Yes, she got a good mark. Thank you.

No. Let's deal with print.

Yes. However -- and this is a much wider argument -- for me, still, print sets the national conversation, not what appears on the screen. What appears on screen is a repeat of that, but what we don't know is -- and yet not enough work has been done on this -- as ...

Well, we're only dealing with print here. I mean --

As you probably see, I write endlessly about it. It's been my interest and passion for 20 years, this whole business, and I have been a critic and commentator all that time, so I could spend hours here, but I'll just do it in one sentence: we have ...

Well, yes. That was somewhat -- one of my criticisms of the Press Complaints Commission and PressBoF over the years has been it being too opaque a process. We want transparency, and it seems to me that this is also rather opaque, about how you would appoint.

Mine is really an ...

Yes.

Voluntary.

Appendix 2. It's great, isn't it, because the really thick outline is the trust board at the heart, but it's these little bodies feeding into it which struck me as being problematic. The industry funding body and the appointment panel for the chairman's appointment and so ...

Having been through the contract, and I had to do it two or three times, but anyway, when I -- the key to me is this little diagram. I think you used this.

Yes, Lord Black's.

Oh, did I?

Yes. That's also true. And I'm sure Guy will have already had that advice and that's the reason he felt confident in saying it wouldn't fly, but I'd hope that we could make it fly.

No. I'm not keen on the press cards. I've read what Paul has had to say about it but I'm not keen on it. I'm not keen on anything which inhibits free speech, which means that free floating journalists can't operate, and so on. So ...

Of which I'm not in favour, yes.

The publishers. So advertisers, magazines, newspapers form a collective council at the audit bureau of circulation, and so they can decide their own fate. So if one of their members is not part of the regulatory, they can say, "Right, you're out of the ABC, you're not getting ...

The VAT one doesn't work, but others have come forward since then, such as the removal of the Press Association service. That strikes me as very harsh indeed. I'm not certain about where we stand on freedom on that one either.

To be honest, I can't think ...

Sure. I think that obviously we'd -- obviously I think there would be, for small publications, there would be this point that they would be able to say, "We have the kite mark, we are regulated, we have gone into this voluntarily, and we like what it means in terms ...

Yes.

No, I think the truth is that since we're dealing with people who exercise power which has caused this crisis in the first place, that there has to be compulsion and I don't see that that is an inhibition of press freedom to -- you know, we don't ...

Yes.

Yes. And that is where the whole set of problems lie, in whether we can -- whether people are going to say this is clearly such a fantastic idea, we're going to sign up to it, we're going to be involved, or whether they say, no, I'm not ...

Yes.

Although there is an arbitrary business about where you make the split, but I think that can be talked about.

I am content with that approach. I wish I'd seen it in advance. But yes, I'm content with that.

Yes. Large companies would have to be in. That's true. But they are -- they're the dominant, powerful, influential press in our country.

Yes. I ought to say that of course I made my submission in advance of reading Lord Black's contract, which I only saw a couple of days after, going through it really carefully. I'm not against the contract idea in theory, you know, his theory of the contract ...

Well, tough. I think they just have to take that on board, to be absolutely honest. No, I think a readers' editor has to be separate from the daily run of things. It seems to me, going on the level and number of complaints that go in at the present ...

Yes. I mean the role of the readers' editor -- and lots of papers have appointed readers' editors or internal ombudsmen in the past -- I'm talking about tabloids -- they've tended not to be really interventionist in the office. I think we'd have to conceive of a readers' editor ...

I think that what I'd like to imagine is that readers' editors satisfy complainants well enough, that if complainants -- what complainants need to know from the readers' editor is: if you're not satisfied with what I'm doing on your behalf and the result, then you have the ...

Yes.

I think one of the things I've noticed in the criticism of the current system is that people are really confused about the role of the Code Committee. Mainly, for instance, people will simply say and have said over the years: Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail ...

Yes.

That's correct, yes.

(Nods head).

I hadn't thought about that, to be honest, I just hadn't. Newspapers will probably be able to -- yes. I mean, for the purposes of the argument, I'm sure newspapers could appeal to the ombudsman too.

Yes. Prominence is important. Again it has to be said the PCC has improved that matter over the years, but we still feel, I think, that a front page -- an adjudication against a story on the front page should result in some kind of front page apology and prominence it ...

Yes, that's exactly how I see it.

A filtering process.

It would look like that, wouldn't it, but I think that what we need to do is to impose the kind of rigour on each case that is not there at the moment, and that is: is this a minor breach, an accidental breach, an oversight, a mistake, which ...

I do.

Well, no. If you say that we're looking at a composition here of 15 people and only two of them would be national newspaper editors, and although I've not put this, they could be appointed on a rota basis, there are only in the national sector, what, 20 ...

Yes, the retired editors, I think, is a non-starter, to be honest. No editor comes without baggage, and retired editors are no different. At least with working editors, you know where they're coming from. You know that they're also steeped in the contemporaneous business of journalism, which develops ...

Well, I wouldn't -- fine. Yes.

Yes. There are all sorts of problems I've not explored here about fines, to be honest. It's very difficult to know what would be an appropriate fine for companies that are -- you have the problem that either companies are losing loads of money, so does the fine make ...

Yes.

Yes, I think so. I think that's really what I mean, yes. This ombudsman has to be brought in only on special occasions and therefore stands apart from the PSC, but is the auditor and monitor of that body.

I'm not quite certain I follow you there. The ombudsman -- independent of whom and where?

I think the statutory underpinning comes from the creation of the PRB itself, that underpinning, but I mean, yes, the whole system is underpinned by statute. I think that's fair enough.

The important thing is that the state, however, has no input into the appointments and to the workings ...

And dealing with that arbitration and conciliation service that we still believe is reasonable in the general run of things, although I believe its work would be less onerous if at the same time newspapers, as I'd previously mentioned, were to deal with complaints themselves and that there should ...