'What Ails Media? My Wife Says, A Panic Of Seriousness'

As a successful newspaper and magazine editor on both sides of the Atlantic, what, according to you, are the five major challenges confronting editors and news organisations in an era of diminishing attention spans and multiple distractions? And how should they deal with them?
The challenge to journalism is always double-edged: to disclose the important, which others often enough want to conceal, and make it readable/watchable. Then, of course, create or find ownership (as I was lucky enough to do with Lord Thomson) that enables the profession of journalism to be carried on within the increasingly complex business of the press.

You were one of the first to resist Rupert Murdoch. Twenty-five years down the line, do you think the Murdochisation of the media—tabloidisation of content, flippancy, price-cutting, synergy between editorial and marketing etc—has come to stay for good?
Not all those elements are wicked in all circumstances. The real issue for me is how to retain a decent pluralism—resisting the pressures for monopoly/oligopoly and secrecy—so that good journalism can flourish amid the dross. Let them eat cake if they want to.

With governments receding from the lives of citizens thanks to globalisation and privatisation, has investigative journalism lost a sitting duck? Can it ever be as easy uncovering corporate malfeasance given their PR machines and legal and financial muscle?
I don’t accept the premise. Government can only recede so far—ask the citizens of New Orleans—there remains a very important area for intelligent scrutiny. Also, there is a vast area for investigation where any one national government may not have truth locked up in some safe: think of global warming or intellectual piracy, or global financial swindles. In our Sunday Times exposure of two major financial scandals in the ’70s, the trouble was that no one government was responsible. The crimes slipped between the cracks. As for corporate malfeasance, I think the recent scandals—I speak of the US here—have vindicated the importance of investigativejournalism. When Insight began some major investigations at the Sunday Times, it was considered in bad taste to suggest there might be such a thing as a dishonest business.

Do you think the rise of ‘Citizen Journalism’, with blogging being one element of it, represents a diminishing trust in the established media? How can news organisations go about building credibility in the eyes of readers, viewers and listeners?
Established media has lost some trust, no doubt, but I think the rise of blogging is more to do with the appetite for telling the world where to get off. Very healthy. Most of it is opinion/argument, which is fine, but there is no central organising intelligence to sustain the heart of journalism which is reporting. (And sometimes that reporting is too difficult, too urgent, to leave to one reporter). Indeed, a significant proportion of cyberspace perpetuates myth and falsehood. The absurd lie that Jews blew up the World Trade Center on 9/11 began life on the web and got endlessly recycled by the credulous, the ignorant and the malevolent. One of the tasks I would submit to mainstream media is the regular detection and exposure of cyber propaganda.

As an editor who commissioned the biggest investigative stories of the 20th century, where do you stand on the renewed debate on protection of sources? Can patriotism or national interest be words at all in the lexicon of journalists?
We all know the importance of good sources, but too often journalists are manipulated, infatuated with the secrecy of a single source and don’t do the checking and research to justify publication. Journalists should be not be reckless in promising confidentiality for sources. When they do, they should be prepared to face the consequences—fine, jail, whatever. I am in favour of carefully defined shield laws which permit pressure for disclosure only on grounds of the highest national security or criminality. But I’d say that the press owes its freedom to respect for the rule of law and, if the law is bad, fight to change it—as I did in the Thalidomide affair.

When mainstream news has become business, is there any sanctity to the contrarian positions we hold? After all, it can be argued, it is to suit our market needs.
We shouldn’t be contrarian just for our own egos or bottom line. There is no shame in good journalism that is supportive. Remember Cordell Hull’s bon mot: "A lie has got half way round the world before truth has time to put its trousers on."

What is the most heartening fact about today’s journalism, across mediums? And what do we in news organisations need to do to make journalism an exciting profession for youngsters and a fulfilling experience for readers?
It’s heartening that there is more recognition now than there ever was. The lifeblood of a free society is a free press—free to inquire as well as vent. If that doesn’t excite the young, or anyone, then we are all in a lot of trouble.