Nick Davies is a freelance journalist who has worked under part-time contract for Guardian News and Media Limited since 1989. He trained as a journalist from 1976 to 1978 with a scheme for university graduates which was run by the Mirror Group, based in Devon and Cornwall. Since then, he has also worked as a Fleet Street reporter, specialising first in crime and home affairs.Davies told Leveson about his book, Flat Earth News, refused to reveal his sources on his claim that the Daily Mail, as other newspapers did, paid police officers and civil servants for information, and said self-regulation hasn't worked for the industry.For Davies' full oral evidence, click here. For his written evidence, click here.On self-regulation [oral evidence]:I think that the history of the PCC's performance undermines the whole concept of self-regulation. Re-reading this evidence, because you sent it to me at the end of last week, I noticed that I was speaking up for self-regulation, but I wouldn't any more. I don't think this is an industry that is interested in or capable of self-regulation. I think probably at this point I was at the edge of that conclusion, but hadn't quite come to it. I think I felt that perhaps the problems which I'd seen in the PCC, particularly with handling the original outbreak of phone hacking in 2006/7, the McCann case and the Max Mosley case, might have been the result of the particular chair and the particular director, and for me there was a turning point in -- this is April '09. We published the Gordon Taylor story in July, and n November, the PCC published the second report on phone hacking. Different personnel, different chair. The former -- well, I think the same director, but the man who is now director was involved in the production of that report, Stephen Abell, who I regard as a good man. But the report was terrible. Just an awful piece of work. You know, my editor resigned from the code committee in protest. He went on the radio and said, "This is worse than useless", which I think was an understatement. And that shifted me across the line."I just think -- I do not trust this industry to regulate itself. I say this as I love reporting. I want us to be free. You have a huge intellectual puzzle in front of you. How do you regulate a free press? But it obviously doesn't work. We're kidding ourselves if we think it would, because it hasn't."On his phone hacking investigation [oral evidence]:"There's a loose assembly of about, I would think, between 15 and 20 former News of the World journalists who have talked, on condition of anonymity, in detail to me or a researcher who was working for me, and they've been a tremendously important engine driving the story forward. Separately, within the private investigation industry, profession, there are some -- I suppose you could call them senior investigators, who are very worried by the activities of people they would see as cowboys, who they see damaging the reputation of their industry, and again, on condition of anonymity, there are, I suppose, more like four or five or six -- I'm finding it a little -- but around that number, but no more than half a dozen, but who have again been tremendously helpful, partly about the generality of how they operate, about the skills they use, and also, I think with all six, about work for newspapers."So that's two big pools of people. The former journalists, the PIs, the private investigators. There's a third pool, which are the victims and their legal actions, who overlap to a considerable extent. So if a reporter says, "So-and-so was a victim of the hacking", then I go to the public figure or their representative and say, "Well, they're saying this. Does this coincide with anything you know about?" And they may say -- I mean, at the top end of the scale, they may say, "Operation Weeting have just been on my doorstep. It's definitely true." At the lower end of the scale, it's: "You know, I always suspected it. There were these occasions." And then you start this checking and overlapping business. So those these pools of people would be very important."On public interest [oral evidence]:"Well, one way of approaching it is this. Different journalists have completely different definitions. So people from the News of the World will tell you, in all sincerity, that it was in the public interest that they exposed Max Mosley's sex life. I profoundly and sincerely disagree with them. I do not think that was in the public interest. Now, I understand that the courts came down, so to speak, on my side of the argument. They still haven't persuaded those other journalists that they're wrong. They sincerely believe that the boundary line is in a different place and there have been some cases -- for example, the John Terry case -- where the courts themselves have danced on both sides of the line, at first saying the story about John Terry having an affair is confidential and then jumping over the line and saying, "No, actually, it's in the public interest that9 this be disclosed", and if the courts aren't clear, how am I supposed to be the clear, the hack with the notebook?"Well, we had a huge problem with the Wikileaks stuff. Because in the middle of all this phonehacking, I went off and persuaded Julian Assange to give all this material to the Guardian and the New York Times and Der Spiegel, and it rapidly became apparent that that material contained information which could get people on the ground in Afghanistan seriously hurt. They were implicit identified as sources of information for the coalition forces. I raised this with Julian very early on and he said, "If an Afghan civilian gives information to Coalition forces, they deserve to die. They are informers. They are collaborators." And there were huge tussles between the journalists and him -- actually, maybe this isn't a terribly good example because I would say emphatically it's absolutely clear that we couldn't publish that information and didn't, but he did. I would love to have been able to go to a specialist advisory body and say, "Where is the public interest here?" in order to be able to show it to him, to persuade him."There's another example I've just thought of. We have to be a bit careful about this because this is information that's not been published. About six years ago, there was a senior politician in this country whose child attempted suicide. This is a story which we have never published and it's very, very debatable as to whether or not we should have done. You will hear journalists debating it because it became politically significant for that politician's career that the child had done this, and yet we never reported it."On commercial pressures on broadsheet newspapers [oral evidence]:To take you up on -- because I think I've given the answer already, which is that the commercial considerations are reduced in the broadsheet paper, and in particular the broadsheet paper owned by the trust. What I'm arguing for is that -- journalism doesn't begin with checking facts. There's a prior stage of selective judgment. What subjects should we cover? Having decided to cover this subject, what angle should we take? What priority do we give it in the bulletin or the paper? At what length, with what language? This is all highly selective. How should we make those selective judgments? Overwhelmingly, they are made on commercial grounds. So we want the story which is quick and cheap to do, which is why we recycle agency copy and other people's stories. We want the story that will sell papers, so therefore you pick the sexiest possible way of telling it. The problems that are associated with that I think spread across the spectrum. I'm not exempting the Guardian from problems. We have run stories which were clearly false."The Jersey children's home -- do you remember that, a couple of years ago -- where the idea was that the police had evidence that children had been killed and buried in the ruins of an old children's home on the isle of Jersey. That's a classic of what Richard [Peppiatt] was trying to describe earlier. The evidence for the truth of that proposition is screaming its falsehood. So, for example, the police said, "We have been looking into the ruins of this building and we have found a cellar which is exactly like the cellar which is described by our survivor witnesses." It's "very dark".Cellars are dark. It means nothing. Then they said, "And in this cellar we found a bath", and it's quite alarming, this, the sort of hints of torturing. "It's actually bolted to the floor", as though everybody's bath was mobile. It's silly. It doesn't make any sense. So then the problem that occurred on all newspapers across the whole spectrum is it's too good a story to knock down. So it's exactly what Richard was saying.A reporter from any paper is sent out to Jersey to follow up on this story. The reporter who rings up and says, "Actually, this is crap, there's just no evidence for this at all", they will not be thanked. It's a great story.On payments to sources [oral evidence]:"I've said in the statement that I think the issue is not primarily ethical. I'm not one of those people who says chequebook journalism is inherently evil. I think it's a practical question. So if you go back to my business about the human sources on that primary route, the key14 thing we have to do -- sometimes easy, sometimes terribly difficult -- is to motivate people to talk to us. People of -- like I have to be able to get the 12-year-old child prostitute to talk to me, and the police officer who is trying to arrest her, and the social worker who can't control her, and the pimp who's taking money off her. All of them I have to persuade to talk to me, and the way to do that with success is to find a motivation and build a relationship. It's the most exciting, interesting thing in reporting. If you pay -- and this is why I say it's practical, not ethical -- (a) there is a chance that you're giving these people a motive to fabricate, to earn their money, and (b) at best, you get a very limited amount of co-operation."So there have been occasions when I've been, so to speak, competing with tabloid journalists for the same story and they've gone in with their chequebooks. If you could quantify it, they've got the first couple of pages of the story but I got the whole chapter because people decided they want to help. That, I think, is where the problem is. You see, practical rather than ethical. There's a subsidiary point where clearly if you -- if a journalist or anybody else is offering to pay money in contravention of the Bribery Act, then there's a legal problem, clearly."