Nick Pollard: The man who put Sky on top

Terrorism in London gave Sky News its finest hour. But its boss, Nick Pollard, has long been ensuring his is the channel everyone turns to. He talks to Ian Burrell

As presenter Mark Longhurst stands on a raised platform in front of this news alert, reporting details of a fresh terror scare at Luton airport, his boss, Nick Pollard, looks on from the floor. Around them, people are talking into their phones with renewed urgency: "We're getting a bit stuck for crews, we could do with you scrambling up to Luton... "

July has been one of the most memorable months in the 16-year history of Sky News, as the trail of terror has unfolded in the wake of the blasts that hit the London transport system on 7/7. When Pollard left school to join the Birkenhead News more than 35 years ago, he could scarcely have imagined the concept of rolling television news, let alone being in command of an organisation to which politicians, national newspaper editors and senior police officers turn when a big story breaks.

"It's crucially important to us that if you go into Downing Street, they are watching Sky News - which they do," he says. "That if you go to Scotland Yard they are watching Sky News. In every newsroom, parliamentary office and business it is vital for us that the channel they turn to for breaking news is Sky News."

He proudly pulls out a photograph of political reporters at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, glued to his network's coverage of the London bombings. "Within seconds every set was turned to Sky News," he says.

The London terror story has been an important test for Pollard and his team, who are under pressure from the younger BBC rolling news channel, News 24, which has grown with the spread of the Freeview platform and is now shoulder to shoulder with Sky in the ratings battle. Having trounced its publicly funded rival in its coverage of the tsunami disaster, Sky was anxious to prove itself on home soil.

"As a domestic story there has been nothing like it in my career since Lockerbie," says Pollard. "The test in the most personal sense is whether it's the sort of story that makes you need to phone home and check where your wife and kids are. The answer both on the 7th and the 21st was yes. I've got teenage kids and my absolute first thought was: 'Are they in London, are they using the tube or on a bus somewhere?' Like anybody else, I was finding that the mobile phone network was down."

His own network, shouting out its Breaking News logo, was partly responsible for that. Enjoying what Pollard admits was a large slice of luck, Sky stole a march by reporting a terror attack when the other channels were still referring to a power surge on the tube system.

The luck was that Bob Mills, a Westminster-based Sky producer, was yards from the Tavistock Square bus when it exploded. He immediately rang the newsdesk. "We were fortunate to some extent," says Pollard. "He said there was absolutely no question it was a bomb and we went with that. We would have been more cautious with someone we didn't know, but Bob's a journalist and he told us what he'd seen and experienced."

Sky had further good fortune in that its helicopter (a £300,000-a-year luxury that gives it an edge on rivals) had been recalled from Gleneagles that day to film over east London. Pollard says: "It was the day after the Olympic decision and we were going to use the helicopter to do aerial shots to demonstrate projects that were going to get green lit. We had it in the air very quickly over Aldgate tube, showing live scenes. That was a big step forward for us."

But it has not been luck alone that has delivered a succession of scoops, including the revelation that the attacks were the work of suicide bombers and that a man had been shot at Stockwell tube station, although ITV News's stunning footage of Friday's Notting Hill arrests were unrivalled. During eight years at Sky, Pollard has learned that the way to react to a genuinely big story is to "clear the decks, just drop everything".

He says: "We've got a well-honed plan, even though it's not written down. You bash the phones, start putting up maps of where these incidents are reported and, most crucially, try to get on the phone somebody who's seen what was going on, whether it's the managing director of London Underground or someone on a mobile phone standing outside a tube station.

"It's an awareness of the importance of chucking all your resources at the stories that really matter and being content to ignore the others. After 7 July I don't think we covered another story at all for 48 hours. My view is that you can't go far wrong sticking with a big story even slightly longer than necessary, rather than leaving it too soon. People are hungry for news like that and you are providing a classic public service as well."

This approach gives Sky an advantage over the BBC, whose public service requirements carry a greater pressure to cover other news. Senior BBC news staff believe that Sky is too quick to shout about its scoops and that the subscription channel's frequent willingness to jump the gun often leads to mistakes.

Pollard is angry at the suggestion. "It's interesting to see the BBC jumping through hoops of their own making on this. Last Thursday they clearly made a decision to be very, very conservative and stuck with one caption saying 'police investigating incidents on the underground' for about an hour-and-a-half.

"Our philosophy is that we will tell viewers what we believe is going on, we will attribute every source, claim and figure that we quote. We will also tell viewers what we don't know. I have a feeling that viewers, who are now quite attuned to 24-hour news, understand the rhythm and dynamics of an evolving story and would rather be told what we believe is the detail of an unfolding story, rather than waiting until the whole story is known."

Pollard, who worked in radio and television news for the BBC before spending 12 years at ITN, where he executive-produced News at Ten, says he "fundamentally rejects" the claim that "the BBC inevitably puts forward that Sky is much less accurate than the BBC".

He says: "I don't accept that because I think our journalists and production people at every level are the equal - and, in fact, the superior in many respects - of the BBC. I've worked at the BBC, I've worked at ITN and I've worked here and I would say this is without doubt the best team of broadcast journalists in Britain." As if anticipating the next break in the fast-evolving terror story, Pollard ends his every sentence with a glance over his shoulder at a bank of TV screens in his office.

The star act in Pollard's team over the past weeks has been his calmly spoken crime correspondent, Martin Brunt, who has repeatedly brought news of developments in the story before they have been officially confirmed. "I think he is without peer," says Pollard. "He breaks stories continually and is unflappably good at what he does. When rumour and wild claim are swirling around, Martin will make sense of them and tell the viewer what we know and, crucially, what we don't know. I would trust Martin's instincts and contacts. It's a classic old Fleet Street talent of having contacts and nurturing them."

It is a skill that Pollard admits is not widespread in this area of journalism. "I accept that generally in continuous rolling news it is harder for journalists to cultivate and know how to use informed contacts as much as in the old days, when people had more down time and we all had thicker contacts books," he says.

Conscious of critics such as veteran war correspondent Martin Bell who have suggested that the demands of 24/7 news discourage journalists from uncovering the real stories, Pollard has recruited 30 more staff who are encouraged to work off-camera, "digging out the story, going and shooting material off-site". Although the London bombings have provided a showcase for rolling television news, Pollard does not agree that newspapers have looked off the pace, far from it.

"What newspapers can do that we can't realistically do is add detail. I was really taken with the detail in the papers about the named attempted bombers. The papers really pushed the story forward, they had details of these guys' entire lives since they came to the UK, the criminal record of one of them. It's classic forensic newspaper digging," he says. "Even if we could do it, and we could if we put the manpower onto it, it doesn't lend itself to television news output."

He says: "I'm personally a huge fan of the UK newspaper industry and all newspapers have adapted pretty well to the era of 24-hour rolling news. They've had to. I was really struck on the morning after 9/11 - and to a lesser extent 7/7 - by the power of still photographs and written accounts, which tend to hurtle by to some extent on rolling news."

Asked for his high point of Sky's own coverage, Pollard gives a surprising answer, citing a day of coverage called Inside Islam, based in the Beeston area of Leeds. "I was very pleased with the persistent effort we made to really understand the communities involved and try to give some insight into the Muslim communities and the complexities of them.

"Some parts of the media are often accused of treating the Muslim community as one single entity when everybody knows it's not. It needs a lot of explaining and a lot of sensitivity and you can only achieve that by very hard work, more diligent cultivation of contacts and proving yourself a trustworthy organisation. When we did our whole day about the Muslim community and their reaction to these events I think we did the subject and the people justice."

Pollard says he tries to maintain a balance between "light" and "heavy" in Sky's coverage. During last week's analysis of the latest terror arrests, a presenter referred to suspect Yasin Hassan Omar - "and his pals" - and asked whether he would be "dobbing in his mates". The BBC, you would expect, would treat the subject with a little more gravitas.

The Sky News boss readily accepts that News 24 is more appealing to the later adopters of multichannel TV who have signed up to Freeview and are more comfortable with the BBC as a news source. "In Freeview, News 24 has a strong lead over us," he admits. "We reverse that in a number of ways. First of all, being the leading news channel and not retreating from our view that we have credibility as well as speed and fleetness of foot. And by continuing to improve our journalism, not resting on our laurels and getting the message out that we are the best at what we do."

Pollard points out that the BBC has 55 international bureaux compared with Sky's seven. And within the UK, both BBC News 24 and the ITV news channel can draw on a network of regional newsrooms.

Much as he might like the idea of the "fleet-footed" outsider punching above its weight, Pollard knows the media-savvy rolling news audience is well aware that Sky News is part of Planet Murdoch - like Fox News, which has transformed American television journalism with its partisan coverage post 9/11. But he remains defiant.

"People who don't like us will see us in the most negative way. I'm always amazed when people say you are not Newsnight, the Today programme, the FT, the Daily Mirror or The Sun. You can't be everything and we do what we do very well," he says.

In a couple of months, Sky News will be upping its game by moving out of its cramped newsroom to a new building within the BSkyB complex on an industrial estate close to Heathrow airport.

With BSkyB chief executive James Murdoch (now heir apparent to his father's empire after elder brother Lachlan resigned from News Corp on Friday) due to announce latest profits figures this Wednesday, Pollard says Sky News is "very happy to be part of the Sky umbrella". "We are fortunate to be working at a time when Sky is doing very well commercially, because there's no getting away from the fact that television news is expensive and all the technological advances in the world will not make it cheap."

Since Pollard, 54, came to Sky he has transformed its live and location newsgathering operation, increasing a fleet of three links vehicles to 15. "I've never seen anywhere with the energy and drive of Sky News. When I came here in 1996, it took me a good year to get used to the pace of work and the commitment people had," he says.

Pollard, thoughtful and measured, stressing the need for cultural sensitivity and attribution of sources, is far removed from the brash, gung-ho and macho Murdoch executive that Sky News's detractors might imagine.

When asked to talk about himself, he shows an unusual humility for a phenomenally successful journalist. "I wasted pretty much my entire secondary education," he says. "I did, for some unaccountable reason, maths, physics and chemistry as my A-levels and was completely hopeless at all of them."

Maybe he should have studied arts subjects? "I think I would have wasted that as well. I wasn't really cut out for a school education and if, by some unaccountable reason, I had managed to get to university, I would have made a complete hash of that," he says, a little ruefully. Then he adds: "I sort of fell into journalism and have absolutely loved it ever since."

Pollard is now a "voracious" reader of political and military history. "I'm ploughing through a wonderful biography of Nikita Khrushchev, it's fantastic and in a way a complementary volume to one of the best biographies ever written, the Simon Sebag Montefiore biography of Stalin. I'm a huge fan of John Keegan [stalwart of The Daily Telegraph] who I think is peerless as a military historian and have bought everything by him. Max Hastings (the former Daily Telegraph and London Evening Standard editor) is another, especially his book Armageddon on the closing year of the war."

Pollard ruminates: "I don't think I could write a book, I just don't think I've got it in me. But I'm insanely jealous of people who do. Actually, I did once start writing a book on a Saturday afternoon. I got about a page-and-a-half written and then subbed it down to about 30 words. You can't do that with a book. It was a sort of pot-boiler novel."

When he looks at young Sky News recruits he struggles to recognise himself. "I have been struck by the younger people coming into the business. They know so much more than I did at that age and they are so much more confident. I didn't get into television until I was 27 and [before that] I was able to make an enormous number of mistakes and have them kindly corrected by various mentors.

"There's so much more pressure these days," says Pollard, who faced one of his most difficult times when Sky News reporter James Forlong killed himself in 2003 after being found to have faked a report from a nuclear submarine.

The Sky News chief thinks on a little and then recalls a pair of colleagues who do remind him of the younger Pollard.

"There are a couple of people at Sky who I have been particularly gratified to see who are quieter and not the pushy sort, slightly more introverted. I don't mean that to be a criticism of everybody else, but you know what I mean. It's nice to see those people getting a chance in our business, because there's a slight tendency that people who get on best are those that shout loudest at the earliest possible stage. I wasn't like that."