Tackled during questions about the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone by News of the World journalists, Harding’s instant reaction was to admit that if such “disgusting and indefensible” behaviour had occurred, then it would shame not just the people involved, not just the News of the World, “but newspapers in general”.
He has not changed his mind in the five months of further revelations, scandals and political rows that have buffeted the industry ever since.
“When that Milly Dowler story broke, it was obvious you had a colossal story which was going to have a huge impact not only on the News of the World, not only on New International but on the whole conduct of the tabloid press more widely and the perception of journalism in the public,” Harding argues.
It was also the moment that the Times began much more detailed, comprehensive coverage of the phone-hacking scandal – something critics say had earlier been missing.
“The Milly Dowler story seemed to me to change the whole nature of the conversation. Did we fully understand the questions raised by some of those celebrity (hacking) cases? It was the Milly Dowler story that suddenly made you think – hang on a second, there is a real problem here,” says Harding, a former media editor and Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times.
Green light given?
After the Milly Dowler revelations, was the Times, as some have suggested, given implicit “permission” by News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch to run detailed coverage of the growing scandal?
“The simple fact is, we got on with reporting the story. That story took off and we just went with it. There was never a discussion in that way (with Murdoch),” Harding insists.
There was no discussion in advance, the Times editor says, except in a leader conference where it was decided to depart from the paper’s usual practice of not commenting on the affairs of News International.
The result, the day after the Dowler revelations - a main leader headlined: The Practice of Journalism.
The article argued that journalists were now in their version of the MP’s expenses scandal and went on to claim that if the allegations were proved to be true, “there will not be a journalist in the country who, after warranted anger, will not feel shamed and depressed”.
Critics attacked the leader and its headline for implying that somehow all of British journalism was in the dock rather than News International.
Later that month, Harding appointed a senior Times correspondent, Ben Webster, as media editor to cover the biggest media story of many years after a gap of many months when the Times had no media editor.
Leveson Inquiry
Now Harding, like all the other national newspaper editors, has turned his mind to Lord Leveson’s inquiry into the “culture, practices, and ethics of the press” and the future of regulation.
The Times editor, the youngest in the paper’s history when he was appointed in 2007 at the age of 38, believes that Lord Leveson’s seminars have been highly informative and have raised “a whole host of issues” about the way the press operates.
But, despite all the questions, Harding is convinced that statutory regulation is not the way forward.
“I haven’t seen any form of statutory regulation that makes me confident that you won’t see a future press in some way or another seeking to curry the favour of the Government or curry the favour of political parties,” he says.
The Leveson proceedings so far have thrown up a number of substantial and reputational issues for self-regulation.
They include the fact, Harding believes, that the newspaper self-regulation doesn’t command the respect of the public and there is also the “colossal problem” that Richard Desmond was free to take Express Newspapers out of the Press Complaints Commission.
“If we are going to preserve self-regulation, it is going to have to be clear to people that there is a prize for being part of it and a price for not,” says Harding.
The Times editor believes that in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, the industry has to have a regulator with both investigative and punitive powers.
Is it therefore time for national newspaper editors to set aside their traditional rivalries, get together and offer an agreed “solution” to inform Lord Leveson’s deliberations?
“I expect it will be Lord Justice Leveson who makes these decisions. I am not sure we could get together and mark our own homework and say here’s the solution,” says Harding who speaks Japanese and Mandarin as well as French and German.
He acknowledges, however, that editors have been talking much more to each other in recent months and trying to understand their different problems whether it be libel tourism, privacy or injunctions.
Harding, who has condemned News International’s handling of the phone-hacking crisis as “catastrophic,” believes the Times has not been damaged by the affair and is “very proud of the culture and the behaviour of journalists here”.
The Times paywall
While phone-hacking has understandably hogged the headlines in recent months, away from the main battlefront, the skirmishes over paywalls continue unabated.
While industry specialists continue to pronounce the Times experiment a failure – or at least that it provides no economic model for the industry as a whole - James Harding will have none of it.
“I think the policy has been a terrific success. If you had said 18 months ago, that we were going to be in a position where we had more people buying the digital editions of the Times than are paying to read the Independent on any day of the week or the FT in this country on any day of the week, we would have bitten your arm off,” insists Harding.
The numbers he is relying on for his surprising optimism was the announcement in October that the number of people paying for a digital version of the Times had risen by 10 per cent in the last three months to around 110,000 though visits to the Times website have fallen by around 85 per cent since the paywall was erected.
“I have a simple view about this. If I opened a shop in Oxford Street, I would not spend my time boasting about my window shoppers. When we looked at it, we make more money out of the 110,000 digital subscribers, 50 per cent more than we did on 20 million unique users,” says Harding.
At the same time, ABC circulation figures for the paper edition of the Times showed a fall from 440,510 to 429,554 in the three months to June.
Harding concedes that if all his eggs were now in the single print basket, he would be very depressed and worried and believes the central issue is not what is happening in print but how fast publishers can make the transition to digital.
Circulation growth
For Harding, the key issue is not that his paper sales are down, but the balance between that decline and the rise of digital sales.
“What is the number of people paying for the paper in either form every day? We are in the black – up three per cent year-on-year. That’s not breathless prose but we have circulation growth for the first time in nearly a decade,” he says.
More than 45,000 are now paying to receive the Times via their iPad and research shows they have an average income of around £109,000 and spend 42 minutes a day reading the digital Times.
Harding says he is now seeing similar numbers starting to grow on the iPhone, though he concedes that the technological challenge of creating a simple digital platform for advertisers has been more difficult than anticipated.
Over the next few months, more ads will be rolled out in the digital editions.
“I am hugely relieved, even quite encouraged by the rate of growth of our customer sales in digital and the fact that we are now in growth as a newspaper,” says Harding who believes that hybrid payment methods, where some material is offered free are often confusing.
The most successful payment systems, the Times editor insists, are those where the customers know exactly what they are paying for and that are clear and simple.
Looking ahead
Another threat potentially facing Harding and the Times in the wake of the closure of the News of the World is how secure is News Corporation’s commitment to the loss-making paper.
What if the remaining News International titles became simply too troublesome and old-fashioned for a multi-national corporation whose main interests are in film production and commercial and pay television?
“I can only say on this, that what Rupert Murdoch has said to me in private is the same as he has said in public, that he absolutely believes in the paper and is pleased and proud to own the paper and wants to continue doing that,” says Harding.
Does he think the Times punches its weight in delivering major scoops and campaigns, after all it was the Daily Telegraph who unveiled the MP’s expenses scandal and the Guardian which laid bare phone-hacking in the face of many denials?
In his defence, Harding cites campaigns such as on-street grooming for sex in the north of England, waste in Ministry of Defence procurement, opening up family courts and exposing the difficulties of adoption.
“Do I think we have further to go in terms of making sure that as well as breaking big stories and providing commentary and ideas, that we do really muscular investigative journalism – absolutely - and we are really committed to doing that,” he promises.
Wasn’t it a bad mistake to decide to kill off the Times 2 section?
“We listened to our readers and I said, I’m sorry, I made a mistake and we are bringing it back,” says Harding.
Surely it was also a mistake to get rid of the People column following the earlier axing of the Times diary. Doesn’t every paper need a decent diary?
“I regret not having a diary. If anyone is interested in doing that job, you know where to find me,” says the listening editor of the Times, James Harding.
