try to make stories explicable. In the case of that story that will absorb something like half our programme tonight so we have plenty of time, space, what we would call elbow room, to make those explanations. If it was an incremental move in the story as opposed to a defining move it is more difficult to find the time in a half hour programme to bring all that context in every time. Certainly on a big story of that sort we would always strive to do that.

Q51 Baroness Howe of Idlicote: I think you have done a pretty good promotional programme, as it were, on how you have adapted to more challenges from the technical world apart from other forms of reporting. Could you tell us if there are extra pressures caused by the purely digital and Internet media environment which is obviously much more competitive? Do you have any thoughts on how further you can encourage high standards coming out and giving you an even greater mark for independence and impartiality?

Mr Munro: I think in an age where there are so many outlets, so many people doing what they would describe as journalism, particularly user generated content as it is now called, people filming things on mobile phones and that sort of thing, the unique selling point of terrestrial television news – whether it is BBC or ITN products – our standards hurdles need to be maintained at the very highest level on accuracy, on impartiality, on sourcing and that will be the differential between what we do and what is available at the click of a mouse on a website as the years roll forward. That will be our unique selling point. Our proposition to our viewers is one of trust: you need to give us half an hour of your time, we in return will give you a robust, truthful, honest, impartial, accurate account of the stories that we are bringing you this evening. That is, in a sense, a bargain with the viewer. We have to deliver on that and that is our primary purpose in making television news programmes otherwise we will end up – the whole industry, I am not talking specifically about ITV – being pulled down

28 into a user generated content led world which is not where we want to be and I do not think it is where any of the broadcasters want to be either.

Q52 Baroness Howe of Idlicote: If I may ask you a further question, thinking about the younger generation, you made some comment about one of these programmes, the later one, tending to attract a rather younger audience. Equally there have been a lot of comments about how the really young generation are not watching any news at all. I wondered what your thinking is here and how you are going to try to attract them in. They are maybe sending clips of what they are doing to one another and so on.

Mr Wood: Part of our business is in producing video news for mobile phones and for broadband sites and we do stream news channels on mobile phones. An element of that is showbiz coverage and celebrity coverage. The people who tend to watch news on mobile phones tend to be under-25s and their primary interest is in the showbiz coverage or the sports coverage, but through those entrance doors they also watch the other bits of news. We know that when there are major events the usage levels go up quite sharply so they do watch breaking news. The same on broadband, we feed news content and news clips into a range of different broadband sites and we are working with people who will be producing news with a flavour. The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Mirror, The Mail, The Times are all developing their own broadband and video propositions. Telegraph Television and Guardian Television when they are here – and it will not be long – will have their own flavour and their own slant.

That is fine because you know what the label is and you know what it stands for. In between all that, anything which is labelled “ITV News” “Channel 4 News” has to be balanced and impartial and has to be trusted. We give up trust at our peril. In a fragmenting world trust brands will become more important.

29 Q53 Lord Inglewood: We have so far looked at this from the viewers’ perspective. I am interested to go behind the scenes and probe a bit about the way you do it. Presumably you do not have any golden rule about how much domestic coverage and how much international news you cover, but you must aim to get a balance on that I assume.

Mr Munro: Yes, we have a balance. There is no golden rule because what you describe as a domestic and what you describe as a foreign story is quite often not that easy to define. A

British soldier killed in Basra is both; Madeleine McCann’s parents are on foreign territory but it is essentially a domestic story. We talk about global warming a lot, it is cause and effect; what we do here has an effect elsewhere in the world and vice versa. So there is not a quota but we usually try for a balance in a programme. Ten days ago when Sheffield was under water the whole programme was about the floods apart from a brief little rap, which is three or four other stories that you need to know about but everything else in the programme was the floods. That is not balanced in that sense but within the floods coverage we will make sure that there is one piece that is an overview piece, there is an environmental causes piece, there is a piece that is living the day with one family and so on so that the contents themselves are not repetitive.

Q54 Lord Inglewood: I think it was Mark Wood who said that you had five overseas permanent correspondents and then you flew people in and out as the world required.

Presumably this is a reduction on what was the case in the past.

Mr Munro: We used to have six at one stage. We used to have a bureau in Moscow but that was in the days when Moscow was incredibly difficult to get in and out of; visa issues were a nightmare, it was almost impossible to react to a breaking story from London in Russia. In the days of the Cold War obviously that was a major issue. The Cold War is over; the visa issue is over; we closed up the bureau and moved the money into what we call variable

30 coverage, that is to say spending more money on putting people on airplanes to go to places where stories were happening.

Mr Wood: We opened a reporting bureau for both ITV News and Channel 4 News in China last year, a new bureau, and that has been incredibly productive for both. It is not a breaking news story because covering Chinese daily news is not what interests our viewers but for

Channel 4 News and ITV News the whole range and series of reports on what is happening in

China and the changes in China has been incredibly watchable and has gone down very well.

Q55 Lord Inglewood: You must use, in one way and another, quite a lot of part time people, stringers. Do you take information from the public as if they were your people and use that?

I am trying to get a picture of how you get out there and do it.

Mr Munro: The answer to your question about viewers is yes in the UK. We would not normally have direct contact with members of the public on foreign news until we actually get to the scene of the story. ITN is a domestic brand. The viewer video issue in the UK is becoming a really big source of picture, the source of picture that all broadcasters are making use of increasingly. There are some very prominent examples of that. Perhaps the most prominent that we have had recently was the arrest of the men, the jury is still out in the trial of the 21/7 alleged bomb plot when we had user generated content as we call it. It was not actually filmed on a mobile phone but nonetheless it was from a member of the public who contacted us. That is increasingly important and we are about to launch a whole website called ITV News Uploaded where people can upload that material and we will only harvest the very best of it for terrestrial news programmes but it will become a vehicle through which we can contact viewers who have contacted us with events. The floods coverage last week was full of pictures of water rushing down streets which had been filmed by viewers.

31 Q56 Baroness Thornton: Some of my questions have already been answered in the issues earlier about your early news bulletins and the ratings and so on so I will not ask you to repeat that. Since 1981 your overall share of viewers for ITV News has dropped from 49 per cent to

19 per cent. What has happened to the rest? How do audiences for news compare to the overall decrease in your viewing figures? Has news fared better or worse than other genres?

You touched on this but perhaps you can expand on it, what is the age and demographic profile of your news viewers? My 19 year old daughter almost certainly accesses some of your celebrity screening I am sure; I wait in expectation of her watching the news. Can you give us some idea about what trajectory you think you are on at the moment?

Mr Wood: Inevitably the viewer numbers to the news programmes rest within the schedule and as the audiences fragment the number of channels multiplies. The viewer numbers for the mainstream networks have been in steady decline and therefore viewer numbers for news programmes have. At key points, for example at the 6.30 News on ITV, we outperform the average for that time. We compete with the BBC, we have roughly the same sorts of audience numbers. I think Channel 4 News, the performance of the News tends to above the expectation of the schedule at that time so that is quite encouraging. Channel 4 News has a very fast growing young demographic which is very encouraging. In fact Channel 4 News right now is getting the biggest audiences it has had for four years which is quite an achievement given the decline otherwise. The reality is that one would expect the network’s viewing numbers to continue to decline for a while but then probably bottom out. If you look in other comparable countries where fragmentation of the spectrum has happened earlier –

Germany is a classic case where there have been multiple news channels for a long time – the big networks tended to then bottom out round about between 16 and 18 per cent, sometimes up to 20 per cent. It is quite likely we will see something like that here. Then what you will have is the accessing news on other platforms. People do watch news channels; they watch

32 news on demand on the Internet. Broadband has made news a more enjoyable experience on the web. People do access news increasingly on the web and look at both video news and straightforward text news. Part of our business is to deliver news on multiple platforms, in different ways and in different packages so that we can get people interested in different places. There is a challenge in getting younger people to look at news. Newspapers have the same issues. We are all in the same boat, frankly, trying to find ways to engage attention. I think showbiz coverage is a good way in because you get attention and there is other stuff as well.

Q57 Lord Maxton: At the moment you are quite right, more and more people go to the computer for the news and your news is scheduled on television. However, there are now on the market already machines actually quite low bands which would allow you to watch your computer generated news on your television and control it from your television. Does that not begin to make the whole concept of news scheduling irrelevant and in the long term mean that we will not have programme scheduling?

Mr Wood: It will be both and we want to be on both sides of that divide and have strong multi-media offerings on the web as well. Channel 4 News and ITV News will be available on demand on the websites as they are now so we will continue to make that easier to use.

Recent history shows that when there are big stories breaking people still like news programmes. They like to go to an anchor and a pre-arranged, pre-organised running order and a presentation and interpretation. I think, particularly at times of crisis or major stories as we have had this week, the audience numbers shoot up, even though you can go to Sky News or BBC News 24 you can go on the web and get a news item.

Q58 Chairman: How much do the rise by?

33 Mr Wood: Earlier this week they were up at the weekend by about 25 to 30 per cent on normal.

Q59 Chairman: What does that mean in people?

Mr Wood: The weekend audiences are heavily dependent on the schedules but there were probably about an extra million viewers on Saturday night and I think about an extra one to two million on Sunday night.

Q60 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: I think this question may be connected to the one you have just been answering. I just wanted to ask you a bit about regional news and regional news gathering. Do you think that regional news will be more or less affected than national news by the digital switchover? Just generally, I think you said earlier that you do not supply

ITV’s regional news; am I right in thinking that?

Mr Wood: That is correct.

Q61 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: What is your perspective on regional news gathering at the moment and how it will go in the future?

Mr Munro: I will take the latter point first, on regional news gathering. Our perspective on it is that we have to be able to news gather across the UK in any village where any story happens. Potentially that story might be a Soham; no-one had ever heard of the village beforehand but it suddenly became a massive story. Having what we would call regional reach is crucial. It is crucial to reach those stories and it is also crucial that when we are doing stories that we discussion earlier – Health Service provision, GP surgeries or whatever – that we do not always have London voices, that some of the patients we discuss those issues with might be from a constituency outside London. We need to be able to reach the hospital and

GP in Sutton Coldfield, for example, to do that story just as easily as we can reach St

34 Thomas’s over the river from here. For that part of the world Central News (which is the ITV brand carrier in the Midlands) is a very, very important programme. It gives the region a sense of identity, it gives regional viewers a sense of what is happening slightly outside their orbit but nonetheless within their hinterland (to mix my metaphors) in their region. I think they are very important and ITV is built on a regional structure; it was founded on a regional structure. We fervently hope that the role of regional news carries on and continues to attract audiences in years to come. As a network news provider, having that infrastructure out there around the UK is really, really important to us.

Q62 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: In terms of how that will be affected by the digital switchover and also by the disaggregation as it were of all the news gathering?

Mr Wood: We cannot answer that really because it is an ITV question. What I would say is that I think ITV will be making comments about this. It is going to be a challenge for ITV.

Regional news is a very heavy cost infrastructure for them and it does not generate the advertising returns. They have raised the issue a couple of times saying that when digital switchover comes along they will not be able to support that infrastructure in its current form and I think they are trying to engage in discussion with OFCOM about how it might change.

ITV is very committed to its public service obligations. News channels and regional news are up against the BBC which, of course, is offering its content free and unfortunately does quite a good job. If it did a bad job it would make life a lot easier for us all but it does make the market place quite tricky in this country. You cannot run a news channel in competition with

BBC here because the market is so small.

Q63 Chairman: You have been very patient and we are way over time now. One last question I have was that you referred earlier to the contract between ITN and ITV, is that contract in the public domain?

35 Mr Wood: We have agreed to the terms of the contract running until the end of 2012. It is a confidential commercial contract but it will be seen by OFCOM as part of their regulatory role.

Q64 Chairman: We might negotiate with you about whether it could be seen by this

Committee?

Mr Wood: I am sure that would be open to discussion, yes.

Q65 Chairman: I think you missed your vocation in politics! Thank you very much. It has been a fascinating session. I think there may be other questions which we might like to ask you about so perhaps we can put those on paper to you and send them to you.

Mr Wood: Please do, and thank you for some very challenging and interesting questions. I think we are all looking at some of the same issues here and I would be very happy to answer any further questions and I am sure Jonathan would also be happy to do so.

36