John Witherow’s office on the eleventh floor of the News Building is so nice, with views so panoramic and far-reaching that it seems to look down in judgement upon all of London. ‘Gosh,’ I think to myself, ‘the occupant of this office must be one of those powerful press barons about which I have read so much. He must be able to change society, rouse his readership, make or break careers and topple governments’. Looking down the Thames, I cannot help but be impressed. Witherow, who edited The Sunday Times for 19 years and has been editor of The Times since 2013, has a similar effect upon me. Half way through our discussion of the press’s positive capacity to influence society, with these thoughts battering down my better instincts, I cannot help myself and ask him if he recognises how powerful his editorship makes him. He roars with laughter before assuring me: “No, no. I’m just a hack”.

He is similarly disarming and self-deprecating as, throughout our interview, he demonstrates a deep awareness of the importance of the role of the press in public life and a sincere concern for its future.

Witherow is eager to discuss The Times and its response to the challenges posed by the digital news format. “One of the reasons that we can maintain good journalism,” he tells me, “is that we’re charging for content online. There’s so much free content out there the only way you can get people to pay is if you have different and, we hope, better content. So it’s a virtuous circle. It’s a merit of the policy we’ve been pursuing for seven years now, of charging online which we hope everybody will go and do at one stage”

Chuckling, he tells me that “you students should be paying. We do a student deal: £20 a year for The Times, very reasonable!” I mutter something non-committal and the conversation moves on.

“We believe this is the only way you are going to sustain newspapers in the future,” he continues, “because advertising in print and even now in digital is declining. The model of newspapers for centuries has been a combination of cover price and advertising and, if advertising means disappear entirely, which is quite possible because Google and Facebook are just eating everything and shoving ads on disgusting pornographic sites and jihadi and that kind of thing, we’ve got to find other sources. And in the end it’s going to be people prepared to pay for quality news”.

Though he makes clear that “it’s a gamble”, Witherow’s argument is very convincing. He points to examples of other newspapers without paywalls, noting that “on The Guardian they’re making horrendous cutbacks and journalists are losing their jobs, which is tragic. The Telegraph has to meet very high profit targets and they’re shedding staff to do that. We hope, with reasonable confidence, that the model we’re building is one that will survive the near future”.

“It’s been a very slow, tough battle to get digital subscriptions working,” he continues, “but gradually the world of newspaper media is moving towards that. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the FT, The Economist, are all subscription models and increasingly it’s happening around the world. The Telegraph’s partial subscription, The Guardian’s begging: at some stage they’ll have to face up to it and just start charging and that’s a good thing”.

Witherow is clear that “the less free content, the better..."

Witherow is clear that “the less free content, the better. As a consumer you might say that’s not so good but there will always be free content out there. If people can find economic models that work free then good luck to them but you’ll find the journalism in them isn’t great because you can’t invest in it. So I think ultimately most mainstream media will move to subscription models and some will survive and some won’t”.

Following this exposition of the challenges posed by modern technology I wonder if he is a tecchie. His responsible is direct: “No. I’m a dinosaur, but we’ve got some really good tecchie people here! There’s the newsroom,” he says, gesturing beyond his office door, “which is full of unreconstructed old journalists, mainly, and then you got all the tecchies who are about 22. It’s nice, you get a nice mix and we’re getting much better at integrating and learning off each other.”

Despite his ambivalence on the future of some existing publications he is more confident when discussing The Times’, telling me that the newspaper is experiencing “a golden period because we’ve seen a huge polarisation in society of attitudes, partially fuelled by social media. Part of that is the rise of Corbyn in this country, which has led The Guardian to move leftwards to try and satisfy that very vocal readership it has and The Telegraph has moved to the right because of Brexit. It is becoming quite similar to the Mail in some areas. I think this territory that has been vacated gives us huge opportunities to put forward a whole range of opinions”.

We discuss the importance of such a plurality of voices before our conversation hits upon the problems of being a journalist. Journalists, along with lawyers, rank among the country’s most maligned professions and Witherow offers a blunt answer as to why that is: “because we’ve probably earned it”.

“Journalists are reprehensible creatures who hack phones and do ghastly things and it doesn’t matter if you’re The Times or The Financial Times, you’re a journalist"

He points to the phone hacking scandal which damaged the reputation of journalism and established the view that “journalists are reprehensible creatures who hack phones and do ghastly things and it doesn’t matter if you’re The Times or The Financial Times, you’re a journalist – and I think it’s quite worrying. We do constantly strive to get stories right, we’re very particular about correcting stories if we get them wrong because we want it to be as close to the first stab of the truth as is possible. So it’s not great, that, but there’s nothing we can do really other than try and do the job well”.

He doesn’t think that President Trump’s criticism of the media has had much effect, though, noting that “for the sort of readership we have they dismiss Trump’s comments as rantings against established media, mainstream media as they call it. I think most rational people go ‘that’s just Trump mouthing off.’ When they look at what’s in The Times I hope most of them think it’s credible. The fact that we put our hands up when we get stuff wrong is very important. Admit your mistakes, correct them, don’t dig yourself into a hole. Mistakes are made in journalism, inevitably. It’s a fast moving production process. We’re printing 100,000 words every night, 250,000 on a Saturday. The Times and The Sunday Times print about a million words a week, and I challenge anybody not to make mistakes in that. But we’re bloody careful, or try to be”.

Clearly, I say, the press has a lot of sway and I am interested to know to what extent politicians seek to influence it. As Newsnight recently revealed, David Cameron attempted to get Paul Dacre, the editor of The Mail, sacked and I was curious if Witherow had any similar experiences. “I’m sure people have tried to get me sacked,” he replies, “but I haven’t heard it. To the great merit of the proprietor he wouldn’t say anything”.

He tells me that the image of Rupert Murdoch as a malign influence upon British society is “a ridiculous caricature. I think Murdoch’s a terrific proprietor, he supports The Times, The Sunday Times, he believes in good journalism and he doesn’t interfere. He’s a model proprietor”.

Witherow says that when he meets politicians “they’ll be trying to push their line but not in a particularly forcible way. By and large they leave us alone and thank God for that,” he laughs.

Varsity: Looking forwards, looking back

He is circumspect regarding the media’s power, telling me that newspapers “like the Mail or The Sun do have quite a lot of influence, not power, and I think particularly this current government will take notice of what the Daily Mail does because it’s a big supporter of the government, an overt supporter, and therefore they want its support. So they’re very aware of papers like the Mail and The Sun but because we don’t take that highly polemical approach, less for us.”

Our conversation moves to those articles that Witherow has been proudest to publish, before I shift it in the direct of The Times’s interviews section. I am interested to hear how Witherow managed to secure an interview with President Trump. The answer is more straightforward than I had expected. “Just lobbying,” he says, “and because The Wall Street Journal is a paper in the same group. They were very helpful, too, because they’d already seen him, so that certainly helped”.

The fact that Witherow landed such a prestigious interview nevertheless impresses me and I persist, querying whether he was tempted to conduct the interview himself, instead of leaving it to Michael Gove. “No,” he replies, “I thought it would be funnier to have a Brexiteer interviewing him and so it turned out. I’m trying to get a Merkel interview and I would do that and Putin, but they’re very hard to get. You’ve just got to keep plugging away”.

It is an approach that this interviews editor recognises all too well