CEOInterviews.AIInsight with the editor of The Times Robert Thomson

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Interviewer0:00

Okay, nice to see so many people here. I ought to say straight away, I've interviewed Robert Thomson, that's this gentleman here, on two occasions for print in a very formal way, not long after you became editor of The Times in 2002, and then when The Times shrank in size, but Robert will tell you not in quality, in 2004. But this is our first public gig, really. I'll just do a brief CV of Robert before we start, just in case you don't know. He was born in Australia, and he shares a birth date, although a different year, from Rupert Murdoch, who happens to employ him. You shouldn't read too much into that, I don't think. Robert became a cadet journalist on the Melbourne paper, I think the Melbourne Herald, when he was just a young 18-year-old, 17, and then graduated to the Sydney Morning Herald. And I think they then sent you off to China, where Robert then learned to speak Mandarin and got married, I suppose, as well, or at least met the woman he was going to marry. I think you then went to Tokyo, and learned to speak Japanese, of course, and now you've learned to speak English coming here, which is brilliant as well.

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Robert Thomson1:37

Imperfectly.

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Interviewer1:38

That's right. I then think you got hired when you were in Tokyo by the Financial Times, actually in Beijing.

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Robert Thomson1:45

I worked for both the FT and the City.

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Interviewer1:47

That's right, because you were stringing.

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Robert Thomson1:48

That's right.

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Interviewer1:49

And then the FT brought you back to England and did something interesting with you, made you a foreign news editor. And then after that you got promoted through the FT into running, you went back I think to Asia for a while, and then you ran the weekend edition, I think, from FT News, edited weekend to the FT. You see how brilliant I am at summing this up.

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Robert Thomson2:14

Journalistic recall.

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Interviewer2:15

That's right. And then you went off to run, most importantly, I think, the FT in New York, and you did that very well. And so a lot of people thought when the editor of the FT goes, you will become editor of the FT, but for some unforeseen reason, but I'm sure you're very happy now, they didn't make you editor, and they gave you as compensation Asia to run. But then an Australian called Rupert Murdoch called and made you editor of The Times. This is the shortest biography possible, but that sort of gets us, you now get a feeling of how clever he is, how clever Roy is, or how incredibly lucky, I don't know. So I'm going to sort of split this into sections. Let's start with The Times itself, which was Britain's paper of record. Is it still?

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Robert Thomson3:17

Right, very much so. Britain has changed, and therefore the paper of record has to change.

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Interviewer3:22

In what way has it changed then? Britain or the both?

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Robert Thomson3:25

Then if you want to do discourse, I think it's Britain. The slogan for The Times used to be 'the top people's paper', and that was why it was presumed to be the journal of record, because it was only for the top people, and only the top people mattered. Well, I think Britain is a country which has changed fundamentally. There are many people who have the characteristics of top people, and 'top people' was almost inherently misogynist in that top people were mostly men in pinstriped suits. And it is now a genuinely diverse country where there never has there been such a large number of people been to university, never has the character of the person going to university been so diverse, never has the range of interests of the individual from the arts to sport to politics to international affairs itself been so diverse. And so naturally the journal of record has to be itself diverse. And I think you see that in the pages of The Times, because there's sometimes a presumption, journal of record, well, you should do politics, a little bit of foreign affairs, of course you do the arts well, and that's about it, because anything else is beyond the pale. When in fact the Renaissance reader, the cultivated person, has a range of interests that need to be reflected in the pages of the paper. And I mean, I'm sure you know, Roy, that there was much talk five, six years ago about the daily me, the digital daily me, that news would be customized for you. Well, I think what we take for granted as print people is actually every person customizes every newspaper for themselves anyway, and so the daily me exists.

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Interviewer5:14

And does that mean that you're all things to all men and women?

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Robert Thomson5:19

Oh, not at all, because you're always confined by space. You make qualitative and quantitative judgments about stories. There's a hierarchy of content, and that's reflected in both the qualitative and quantitative judgments about what you should or shouldn't run, or what is interesting to the reader, and what you think should be interesting to the reader, because you can't just play to content prejudices. You have to stretch what you think a reader is interested in and take that reader with you, without being too pretentious about it, take that reader on a journalistic journey.

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Interviewer5:53

One of the criticisms of The Times, though, not just under you but in recent years, is that it's made itself, by forms of price cutting and gimmicks, promotions and so on, widely available to people, but at the same time that's led to a diminution in the quality of the product itself.

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Robert Thomson6:13

I've heard that criticism before. But how do you define quality? I think journalistically you define it by the quality and the range of the journalism. And now, how do you prove that? The Times has always been famous for its foreign coverage, you know, back to the Crimea, but we've never had more foreign correspondents than we have now. And I think to talk about quality, you have to in the end talk about investment in journalism. We now have 23 staff correspondents around the world; five years ago we had 12. Now you can talk about quality journalism, but I think you have to prove it in the pages, and that's certainly one way of doing that. Secondly, political coverage. I think we have a greater range of writers from, you know, Matthew Parris to David Aaronovitch, who are giving people a wide range of views in a way that's quite unique. And it has nothing to do with the size of the paper, it has nothing to do with Sudoku or a free DVD, but is actually the essence of The Times.

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Interviewer7:19

Do you, day on day, get heavily involved in the content, or does an editor nowadays get so removed with the need for marketing and endless meetings with the suits? I know we're both wearing suits, but you know what I mean by that phrase. In other words, you're not now locked into the content of your paper so much?

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Robert Thomson7:42

I think it's two things. One, I think your instinct about how busy bureaucratically an editor is is somewhat correct. You are caught up in meetings, and those meetings are strategic meetings. You're often planning ahead six, twelve months. You're talking to the marketing department about what you want them to market. You're trying to get new things off the ground all the time. Those are interesting, necessary meetings for The Times. But at the same time, you have to have faith in your senior editors. So the editor obviously has to know what's going on, but it's not, I think the judgment of an editor is not interfering all the time, it's knowing instinctively when you should intervene because something is not quite right, or we don't have enough resource, or we haven't, or I think we haven't quite understood the import of a story, or the rhythm of the paper isn't right. And the great thing about The Times is that we have so many senior people who are so good that that kind of direct intervention is less than it might be. And that's not because I'm busy, it's because those people are genuinely good, they're good journalists.

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Interviewer8:55

One of the reasons I ask that is because I think one of the criticisms leveled at The Times is that it's a very reactive paper, in the sense that editorial passion, and I'm thinking editorial passion always comes in the end from the editor, is lacking in the way that perhaps strive comes through in other newspapers. In other words, it's very easy to do The Times in a sense, because you know news happens, you don't campaign for anything, you don't push very hard, you have a range of contributors, but you know there's not a single strand which you say The Times is punching in this direction. But there's a great temptation, you know, to be sensationalist, the idea of the views paper rather than the newspaper. I mean, I would argue that the views paper is a corruption of traditional journalistic principle. And I don't... you're attacking Simon Kelner now.

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Robert Thomson9:53

Well, I guess not him personally, but professionally I disagree with him, yeah, fundamentally I disagree with him. Because I think you have to have the objective of being objective. Now we all know as journalists that pure objectivity is almost a fantasy, but to have the aim of it, I think, is important. And The Times breaks more stories. I mean, if you were to add up the number of scoops in The Times, those of the other papers, we would do more than all of the other papers aggregated by a long way. And you look at, because campaigning, you know, I'm a little, again, because I'm a 17-year-old graduate copy boy style hack, and those old-fashioned values that were socialized into you then, I think, are still important now. And there's something about campaigning that I'm a little uneasy about. But whether it's, you know, I think you can campaign qualitatively and objectively as a journalist when you put resource into a story. And so you look at, for example, the case of the Iraqi translators who were neglected, that wouldn't have happened one, if we didn't have good people in Iraq following up that story, and two, we didn't pursue it. Now was that campaigning or was that just good reporting?

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Interviewer11:11

Was it revelatory? I mean, do you think that that's an example? I mean, you talk about breaking stories, give me some examples of stories you at The Times have broken.

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Robert Thomson11:21

Well, just in the past month, you know, the Gordon Brown speech story, and actually interpretively the speech itself. What sort of speech was that? Because listening to it and talking to the, you know, to the very bright people around me, was clear that that was a problematic speech, whereas a lot of the coverage was, you know, brilliant Gordon Brown speech, he's positioned himself perfectly. But actually that speech predated the difficulties he's now having. So there are scoops which are factual, and because we invest into journalism, we just, whether it's Richard Ford on the, you know, the increase, the bribes to potential deportees, whether it's the Sam Coates piece this week about the government alerting various schools around the country that they're going to be mentioned in the Gordon Brown speech and they weren't. I mean, every single day there are scoops in The Times that you just will not find in another paper. And that's not down to me, that's down to the individuals, their quality as journalists, and, you know, the fact that we have them on the beat.

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Interviewer12:27

Let me change the tenor then a bit. The Times is owned, in case you didn't know, by Rupert Murdoch. Not, of course, it's owned by News Corporation, or News International, which is the British division of News Corporation, and the News Corporation chairman is Rupert Murdoch. And everyone, of course, is always fascinated by how much Rupert Murdoch tells you what to do. So how much does he tell you what to do?

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Robert Thomson12:57

Well, he doesn't tell me what to do. The converse, we will talk a few times a week, and we will talk about Japanese politics, what impressions of Aso versus Fukuda, we'll talk about what's going on in Georgia, we'll talk about Russia, we'll talk about the British economy, the housing market. And these are the conversations of a curious person. We do not talk about what's in the next day's paper. We have never talked about what's in the next day's paper. Never, never, never. He has never instructed me on what to put in the paper. He has never instructed me on what to put in the paper. Now the presumption, of course, is the opposite, and the presumption is wrong.

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Interviewer13:39

And what about post-mortems on the paper? 'Hey Robert, why did you do that in the paper?' And does he never say that?

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Robert Thomson13:57

No.

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Interviewer13:58

He's never criticized your paper, never criticized the content in your paper?

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Robert Thomson14:03

Well, his fascination with the craft of journalism and newspapers is obvious. And so if he's in London, you might have a conversation, for example, where he was, 'I didn't like the crop on that photo, why did you?' You know, and these are technical issues. And that's because he knows where the line is. It's very clear. And there are technical issues, which is the typeface too big, too small, and a lot of the time, you know, those are things to be discussed, because I might have thought I kind of have, you know, Rupert here, a parrot on the shoulder.

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Interviewer14:45

But I mean, I rather imagine him saying to you, 'You're a bit harsh on Gordon Brown there, don't you think we ought to give David Cameron a bit of a thought here?'

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Robert Thomson14:55

No, no, no, never, never, never, not once, not ever, never.

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Interviewer15:05

And just in case people are wondering, we're absolutely on the record here. So there we are. And so you just chat about Japan and Britain and this and that, a broad range of subjects. Of course, people will say when you say that, they'll say, 'But surely, Robert, you're practicing self-censorship. You know what will please the old man, the very healthy old man, but anyway, you'll know what will please him and what he would dislike, and you cut your cloth to suit the Murdoch ethos.' Is that true?

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Robert Thomson15:52

No, it's completely untrue. A certain type of person will, at the time, I think it has to be an internationalist, it has to be somebody who believes in markets, probably a transatlanticist, and all of that is in my background. So in the choosing process, he knew he wasn't buying a communist.

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Interviewer16:12

Well, not that he knew at the time, Red Robert. But I mean, he actually, he knew that you shared views about the market and the importance of a free market. You roughly agreed on the political situation around the world, and then he lets you get on with it after that. Is that what you're saying?

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Robert Thomson16:35

Exactly, yeah. That's certainly how I found it. Now, how the interaction is between Rupert Murdoch and other editors, I don't know, but that's certainly the case in my case.

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Interviewer16:50

So Robert Thomson has complete control of The Times' content. In, you know, the buck stops with you.

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Robert Thomson16:56

And if there are errors of judgment in The Times, they're my responsibility, and they're probably my errors.

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Interviewer17:05

Well, but Rupert likes you, and Rupert thinks a lot of you. So I'm going to move on to another subject, which is, I must actually just remove my phone here for a second, because I had a very witty message which came through while I was on my journey here today. Before I ask this question, I need to call up this message, because it is so incredibly good. Because it actually said, 'I know you're going to ask Robert Thomson whether or not he's going to become the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, but why don't you actually tell him what he's going to say.' So you are going to say, when I ask you this question, 'Thanks for that, I guess. I must tell you I'm very happy in London, my family is very happy in London, I love editing The Times, and we haven't bought the Wall Street Journal yet.' Your prescience is perfect. That is exactly what I'm going to say. Now I read, both on the net in England, and I read now, because it reverberates around the world, from the site Editor and Publisher, which is as good as it gets in terms of truth-telling and relaying very, very good gossip, that you are going to become the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. So now that you've got the answer already, what have you got to say?

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Robert Thomson18:39

I'm afraid the answer is the same.

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Interviewer18:42

You're just not going to move on. This is just the perfect public forum, if I may say so, in which you have the opportunity to say, 'Roy, I'd like to tell everyone here and the wider world, I'm about to become publisher of the Wall Street Journal.' I love London. Would you? I love The Times. My family loves London. I love my family. When I've spoken to you before, you've also extolled the virtues of New York. And of course, when you were on the Financial Times, your great rival, the paper you needed to beat, was the Wall Street Journal. And you made a bit of inroads there when you were at the Financial Times. I don't mean in numbers, but you actually started breaking stories and did better than them and so on. What do you think of the Wall Street Journal?

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Robert Thomson19:36

It's a wonderful paper with great journalists. The Wall Street Journal wasn't the only competitor, the New York Times was a competitor as well, because you're looking at expanding the reach of the Financial Times nationally. So in some ways you were as much focused on the Times as you were on the Journal.

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Interviewer19:55

A lot of people just do a bit of Wall Street Journal here, but a lot of people were surprised that Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal. Why do you think he bought it, or is buying it, because it's not complete, the deal is not complete yet?

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Robert Thomson20:11

Well, I mean, there's a better person who's better qualified to answer that question than me, and he's not in the room. But I would presume that the paper has been lacking investment. But I think all journalists, and it's something true of The Times too, you know, how do you, it's a terrible word, but how do you leverage your content in a way that allows you to invest more into journalism and allows you to extend your reach? And at The Times, we now, in the last ten years, and particularly in, I guess, in the last few years, we now have about 35 partnerships globally. The online audience for The Times, which is a more domestically oriented paper than Dow Jones as an organization, is, you know, 12.5 million, and the most recent audited figures show a 40% increase year on year. And so I think anyone who's interested in high-quality journalism, and business journalism in particular, can see the value in that and the potential value in that.

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Interviewer21:32

It takes us on naturally, because I sense your embarrassment about talking about this subject, but let's go on somewhere where you're not embarrassed at all. One view about buying the Wall Street Journal is that Rupert Murdoch will free up its online content, remove maybe not completely, but maybe part of the pay wall, the subscriptions that people now have to pay. But that takes me on to the internet, really. The Times, especially since Rupert's become a bit of a digital missionary, has improved its online content considerably, its functionality on the site, and also the way it looks, the design, and the amount of copy. Do you share the view of some digital missionaries, not Rupert by the way, I understand, that newspapers are doomed, but newsprint is doomed?

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Robert Thomson22:29

No, absolutely not. I think if you look at The Times' circulation over the last, say, 30 years, you know, factoring, discounting, I guess we're doing 630, 640, depending, 640,000 depending on the month. And the full price, which is what from the time I arrived what we've really focused on, is pretty stable. I mean, there's a slight decline, admittedly, but it's not a dramatic decline. Which if you looked at US newspaper circulations, which were released this week, very bad, are some dramatic declines. And those are of papers often in single-paper markets. And I think part of what makes The Times strong is actually the cordon of competition that is the British market. And you would, if you stood outside and looked at Britain, you would say, well, of course newspaper circulations have to, because one, there are too many newspapers, and two, actually the usage of digital content in Britain is more advanced than in most countries other than Japan and South Korea, and certainly more, the number of people who buy things online and who access things online and use 3G, because of the sophistication of 3G here, it tends to be greater. So newspapers would seem to be uniquely threatened in Britain, but actually, relatively speaking, they are almost uniquely prospering in Britain. There's, I think, the point about audiences, and we were talking before we came on about being in the foothills of the internet, which is Roy's phrase, and I think it's a nice way of putting it, that I think anybody who thinks they've scaled the mountain is hiking in the wrong range. And we are all discovering new things virtually every day, and that's almost a naive thing to say, but it is a moment in journalism where it's the truth. And you see, because the inherent transparency of the web, you're seeing what other people are doing all the time. And you know, as an avid blogger yourself, you're experimenting as well. But the core of what we do is the content. And you can have gizmos and gadgets, and you can have pop-up computers and pop-down TVs, but in the end, unless you have a core of very, very good journalists and a range of correspondents and extended expertise, you will inherently be limited in your audience.

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Interviewer25:08

Content is king.

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Robert Thomson25:09

It is, and to an extent, well, the user is king, but the user can discern the quality of the content and will make very harsh judgments on the basis of that content. They will or they won't come to your site, because the obvious promiscuity of users that we see every day in digital demographics is painfully obvious. But what I'm confident about at The Times is that over the next year we will overtake The Guardian, and that the gap between ourselves and most of the other papers here will grow. And that's because we have continued, we've been able to continue to invest in journalism. And anybody who thinks that this is an age where certain technologies have become redundant, well, I mean, maybe they're right, but anybody who thinks the journalist is redundant is a fool.

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Interviewer26:08

So could we be in a situation where we see the decline of the newsprint newspaper in the United States way in advance of its decline in Britain? Is that what's going to happen?

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Robert Thomson26:22

It will depend entirely on the paper and how they react, how they understand what you might call awkwardly the information environment, how they understand how people use information. And unless you have a coherent conception of complementary content, which is complementary in what you do as a newspaper and on the web and through mobile telephony, and complementary also in the sense of how people are using that content, then you're in serious trouble. The threat to you has never been greater. The punishment of the ignorant is real and fatal.

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Interviewer26:58

Do we think that the web in its widest sense, the net or whatever, is really the highest form of democracy now? Because we don't, we now don't tell people, we're not the great high priests anymore. User-generated content means we get answered back, we get corrected. Some of it, of course, is abuse, but laying aside the abuse, laying aside the abuse, of which I get my fair measure, we also know that bloggers, citizen journalists, whatever you like to call them, correct us a lot more than they ever did. So is that going to create a different kind of media outlet in the future?

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Robert Thomson27:47

Well, I think it's already creating different types of media outlets, and you can see it in the aggregation of user-generated content, the aggregation of people's opinions about hotels, the aggregation of their views about politics. But I guess the core of the question is, is the role of the journalist as a navigator with nous being progressively digitally diminished?

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Interviewer28:12

Eroded, eroded, eroded.

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Robert Thomson28:16

And actually, I don't think it is. And I don't think that the sites like The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, would have the traffic that they do if people didn't have faith in the professionalism of their judgment. I think one of the issues we have as a society, I was fortunate enough to grow up in a household where you read the newspaper over breakfast and your parents put content in context, you knew where things came from. And there are younger people who aren't socialized in the same way. And the question you have is, do they understand the provenance of information? You know, they've been educated in a way to be digitally discerning, and I'm not sure about that. I have faith in the intelligence of most people and the judgment of most people, but what you do know is that they're being educated in a different way. But that's where it puts extra pressure on journalists to be very good at what they do, so that someone who comes from sociologically from a different background can appreciate the difference in judgment qualitatively that they're getting from a journalist and somebody ranting on a couch who hasn't taken their medication. But the other important aspect of the net is that it's opening up worldwide. And so what we're also seeing is the export, in many respects, of our concept of freedom, press freedom, or market freedom, whatever, we're seeing that exported, and at the same time allowing those societies to open up too.

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Interviewer29:58

Do you think that our kind of freedom in the West, United States and here as an example, Europe, is the most perfect form of freedom and press freedom available?

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Robert Thomson30:10

Our freedom, I mean, having lived in Japan for five years, Japanese newspapers are very competitive, Japanese websites are very aggressive. They would see their journalistic freedom in much the same terms as you would describe Western journalism.

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Interviewer30:27

I accept that, but I'm thinking of China, I'm thinking of third-world countries where they've never had the possibility of escaping from state control of the media before.

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Robert Thomson30:38

I think our Western media values are values that we shouldn't be ashamed to export. And it's interesting, I think we're putting pressure, I mean, collectively as societies, not necessarily as individuals, we are putting pressure on China. And you can sense the Chinese sensitivity about openness of the media. And you can see, and China is by no means entirely open, but the types of issues that people can now talk about in talk-back radio, you know, from what I see in China, and I tend to visit about once a year, the number of titles on the Chinese newsstand, and a lot of those titles actually have evolved out of the People's Daily or the Guangming Daily, the traditional Chinese newspapers who realize that they have to change and be more viable and be more accountable. And so I do think that the Western concept of accountability, which is part of the journalistic role, is embedded now in the Chinese psyche. How they deal with that in the longer term, during the Olympics they're dealing with it by allowing people to riot, so that shows you that they're aware of it, in some cases painfully aware of it. But we should certainly not be shy about espousing those values, and definitely not embarrassed about it.

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Interviewer32:00

And so we are more or less perfect form, as it were. Here we are, I mean, well, no, you've said you have a giant mogul owner, but who doesn't interfere in your editorial freedom. I think you'd agree that advertisers don't constrain you in any way.

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Robert Thomson32:22

They don't.

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Interviewer32:23

They don't, do they?

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Robert Thomson32:24

No.

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Interviewer32:25

So we have the most, so here you are, a youngish editor from Australia running a serious newspaper with a readership probably in the range of two million, a bit less, at complete and utter freedom to do as you will, really, within the laws of the land.

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Robert Thomson32:47

Well, but within, you know, it is power, but its power is responsibility, and you have to exercise that power judiciously. And it can't be wrathful, it can't be venal, it has to be professional. And I think you, without savoring, over-savoring, celebrating power, you have to be conscious of it, because as an editor, you can inadvertently, unknowingly, in some cases, not necessarily me personally, but willfully hurt people, and you can change perceptions. And so the restraint is in the end your conception of your responsibility as an editor, and partly it's a responsibility as a custodian of a tradition, which I have as editor of The Times, but it's also a responsibility that comes, hopefully, from something of an understanding, if not a clear understanding, of the role of the media in society.

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Interviewer33:54

Let me ask you about your rivals then. Are you, we, I've just outlined how wonderfully free Robert Thomson is, but would you say the same of your rivals? I'm thinking now of The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Independent.

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Robert Thomson34:14

Well, you can't trap me, because I don't know. And I sense that those papers and their editors have a great deal of freedom. Whether it's total freedom, whether it's, you know, a second-guessing of a different kind that goes on, I'm not in a position to know. But those are, let's be honest, those are good papers, and Britain has a great newspaper industry, and we're lucky to work in it.

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Interviewer34:47

But I think, you don't really think The Telegraph's a great paper, do you?

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Robert Thomson34:53

Is this on the record?

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Interviewer34:58

Really.

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Robert Thomson35:02

Well, the problem, because Will Lewis is a very good friend of mine, and knowing Will, if I say The Telegraph is a great paper, he's going to put it in an advertisement, because he's such a clever chap. He'll put an advertisement saying, 'Robert Thomson at The Times says The Telegraph is a great paper.' So I'm going to have to exercise some self-censorship there.

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Interviewer35:18

What about The Independent? You've already said you don't agree with the views paper.

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Robert Thomson35:22

No, I don't agree with that. I mean, I fundamentally disagree with that. But that's, is it wrong? I think journalistically it's a great thing to debate. That the fact that I disagree with it doesn't make it wrong. But I would worry if that became the norm in Britain. At the moment it's not.

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Interviewer35:44

One of the big arguments now on newspapers is that we can't afford to have Sunday papers that are fully staffed in the way that they used to be. We're looking at integration problems which have hit The Guardian and Observer, have already hit The Daily and Sunday Telegraph. The relationship between you and The Sunday Times is slightly different. You lose pots of money and they make pots of money, so you know, you're the slave to them, which is different the other way around.

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Robert Thomson36:10

We make money from next year.

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Interviewer36:12

Ah, right. Now I wondered about this when you were going, you are going to make a profit next year.

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Robert Thomson36:15

We are going to make a profit.

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Interviewer36:17

And if you had, did I hear that in 2001, 2002?

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Robert Thomson36:19

No, you heard the editor of The Times say we will make money next year.

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Interviewer36:28

You, The Times, devoid of anything, will make money next year, which will be the first time, by the way, in its history, will it not?

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Robert Thomson36:33

Well, in modern history.

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Interviewer36:37

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am talking since the war. The Times has never made money since the war, basically the Second World War, in case anyone's worrying about wars. By the way, I think unique moment, almost accidentally, we made money during one half in one year, about 20 years ago, but that was more serendipity than strategy.

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Robert Thomson36:59

Right, okay. I wandered away there for a second, but I'm really, so you're next year, you're going to make money.

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Interviewer37:07

We are.

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Robert Thomson37:08

Gosh, will you publish that? Will you actually, you'll just say that, of course, because you don't have to produce figures. But if you look at, well, the figures, if you do the math, we've shared some of what you might call the more trivial circulation. I mean, I think if you looked in land reclamation projects in continental Europe, you'd find a lot of copies of a lot of British newspapers which were never read but were printed and were counted.

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Interviewer37:42

Yes.

R

Robert Thomson37:43

And so, no, I know one publisher had a garage full. But anyway, so in 2003, we at full price, and now we were discounted to the market price, not meaning to sound too much like an accountant, but at full price, we were 100,000 behind The Telegraph. We're now, the most recent ABCs, were 47, 48,000 ahead of The Telegraph. Same time, we were three times the size of the FT at full price. We're now five times the size of the FT at full price, and that price is much greater than it was. And so, you know, that's a hell of a deficit we've made up, and we've kept the readers in doing so. So we are now, we've had a lot of support during the difficult period, but we are now at that point in The Times' history where we can say, quite genuinely, that The Times are self-sustaining. And on top of that, you have the internet revenues, which is in large part a repurposing of Times content.

I

Interviewer38:42

I started off this question, I wandered into the profitability or lack of it of The Times, but accidentally really, but I was going to ask about this provocatively, accidentally really. I was going to ask about this seven-day operation. Now, do we think that that's the way, which has always been the case in the United States, as you know, they never delineated between a Sunday title really very much than the other six days. Is that the way we're going to go in Britain, and is that the wise thing to do, given that we're going to integrate?

R

Robert Thomson39:16

Well, there's a distinction between integration between the paper and online, which The Times and Sunday Times do each in their own way, but quite extensively, and between a daily paper and a Sunday paper. I don't think that trend is given at all. And you have to make a distinction between what are the exigencies of contemporary cost control and what is a meaningful trend. And in what we're seeing in other papers, at least from a distance, it's more the former than the latter. I think Sunday papers have a, are a law unto themselves, and have a life of their own, and should go on having a life of their own. And you can use the digital age as an excuse, but this is actually an old battle, you know, what should Sunday papers be, and shouldn't they be seven-day papers? And I think in some cases, technology is being used as an excuse for contemporary cost control.

I

Interviewer40:21

Yeah, fine. What about 24/7 news? We're going to have to staff up 24 hours and keep pumping out.

R

Robert Thomson40:29

The beauty of the net is that usage is so transparent that you know when you have to bulk up the content or refresh the site. You can almost pick the hour when the US wakes up. So yes, it's 24/7 but with different emphases during a news day. The main thing for us is not only to break down the barrier between online and offline—most sensible newspapers have done that long ago, and any paper that boasts about that now is showing how remedial it is—but to break down what I've always thought is a bit of an issue, which is the divide between the day and the night side of a newspaper. You have a day side commissioning stories and a night side picking up stories, and there's a certain 'us and them' between the day and night side which is almost more pronounced than the 'us and them' between a paper and a website these days. So what we've tried to do is not just bring the paper and the website together but to deal with that issue, so you have the day news editor and the night editor within talking distance, discussing stories and why they were conceived and why they turned up in the form they seem to have been written.

I

Interviewer42:07

I'm going to open this out to the audience after I've asked this single question, which is really a much wider question than the Times. You implied that we have a relatively healthy press situation here in Britain with lots of competition, but lots of people are very critical of the press. I'm going to mention just one story as an example: the treatment of Madeleine McCann and her parents. We in the press, as a whole, out of this lively competition, also do things which are quite reprehensible. I'm not going to get into the ridiculous business about Heather Mills McCartney and her criticisms. I'm looking really at the treatment of a tragic couple here. You've covered a lot in the Times, more than some other serious papers, less than the Telegraph for sure, but you covered a lot of this material. I wonder whether we sometimes, out of a sense of competition, get out of kilter totally and don't realize how hurtful our kind of—I use 'witch hunt' advisedly—but that kind of press pressure, feeding frenzy, if you like, the kind of problems that causes, and the reason that we as journalists are therefore held in some disrepute in public. Long-winded question.

R

Robert Thomson43:47

No, very good question. It varies a little paper by paper. Clearly we've been covering it, and you also notice on the most-read internet stories the McCann narrative is quite a complex one because they clearly corrupted the media in the first instance to a certain extent and then have perceived themselves to be victims of the media. You can point at this paper exhibiting this success and that paper, and all I can say is that the person we have on that story is one of our most serious journalists and only writes what he knows to be true. To the more general, I think more serious point: does this competition produce excesses, ugly excesses, unfair excesses? Does it produce persecution? And the answer is yes. And editors in the end have to be held responsible for those excesses. And journalists can see, sometimes it's almost laughable if it weren't hurtful. But I think we do have to be more conscious of the social impact of those excesses as journalists generally. I think we can't just pass it off as one day's newspaper, we'll do something different tomorrow, because newspapers are having every day to justify their continued existence, and that's a good thing. I think we should do that anyway. But if there is a huge credibility gap for newspapers between what readers, who are better informed than most of us give them credit for, know to be true and what we collectively present as truth, then newspapers really are an endangered species.

I

Interviewer45:47

I'm going to open it out now. My one admonition is: speeches, no; questions, yes.

P

Philip Jacobson46:01

Philip Jacobson, ex-Times. We seem to have been tiptoeing around the C-word, China, and I wondered if you could tell us, assure us, that Rupert's track record in China, which is not entirely spotless, has ever affected you, has ever affected your judgment, or in your opinion will ever, with the Olympics looming.

R

Robert Thomson46:25

It hasn't. You can only judge the Times by its coverage, by its leaders. I'd advise anybody who has concerns on that issue to do an archive search, to put in the word 'China' to see what we say. We're pretty critical of the Chinese, having been there as a correspondent and having seen certain things that have grown rapidly in a way that I think we would all agree is to the benefit of a large number of people, and seen other things that are clearly reprehensible. And in the end, it's in the quality of the correspondent. And I think anybody who suggests that the person that we appointed to cover China, Jane Macartney, who was there when I was a correspondent in the 80s, that Jane is anything other than honest, objective, is a journalist with the utmost integrity, is disparaging one of the best correspondents I've ever met. And I think it's worth anybody who has concerns about that, again talking to other correspondents who work with Jane. The proof is not in the presumption, the proof is in the practice.

I

Interviewer47:41

But what she sends back, does it always go in? Does it go in without any input from Rupert or any reaction?

R

Robert Thomson47:49

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, I mean, I know some of you probably know Jonathan Mirsky. All I would ask you to do is send Jonathan an email and ask him what he thinks of the Times' coverage of China.

I

Interviewer48:03

Now, I think at the back of Phil's mind will also be the memory of Rupert knocking BBC World off the satellite in order to placate the Chinese, and this idea that he would be prepared to do that—that's quite apart from the Myriam episode, which I leave to one side because it gets very complex—but that's a really straightforward thing in which Rupert, having said really that new technology would open China up, at the very moment that he could have opened it up and put in BBC World, he was prepared to knock it off. Did that not strike you—I know it happened well before you became editor—but does that not strike you as a dangerous thing for a media mogul who believes so much in freedom and in the freedom of expression and the free market to have done?

R

Robert Thomson48:52

I mean, the honest answer is I wasn't privy to the logic in that. I think, as I understand it, that decision was a little more complicated than that. But how that decision has been interpreted, it does of itself provide a discipline. It provides a discipline for editors, it provides a discipline for anyone who has anything to do with China.

I

Interviewer49:13

Okay, I'll take another question.

A

Audience Member49:19

You touched upon objectivity as a hallmark for good journalism. In your experience with both the FT and the Times, which of the media brands in Asia, particular reference to Islamic states, do you feel that people think is the most objective? British media brands or any media?

R

Robert Thomson49:46

Well, I mean, the Middle East I'm not an expert in, but I can only—I would say the Times, to be honest, because we have by far the largest number of—apart from broadcast—we have by far the largest number of people. Whether it's Richard Beeston or Michael Binyon, we're the only British paper with a permanent correspondent in Baghdad, and we have senior writers going through Iraq in addition to that. So I would say, certainly in print, incontrovertibly the Times. And we find that in our relations with leaders from the region, whether it's if Iran gives an interview, he tends to give it to the Times, and we now print in Dubai as well. And again, I'm not sure that—I think for people to believe that you take a region seriously, you have to take the region seriously, both in the amount of coverage you give to a region and actually your interest in that region is the proof. And you can talk about how you care and so on and so forth, but if you're not there, you don't care.

I

Interviewer51:01

Robert, your paper thought it was a jolly good idea to invade Iraq. Are you pleased about that now?

R

Robert Thomson51:11

Actually, yeah, I did support the invasion of Iraq. I think anybody who did, and a large number of people did, I think for varying reasons—it wasn't just a WMD decision—can only be beyond disheartened with the way it was conducted in the first year. And it was catastrophic. And if you had a belief in those ideals, to not pursue those ideals in a practical, functional way to ensure that those ideals were made real was beyond negligence. And we've all been witness to that, and most tragically Iraqis have lived that reality. But I think there's a separate problem, which is it is now statistically provable that Iraq is getting better, and there are so many people who just do not want to admit that because it goes back to should we or should we not have invaded Iraq. And I do think that there's an obligation for those who want to go on having that argument to look at—and clearly things went wrong and more than wrong—to look at where Iraq is now and start to have a different debate, which is what will really be in the interest of Iraq, most particularly what will be in the interest of the Iraqi people, and what is in the interest of that region, because the facts on the ground are a lot different now than they were 12 months ago.

I

Interviewer52:51

And if you, as editor of the Times, had said on balance, I think it'd be a really bad idea to have invaded Iraq, that wouldn't you think have put you into conflict with a proprietor who was absolutely gung-ho for invasion?

R

Robert Thomson53:11

I mean, that's a hypothetical situation. I wasn't in that position. I was in favor. If you go back and look at the leaders of the—again, you can check all these—you go back and look at the leaders at the time, the Times line was different to other lines within News Corporation publications, and there was just much more diversity than the company as a whole is ever given credit for, because there's a caricature of the content. But I mean, I can only speak for my experience at that time, and I was clear about what I thought was right. And that wasn't just a moment of personal epiphany, it was discussions with a lot of very smart people around me at the Times, people in Westminster, the leader writers, the foreign experts, and there some people agreed and some people disagreed. But that was a discussion that was going on over a period of months, and then it was up to me to make a decision, and that decision was in no way influenced—

I

Interviewer54:16

I haven't asked you about that. I mean, you sort of hinted at it in something else you said. Is it a kind of collegiate way that you run the Times? A lot of discussion goes on, it's not just the word of God from yourself as God?

R

Robert Thomson54:28

Yeah, you throw this open to discussion with your senior executives, with your leader writers and so on. Very much ahead of an election, we will—I'll try to get at least—the last election I got the sector specialists in well ahead of time to try to go through in a meaningful way, not just to act upon my prejudices, and we all have prejudices, but to go through in a meaningful way what was happening in those sectors. And Alex Frean is a great person to talk about education, Ben Webster is a great person to talk about transport with, Ruth Gledhill on religion, for whatever about religion in an election—divine intervention. Those people have a lot to offer. I mean, they know their subject better than I ever will, and it would be foolish not to tap into that wisdom. And you are influenced by their thoughts, you really are. And if you look at the collected wisdom of the Times leader writers, again, it's not just the leader because we're specialists all over the place, you are naturally open to their thoughts because their expertise is so damned obvious that the foolish thing is not to listen but to ignore.

I

Interviewer55:58

Another question.

G

Graham Dilley56:02

Graham Dilley, reader. Apocryphally, there was a tradition on the Times that when it came to writing a headline, everyone sat around and said, 'Okay, how can we come up with the best one possible?' Is that true? And B, does it still apply these days, and if so, in what way?

R

Robert Thomson56:22

A, I don't think so. B, I hope it doesn't apply. But it was also apocryphal that the Times editor had two butlers, and I'd like to make that tradition real.

I

Interviewer56:37

Another question, yes.

Q

Quentin56:43

Thank you. My name is Quentin, we're from Reuters. I'm just interested to hear your view on free papers. News International has the London paper here. Do you take the kind of Harry Potter view that if people are reading papers at all, that's a good thing, or do you think it's just paparazzi shots and agency copy, so it's cannibalizing real newspaper readership?

R

Robert Thomson57:05

Well, it's competition. I mean, I'd prefer there to be only one paper and to be called the Times, and for all of you to have no choice but to buy my paper. But the reality is that there probably will be more free papers, but possibly I think we're at an interesting stage for the free papers now. And I mean, Roy probably studies this a little more closely than I do. Are they directly a good thing for the Times? Well, I think they do have an impact on the sales of the Times. Are they a good thing for media generally and for journalism generally? Actually, I would say yes. I mean, I was talking to a journalism professor—not Roy, to spare his blushes—and said, 'Well, which newspaper do you read each morning?' And this person said, 'Well, if I'm not in a hurry, I'll read the Times, and if I'm in a hurry, I'll read Metro.' And that just reflects—some of you have probably been educated by this person, but it's not Roy, I promise you it's not Roy—and so they are fulfilling a need, and I think they are continuing a tradition. But does every person who reads a free newspaper graduate to the Times, the Telegraph, or the Guardian? Probably not. But are they keeping alive the tradition of newspaper reading? Certainly, yes.

I

Interviewer58:38

Well, I'm interviewing you, so I'm not going to give my view. There you go.

J

John SW58:47

Hi, my name is John SW, I'm a trainee from the Telegraph. I was wondering if there were any couple of things that David Cameron could do that would make the Times back him in 2009 or 10, or would it be more about him sustaining a lead in the polls?

R

Robert Thomson59:06

I don't know. Well, again, I think you need to look at—I mean, we've been pretty tough on Gordon. I personally thought Labour conference was an exercise in hubris, and for me, that was a turning point there where that speech was an abomination. 'British jobs for British people,' mentioning Britain or—I am told, I didn't count it myself—Britain or British 23 times. That was a moment where you thought, 'Hold on, there's something going on here that isn't quite right.' And it's that concern that I have at the moment that is certainly influencing our leader line, and I would argue. The other thing that people need to look at, and which would influence political judgment—not who's ahead in the polls, that's definitely a sideshow—but the growing size of the state. And if at 43, 44, 45% of GDP, that is an enormous state, and I don't think the Prime Minister quite realizes how difficult, because the state is a self-funding, self-generating organism, and it's just very, very difficult to curb it unless you set out to do so. And for me at this moment, the defining issue is whether Mr. Brown or Mr. Cameron recognize the long-term danger to Britain as a vibrant society of a state that has grown to a point where it's potentially stifling that vibrancy. And without being too political, I think there was clear 10 years ago that the social contract was renegotiated, that Britain as a society had agreed that there should be more investment in the social infrastructure, and that the middle classes, which is most people in this room, had also agreed that they would pay more tax. And what you saw with inheritance tax and the reaction to it was that moment in British society when people said, 'You know what, the state has just got a little bit too big and I'm contributing a little bit too much, and I want the social contract renegotiated again.' And I would argue—and it's obviously an argument that will be had over the next couple of years—I would argue that we have reached that moment in British history.

I

Interviewer1:01:55

Robert, you've avoided giving us a scoop on your becoming publisher of the Wall Street Journal, but would you give us a scoop by revealing that you're going to back David Cameron in the next election then? Because that's clearly where you're going with that.

R

Robert Thomson1:02:09

No, we have to see what—one, when is the next election, and two—but it's game on, it's absolutely game on.

I

Interviewer1:02:21

Somebody at the back there, yeah.

J

Jeremy Clar1:02:27

Hi, Jeremy Clar from The Hill. Considering that the papers such as the Telegraph have deserted the Docklands to go back into the City of London, do you anticipate that the Times and News International would give up its iconic premises in Wapping?

R

Robert Thomson1:02:39

Well, they're already agreed to do so. I think I've read in other newspapers, actually, I've read in my own newspaper, we're seriously considering doing that.

I

Interviewer1:02:54

Yeah, the gentleman here.

J

Jules Batki1:02:58

Jules Batki. You probably describe me as a 'top person suit,' but when you write your final editorial, whenever that may be, will you reflect if you polarize your reflection: the Times changed you, or you changed the Times?

R

Robert Thomson1:03:14

Oh God, I wish I thought of that. Well, clearly the Times changed me, and being a journalist is an absolute gift because you're exposed to so many different people, experiences, information. If you're not in some way altered by that, then you really are an unfeeling automaton. And I think that's why we become journalists, because we're aware of the potential and of the value of experience. We may not quite express it like that, and actually to express it as almost a demeaning—Have I changed the Times? A lot of people have changed the Times, and the Times has to change. And it can only change when you have a very large number of very capable, very skillful people who are absolutely committed to it. And a lot of the ideas for change come out of those people. It's not some divine writ for me. And I think any newspaper—an editor, it's a slightly dictatorial structure, it's not egalitarian, and a newspaper can't be egalitarian. And I think anybody who presumes that it can is seriously mistaken. But because somebody has to be responsible, somebody has to sign off on that front page and sign off on that leader. And if there's any blurring of those lines, then I think you almost by definition lose your way. But the ideas are coming up from all over the place, and what you try to create is an environment, a real meritocracy of ideas, which is also reflected in a meritocracy among the people who work for you. And it is a very, very large number of people who have clearly changed the Times, both in print and online, over the last few years, and will go on changing it. And I have absolutely no doubt they've changed it for the better and have put the Times in a position where a paper that's been in existence since 1785 is now absolutely sure to be around for another couple of hundred years.

I

Interviewer1:05:31

Really? Okay.

T

Tim Nolan1:05:36

Hi, Tim Nolan, just a member of Joe Public. I read Kay's biography, and one of the things that came out of it was a perception that 24-hour news has meant the need for a lot more comment to fill the airtime. And with that has come the fact that comment is now starting to permeate into factual news, such that objectivity is being lost a little bit, and you get correspondents giving their view rather than just reporting the story. First of all, do you agree with that? And secondly, do you think there's any way in which we can turn back the clock a little bit, such that by all means we need comment, but when we report the story, the story is reported wholly objectively?

R

Robert Thomson1:06:28

It's a serious point that's not talked about enough, I think. The objective of being objective, it's an easy mantra to chant. I think the hardest thing for a journalist and a correspondent is to be in a situation where you have pretty strong views and you almost feel that you should juice the coverage so that what you think should happen happens. And I think that is a tragic mistake. I think that's fundamentally wrong. I think you have to—we all have beliefs, views, opinions—I think you have to have enough faith in your beliefs and perhaps even your philosophy that the facts on the ground will ultimately reflect what you believe to be true. But the only thing you should report, or try to report, are the facts on the ground.

I

Interviewer1:07:33

There's no such thing as objectivity, it's not attainable, is that what you're saying?

R

Robert Thomson1:07:38

Well, not in the scientific sense, but I think we have to aspire to it as journalists. And I think you see, thankfully, a lot in the Times, but you see in reporting—I think you see it a lot in a paper like the New York Times, for example—of people being caught up in the emotion of an issue. And the second journalistic sin is people being self-regarding, writing stories because it's socially acceptable to give a story a certain twist. I find that anathema, and yet that is implicitly, and I think sometimes explicitly, present in certain types of journalism. The social acceptability of the journalist influences the journalism. That's a fundamental breach, I think, of the role of the journalist. I think the journalist, whether you like them or not, should report the facts on the ground.

I

Interviewer1:08:43

Okay, gentleman.

A

Audience Member1:08:48

Do papers need to be economically viable? Do they need to make money? And if they don't, can that compromise their moral objectiveness?

R

Robert Thomson1:08:59

It certainly can. Papers need to be viable. Before I took over the FT in the States, I went around 28 states and tried to meet the editor of the major newspapers in each major town that I went through, and some little towns too. And it was fascinating looking at what you would judge to be the viability and non-viability of certain papers. And the first thing you lose from papers that are not viable, or from owners that don't believe in journalism, is international coverage. And it was quite striking, actually, because when I arrived in Beijing in 1985, papers like the Baltimore Sun, the LA Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution all had correspondents in Beijing. None of them have correspondents in Beijing now, and it's down to what would be perceived to be a lack of viability. The journalist numbers are reduced when papers are perceived to lack viability, and inevitably, absolutely, the quality of the coverage and actually the quality of the service that paper provides for its community is diminished. And one of the things that I think most UK newspapers picked up on pretty early, because of the intensity of the competition, was that you did have to build up the web presence meaningfully. And you look at certain US newspapers who are, say, the Houston Chronicle—I don't mean to be unfair, which is a great paper—but it struck me as strange even five or six years ago that someone there hadn't said, 'Houston, oil city, we should dominate energy coverage on the web.' The truth is, that opportunity to generate revenue was missed, and the number of journalists working there now are far fewer than otherwise would be the case.

I

Interviewer1:11:10

But well, we have around, online and print, about 4,900, 5,000 journalists, which is about 10% more than when I arrived, in total.

R

Robert Thomson1:11:30

Yeah, staffs have increased on the serious newspapers with the exception of the Telegraph, which has gone down.

I

Interviewer1:11:37

Oh, well, no, it's the Guardian and Times have increased, and the Telegraph and Independent have gone down.

R

Robert Thomson1:11:44

That's the case. A question here.

I

Interviewer1:11:47

Can I just do one interim then, because it strikes me that lurking beneath your question was whether or not you regard journalism as a private enterprise profession or a public service. Is that right? I mean, the Times notoriously is not too keen on our great public service broadcaster. Do you not like public service journalism?

R

Robert Thomson1:12:10

No, I like public service broadcasting, but I like public service broadcasting. I don't think the BBC should be the only planet. I don't think the BBC should—I mean, if the BBC's resources were going into serious journalism and serious public service broadcasting, I wouldn't have an issue with it, but they're not.

I

Interviewer1:12:31

Okay, Simon.

S

Simon F1:12:33

My name is Simon F, I'm a writer in the broadcast. I'm interested in your views on the state. I quite understand why Rupert Murdoch doesn't have to do anything in order to influence the way in which the Times argues in public, because quite clearly you agree with it to such a great degree. I therefore imagine that you don't think the state has any particular role, for instance, in the separation of the carriage of cable television and the development of the content of cable television, as in the case with Sky. So you would presumably argue that that's a broadcasting regulation too far, and that actually News International and so on and so forth and Sky should be allowed to operate in the way they have done. We've seen the problems that that causes in China and the lack of freedom of speech that that kind of so-called free market has caused there. But what I'm really interested in is your view of the state, because you talk about it in terms of the amount of GDP. Isn't it a more accurate way of looking at the state to look at what the state can do? Is the state an organization, a body, a thing that can open up opportunity, give people a leg up, or not? Because typically, it seems to me, I'm always surprised when people, for instance, leap on the inheritance tax, that actually privileges the top, the richest 3,000 families in the country. It's only 6% of all tax paid, it's a minute—people's reaction to inheritance tax is actually what they think they might have to pay, whereas they're paying it now, and if they died today, actually, in fact, people don't pay inheritance tax, they avoid it. We will do, we know how to do it. So I'm slightly surprised that you take a, if I could call it, a tabloid political view of inheritance tax. My question is: how do you define the role of the state? Is it about the size of the state, which is a typically, if I may say, right-wing view, or is it the function of the state, which I might say is more centre-left view?

R

Robert Thomson1:14:22

Oh, it's the function and the cost of the state, and when the two are—well, of course, you can't talk about—as taxpayers, we're investing in the state, we're investing in our state. The state is not a separate body that we should grow to know and love as an extra pen. It's part of us. And there is no doubt that—I would argue there is no doubt that the state has a very important role in giving the genuinely disadvantaged, dispossessed every opportunity in life, and that means a lot of subsidies for poorer kids, better schools, healthcare, state-funded healthcare, all of those things that make young people able to realize their potential. And there's no doubt about that. Now, how do you—that figure of 44 or 43 or—I mean, that's of course that doesn't capture in great detail interventions that are positive, and I think frankly interventions that are self-serving. Because the problem with a bigger state is that it becomes self-serving and self-sustaining, and it is a long way, I think, from what you would like and I would like to think is the ideal involvement in the state, which is to create opportunities for people who want to take them, to make sure that, you know, as they say, young people are not left behind, that the old are not spending their final days in deprivation. There is not a—I think that argument is over, generally speaking.

I

Interviewer1:15:53

If I may disagree just once, is that you were talking—you allied there from the state's role in terms of the poor, as you said, and the excluded, and then you went over to talking about young people as if you meant all of them. You know, the state either has a role in relation to everybody in society, or it's a kind of safety net. Which is it in the Times' view?

R

Robert Thomson1:16:12

Well, it's somewhere between the two. But unless you have a thriving private sector, you will not create jobs for young people. And when you have 70% of job creation in parts of the Northeast being state-sponsored job creation, this society has a serious problem, because you are not going to get—you may get to the point of having educated people, but you're going to have educated, very frustrated young people who are not having an opportunity to express themselves in working life, which most of us in this room have had the privilege of doing. And I think it's a big, it's a complex question. It's not are you for or against the state. Of course you're for the state, but it has to be a state that responds to the country. It can't be separate from the country. And one of the dangers is as a state gets larger, it does develop a life as a separate entity, and I would argue that we're getting close to that point.

I

Interviewer1:17:11

I'll—okay, two quick questions then. One there.

A

Audience Member1:17:18

Journalist. You, I think, you said that online and the Times—how is it that the Times will be making money next year? Is online going to be making money, or can online news ever make serious money? And are your journalists having to do both print and online?

R

Robert Thomson1:17:38

Well, all the journalists basically are doing both, either in subbing stories frontline or writing stories frontline. The profitability of the Times—the advertising revenues are pretty strong at the Times, they are year-on-year. The circulation and circulation revenue is way above budget, so actually we will be slightly ahead of our schedule on profitability. How you—what is the cost of online? I mean, nobody—the apportionment for online is very, very difficult to calculate, because it's—what percentage of the journalist time do you—and in a way, I think those arguments are fatuous because they create a digital divide where there really is none. I think what you're doing is creating content for the different media, the media of delivery, and out of that you're able to repurpose and—I mean, most importantly provide information, but through that provision also generate revenue. And so the cost of the content is pretty constant. And I think once papers get to this point where you have a reasonably constant cost of content but so many avenues for repurposing it and generating revenue, you're in not a bad position. And without being too complacent about it, we're not far away from that at the Times.

I

Interviewer1:19:19

Well, online ad revenues are up around 45, 46% year-on-year, so it's serious money from a low base, but I think we all see which way the trend's going. There was one question over there to be fair.

R

Robert Thomson1:19:34

The base was a very low base two years ago, and that base keeps getting bigger. That's fair.

I

Interviewer1:19:42

Yeah. Oh, it's one of the reasons—certainly, I'll make this the last question because we've reached that time when we're getting hungry and thirsty. The Guardian recently launched its Guardian America website. Well, I'm not sure I entirely understand the point of this in particular. I do absolutely understand the advantages of, even the necessity of, taking a newspaper brand and going global. Would you agree? And if so, how is the Times global, or what are the plans for?

R

Robert Thomson1:20:16

We created an international homepage just about a year and a half ago, because a third of the audience is in the US. We have—global papers aside—we have far more correspondents in the US than any other paper. And I think part of it is having to report a country like America or India, which is going to be a great source of readers for the Times in the short term, having to take that country seriously. Because my experience with the Financial Times was—and my instinct when I arrived was—we have to improve the US coverage. It's not why a person will necessarily buy the Financial Times in those days, but it's how you will be judged, because your US audience will definitely read your American coverage, and if it's naive, if it's the correspondent abroad writing jolly stories which are caricatures, then you'll lose your audience quickly. And I think the same lesson has to be applied to Times Online, whether it be for the US or for India.

I

Interviewer1:21:30

Okay, well, we'll bring it to an end. And can I just ask you a very easy question: looking back over five and three-quarter years as editor of the Times, what was your greatest moment and your worst?

R

Robert Thomson1:21:44

Easy question, impossible to answer. Well, impossible to answer, and I'm not in a reflective mood at the moment.

I

Interviewer1:21:56

Okay, that's a tough question to ask. I should have prepped you on that. Okay, I think we'd like to thank Robert for his attendance. Thank you.

Insight with the editor of The Times Robert Thomson

About Robert Thomson