As chairman of Chime Communications, Lord Bell resides over an empire that spans 19 PR companies and includes Bell Pottinger, Good Relations, Harvard, Stuart Higgins Communications and Resonate, some of the best known PR agencies in the country. Over the next hour and a bit, the man who helped found Saatchi & Saatchi before going on to mastermind many of the Conservative Party’s most successful campaigns opens up about all things PR…

Lord Bell thanks very much for your time today.
Please call me Tim.

Many people have credited you with being the founder of modern PR – what do you say to that?
I don’t think I’m the founder of anything – I don’t take myself that seriously. It’s true that I’ve been doing it for a long time and I’ve met a lot of people and I know a lot of people…and I’ve learned and I’ve listened and I’ve not had the arrogance to think I can do something better than my predecessors would have done it.

I think I probably had a very high profile because of the election work I did for Margaret Thatcher. That was a very successful period and because it’s a seminal period in the history of the British economy and the British country, I get attributed all sorts of garlands to which I’m not entitled. I do keep saying they’re not true but nobody believes me.

One of the things Maurice Saatchi [one of the co-founders of Saatchi and Saatchi] did was to talk about the advertising industry, how it works and the function of advertising in the economic mix and that always struck me as a rather more sensible thing to do than simply compete for the best idea. So I’ve taken the trouble to try and understand what communications is and how it works and I talk about it because if you’re going to have someone spend millions of pounds on your advice then it’s probably a good idea that you can convince them that you know what you’re talking about.

I don’t like the myths and the mystification of it. I think the jargon is silly and I think there are people who try and make PR sound fantastically complicated when it’s really quite simple – why try and use long words to make it sound more important than it actually is, and I don’t like people who demonstrate their ignorance by trying to sound like they’re highly intelligent when they’re not. These are all things I would say to my client about the way they communicate.

The great skill of our industry is that we take very complicated and complex issues and propositions and fantastically simplify them – that’s our great achievement.

Are you still hands on with accounts?
I spend around 70% of my time on client work. My skill set is that I’m a highly glorified suit. Suits are responsible for client relationships and relationships contain all sorts of things, from getting someone tickets for something to very big things like changing what’s written in a newspaper.

I feel particularly passionate about this industry and what it does and how it does it and I feel passionate about Chime.

I love doing pitches…and I’m extremely good at talking about this business and what we do and the industry and how it works so I spend a lot of my time visiting chief executives and chairmen and presidents and prime ministers and talking to them about communication and how it works.

Having a title is quite helpful – people quite like people with titles. For some reason they feel that means something.

What impact has the recession had on the industry?
One thing the recession has done is that people have discovered that they can achieve satisfactory results using internet communication and I think that habit will stick and I think the industry reacted to that by creating greater capability. And I think that is a structural change which is partly caused by the economic recession and partly by the technology connected to the internet becoming more relevant.

Markets have structural change and generational change. Commercial television and the internet are the two great generational changes in the British market and it’s a great mistake to think that social media is a generational change, it’s not.

What do you make of the advent of social media then?
Social media is just a distribution system of messages to a target audience and for some reason people have given them funny names…but to move them as though they are somehow more important than other forms of communication I think is a great mistake. Marshall McLuhan said in the early 50s ‘it’s the medium, not the message’. He was wrong then and he’s wrong now and anyone who repeats that now is still wrong.

Television at the moment, no matter what anyone says, is still the most powerful and impactful form of communication…Using what is effectively a television screen as though it is a newspaper (the internet) is, I think, a mistake.

I think newspapers are terribly important but not the most important thing in the world, I think posters are very important but not the most important and I think social media is important but not the most important and this modern debate of ‘shall we be digital or not’ is just fatuous.

I think the PR industry is prone to attracting people who want to claim that they can do something or understand something that other people can’t or don’t and so they catch on to something new and they try to be the people who can use it better than anyone else. The problem is that quite a few PR people bother themselves with discussing whether PR is better than advertising or advertising is better than direct marketing, which is just a completely silly conversation.

Everybody in the communications business should be channel neutral and they should seek out the channel which is most cost effective and most likely to deliver their message to the right people in the most economic way. To write down rules to say that x is better than y is just arrogant, silly and rather stupid without substance.

When commercial television started everyone predicted that newspapers would close but actually more opened. When the video recorder came along everyone said that people would stop watching television but actually they increased the number of hours they watched. As the internet emerged everyone predicted again that newspapers would disappear but they didn’t, they went online.

Because the internet is simply a distribution channel. I keep saying this and nobody agrees with me and they all think it’s very boring but that’s what it is – it isn’t anything else.

What do you think about professionalisation of the PR industry?
To be honest with you I’m the wrong person to ask because I don’t have any educational qualifications of any substance.

I learned doing the job and I think that’s probably the best way to learn it. I’m not convinced that people with MBAs or degrees in marketing or communications actually have any idea about how to apply that learning in the real world. The fact that you’ve studied theoretically doesn’t mean you know how to do something practically.

What’s your newspaper of choice?
The Times.
I’ve developed the ability to speed read – it’s something you learn to do. I’m not saying it’s a substitute for reading at length and reading properly but every day the newspapers are spread out in my office and I can glance at them and pretty much know what’s going on.

How are you feeling about the year ahead?
I think 2010 in the UK is going to be a very difficult year because there’s a general election, there’s a ridiculous political debate about what economic policy should be followed, the country is bankrupt, it’s very, very hard to see how the levels of public expenditure can be sustained when we aren’t creating sufficient wealth in the private sector to fund that. And there is of course the issue that if you do that through increased taxation you demotivate people which in itself reduces the GDP.

Is Chime on the acquisition trail? I’ve read elsewhere that you’re looking for a healthcare agency?
No that isn’t true – I didn’t ever say that.  I’m neither looking nor not looking. Naturally I’m not going to tell you the company’s strategy. But ask me if I’m going to grow the company through acquisition and the answer is no. I’m going to grow it by organic growth but if acquisition opportunities come along that would expand our services or make them better or higher quality, and if I could do it at the time, then I’ll do it.

What kind of chairman are you?
Bloody irritating. Ask anyone who works with me and they would say bloody irritating. I interfere too much. Part of my DNA is that I’m very interested in detail. It’s equally true that, over the years, I’ve become very good at looking at things on a macro level.

I interfere a lot, I ask a lot of questions, I push people, I chivvy people. I am what I’ve always been – I’m very interested in communication.

I’m not a great visitor to my empire – I find it a rather boring and stupid waste of time. I don’t think it’s my job to go around and see all my companies. I have very competent people in charge of those companies.

How do you think the industry is faring with evaluation?
Evaluation is the area that the industry is least good at or least wanted to be good at. Everyone in the world quotes Lord Leverhulme who said 50% of communication is wasted – he said it 50 or 60 years ago and since then nobody has enhanced that position. It’s still true that nobody knows what proportion is wasted.

Evaluation of course can’t be done without knowing what the objectives are but it’s more about the preparedness of people to be evaluated. I happen to think it’s very important for us to evaluate our work because otherwise why should anyone have any confidence in the relationship.

We have a research division and recently bought a data analytics company and we’ll start to use data analysis more than we previously have.

Do you have a Blackberry?
No. I have a very old Nokia – it’s about 15 years old. It’s the best designed phone there has ever been. It happens to have the best battery life of any phone.

I don’t need a Blackberry because I don’t want emails. I don’t want to receive acres of spam.

The telephone is a natural extension to my ear – I’m on the phone all the time. The internet has helped me absorb information but I don’t use it for communication. It’s a monologue and I’m more interested in dialogue.

Email has almost certainly been responsible for a reduction in communication rather than increase which is one of the things that I find quite funny about it. People say it has improved communication but it hasn’t. It has become a sort of tool in order to show off to other people.  The important thing to look at with any email is who it’s copied to because almost certainly the key point to the message is not to you it’s to the other people. And it’s very dull all that stuff.

Any plans to retire?
None at all. Do I want to stop working? No. Do I love it? Yes. Do I enjoy it? Yes. Do I get a buzz every day? Yes. And I hope that will go on.

I hope that my senior colleagues will turn around one day and say ‘you can’t do it anymore’ and that I’ll stop before I make a complete pillock of myself. There are people who probably think I should do that already.

What would you consider to be your career highlights?
The thing that I’m most proud of is working on the post-apartheid election in South Africa in 1994 because it was a genuine world-changing event. Equally important was the work that I did for Mrs Thatcher. I’m not claiming credit for it, but what she did was change the world – she brought privatisation to the fore, she brought forward the concept of free market and did a wonderful job for this country. It has all been undone in the past 15 or 16 years.

Tell us about Margaret Thatcher…
She’s a proper person. She believes in employing people for their expertise and on their subject they are regarded as the experts. Where you get into trouble is when you step out of your area of expertise and start trying to be a smart arse about things you’re no good at and that’s when you got hand bagged.

I was hand bagged several times and it’s a salutary experience. As long as you don’t take yourself too seriously, being hand bagged is actually a very good learning curve.

I see her regularly. She will remain a very significant person in my life forever, just as Charles and Maurice Saatchi will. They were very big influencers…

How are things looking for Chime this year?
We made budget in January, we’ll probably make budget in February. At the moment the first quarter looks good but I am apprehensive – and I use this word deliberately – about the rest of the year. I’m apprehensive about a double dip in the recession, I’m apprehensive about the impact of purdah [the pre-election period when politically contentious announcements cannot be made] on parts of our business and I’m particularly apprehensive about the distraction of the election campaign which seems to be going on forever. And I rather suspect that what Brown might be going to do is let there be an election campaign without an election date the way things are going.

It’ll be May 6 if Brown allows us to have an election. He may decide that we’re in a state of emergency and therefore there shouldn’t be an election – he’s got that level of arrogance. He could try. He wouldn’t be the first politician who has tried.

The business outside the UK is growing, particularly in Europe and the Middle East. The reality is that if you’re exclusively dependent on the UK then I don’t think you’re going to have a great year.

Any words of warning for the industry?
In the early 2000 we got involved in a lot of dot comery. We got involved with people with ideas but no funding. There were people offering us a percentage of equity in companies that were worthless.

There is a similar outburst happening at the moment with green projects. There are an enormous number of people coming up with ideas about creating new energy sources, creating renewable energy and new ways of creating energy and our industry gets sucked into doing all sorts of presentations and proposals and work and actually many of those things are never going to be funded and they’re never going to be paid. And I’m trying very hard to be once bitten twice shy because the dot com period cost us a great deal of money.

We are involved in a great number of green projects willingly and happily. What’s more likely to happen is that conventional businesses will become greener rather than a raft of new green businesses.

Any final thoughts?
I think it is a pity that the popular view of our industry is brought about by newspaper comment on people like Max Clifford. I don’t blame Max for it – he’s pursuing a living doing what he does but he’s not in the same business as us. Equally I think it is a great pity that people think that what we try to do is make a rat look like a squirrel. I think it’s perfectly true that we try and take out some of the good bits of a rat, if there are any, and try and talk about those. I think it’s a pity that too many people in the industry think that’s a good way to describe us and they’re rather proud of it.

I think Max is in the business of personal publicity and that isn’t the same thing as public relations or communication. There’s plenty of room for people like him and he’s the dominant brand. Publicists are not the same thing as communicators.

Lord Tim Bell was speaking to Celina Maguire, Gorkana’s Consumer Director.

As editor-in-chief of The Economist – he joined the magazine because it “looked interesting” – he enjoys the best of both worlds. His thirteenth floor corner office in a tower block tucked away behind the stuffy charms of London’s St James’s Street is favoured with views few buildings in the City can rival.

Between jetting off to Davos for the World Economic Forum, and returning to London to oversee the closer integration of The Economist’s website with the print version, he is a difficult man to pin down. But we manage to find a slot, while he wolfs down soup and a sandwich before his next management meeting.

It has been said the global economic crisis was good news for The Economist. The recession pushed the title’s core subjects into the lime-light, boosting weekly circulation to 189,281 in the UK and nearly 1.4m worldwide.

But Micklethwait is not so sure. “I think we may be faring better than others, but it’s still a tough market. Our advertising is down by around 20 per cent,” he admits.

The Economist has had to cut costs, particularly on the commercial side while in editorial there have been pay and hiring freezes. “Yes, that sounds better than sacking lots of people, but it’s still quite hard,” he says. Such tough decisions helped The Economist Group to increase its operating profit by 26% to £56m in 2009.

Readers turned to The Economist, founded in 1843 to campaign for free trade, to help them understand big events such as the election of Barack Obama and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, although this effect has tailed off.

“People probably feel more threatened now by what is happening around the world than they ever did before, so we have a big foreign staff and our aim is to keep on expanding our network overseas,” says Micklethwait. The Economist, which comes out every Friday, is printed simultaneously in six countries including the UK and the US.

Before taking over from Bill Emmott in 2006 to become the 16th editor of The Economist, Micklethwait ran the title’s business section, set up its Los Angeles office, ran the New York bureau, and did stints as Media Correspondent and US Editor. He has been in pole position to observe the dramatic changes in journalism both here and in the US. Back in the early 1990s, he had an office at the LA Times, one of the great US metropolitan dailies, which has since suffered major job cuts.

“The LA Times felt like an impregnable castle, much more secure than any of the British papers. It had a monopoly over one of the biggest cities in the world. The big American newspapers couldn’t go wrong.”

But go wrong they did, and Micklethwait believes a flawed business model was to blame. “The big city US papers had a business model which was heavily based on classified advertising. Rupert Murdoch once called classified advertising a ‘river of gold’. Suddenly a technology shift came up which stopped that river of gold.”

 As to how to solve the problems of newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, he is only prepared to give a “wishy-washy” answer. “Probably more people will pay for something online, but a lot of it will come from advertising.”

The Economist has flitted between erecting a pay-wall to read its content online, taking it down and putting it back up again. The current overhaul of the website involves dividing it into “channels”, which correlate to the different sections of the print version of The Economist.
The title has created a new layer of channel editors, who report to section editors. “We will end up with a homepage that is a competing forum between all these different channels,” says Micklethwait.

He wants readers to engage more with the website. “You have a clever group of people who come to The Economist. Some come to the internet site, because they want to find out what we think is important, what do we think about the new inflation figures in Britain. Other people come because they want to take part in a debate; they want to argue about stuff. The plan is to get them to debate with each other as well as with us.”

However, the technological development which he believes will change journalism even more than the internet is the hand-held e-reader. “I think the iPad is a huge development and the Kindle is a gigantic development. They are likely to have more of an impact on our industry than the internet has. I would expect in five years 10 to 20 per cent of our subscription being to people who use those gadgets.”

“The reason why it makes a difference is you finally have something about the same size as a magazine which you can carry everywhere. You are going to have one thing which is going to become effectively your information source. It’s going to be a big deal.” In two to three years time, he argues, e-readers will offer more sophisticated options such as being able to click on charts to find out more about the numbers behind them.

Reviews of The Economist’s Kindle subscription package on Amazon.co.uk complain about the high price. At around $12 a month the title is considerably more expensive than some of its rivals: Newsweek and Time magazine charge $2.99 a month, while The Spectator is $4.99 and the New Statesman $5.49.

Defending the pricing strategy, Micklethwait argues, “I think it’s very important with these new gadgets that people do not look at them as extras, and I suspect this is as key to the survival of the media as anything else. Magazines and newspapers should look on these as things that could replace their basic product. If they don’t want to make money on them then they are committing assisted suicide.”

The Economist does not face the same pressures as a 24 hour news organisation, although it describes itself as a newspaper and attempts to cover the main business and political events of the week. “People come to us for analysis, which means we have to be up to date – one of the impacts of what we’re doing at the moment is that the home page will change much more often – but we’re not trying to become a daily newspaper.”

While the title’s unique format gives some protection in a difficult market, its editor is by no means complacent. “Fundamentally what we’re all competing for is somebody’s time and somebody’s money. In the end somebody has to buy us rather than buy a collection of different newspapers, or watch the TV, or even go for a run. We have to produce stuff that is interesting enough to make that leap,” Micklethwait explains.

He believes there are two main factors which have driven the success of The Economist in recent years. The first is globalisation, “to the extent that somebody in Britain needs to know what has happened to China’s fertility rate, or why Haiti was in the state it was”.

The second is what Intelligent Life, The Economist’s quarterly life and culture spin-off, has described as “the age of mass intelligence”.

“Look at the films people are watching, at people pouring in to literary festivals, symphony orchestras, art galleries; the museums are fuller than they have ever been. People want to have some room for ideas in their world. They will go and buy a copy of The Economist, or a copy of Prospect. But they don’t necessarily think ‘I’m a serious person’. They also buy things that are much more overtly trivial at the same time. People want variety.”

The magazine has ambitions to expand its readership in the UK by reaching out beyond its traditional business audience. Micklethwait says, “Our new drive is to appeal to a much broader audience. The more people we can get to try it, the more they will think about it in a different way.”

In a bid to attract new readers, the title ran a memorable cinema advertising campaign last year in which a man walks above city streets on an ever-ascending criss-cross of red tightrope wires, with the strap-line “Let Your Mind Wander”, which it intends to follow up this year.

Although he is keenly aware of the problems facing the industry, Micklethwait remains optimistic about the future of journalism. The Economist is a supporter of the Catch 22 Academy, which aims to help young people break into the media. He says, “For anyone who is young, clever and has got good ideas there is hope. You could argue that the fact there is such huge carnage in our industry creates opportunities for young people in ways that it didn’t before.”

In 20 years’ time will people still be reading the print version of The Economist? “I hope so and I think so as well. Print is a very convenient product – it’s something you can roll up and put in your pocket. The question is whether in 20 years’ time it will be a majority or a minority format.”

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The office swap coincides with his appointment as Executive Chairman of Haymarket Media Group, replacing his father Michael, who set up the company in 1957.

While Heseltine Junior is now responsible for the day to day running of Haymarket, Lord Heseltine remains Chairman of the holding company and still occupies the office next door to his son.

Haymarket today publishes a wide range of business, customer and consumer magazine brands from the advertising bible Campaign to the market-leading motoring magazine What Car?. The company has offices in the UK, the US, Germany, India, Hong Kong and Australia, as well as licensing its titles with more than 80 publishers in 42 territories worldwide, and running exhibitions and live events.

From a display rack set against one wall, Heseltine hands me a battered green 1961 edition of The Directory of Graduate Opportunities for Qualified Men, one of the earliest Haymarket publications. Then, to demonstrate how far the company has come, he picks up a glossy coffee table tome recently produced by Haymarket’s customer publishing division for India’s Scorpio cars.

Following one of the toughest years the media has ever faced, he is optimistic. “The opportunities are limitless, as long as we never have to go through 2009 again, I’ll be happy,” he says.

Last autumn, Haymarket took the decision to restructure its media division with the loss of 18 editorial jobs. The print version of Media Week closed after nearly 25 years, and the title’s editor Steve Barrett departed, although the brand still exists online. The monthly title Revolution, meanwhile, was folded into Marketing as a quarterly.

Heseltine describes the impact of the recession on the company as “incredibly difficult”, adding: “Having to make people redundant is the worst thing any manager has to do in their career. It’s horrible. Closing magazines, yeah, that’s very difficult, but we are a commercial organisation and you have to make business decisions.” He points out 78,000 users accessed Media Week’s advertising-funded website last month, compared to the 15,000 who paid for the magazine at the height of its circulation.

Despite hard times, he does not think journalism is in crisis. “We’re going through change. Is change crisis? I don’t believe so.”

He is confident advertising will return. “Advertising will come back over time. What nobody knows yet is where advertisers will put that money. It’s the effectiveness of your advertising dollar that’s going to drive the change.”

Haymarket’s approach to the new media landscape of social networking sites, iPhones and e-readers, is to treat its titles as brands which can be delivered over multiple platforms. “About five years ago we changed our name from Haymarket Publishing to Haymarket Media Group,” explains Heseltine. “That signified a big change in the perception of what we do. We now are a company that has approximately 100 different brands across the world in about 21 different markets.”

“Once, you would publish a magazine and it would go on a shelf and you would start all over again. Now at the heart of our brand we have the magazine, but then it will go out via 20 different forms on the internet – on a website, via an email newsletter, via Twitter, on somebody else’s site where we have syndicated that content. Most of our products or brands have got awards attached to them, conferences, forums, exhibitions, special projects divisions.”

Haymarket’s What Car?, for example, has existed as a magazine for nearly 40 years, and is now also a popular motoring review website, with a spin-off new car guide and used car price guide, a recently-launched Indian edition and licensed editions in Italy, Russia and Kazakhstan.

“We take in media in different formats at different times of day,” insists Heseltine, recounting how the previous evening he bought two magazines on his journey home, went online to buy cinema tickets, went for dinner with his wife, stopped at a bookshop on the way to the cinema to buy a book, watched the film, went home and read a newspaper.

When it comes to online charging, however, Heseltine is more cautious than some of his rivals. He reveals, “We recently did a survey of our online users. We asked them all the same questions and every market gave a different answer. There will always be those who just want the news. There will be others who will go down deeper. Then there will be those who say ‘this information is so important to me that I will pay’.”

“It might not be a financial payment; it may be a form of information exchange. People may want a subscription to the archive of the magazine because it’s got data they need to do their job. People may be totally happy to pay to read something on an e-reader, or an iPhone app. There’s no one solution fits all.”

A handful of Haymarket’s specialist business titles, such as Windpower Monthly, already require readers to pay to access their websites, but charging for other sites is not a priority.

Heseltine says, “I look at my competitors, a huge number of them are putting content behind a gateway. Then you get to a point where everybody is putting everything behind a gateway and then someone will open up a gateway.”

The latest set of financial results posted on Haymarket’s website date back to 2007 when the company made a £31.7m profit before tax on a turnover of £247m. When I ask Heseltine whether the company made a profit in 2009, he laughs and replies “of course”, explaining that being a private, family-run company has given the business greater flexibility to ride the recession.

“It makes us quite agile. It means the staff can have access to senior management any time they want. We make decisions pretty quickly.”

When he handed over power in December 2009, Lord Heseltine sent a cautiously upbeat farewell message to staff, saying: “The mood has lightened and it is possible to argue that the worst is over. Over the last month or so, trading in many divisions has been better than we forecast.”

His son speaks of “quiet optimism”. “One swallow doesn’t make a summer is the expression that needs to be used. Our budgets are nowhere near where they were in the height of 06/07, but they have just taken a step forward.”

After joining Haymarket at 26, Heseltine worked his way up from classified sales executive, to publisher, to research and development. He started out on the BBC Gardeners’ World Live exhibition and has worked on What Hifi?, Sky Sports magazine, Gramophone, the launch of Revolution and the launch of PR Week in the USA among others. He also helped to run the company’s Indian business, which has its head office in Mumbai, overseeing the launch of Campaign, PrintWeek and Stuff in India. “I walk the floor,” he insists.

Over the next five years, he would like to see double digit growth in Haymarket’s overseas operations. In the UK, he wants to “take our brands and make them bigger and stronger, diversify in terms of revenue streams and the editorial products we put out – we could be in online TV, in radio”.

How can media companies position themselves to benefit from an economic upturn? Heseltine’s formula is: “Keep very close to your market, stay close to the people you write about or sell products to, spend a lot of time looking at what you produce, at how it helps readers do their job better and make sure that every word affects the reader in a positive way.”

Training journalists to be multi-skilled is also crucial, he believes. “Our journalists will go out and research a feature and from that write a news story, a comment piece, they might do a video blog, a podcast. They take their ability to ask the right questions and present the results in different formats.”

When Lord Heseltine announced he was stepping back from the day to day running of the business, The Guardian questioned whether if The Directory of Graduate Opportunities had been published today it would have featured many openings in the media.

“Unfortunately it’s always tough for those trying to get jobs in a recession,” admits Heseltine junior. But he adds, “As soon as people start hiring, the opportunities will roar back. Some of those graduates will be part of the entrepreneurial surge we will see as we come out of the recession.”

He enthuses, “Haymarket’s energy has come from those young graduates who have started at the very bottom and bashed out phone calls, that’s given us great strength and I look forward to more of it.”

Heseltine is confident that even in this digital age, printed magazines will be with us for decades to come. “I think in 20 years time there will still be magazines. What they’ll look like I don’t know, but if I go back into the archive of Haymarket magazines from 20 years ago, they’ve come a long way.”

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There is no doubt that the Managing Editor of the “Pink ‘Un” has his sights set firmly on the future.

Bogler, who first joined the FT in 1995 working for the Lex column, before climbing the ladder to reach his current post a decade later, is under no illusions about the challenges facing journalism, which he states is facing “the greatest crisis in a generation”. December 2009 was a terrible month for almost all UK newspapers, and the print edition of the FT was no exception: its circulation fell 6.46% year on year to 400,827.

But thanks in part to the FT’s early adoption of online charging, FT Publishing made a £14m profit in the first half of 2009 and continues to perform well. Content revenues at the newspaper group, or as Bogler prefers to call it, news organisation, are expected to overtake print advertising revenues for the first time in 2010. By 2012, it is predicted content revenues will outstrip advertising revenues altogether.

The impact of the “free is good” doctrine of the internet on the wider newspaper industry, combined with the cyclical downturn in advertising, has been “very, very serious”, Bogler warns.

Against a backdrop of metropolitan daily newspapers in the US going bust and “even a fantastic newspaper like the New York Times teetering”, while here in the UK newspapers are shedding staff and making significant losses, he describes the FT as “very lucky”.

“We, together with the Wall Street Journal and a couple of others are in a sizeable niche. People will pay for business, economics and financial news. If you produce high enough quality content, you can charge for it and you continue to make revenues, which you can reinvest in journalism. It’s a virtuous circle.”

Long before Rupert Murdoch announced his newfound zeal for reinstating value in newspaper content by placing it behind pay-walls, the FT embarked on a strategy which has seen the price of the print newspaper double over the last three years and online users required to pay if they want to click on more than a few articles a month.

The FT now has over 121,200 online subscribers, who pay £3.29 a week for standard subscription, or £4.99 for the premium service, plus more than 600 corporate subscribers, up 117% from last year. These include companies such as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Slaughter & May, who buy a digital licence to receive FT content on whatever platform they choose – via FT.com, through their Blackberries or iPhones or a newspaper stand in their atrium.

“There are lots of bells and whistles, but the basic message is, if you receive our content, you pay for it,” explains Bogler.

Until two years ago, the FT had a deal with Factiva, the Dow Jones-owned business news and information service. Bogler reveals, “They controlled the end relationship with the customer and made lots of money out of it. We said ‘that’s not good, we’re not getting enough money from this and we don’t know who our customers are’. So as of April 2008, every corporate has to sign a direct relationship with the FT.”

Although the internet has had a disastrous impact on the economics of the newspaper industry, “swapping print dollars for digital dimes”, Bogler believes the web has had some positive effects on journalism.

“You get a lot of rubbish, but you also get new insights,” he says.” Over Christmas, British Airways staff were saying on their internal website ‘we don’t agree with the strike’. That’s real, need-to-know information leaking out in a way it never could before. In that sense the internet has been a great enabler.”

The FT’s editorial has changed in response to the rise of citizen journalism, with computer assisted reporting, a team producing up to 100 videos a month for FT.com, columnists’ blogs and initiatives such as the economists’ forum hosted by Martin Wolf, while readers can also easily comment on articles online.

But Bogler adds, “Our journalism has changed in a much more fundamental way, which is that the luxury of time has disappeared. Our audience wants to have instant news and almost instant views as well, and therefore our journalists are working in completely different ways.”

“When I first joined the FT on the Lex column, we used to go for lunch with a chief executive and then write something at four or five o’clock in the afternoon which was printed the next day. The second time I worked on the Lex column, I wrote my note between eight and ten in the morning and it was published by lunchtime.

“That has good and bad effects. It’s good for our readers to have an instant view on something that is potentially a market-moving story. On the other hand you’ve got to think that brilliant though I am, the amount of analysis and opinion that I can cobble together in two hours is less than what I could do in a full day.”

Much reporting these days tends to be done by phone or video conference rather than in person and when lunches do take place, Bogler jokes they are accompanied by water rather than wine. But the internet has in some respects made the reporter’s job easier, with company accounts posted online and websites springing up for disgruntled employees to air their views.

Public relations professionals can assist journalists by thinking in advance about multimedia elements to a story, Bogler advises. He adds, “I don’t just mean file photos of the CEO, but information that can be quickly presented graphically. We often take slides from a company’s power point presentation on their results and stick that on the website. Making sure that their clients are happy to go on video as well as being interviewed at a press conference, that all helps.”

The rest of the newspaper industry is now coming round to the idea that in order to survive they will have to charge for access to at least some online content, believes Bogler, although he qualifies this by saying, “Not everybody has reached that point psychologically. If you asked The Guardian, I think they would find it quite hard.”

He adds, “As I understand it, The Times is thinking of charging for some of its financial and markets coverage, a bit like us. They’re also thinking of whether they can do any sports applications. The Sun charges for its bingo line and it will charge for its Page Three girls. You’ll get little streams of revenue, but whether you’ll be able to put the Daily Telegraph behind a pay-wall, I doubt it.”

What newspapers like the FT can offer in this mass of information, he believes, is “trust and selection”. “If you read it on the FT’s website, you can trust it, we’ve got a seasoned reporter who has checked it out as opposed to a lot of the information on the internet, which might just be someone’s opinion.

“We don’t just throw everything up and say ‘here it is, pick your own’, we tell you ‘these are the three most important stories of the day that’s why they’re on our front page, this is the most important story, that’s why it’s leading our website’.”

The FT has also been keener than most to push print subscriptions. Bogler explains: “Received wisdom has been that a subscription is a bad thing because it’s at a cut price and you would much rather someone bought at retail and paid the full price for a newspaper.

“That’s a bit silly, because even if you give a discount on a subscription, you get your money in advance, and you know your customer, you have some of their demographic information and you can target them.”

Although the FT runs upmarket loyalty schemes such as “lunch for a fiver”, it has been careful to avoid CD and DVD giveaways. Bogler says, “With the Daily Mail sometimes you’re buying the CD and then you throw the paper away. We don’t do that, it loses money and doesn’t really encourage reader loyalty.”

He admits that if The Independent goes free, as it is widely rumoured it will if Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev buys the paper, it will damage sales of other quality newspapers. However, he adds, “a free Independent would be a problem, but not a disaster”.  News is already available free from the BBC and countless other sources, he argues. By going free, he believes The Independent will concentrate the minds of other newspapers about what they can charge for.

“More worrying is if your decline in revenue leads to cutting into your journalism,” he adds. The FT, he is keen to stress, still has a “fabulous international network” of 120 overseas journalists – many more than the Daily Telegraph or The Times, although still “tiny compared to the Bloombergs and Reuters of this world”.

“I don’t really compete against the Telegraph and the Times any more. I do still compete against the Wall Street Journal, but I’m really competing against Bloomberg and Reuters, which are moving to eat the FT’s lunch by adding comment and analysis and so on. Those are the people we’re worried about.”

Does he believe newspapers will still be around in ten or 20 years time? “I think in ten yes, because these changes, although they are dramatic, always proceed more slowly than you expect. In 20 year’s time, I’m not so sure that people will read anything that’s printed on paper. It may well be a newspaper formatted e-book, but people will always want to consume news in one form or another.”

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