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TWST: Let’s begin with a quick introduction to Daily Mail and General Trust (London: DMGT.L)?

Mr. Williams: DMGT is a major UK listed media group. The Market capitalization at the moment is around £2.5 million pounds or about 4 million dollars. We are in a variety of media areas, but primarily still within newspapers -- approximately 75% of the business is in UK national or regional newspapers. Apart from that, we have investments in financial publishing through Euromoney, in exhibitions, in television information or teletext, radio and information publishing.

TWST: How has the newspaper business been performing in light of the decrease in advertising spend? Does one first need to look at the national and regional markets separately?

Mr. Williams: Very much so, and they are very different markets -- partly because of the way the UK economy is behaving as well. On the national newspapers, a little more than 50% of our revenues come from advertising as opposed to circulation, and there have been very different performances on both of those: circulation has been very robust; we increased cover prices on our main titles about twelve months ago, whereas quite a few of our rivals have been discounting cover prices, but our circulation has remained very, very stable, with a very slight increase year on year. So our circulation revenues have been increasing quite substantially, and that is largely offsetting weakness in the advertising market, which I’m sure you won’t be too surprised to hear has been weak. Our main national titles remain the number one stopping-off point for advertisers, so we probably aren’t quite so cyclical as some of the other newspapers. But, we are also the number one in the area of personal financial advertising, and that has been particularly weak.

TWST: What about on the regional side? Presumably that’s a different advertiser?

Mr. Williams: Yes and the regionals have been a lot more stable, a lot more resilient. Partly that’s due to the UK economy being, to some extent, two-speed at the moment – the further you go from London the better the local economy is. The London market in particular is weak, especially anything to do with the City, but once you get out into the provinces of the UK things are still pretty strong. So we’ve actually had very gradual increases in advertising revenue in the regions. We were up about 1% or so in the year to September, 2002. The key categories in the regional newspapers are recruitment, property, and motors, and the latter two tend to be very resilient, even in down times. Recruitment is more cyclical, but not nearly as much as it is in the national newspapers, because the sort of jobs that are carried in regional newspapers are at a much lower level, and those tend to carry on regardless.

TWST: What is your sense of the investment community’s reaction to the company?

Mr. Williams: Our share price is roughly unchanged year on year at the moment. We’ve somewhat outperformed the media sector over the last twelve months; we’ve substantially outperformed it over a five to ten year period, which is the period we tend to look at, and I think that suggests that our efforts are reasonably well-appreciated. We are at a small premium, I think, to the media sector, which I think is probably an appreciation of the fact that we do tend to invest in the long term and therefore our earnings will always be a little bit on the depressed side compared with other companies. So I think that’s an entirely appropriate view of our company at the moment.

TWST: What are the key points about DMGT that you would leave investors with?

Mr. Williams: That we have very, very strong core businesses which are remarkably resilient in difficult times; that we have some very interesting developing businesses which we’ve invested in quite heavily in recent years and, if we get it right, should increase their returns quite substantially over the next few years; and that we take a long term view, and people have got to take us as we are.