The Leveson effect
Will Leveson have a long-term negative impact on the newspaper industry? From the audience, Claudine Collins, MD of Mediacom, expressed concerns that journalists will not be able to do their job properly following the Leveson inquiry in to phone-hacking at MediaTel’s Future of National Newspapers event yesterday.
“I am worried that the mass market will become boring and the industry will lose audiences as a result,” she said. However, News International’s commercial director Dominic Carter was quick to respond that the inquiry will lead to guidelines, which will result in a level playing field, though he agreed that “it is quite a sensitive time at the moment”.
Carter was keen to point out that it is a “media issue”, not just a press issue. “Restrictions on us will have to be extended to the web,” he said. “But Leveson means the line will be drawn, which will mean better newspapers and high quality journalism – which is also better for advertisers.”
Raymond Snoddy, BBC presenter and Newsline columnist, agreed with Collins that the Leveson inquiry “could damage the freedom of speech in the UK”. Snoddy also believes that Rupert Murdoch’s decision to close the News of the World last year was a “knee-jerk reaction”.
However, Carter was clear that the NotW brand had been damaged by illegal behaviour, particularly surrounding the Milly Dowler case, and therefore had to be closed. “It was a right decision from a corporate point of view,” he said.
Carter, in response to a comment from Snoddy about the NotW being “greatly missed”, said: “NotW was fantastic in its time and it broke some phenomenal stories but the reality is the brand was damaged.”
The panel were mainly positive about News International’s new Sun on Sunday title, with Vanessa Doyle, head of press & cinema at Initiative Media, saying “it is a good product and might be as good as the NotW one day”. She explained that, on the whole, advertisers are only interested in buying eyeballs and compelled audiences, not political issues.
Guy Zitter, MD of Mail Newspapers, told delegates that he spent “a lot of money seeing if [Mail Newspapers] could benefit from the closure of the NotW but it didn’t work. Lots of NotW readers were reading the Mail on Sunday anyway”.
He said he is “not nervous about the Sun on Sunday” but is still “astonished” that Murdoch closed NotW. In his view, he “shouldn’t have given in to political pressure”.
Guardian News & Media’s head of client sales Mark Finney agreed that the NotW “did a lot of good” and went as far as to say “it is a shame it closed”, however, he defended his company’s decision to pursue the phone-hacking story.