I don't know. I don't know.

Well, you're absolutely right, because if you go in any magistrate's court in any provincial town this afternoon, you'd be very unlikely to find a journalist sitting on the press bench. Likewise council meetings, likewise inquests. Unfortunately, local newspapers commercially are being driven to the ground. The ...

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I -- not so much a specific point. I think I would add a general appeal that -- I heard a lot of talk about tabloid journalism. I mean, I strongly feel that there are some very, very good journalists who you would classify as being tabloid journalists and ...

We sat down towards the end of his six-month probation period with Richard -- this is we being Adam Gillham who runs the agency with me. We had an amicable discussion with Richard and said that we felt he didn't quite have the background in journalism that we wrongly thought ...

I think in the 12 years that I've owned/run the agency, it's happened three times that I can think of.

No.

Yes, that's correct.

Yes.

Yes.

I'll try and give you a specific example. In the case Chris touched earlier on on syndication arrangements, which is -- basically, we, as an agency, syndicate material on behalf of the Kent Messenger newspaper group. So that will involve us being given stories that have been written by Kent ...

Yeah, and you might be asked --

Yeah. Subterfuge -- again I'm trying to think if we -- I can't even think of a case within our agency where someone has taken part in subterfuge for me to have the need to discipline them. Obviously, we would say -- one thing we do make clear is when they ...

Acceptable is pretty much what I've outlined. Unacceptable would be really making mistakes in court reporting, giving us stories that they can't back up. If one of our reporters gives us a story that we think is potentially defamatory about someone, we would ask them: "How do you ...

Yes.

Yeah. We'll take them through the likely scenarios that they're going to be finding themselves working in. So for instance, with court reporting, we talk to them about the importance of making sure that when they're filing copy from a court case, they're sticking to the ...

Yeah.

Yes, the type of person that we recruit tends to be someone who will have had at least a couple of years' experience working on either a local weekly or regional daily newspaper. They will have had some training either on a postgraduate journalism course or a pre-entry course. There ...

Yes.

The Sunday People on a Saturday had a photograph, like every newspaper that day, come in of Gary Speed's widow at a football match with their son. It was a public event. They were there in memory of Gary Speed. I think it was the Everton football match. The ...

I can give you an example of a privacy discussion. I was chatting to a guy on the legal department of the Mirror group and he said -- I'm sure I'm not going to say anything out of turn, but if I am, you can stop me.

Yes, it's a good --

I think it's a good thing. Has it gone too far? Too early to say whether it's gone too far, really.

And certain types of tragedy are obviously -- in terms of media response, are going to be unique, and obviously Madeleine McCann's parents is a completely different situation, because such was the level of interest in that story from every form of media -- radio, television, newspapers, tabloids, heavy newspapers -- I ...

They vary totally. It never ceases to amaze me how they vary. You can knock on one door and someone can be utterly hostile to the point of threatening violence. You can end up knocking on a door where you end up becoming friends with someone, you end up keeping ...

It's fair to say that on a press agency -- I mean, journalists working on national newspapers I'm sure will say the same. There are occasions when you are asked to go and knock on the door of someone, a family member of someone who may have been involved ...

What may happen is a newspaper may come to you as an agency and request you to carry out an assignment. It may well be that during the course of that assignment a privacy issue, a public interest issue may arise which we would then discuss with the newspaper. Indeed ...

I think there is a concern that the immediacy or the very, very short period of time between us filing a piece of copy and that copy being published on the 'Net, that perhaps the legal checking process at the newspaper's end may not have been quite as thorough ...

I can think of -- in the case of my agency, in the last six months -- one specific one where the complaint was made to either the Daily Mail or the Mail on Sunday but the complaint related to one of our reporters who was on an assignment on their behalf ...

That's direct to NAPA. There may well be instances where an individual agency may well be the subject -- not themselves the subject of a complaint, but may well be -- may well have been involved in an assignment with a particular newspaper. There could well have been a complaint in ...

What I can say is that certainly in my agency situation, if one of our reporters has been working on an assignment with a photographer from a national newspaper, there may well be a discussion between myself, as the owner of my agency, and a senior executive on a picture ...

Yeah. I can't give you any specific examples, but when I've heard the evidence of certain celebrities here at this Inquiry and they've talked about conduct of photographers in a negative way, in my experience, I don't associate that with the conduct of NAPA agency photographers ...

In terms of those more likely to act in a way that people would associate with the paparazzi?

Yeah.

But there is -- I'm just going to say there's an important distinction to make in that -- defining the term paparazzi. I think the image of the paparazzi photographer is someone who will chase a celebrity down the street. What you'll find with -- certainly in my -- I don ...

For example, it might be that a new series of the X Factor has started and obviously there are new celebrities, as they were, and it may well be that a newspaper will say, "We would like you to go to such-and-such a village where such-and-such an X Factor star ...

That's correct, yeah.

Correct.

Yes, yes, but it varies between papers as well. So, for instance, a newspaper like the Daily Mail may well pay more money for the same size story in the same part of the paper than the Guardian newspaper, for instance. So the base paid rates are not the same ...

Yeah.

To be fair, to pick up on a point there just to not create the wrong impression, that's across the press. That's not just in the tabloid press; that's in the heavy press as well. The papers -- the heavy press are carrying a lot more celebrity-orientated stories ...

And they're press cards -- in our case, as a gatekeeper on behalf of NAPA, if someone approaches NAPA to say, "Can I apply for a press card?" they have to be employed by a NAPA member agency. So they can't just be anyone after a press card, and ...

It is.

Yes.

Yes.

I'm Matthew Bell. I'm the chairman of National Association of Press Agencies and I'm also the director and co-owner of Ferrari Press Agency.