1. How has the lockdown impacted you in The Sunday Times?
The challenge is conversing with a team and then communicating with contacts and it’s always more difficult when you’re dispersed. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how the tech has worked so it’s working well in general, conference calls and video calls have tended to get us through.
Sunday papers rely on exclusives and insights from contacts. The usual working week runs Tuesday to Saturday and so on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, reporters would usually be out and about having meetings and attending events which provide so many little gems of intel. In the average week you’d usually you meet between 5 and 20 new people and so the current situation means you are more reliant on existing contacts and much less so on new ones. All things considered, I’m quite pleased at how it’s worked out and the team have performed very well.
People constantly remark that this whole crisis has shown that remote working is possible, and that people are just as productive as they are in the office. Actually, I find people in general work slightly longer - you arrive at your desk early without any commute, the day is more intense because your colleagues aren’t interrupting, and people tend to work until the work is done. In general people have pulled together very hard, but it’s certainly entered the gruelling phase now where everyone’s ready for a bit of change.
Throughout the entire lockdown period I’ve been going into the office on Thursday to Saturday to put the paper and the section to bed, as have the news editor and other section heads. The Sunday Times have now started bringing in other business reporters on a rotation. It’s nice to have a bit of human interaction back in the team and it’s amazing how much quicker things are when someone’s right there, you can just bounce around ideas. Some nuance gets lost in chit-chat or email and when you’re in front of someone it’s much easier to shape up stories and ideas.
2. You’ve always had the difficulty of trying to see how the news agenda is going to evolve throughout the week. During this crisis, how have you been dealing with the speed of which stories have been breaking and the sheer amount of them?
It’s certainly a big challenge but it’s also an opportunity. It’s an incredibly news rich, fertile time right now, I recall someone saying at the beginning of lockdown; ‘if you can’t make hay at the moment, you may as well go home’. This is one of these epochal times in business as 2008/9 was, and it’s a time really to dig in and deliver readers the absolute cutting-edge stories.
Dailies have a different kind of deadline pressure, it’s much more of an intense daily pace but at The Sunday Times it builds up and builds up and builds up towards the end of the week. You’re supposed to look around corners and to try to set the agenda for the week ahead, which is a different kind of challenge. Some of it comes back to the fact that you aren’t out there seeing contacts in the same way and the lifeblood of Sunday journalism is intel and new, fresh information, stuff that helps you guess or read the rooms for the weeks ahead and that becomes more difficult.
In terms of deadlines, it’s no more difficult than what it was before really, it’s just a case of trying to set the agenda and trying to get ahead of things. That’s a real challenge when there’s so much going on, but as I said, it’s an opportunity - it’s time when the salmon are running, and you should be catching them!
3. It’s been quite a crisis for your sector just generally, there’s never been such demand for news, but at the same time the crisis has cut off business models at the knees. If we look at The Sunday Times, have you seen the way in which your readers engage with you change at all during the crisis?
Yes, a little bit. Unsurprisingly, there’s more of a focus on digital, and there was already a strong digital focus already at The Times and The Sunday Times. Digital readership is up very strongly, the additional subs are up very strongly and it’s talked about across different industries but this crisis will accelerate the shift to digital.
The shifts are more remote consumption of information, clothes, food and everything else, and news is no different to all that. I think you’ll see a heightened focus on online from The Times and The Sunday Times. You’ll see more focus on the products in terms of the app, and even readers who are more established print readers who would have been with us for decades, are starting to switch. They’re finding actually the experience is quite nice and intuitively designed to replicate in the best ways the experience of reading the print products. So you can still get the best things from print online in a very nice easy to use format.
So in that sense we’ve seen interaction change, but in other ways, print is still very important as well. We’ve put a lot of effort and craftsmanship into the print publication and we’ve still got plenty of old-fashioned letters from readers too, so people are still consuming it that way. So it’s still a mix but the mix is moving ever more towards digital.
5. This crisis has really had two stories running in it, both health-related. One is the pandemic but one is the health of the economy. Do you see your agenda changing at the moment to look forward more and see how people are going to get back to normal rather than the immediate impact of the pandemic?
In business, it’s a bit of both. As we touched upon, The Sunday mandate is really to look ahead and try to see what’s going to come around the corner and to set the agenda. We keep on doing that in a way we always would have done but we apply it now to the pandemic, the economy and the return to work. So we focus very strongly on that and the news section has done a great job on the health side of things.
I think more and more the debate is turning to the economy and when you look at the furlough scheme, you look at the way that’s sort of acted as a painkiller in the UK’s system and you wonder what happens when UK plc gets weaned off that properly. You look at forecasts of 10% unemployment for five years potentially, 3 and a half million people out of work. You look at all these loans be accrued under B Bills and C Bills and CL Bills. You look at the credit ratings of the small companies borrowing them and the default rates being speculated on; which we broke the story at the weekend that RBS Howard Davies, the chairman, was talking about that 50% deform wave, that some of these agency loans and all the sort of economic turmoil that will flow from that.
So these are all issues that really occupy us and I’d say the key areas for us are jobs, work and unemployment, where does that go? The debt hangover from all of this, state intervention, how do you clean that up? Then we haven’t really yet seen the strategic support for individual companies; so again, we broke the story of the government looking at ways of supporting Jaguar Land Rover, Tata. Big, strategically important UK companies and employers which fall between the cracks of the current support schemes, and then how that is worked out will be another key theme.
So you’re right, the focus is very much switching from the health agenda general to the economy now. I feel that on the business section we’ve always been very focused on trying to look ahead and trying to read where it goes for the next weeks, months and years. It’s not easy when things are moving so quickly but we have to make a stab of it.
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The Speakers
Oliver Shah is one of the leading business journalists of his generation. He was named business journalist of the year at the 2017 Press Awards for his investigation into Sir Philip Green’s £1 sale of BHS. He was also named business journalist of the year at the 2017 London Press Club Awards. His first book, Damaged Goods: The Inside Story of Sir Philip Green, the Collapse of BHS and the Death of the High Street was published by Penguin in June 2018. He was appointed Business Editor of the Sunday Times the following month.