17/05/2014 Newswatch

Hello and welcome to Newswatch with me, Samir Ahmed. Coming up: After a

tumultuous couple of years for the BBC flagship programme, where next

for Newsnight? The editor is here to talk about its mixture of political

and international coverage and its future without long serving

presenter Jeremy Paxman. Ian Katz took over as Newsnight editor last

September. In a moment we have the first broadcast interview with him

since then but before we talk, here is a reminder of some of the issues

he faces on a programme with a long heritage.

The theme tune is familiar, but back in 1980 the idea of mixing news and

current affairs, along with an occasional taste for the unexpected

and quirky, was radical. Good evening and welcome at last to

Newsnight. That has remained through the years, as has its capacity to

arouse controversy, but it was the Government accusing Peter Snow of

being patriotic in the way the Falklands law was covered, that

interview with Michael Howard... ``unpatriotic. Did you threaten to

overrule him? Or more recently the highly damaging rows over its

failure to broadcast an investigation into Jimmy Savile,

following the calamitous error of the McAlpine report which led to the

resignation of BBC Director General George Entwistle. Ian was hired a

year ago from the Guardian, with a brief to revitalise the programme,

which had lost a third of its audience in a year. He revitalised

with things like this interview with Russell Brand and this dance with

Kirsty Wark. But there have been critics of this with out Nelson

writing to us about the dumbing down and intellectual castration of

Newsnight. And: Audience figures have stabilised but the challenge

remains. How can Newsnight provide a distinctive offering which will make

it compulsory viewing in a multichannel world with lots of news

sources? This point was raised by viewers... One of the programme's

raison d'etre has always been its in`depth coverage of politics. The

task here is to make the subject compelling, a challenge exposed by

Ian's tweet following this interview with Labour frontbencher Rachel

Reeves, who he described as boring snoring. He later apologised. But

viewers also found it revealing... Part of the mix is still lengthy

films on serious subjects such as last week's 15 minute report on a

slum skyscraper in Venezuela, made by the film`making residence at

Newsnight. ``film`maker in residence. It also has a team that

implies that serious journalism following the Jimmy Savile scandal

is back on the agenda. Jeremy Paxman is leaving next month, so how will

the man many regard as the Grand Inquisitor be replaced? Ian joins me

now. Thank you for coming on Newswatch. When you got the job,

Newsnight was in a state of crisis so what have your priorities being?

There was an initial task of revitalising the show and bringing

back the energy levels. There was a staff of fantastically talented

journalists who had been through a tough year or so and just needed the

energy and confidence back. That was the first thing. The second was to

identify what was the formula for Newsnight that made it for so many

years, I think, one of the most wonderful things on television

anywhere in the world, and also to work out what was missing in the

application of that formula and I think it was the breaking of

original news, a classy analysis of the day that has just happened and

the day to come, and an air of jeopardy and excitement about what

might happen in the live show. Those are the things I have worked on

bringing back in the last six months or so. Jeopardy is an interesting

word when a lot of what you know you are doing about rebuilding trust. I

would say it is absolutely the case that when it comes to the reporting

that Newsnight does, there was absolutely a task of re`establishing

trust after McAlpine and Jimmy Savile. What you want with Newsnight

is the sense that something exciting might happen during the live show.

You want viewers to think that they might miss something that could

happen live tonight that people will talk about later or tomorrow. Can

you give me an example of something like that that you think has worked?

Things like Matthew Perry arguing about drugs. Friends actor? Yes,

arguing with Peter Hitchens, which we all watched with our faces in our

hands in the gallery. We thought somebody might thump somebody during

the interview. That was one of those moments. But also the interview with

Terry Pratchett about his Alzheimer's, that was one of the

most extraordinary arresting interviews, partly because we were

not sure if it would work live. Investigations are back on the

agenda and you took on some controversial stories, the Edward

Snowden revelations and WikiLeaks. We can't do that at the BBC, can we?

I have left the Guardian so I can't speak about that. I think Newsnight

is in a fabulous position to tackle complex and controversial

investigations. We have hired a team of really strong investigative

reporters and we can give them the time and space and support to do

difficult investigations. I would hope there is not a subject that we

can't investigate. One of the subjects that we got a lot of

e`mails about were the jokey pay`outs. People can understand the

idea of drawing in an audience, but they feel the juxtaposition with a

serious story can make them feel uncomfortable. Is there a danger of

trying to attract new and younger viewers and alienating the loyal

older Newsnight viewers? Not everybody will love everything you

do, which is an iron law, and when I look at the Twitter response to an

individual Newsnight programme, if the response is running at 70`34 and

against, that is broadly right. ``Seven for and three against.

Humour has always been a strand of the Newsnight identity and it is

true that I have tried to dial it up a bit, partly to answer the question

of what Newsnight offers at the end of this very long cycle, when people

have been exposed to hours of news bulletins, and I think a humorous

and distinctive take on the day is part of that answer. The key

question is really whether it is at the expense of the seriousness of

the show and I say emphatically that it isn't. Adding more fun to the

show was not the same as dumbing down and you only have to look at

our running orders over the last month to see that we are serious as

ever. This challenge about how to make political news compelling is

critical. That boring snoring comment, some people thought it was

revealing that television should be about confrontation and

illumination. How do you answer that? I make no apology for trying

not to produce a boring show, which is something we try to do every

night, or try not to do. There is a really interesting discussion to be

had and I hope I have tried to have it about the balance between heat

and light in interviewing, particularly political interviewing,

and I think it is a really interesting question to ask, whether

we have strayed in that balance too far towards the heat. I think what

the Rachel Reeves affair really pointed to was, frankly, an arid

state of affairs in political interviewing. A lot of politicians

come into a studio and their primary objective is not to move by a

millimetre from the line that their party has taken. And we collectively

go out to move them by one millimetre from that line. I think

there is a moment now when it would be interesting to have a public

conversation about how we collectively feel about these

encounters, and to ask whether there is a more productive way of doing

them, both for viewers and for journalists and politicians. Viewing

figures are always going to be brought up and they are not great

compared to five years ago, which is a long`term trend. What will you do

about that and how far can you expect to reverse the decline? I

would be very cheerful about the viewing figures at the moment. As

you say, we have seen a 30% or 40% fall in viewing figures over five or

six years. If you look at this year, which is really when my watch kicked

in and my new people arrived on the show, the audiences have been very

stable. Two out of three months, we have been up on last year. Jeremy

Paxman has been the most dominant face of Newsnight. How are you

replacing him? You might have to ask me back to talk about that. You

obviously thinking about it now because you know he is going at the

end of June. I am thinking about it, that is right, but I cannot give you

an answer because I don't have one. We are in an incredibly lucky

position by having three strong presenters after Jeremy has gone,

all of whom are brilliant at presenting the show. I think there

are many other wonderful presenters in the BBC. We are in an incredibly

lucky position. Thank you very much. Thank you for your comments this

week. You can call us with more thought. Join us again next week.

Until then, goodbye. Friday was the warmest day of the

year so far as we got within 24 Celsius. We could beat that in the

days ahead. Some very warm weather in the forecast. Our weather is

never that straightforward. For some of us, there will be rain over the