NewsXchange 2008

News Xchange 2002: Session Transcripts
11 october 2002

Session 4:
Broadcast News and The Audience: Is the Nightly News dying year by year as it fails to attract younger viewers?

Most broadcasters are now struggling to maintain the audience for main evening bulletins. What are the techniques being used to keep the audience hooked to the main bulletin? In addition to maintaining audience, how do we attract younger viewers and what lessons can we learn from those at the cutting edge in youth TV, interactivity, etc? Is it possible to produce a different type of newscast that maintains journalistic standards but is more appealing to younger, multi-cultural audiences? Or does dramatic change and down-market, soft journalism drive away traditional, core viewers? Who is successfully reaching these viewers without sacrificing their standards?

We will look at some of the broadcasters that have been successful or are trying to break the traditional broadcast mould to attract new and younger audiences. We'll review the role of the traditional anchor, the use of graphics and live techniques in story-telling and whether these pressures are affecting the choice of agenda. Amongst the broadcasters trying the new approach: RTL 2 in Germany; City TV in Toronto; and BBC 3 in the UK.

Chair: Sian Williams, Presenter, BBC Producer: Jenny Baxter/Fiona Anderson, BBC and Charles Bebert, Kane Media

Confirmed Participants:
• Pedro Gonzalez Martin, Director of International Organisations, RTVE, Spain
• Eva Hamilton, Head of News & Sport, SVT Sweden
• Cyril Lollivier, Peaktime, France
• Olivier Mazarolle, Directeur de l'information. France 2 (via satellite)
• Richard Sambrook, Head of News, BBC (via satellite)
• Richard Tait, former Editor-in-Chief, ITN and Vice Chairman, IPI, UK

TRANSCRIPT:

Sian Williams (SW): Thank you for coming in today we are going to be talking about the subject that occupies us all as broadcasters and that is the audience. How do we keep our audience? Is it true that audiences for television news are declining and if it is true, where are they going and how to we get them back? We have got a very distinguished panel with us this morning but the success of today doesn't depend on our distinguished panel here, it also depends on you the audience and if you have got an audience of 100 or 150 journalists, everybody is going to have an opinion! Put your hand up if you disagree with them, put your hand up if you want to ask a question, and we will get a microphone to you.

Let me talk you through the kind of structure we have got for the next two hours. We will be talking first about the scale of the problem when it comes to TV news bulletins - whether those audiences are declining, or whether it is just a myth. Then we will be looking at the sorts of things we can do to try and get them back. The role of the television news anchor for example, how important is the anchor in setting the tone of your bulletin? Storytelling - what's the best way to tell the news? That's another one we will be doing, whether the agenda has changed. We heard Chris Cramer yesterday talking about the agenda and talking about our remit as educators and whether that remit has somehow been lost in the quest to get more people watching and we will also be talking about news television, interactive TV, how do we get young people watching and what techniques can we learn from their programmes?

Before we do all that, let's look at some figures, starting with some figures from the United States. Let's take a look at the audience. It is an ageing audience. The audience from the nightly network news in less than a decade has almost halved. You can see a little blip in the figures for September 11. Who watches the nightly news regularly? More than half are over 65 and only 20% are under 30. The news from the UK is similar, how many hours of news to people watch each week. The over 65's watch 4 hours and the under-44 age group watch less than 2 hours a week. The news from France is similar, who watches the France 2 bulletin at 8 o'clock. This will be of concern to Olivier Mazarolle, 60% of his audience are over 50, 5.5% 18-24, 25-34 only 8%. Actually, while we have got you all here, it will be interesting to have a show of hands to see whether anybody has actually seen their audience figures go up. 4 people, 5 people it's not very much really is it.

Let's talk to Richard Tait. Richard Tait, should we be worried about this, are you worried about this?

Richard Tait (RT): I think we should be concerned but I don't think we should panic. I think there are two issues, one is that older people watch more television anyway but there is clearly a big issue and a big problem that we have to deal with. However we do need to retain our credibility because of what those figures didn't look at, which is if you ask people in France or the UK who they trust as sources of information they will overwhelmingly say television news. By television news they don't mean the news channels, they mean the big network news programmes on terrestrial TV. Despite the decline in the audience, the terrestrial broadcasters have retained a great deal of credibility. So I think we have got a huge dilemma here which is that there is an ageing population that quite likes what we are doing and respects what we're doing and believes what we are doing but we are all heading for the exit door unless we can attract a new younger audience. So somehow you have got to trade accessibility and credibility without damaging either.

SW: Well that's the point isn't it, how to bring in a younger audience. In actual fact I would like to bring in Olivier Mazarolle from France. Olivier, bonjour to you. Thank you very much for joining us. Olivier, we were talking about the audience becoming a much older audience. The figures we saw from France show that your audience is quite an old audience. Does it worry you?

Olivier Mazarolle (OM): (Mr. Mazarolle's comments were made in french, and unfortunately we are unable to provide the translation.)

SW: Yes well fair point actually, what do you do to get the young to watch. You have to completely change things throughout the news to get them to watch a news programme.

Eva Hamilton (EH): I am not particularly worried about the people under 25 they are supposed to explore, they are supposed to study, to party, to travel. I am more concerned about the generation of 25-35, those who have got their first child, their first Volvo, their first house those who are going to take over our jobs and pay our pensions. When they don't watch the news I get quite worried but I don't think it is a mission impossible to get them back.

SW: You don't? What about you Pedro is it the same situation in Spain?

Pedro Gonzalez Martin (PGM): I think the tendency in Spain is the same but nevertheless I think from our point of view we have started to make new innovations and I think that we have been successful in attracting a younger audience. On the one hand we have changed the signs in our news bulletin quite a lot and on the other hand we have a second news channel where we have a news bulletin every night at 10 o'clock that is specifically for young people between 15-30. It is just at the end of the news bulletin on the first channel. It is quite informal, the anchorman does not wear a tie and the top stories are nothing to do with the stories that we have watched in the previous bulletin. We get between a million and half and two million young people between 15-30 watching this bulletin.

SW: I was interested to hear what you had to say about the anchorman being informal and I know that either you've got views on this which we will come back to later but first I wonder if anybody in the audience that would like to comment about falling news audiences because it is not true that audiences are falling across the board. Terrestrial broadcasters are finding it more difficult and say that satellite groups that CNN or Sky.

Member of Audience: My name is Stephen Claypole from DMA Media (UK). I have spent the last two months running an enquiry in Kosovo to the future of news broadcasting there and the interesting thing in Kosovo is that there is an entire generation that had the education system collapse on top of them and they got most of their education from satellite television so the local broadcasting scene has become very vibrant with a lot of international support and the new stations there have had to take account of the presentation style of television so they have been set up in a very imaginative way with a very low budget. Young people are watching news broadcastings not because of the newly found democratic freedom. I spoke to a lot of young people and they said the visual grammar seemed to be right and the way the presentation was done on terrestrial television. The lesson I have learned from being in Kosovo for a few weeks is that broadcasters have lost touch with a lot of the younger audience. At the same time by trying to play to the younger audience they are losing the older audience. The demographics are now hugely in the area of 55-70.

There are organisations like the BBC that have run pogroms against the over 55s. I am told that up to 3,000 who work in the BBC for news and current affairs and so, on only about 30 of them are over the age of 55 and to remove a whole generation from the production of news is magnet in my view. When the demographics are heavily up that end of the spectrum.

SW: Thank you Stephen. Actually I would just like to find out whether there is anybody in the audience from radio because it would be interesting to see whether the same is true in radio with a declining audience. Yes there is somebody. Actually I know who you are because you were seen with my colleagues from the BBC. Basically as far as the BBC is concerned it is broken down into different channels in Radio 4, 3, 2, 1. What about the news audiences for BBC radio. Indicate as unidentified member of audience. Our experience recently indicated that news audiences increasing right across the board and with digital radio we are able to attract a younger audience. We just launched the one extra digital radio channel which is aimed at a young urban audience. It has got a lot of news bulletins but delivered in a totally different way.

SW: Let's look at the tactics that some of the broadcasters are using to win back the audience. There are a couple of things that broadcasters are doing and one thing that I know people on our panel have done is change their terrestrial TV bulletins and put in different anchors so now lets look at the role of the anchor. How important is it. Is it going to change your bulletin to put in an anchor that truly reflects your audience. May be go for a younger audience and a younger anchor. How important is it to set the tone of your news bulletin by using the anchor. Lets look at some of the news anchors, there is now a short video footage.

SW: OK lets talk to Olivier Mazarolle about the role of the news anchor. You changed your anchor recently, David Pugovert. Why did you choose him?

OM: (Mr. Mazarolle's comments were made in french, and unfortunately we are unable to provide the translation.)

SW: Do you think that France, Continental Europe and the UK all follow the United States in the way we chose our anchors and what kind of anchors we have and may be in terms of the anchor expressing their opinions more and being a figurehead for the network. Is that important in France too?

OM: (Mr. Mazarolle's comments were made in french, and unfortunately we are unable to provide the translation.)

SW: Thank you Olivier. Richard Tait, what kind of anchors do we have in the UK and how do they differ from elsewhere.

RT: I think the main thing and obviously I speak to ITN is that we have anchors that are appropriate to the different services. What we are looking at now is the scenario when one size no longer fits all. You saw Kirsty Young on 5 News which was a programme we launched in 1997. She was the first walking and perching newscaster and now we are all doing it. When it first started there was a lot of sniggering which shows how conservative the British news media is and people felt that because she was going to be walking around, the news was going to be rubbish and of course the news was extremely high quality, we had extremely good reports, it was just done in a different style but I think the thing about anchors is that they do make a statement to the audience about what kind of programme it is going to be. 5 News is aimed at a younger audience and has been very successful in getting younger people to watch it.

SW: So do you need a younger anchor to get a younger audience.

RT: No not always. One of the most respected journalists amongst young people in England is Charles Weller who is now over 70 but people believe that he is a journalist of incredible interrogatory and commands respect. In general terms if you are trying to address a group of people, if you appoint a young woman to present your news programme you are making a statement about young people about their abilities and maybe you are making a statement especially when half of your audience is female. We are trying to reverse the trend that most of the people on that video were men and half the people that watch news programmes are women

SW: And most of the women that we do feature are generally in a secondary position.

RT: Well no, not in the clips you saw from ITN. If you take the evening news, the evening news is a different approach. It's not a single anchor programme it is a double anchor programme. What you are trying to do is produce news at a different pace. It is a busy time of the day people are coming in from work at 6 o'clock. They haven't got time to sit and slump, they have got meals to prepare and partners to talk to so for that programme we went for the dynamic approach of two people, two equal people, a man and a woman. The woman is not an adjunct to the male presenter and they produce a dynamic fast moving programme. The key to it is to have a presenter who is appropriate to what you are trying to do in that audience and if you get the right presenter, the presenter reinforces the message you are trying to get across to that audience.

SW: Eva, you changed the 9 o'clock bulletins didn't you. Did you keep the same anchors?

Eva Hamilton (EH): Yes we did, but I would first like to say that I think it is more a question of attitude than of age and I also hate the stereotype of the greyish older man and a beautiful young attractive often exotic woman and I can't deny that we are guilty of that in Sweden as well. That's a stereotype and it puts me off.

SW: Who is perpetuating it then?

EH: We are changing and every step we take is a step forward. What we have done with the 9 o'clock show recently only two weeks ago, was we threw away the old school style desk and we are now walking around. The anchors use the whole studio and it's a big studio with a big screen where you can put a map, you can put weather forecasts, you can put graphics, they can walk up to the screen and have a dialogue or points, or show something at the screen. There is a small desk where guests are invited for interviews so you have an intense interview in a small space and there is a small news desk where the bulletins are presented. This way you get dynamism, you get movement and the different places symbolise different kinds of news. It is only two weeks old but so far it's been a huge success and now we will take the next step and change dramatically our 11 o'clock show, which currently is a short 10 minute show. The change is because we know at 11 o'clock we have the young audience in front of the TV set and we want to take them back from Big Brother to the news.

SW: Pedro, what's situation in Spain? You face quite a lot of competition now don't you?

PGM: Yes, we have had quite a lot of competition since 1989 when the private TV companies had rights on the market but nevertheless from the point of view of news I think that we keep our leadership and for this consideration I believe that we continue to be the main point of reference for the majority of the public in Spain. We have changed the anchorman and woman not only because we wanted it but because the private sector has taken our stars and paid them more money. Channel 3 for example took staff and could pay them 10 times more than we were able to pay so it was a very big temptation for people that had worked all their life in the public sector but the result is that we keep our leadership. Now I believe that the role of the anchorman is not so important for average people, tv still is the point of reference for them. A good example would be, for us, during the coverage of the events of 9/11 we were able to broadcast for 14 hours live with no adverts or commercial breaks and the result was that we were up 20-30% in the ratings on some of our competitors. I think this proves the success of a broadcast doesn't hinge on the anchorman or woman but on the quality of the news.

SW: Let's see if we can join Richard Sambrook, Head of BBC News. I want to ask you a question, Richard, about how the BBC has changed its anchor line-up. For people who don't know, the main 10 o'clock news has a new anchor and the 6 o'clock news has two anchors in place of one. Why did you do that?

Richard Sambrook (RS): We had an opportunity when the two long standing anchors of News at Ten decided to step down this year and there was an opportunity to have a look at our anchors across the day on our BBC news programmes and we have had an opportunity to shift a generation in our presentation. All our anchors are experienced journalists, Huw Edwards is a very experienced journalist and has been presenting various bulletins for years and I think it is very important that we go for people with journalistic quality. The decision between one or two anchors varies across networks, I think as Richard Tait said the decision to go for two gives you something extra, it gives you more pace and more movement and opens up the programme a bit more in our terms. The 6 o'clock news is slightly more relaxed and slightly less formal than the 10 o'clock news with a broader agenda and new production techniques that we may talk about later. To have two presenters on that programme would help the pace and help it make more of show and an open programme than a very straight on authoritative tradition news bulletin which is more the style of the 10 o'clock news.

SW: Richard Tait, two or one does it matter?

RT: I think you probably need two and one. BBC1 and ITV are unusual networks in that they have two big news programmes in peak time each evening and I think if you had only one news programme our experience in British commercial TV would be that it's better to have one strong anchor that people can identify with. Kirsty Young for example when 5 news was launched became the face of Channel 5 and indeed remains the public face of Channel 5. On Channel 4 which is a station that has got a different audience they are going for if you like a much more upmarket audience and the news programme is a much more serious programme with a high proportion of international news presented by a distinguished correspondent, Jon Snow. In many ways he has become the public face of channel 4. As for ITV's decision to have two anchors on the early evening news programme I would tend to agree with Richard and say that you need to make that earlier programme into much more of a show, into more of a programme and less than the traditional bulletin. That is only because on ITV1 there is Trevor MacDonald at 10 o'clock and on the BBC there is now going to be Huw Edwards and you have got to have somebody just as a network. The amazing thing is looking at the pictures you have got of Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. Those people have been presenting the nightly news in America for as long as most other people have been in the business and although their audience has declined the public esteem is as high if not higher than it has ever been.

SW: Thank you Richard we have got a question from the audience.

Tony Maddox from CNN (London Bureau): I have got a question for both the Richards really. Having worked at the BBC a long time myself and been involved in producing programmes and then working in the US network, the single anchor issue is most interesting in itself to talk about, in as much as the age of the people that have been presenting it in American TV. American TV is often perceived to be obsessed with the glamour and production of these programmes but they have probably got a lot more older correspondents and presenters than other networks but I want to be specific about the dual anchor format. What I have noticed when I watch the dual anchor programmes on ITV and BBC is there is very little interaction between the two anchors. Often in local TV in the UK you see dual anchor formats and interaction between the two anchors can often be quite toe curling whereas in the United States and certainly in programmes in CNN an awful lot of production goes into the presentation of the show and the anchors interact with each other if you have got two people there you need two people that are going to be aware of each other. If you are going to have two people there at on opening shot who then read a succession of interviews or clips but in between times they might as well be in different studios and it makes you wonder what the point of having the dual anchor format is.

SW: So it's just for show it doesn't really serve any purpose. Richard Tait?

RT: I think I would agree with most of what Tony said and I think that these programmes, indeed this format, is in transition. The twin anchor approach works best if it's produced as a television programme and what you are seeing in these bulletins is that they are becoming much more like television programmes than news bulletins in the pure sense and so you're quite right that the interaction between the anchors matters. The philosophy at ITN has always been to have few anchors and to try and have if you are going to have a two presenter programme then have two doing it most of the time so that they do build up a relationship and that they trust each other enough to talk to each other or ad lib and the audience enjoys the fact that they are enjoying each other in the studio and I think the BBC because they have had more money than ITN have employed more people. I think my experience with anchors is that the key thing is consistency. Decide who you are going to have and then stick with them and I think there is a lot the UK can learn from the way that the Americans treat these programmes as pieces of television.

SW: OK let' get a word from Richard Sambrook in London. Do you agree Richard with things that Tony was saying that you need the same anchors, you need them all the time and why do we keep messing around putting two anchors on air? You have only got half an hour and you can't build up any chemistry in that time.

RS: I totally agree with that, that's one of the reasons why in the changes that we are going to introduce in the New Year we are going to have much more consistency and there will be the same two people on the 6 o'clock news five nights a week. Huw is going to be the main anchor that we build the news around at 10 o'clock. I also agree with Tony Maddox and am very envious of the way that the Americans do it, the way they get the relationship right with dual anchors in particular. It's the kind of thing you see in the morning shows in the States and I don't think in Britain we have ever got that right. Perhaps GMTV was the closest to it, but it is something that I also feel we need to put a lot more effort into and I think Tony is right, it comes down to putting the production effort into the relationship between the two presenters.

SW: Let's have a chat with Eva because one of the issues raised here has been gender and about getting rid of the veterans and putting fresh new faces in. What do you think?

EH: I would like to agree with Tony there as well because we have the same problem when we put two anchors in, it very often becomes awkward and you can't see that they really enjoy each others' company. When you watch the American shows, there is always this very nice atmosphere between the two people or mostly there is and I would like to learn how you do it. It might be a question of a different way of behaving in different countries or cultures.

SW: I have spotted Suzette actually from NBC, so I am going to try and find out from you why the Americans and the British and the Continental Europeans can't. How do you get that chemistry between the two presenters?

Suzette Knittl (SK): I am not sure that I really know the answer to that. Maybe it is something slightly cultural in a sense that you read what happens behind the scenes and maybe it is not quite as happy behind the scenes as it is in front of the camera but they work hard at getting the right combination and work together to make that happy thing. May there is just a slightly more relaxed atmosphere on American television.

SW: When we were talking about the age of the anchors we saw Tom Brocauw and he is what in his early 60's and also look at Peter Jennings who is also in his early 60's. What happens when they go?

SK: Well it's a whole issue of identity that we have been talking about. We have been talking about the diminishing audience for 15 years, we have been talking about the evening news going away for that long and yet we have stayed with our anchors and even though the audiences have dropped, more than half have stayed with that formula. In NBC's case Tom is retiring in a year and a half, and he will be succeeded by a Bran Williams who has been the heir apparent for a couple of years.

SW: Why didn't you have a woman front the show? Why don't women front the main news shows, why are they always having to fit alongside somebody else?

SK: It's a good question and I suppose that when the final decision is made there is probably a fear of going away from the traditional and going to a lead woman anchor as opposed to a man and woman anchor and the man leads out.

SW: Does anyone have an older woman presenter presenting the main news show? Hello, you're from Ireland.

Audience member: We've got two shows. One is a sort of fairly traditional male/female anchor and the high sort of show has been presented by the same woman presenter for fifteen years and she has got older and we haven't moved her and the audience have stayed with her. The recognition of the audience with her is phenomenal and also associates the whole news service with her main male anchor on the second bulletin would have the same recognition factor but they would be totally equal across various things and she would be a traditional newsreader rather than a journalist which is what the male presenter would be.

SW: Just a quick one before we move on to Eva Hamilton. Eva, how many of your anchors are blue eyed blonde Swedes and does that represent the audience? Do you have enough diversity?

EH: Too many are blonde-haired, blue-eyed Swedes and that's our problem and now when we are cutting down like most of us are, it is also very hard to recruit the new generation and that also shows that our staff are too Swedish. They are now actively looking for diversity, actively looking for people coming from other cultures who can appear as anchors or presenters. It's hard however because so far we haven't come so far as to accept a diverse accent. We still prefer a very severe and correct Swedish accent and to find a combination of a person who has credibility and the perfect Swedish accent was very hard.

SW: Quick one from Pedro before we move on.

PGM: I would like to say that I think that every TV station has proved all the combinations from non-anchor to another anchor and obviously there is a cultural aspect from one point. But on the other hand when you put two people together in the studio there is at least, from the Latin point of view, one who is the man and one who is the second one and I think that the star system doesn't support so well the presence of two people. That means this is why we have changed from two to one. A woman at midday and a man in the evening news and I think that the clip that you showed of Tom Brocauw from presenting the news for thirty years, he is not going to support the presence of another person with him.

SW: So if the anchor establishes credibility then another thing that establishes credibility is the way that we tell the news. It is vital really, if we are going to attract an audience then how do we do that in the way we tell our story. The audience told a BBC focus group recently that they weren't very happy with the way the news is presented.

(runs video footage of BBC focus group)

SW: There is a contradiction already in what that last audience member said in that he wants more news and he also wants simpler news so we will be looking how we tell complex stories in a simple way and give people as much background as they need if they are coming to a story fresh.

We are going to run another video clip - it tells you about the techniques that broadcasters are using to tell stories more effectively.

(runs video footage)

SW: Is there anything that we have seen there that anybody thinks maybe doesn't work? Has anybody got a view on that?

Stephen Claypole, DMA Media, UK: One of the things that I am really interested in is that we have talked about the superb techniques that American television often uses with the anchors and the presentation. Now I believe that the six o'clock news in London used American trainers when it re-launched a while ago and there is tremendous emphasis on using hands which a lot of the audience hate and I would like to ask Richard Sambrook in London about this hand technique and about the anchors in the studio. I don't like it particularly but it has offended a large part of the BBC audience.

SW: Richard Sambrook, in London why do they have to point to stuff all of the time?

RS: Well, I don't think it has offended a large part of the audience. Basically what is happening is I think we are trying to get to a more natural technique of broadcasting. It's no longer good enough to just stand there stiff as a board. Some people do it well and some people don't do it well and I think we have to learn and try and help people to broadcast more naturally and if you are walking around standing up and gesturing to the big boards or the video walls or whatever it is, is not an easy technique. But what we are trying to get to is something that is naturally animated. If it is distracting then obviously we've got it wrong. Some people do it better than others and some people get it wrong.

SW: Who likes the anchor walking around and pointing at boards and doing things – can we have a show of hands? Only a handful – does anybody find that technique distracting? Another handful, but the vast majority are ambivalent. Anybody else like to say anything? Yes, Simon from Sky – you use a big video wall and point stuff out – why do you do that?

Simon Bucks from Sky News, UK: The video wall which we use is at the back of the newsroom. It's an integral part of the set so you see it all the time and we used it a lot for telling stories which are short of picture. Although you wouldn't have known from the sequence in which you showed the clips, I think what's important to know is that Sky is a 24-hour channel, we never have time to rehearse these things or these sequences. The presenter has a quick look at the script and bang, they're live on the channel. It's a fantastic way of telling the stories previously told with a couple of graphics or very few illustrations and I think we are now pretty expert at the way we do it. And the other thing while you're here we should mention is the presenter who you saw there is a very good example of an older woman presenter who says she's 42 but is holding.

SW: Anybody else? Yes, you.

Eugen Freund, ORF, Austria: I think it depends very much on the subject that you're covering. I think if you have a flood in Prague you are not going to use the big screens and do graphics, you would show the flood and if you have letters being written by Prince Charles and you don't have the letters in your hand, then graphics are a good case in point in what to show. I think you cannot exclude one or the other, it depends what story you're covering.

SW: How successful were the other techniques we saw there? There was, I think it was Channel 5 who used a video diary – the first person to tell a story – Eva is that something that you like?

EH: I like that very much. Technically, it wasn't very advanced but I liked it. It was so personal and emotional that I really could identify myself with this young poor farmer. I think this is an example that we can all use. How to find a human example of the big political geographical problems that you want to discuss.

SW: But how do you tell the news if you are just telling it from one person's perspective.

EH: You should compliment that story with another story that might contain more facts, more figures. This is not enough one piece. You should do a package according to my point of view.

SW: Pedro you use quite a lot of live in your news bulletins don't you?

PGM: We have modified substantially the way of presentation – our main news bulletins are fifty minutes long and we put between thirty and forty items and that means that we have quite different items – for example yesterday, our top story was the floods in north eastern Spain and the first twelve minutes were dedicated to that and we had put up to ten different top stories independent from each other and you can chop and change. Maybe this is a very appreciated way to bring the news to the public. It is a very simple way to attract young people as well.

EH: Another one that was very good was the CBS fire exit clip there. That takes a very skilled cameraman – the report was good but the cameraman was even better.

RT: I think both techniques we saw had their place but I am struck partly because we were responsible for both the video diary and also for No Comment which is done by Euro News. But one of the reasons why those are powerful is that it is unmediated access to an event for the viewer and that is an issue for all of us that that farmer under normal circumstances would have been a 15, 12 or 8 second sound bite saying I am suffering, I am very unhappy, thank you very much, now we'll talk to someone else. I think we have got to think about ways in doing the news which don't always involve the package. The package is a tremendously powerful tool, we all use it and we employ people who are good at making packages and most news bulletins will continue to rely on them heavily. But what some of those examples show like the lives and the one in Chicago was very clever, very clever use of camera techniques. What I think this is giving people is very much what they want which is an unmediated access to the news and I think that we should be careful that we don't go too far down the road of so over-producing everything that it goes through a Moulinex of production. So it is quite a difficult trick this because we need to make better produced TV but we need to make sure that the audience gets access to what is really going on and I think that the advantage of a video diary technique is that I think we need to have a piece which puts the piece in context but that was above all a story about personal human catastrophe in the English countryside and not to let somebody have a voice on that would have been to misunderstood what the story was about.

SW: Richard Sambrook in London – we are all using a lot of these techniques, the first person, the video wall, the video phone – we seem to be getting rid of the traditional package which for many people is the best way of telling the story. You've got a beginning, a middle and end and it tells you what you need to know.

RS: I think it is just extending the range of tools that we've got available to us. The audience, what the audience want is a good story well told and what we now have largely due to advances in technology is more ways of telling stories, the big board or the Sky news wall is really an extension of the CSOs and studio spots that I used to use twenty years ago and the video diary is possible because of small lightweight cameras and videophones and because of that, live technology has moved on and there are more tools at our disposal and we have to learn which ones are appropriate for storytelling.

SW: Is there anybody in the audience that is using a technique that we didn't see – a new way of telling a story or somebody that prefers the old way of packaging? I think in the UK we are using an awful lot of lives now, and the balance seems to have changed between the two.

Roger Creyf? (Belgian TV): The only thing I would like to say is that we are talking about storytelling, that it's mainly showing the stories that we are involved in rather than telling the stories and therefore lives are more attractive to the audience when we go live like 9/11, we have a huge audience because it's live or if it's something like live like video diaries or a scene on the screen and I think then we attract the audience and I'm not sure that it's the anchor who attracts the audience – I don't know, but what does attract the audience, do we know that – have we got figures or data on that?

SW: Does anybody have any figures or any data on why people watch? Charles from Kane Media in France – why do you think people watch the news?

Charles Bebert, Kane Media, France: I think there is a good convergence between the two main branches – of course you have to divide subjects into the mainstream which is one subject and the other is the outsider's view which you have to be more innovative about. It is true in Spain that when you are looking at the credibility of the anchor if it is the same as your audience, all of the parameters you gave are the same but when you are looking to France, it's the same agenda, it's the same type of story more or less, there is a 14% difference between TF1 and TF2, the only difference is France 2 is making more international and more politics.

SW: Well that's interesting because it brings us on to my next point which is about the agenda – what do you put in your bulletin if you are trying to attract a new audience. Young people are telling us they don't want politics in their news bulletins – can we afford to dump politics and can you afford to say that we will deal differently and how differently can you afford to do it and is it still about men in suits?

(runs video footage of expert opinion on news agendas.)

SW: It's about making things gel Richard Sambrook, and sometimes you can just get too much of the dessert bit – too many celebrity stories perhaps – does that take away from the news?

RS: I don't think that every single news programme has to be the same. I don't think there is just one news agenda for the day that every programme has to reflect. I think what we're seeing in broadcast news is a greater differentiation between channels. A public service broadcaster with the BBC are always going to have a serious agenda and do the big foreign and political stories and will try and find ways of doing them that audiences can relate to, but if audiences are interested in sport or entertainment news then we have to have some of that in there as well but it doesn't mean to say it has to dominate the news but just because you include a piece about Madonna's news it doesn't mean that the whole of our editorial values have done down.

SW: Richard Tait if we're interested in Madonna's wedding or Beckham's baby surely young people can get it where they want - they don't have to tune into a news bulletin to get it?

RT: All the research that we have done says that people expect both. They don't see it as either or. I think we are short changing the audience if you don't tell them what is going on in the world and if you don't report the important political and diplomatic issues that are going to change and affect peoples' lives.

SW: But if you have a couple of lifestyle celebrity pieces in there then surely you have to take out a couple of news items.

RT: I think every story in the bulletin has got to be worth putting in and I actually agree with Chris Cramer talking yesterday about some of the meaningless garbage there is coming over the airwaves. There is no need to report that but there is a need to report the important sporting or entertainment or media stories because people are interested in them and they are part of peoples' lives. The crucial problem we have got in most western democracies is about politics and I will just share with you my favourite statistic which is that Nintendo did a survey recently to show that 97% of young Britons knew who Super Mario was but only 23% knew who Chancellor of the Exchequer was! So do you say ‘oh to hell with it we're not going to bother covering politics'? No you can't because whether they are interested in it or not you have to cover it because it's politics. News editors have got to take a balanced view and say ‘I know you're not initially interested in this but you should be because it's about your economy, your country going to war and I'm sorry but we are going to tell you about it' but at the other level you cannot ignore the fact that we now live in a much more complex culture where people are interested in consumer affairs, are interested in David Beckham and they're interested in Madonna's wedding and I don't see there is any problem in producing a balanced programme that covers all those bases.

SW: You must have views on this in the audience – can you do both in a news bulletin of half an hour? Can you report celebrity stories and still report the news? You have to be brave, you have to make these decisions if you're going to attract the new audience and the audience is telling you that it wants to see more health and weather stories – do you put more in and let the audience dictate the news?

Edith Chapin, CNN, USA: I work for CNN but if you were to watch the main American news bulletins at 6.30, three or four nights a week, the lifestyle stories centre on a medical story that surrounds the medical problems of people that are over 50 and the news is presented by somebody who is over 60 and the audience is shrinking from people over 55 so why is the health story centred around something like that – what happens when you're ageing? This is something that people in their thirties are just not going to be interested in watching.

Dutch journalist (from the audience): The thing is that we all stick to bulletins and older people still watch the news or older people still watch the bulletins at 8 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock whereas younger people want to get the news when they want it and they want it all the time. They don't want to see it at 8 or 10, they want to see the news when they've got time. You need to be able to give it to them via broadband internet or video on demand.

Anne Campbell from BT Broadcast, UK: I have a daughter who is 28 and very internet based. She and her peer group have quite sophisticated ideas, they have CNN news on the internet flag them when a news story has come up and they will dip in and out of news programmes on TV at any particular time, but they will research the background to the stories on the internet because they don't want to be given a story with political bias and also they like showbiz style news as well.

SW: We are going to be looking at the role of the internet a little bit later on and also what we can learn from youth TV as well because there is a lot happening there in terms of just getting headlines out and this is, as you said, something that a lot of the young people want.

Unidentified member of the audience: I will say I have the same tendency in that we have to attract different audiences. We found in the 1990s that people were more interested in the local news so what we did was to expand the local news coverage across each station and each network invited people to discuss their own problems and you had to tell them in many ways that the whole structure has changed and actually we have to tell people why we tell these news stories to people you know about genetically modified food. You have to tell them so many things – things that they don't know and that the younger generation think that the news must be much more greatly related to their lives.

SW: I think that is a good point that there are subjects that you need or you feel you need to tell the public and how do you get what you want to tell the public – how do you get that more accessible. If the audience is saying we don't want to hear from politicians either, how do you make politics sexy?

EH: I would just like to say that I don't think there is anything shameful in adding a spoonful of sugar – that's a good way of doing news. When it comes to making politics sexy I think it's a misconception to think that young people are not interested in politics, they are actually in my country and your country extremely interested in the shortage of housing, the lack of day-care centres, I'm talking about a young audience of 25-35, the question of ageing and people not being able to look after their ageing parents, interest rates. The thing to do is to cut out the spokesman of the Prime Minister's office, cut out the spokesman of the Government official, cut out the middle man.

SW: We had somebody there from City TV in Barcelona saying well people just don't like politics so we don't give it to them.

PGM: In fact I think many young people like in Sweden and like other places don't laugh at politics and in order to attract that kind of audience we have introduced a lot of stop stories and we have changed the order and we have put say Madonna's wedding at the top and at the end of the day you can put the politics inside and maybe then people, young people, will watch. I think to make it more attractive, you have to make it maybe not sexy but you put a lot more human interest stories in.

SW: Richard Sambrook in London – the BBC, the remit was always to educate inform and entertain and now they have added a new one which is to connect as well. Do you think sometimes we lose the education bit because we are too busy trying to inform and entertain?

RS: Well, I hope not – our strategy on education is basically to try and build it into a lot of other kinds of programming. Our strategy on education is to try and build it into a lot of other programming so for example on the history programme if you then go online there will be modules that you can do academic courses and so on. I think the education is a slightly different issue. In terms of politics I think it is just about being more creative, we have just done a big review of all our political programming here over the last year and I don't think its right to say young people aren't interested in politics they just don't relate to the kind of things they are interested in, what's going on in the House of Parliament but they are desperately interesting in single issues like the environment and the things that have an immediate impact on their life like transport. We are trying to do a number of things that look at politics from the ground up things that impact people's lives and then take them up to the leaders of power and it is ways and there are ways that you can do that through television or interactive services but I think it is wrong to say that people aren't interested in politics I think they are just bored with the way that it is done.

SW: We know that they don't vote and we know that they don't like politicians. Richard Tait, so do you just leave the politicians out of it and just do the grass route things.

RT: I think that's part of the answer in the UK we just have the lowest turnout in general electron history 59% which was a shock to many people in this room compared to the turnouts in European elections and as Richard said what we have discovered is that they quite like our coverage of politics they like the campaign but the trouble is watching the campaign put them off the politicians do they watch the coverage and then decided that they weren't going to vote because they didn't feel that there wasn't a connection between their concerns and the way the politicians behave. I think in terms of how you do politics you need if you are going to try and attract a younger audience to start much more with their mind set in the UK and I think in other countries politics has been a bit of an insiders game. Politicians and political journalists get on really well together they tend to be middle-aged men with a slight cosiness about political coverage in newspapers as well as television which I don't think younger people like, they are a bit edgier about life and are a bit less prepared to accept that that's the best way to deal with people and that certainly on 5 news for example we have a young reporter in the general electron going around taking a completely different approach to the election. What is this phenomenon and why are they behaving in this way. We had some success not complete suggests some of the pieces worked and some didn't but it did show that younger that younger people were prepared to ask slightly sharper questions about what is going on.

SW: I think either might find this next VT that we are going to run quite interesting because either tried to do something quite different in Sweden in her coverage of politics to get more young people watching so lets have a look at it.

(runs video footage)

SW: To what can the traditional news bulletins learn from these youth programmes either your re-launching your 11 o'clock bulletin how are you going to do it?

EH: We are just going to try to a great differentiation between programmes depending on what time they are on the air. We know the later it gets the younger the audience is the 7.30 news show on channel 1 is quite a traditional news show, the 9 o'clock show we threw out the desk and we had people moving around. The 11 o'clock show is a 10 minute show and we know that the young audiences are in front of the TV set at the time so we try now to have short stories a nice mixture of politics and entertainment and also connected to the web very closely so we will have items where we will point out that there is more to be found on this story on the web. On the web there will be string clips say the suicide bomber in Israel but then you can click again and go to a different level where you get a deeper background on the fax on the stream stories so you can use it when you are studying when you are in school and we also know that there is an older audience at the 11 o'clock news so this is an experiment.

SW: This is a really good point isn't it Richard Tait. How do you bring in new techniques to attract the young without alienating the old.

RT: I think we have to be realistic some of those techniques would scare and over 65 you are away from the television and it might not scare everyone away but I think some of them would and some of them would not and I think we have really got to. I think what we have seen here today we have got a huge range of tools at our disposal and we have to get the right combination of tools to get the right mix of audience and I think that anybody who sets out to turn the main terrestrial news bulletins to news programmes is risking disaster because the core audience to those programmes is likely to remain an older audience. In terms of attracting them I think most of the techniques we have seen today have their place. I don't think myself that techniques that are entirely aimed like 60 seconds on the BBC or 60 second news bursts are relevant to a mass audience programme but some of those people who are learning how to do things differently should be brought in. Part of the problem is that we have got rather a narrow view of what sort of people can work on these programmes. We haven't talked today at all about portrayal but most of us now look at multicultural societies. American television has been very good at getting anchors and producers and presenters who represent black America or Latin America and I am not sure in Europe that we have been quite as successful and unless we reflect the audience whey should we expect them to take us seriously.

SW: I would like to put that point to Richard Sambrook, I don't know whether you could hear Richard Tait Richard Sambrook but do are news programmes and news anchors reflect the audience that we are broadcasting to?

RS: I think it's important that I do. I don't think we do too badly in Britain really and ITV has had Trevor MacDonald as a black newscaster the eminent newscaster in Britain for some time, we have got Maura Stewart, we've got George Aligiah so in terms of anchors on the screen Britain is pretty diverse and similarly I think there are some very talented black and Asian correspondents coming through across the broad on UK television. I am more interested in the diversity behind the camera and I think the advances of doing something us for one extra is targeted niche digital radio service but what I hope is that some of those people will come into our main new service of television news and bring with them some experience and perspective on life that isn't there otherwise and I think it is very important otherwise that we perfect our off camera stance as well.

SK: I would just make the point that in the last few years we have all tried to diversify as we have seen the audiences dropping and we have tried new ways of approaching new audiences through the 24 hour news channels and this has certainly given MBC the opportunity to try many new types. We are doing a lot better in recent years with the diversity on air than we ever did before the traditional news programme, the evening news theme is still where it was but we certainly have more correspondence in the field of a diverse nature than we ever did.

Amy Selwyn, BBC News, UK: My question is this what are the recruitment and development practices that people are using to actually bring in diverse opinion, new skills, people who will engage with the audience, who we hire, who we retain and who and how we retain people and give them the values that say we want to engage with our audience because they are not all, you know we don't want all white men in their 50s.

SW: Which is a lot of what we see on the screen isn't it Richard Tait, white men in their late 50s, we are not doing it right are we?

RT: I think we are actually, I mean particularly at ITN there is a hell of a lot of Afro-Caribbean Asian men and women coming through and that is something that just wasn't happening at all 20 years ago and I think that as always with these things there is a lag in perception and that's why I think Richard Sambrook is quite right in the fact that Trevor MacDonald is the most respected newsreader in Britain with a rating that any US newsreader would die for and its an incredibly important signal to people that journalism is open to people of all talents and I think what we have been talking today about is about making connections with your audience. One of the ways you can do this is making sure that the people that appear on screen are sending a signal to the audience that we understand the society that you look in and I think there is a separate issue about executives. If I look around this room I see a lot of executives and they are all basically white faces and I think there is a time lag there as well but it is a separate issue to what we do on screen but it is linked.

Nick Bradbury Freelance Journalist, UK: I wonder whether we don't spend too much time thinking about anchors and presentation of news and production values and I will be honest I watch far less television news now, I listen to the news on radio 4 I don't really care whose reading the news as long as I can hear what they are saying. Give an example, the 10 o'clock news which I watch from time to time, I would like to ask Richard Sambrook, Andrew Marr has become a bit of a media star and so much of the bulletin seems to be between the conversation between the presenter and the correspondent and I think there is far much more of that and why is that because it seems to be meditated news. I think back to an earlier clip with the guy on the fire escape and I thought it was a wonderful idea, you don't see enough of that this is really show and tell a great use of television correspondents talking to anchors is not a good use of television. I wonder what Richard Sambrook has got to say to that.

RS: I don't think you can say its good or bad some of its good some of its bad and in terms of Andrew Marr our political editor I think he's got a lot to offer in terms of UK politics and I think one of the things he has done is to help our audience understand Westminster in terms of their everyday lives. I think we talked earlier about how to get people to relate to politics and I think Andrew Marr has inside knowledge and intelligence is a big help in doing that and that's why we use him in that way but equally I quite agree that I see it not just on the BBC but other channels as well Journalists interviewing journalists and you think this has gone a bit crazy and certainly at the BBC we are trying to rethink that and say are we in a hall of mirrors here sometimes. I think there is no question that a specialist journalist interpreting events can really help the audience understand things that they would otherwise find difficult.

Simon Blackburn: But don't you risk then having more opinion than news?

RS: There is a difference, a grey area, between professional judgment and personal opinion and Andrew Marr was appointed after some criticism from the right wing press but actually I don't think anybody has attacked him in terms of bias in terms of his broadcasting since he is working for us and I don't believe anybody could in the way that he goes about doing his job because he is an extremely able and professional journalist so there is a difference between professional judgement and personal opinion and professional judgement is legitimate and personal opinion isn't.

Tony Maddox (TM), CNN (London Bureau): I don't want to risk losing a day's pay but I want to come to the BBC's defence here. I think that what Andrew Marr does and does very well and it relates to the woman at the start of the focus group file this is most of the stuff I simply don't understand and I think what have lost sight of is a lot of the news journalists are acutely aware of what everybody else is doing, they read the papers, they search the internet and they cover stories for months, but I don't think what we do sufficiently is to do the ‘new reader start here' kind of approach. So how many times do we cover the Middle East? Now if you were to say to people what do you know about the Middle East, what do you know about 1967, what do you know about Palestine, where do you think these places are. The fact is that 70, 80, 90% of the audience wouldn't have a clue.

SW: But is it our job, is it the job of a news bulletin to give them that background?

TM: Yes it's absolutely our job and the job of the news bulletin because if you type in the story and you know that if people don't understand the key facts then the story itself is a waste of time and I think Andrew Marr is very good and there are other people and where I think British news has improved, and I will include Sky in this, has been the attempt to contextualise stories better and to make them more relevant to the audience by using the video. I'm not frightened by one reporter talking to another reporter but I think it depends on what they are talking about and whether it is successful but we do make big assumptions about the public's understanding and I think the reason why a lot of younger people don't watch is because they say “this doesn't touch me, I don't get it, I don't understand it”. You or I do this and we read a newspaper and we will be reading through and saying ‘oh I understand the background to that' but there are big impregnable areas of business and I am not going to bother to look at it. Take the Sun paper which often gets heavily criticised but one of the brilliant thing they do on big stories is ten things you need to know. It takes 40 seconds to read it and all of a sudden everything else makes perfect sense.

SW: Thanks Tony, how do we give people the background they need to understand the story better? One of the members of the audience made a point earlier about the amount of people that were using the internet and certainly last month when the Iraq document was published BBC online got half a million attempts to download the whole document.

Turkish Freelance Journalist from Audience: I think what we have already forgotten is to put the news as simply as possible because everyone wants to know exactly why so you have to give background that's what we are trying to do. First give the news and then explain why it happened, where does it come from, what was the start of the event at the same time we are going to try and get the viewers to ask questions to participate in the news.

SW: How do they do that, by sending emails?

Turkish Freelance: Yes by that but we have Q&As we just try and involve the audience as much as possible and as the anchorman you ask the question to the expert with the politicians or whoever and we are trying to get people to be inside the news to answer their questions. ...........
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