Another week, another article from a local newspaper person moaning about how the BBC is all unfair and that what with their license fee and everything. This time it’s Marc Reeves, editor of the Birmingham Post, declaring the BBC’s spread threatens survival of local newspapers.
I understand the basic point he’s making here, that a business like the Birmingham Post and Mail, faced with falling sales, falling advertising revenue and, until recently, years of chronic under-investment by the mother company (they’ve gotten better in the last 12 months), cannot compete on a level playing field with the BBC which does not need to do tricky things like turn a profit. I might not feel as passionately about it as Marc but I understand the point. And I could make the argument that the reason the BBC is doing rather well in the online news arena is because they invested heavily in it over the last decade, raising the bar while the mainstream newspaper industry (with the exception of The Guardian) buried their heads in the sand in the hope that this nasty Internet thing would go away. I could make that argument but it’s not that useful really.
So instead I’m going to offer a bit of advice and a different perspective. Stop trying to compete with the BBC. They’re doomed. If you think you newspaper people are in trouble how do you think a monolithic corporation with broadcast seared into its veins is going to cope in this new era? I predict rather badly.
BBC audiences are falling but I don’t think it’s because of the multi-channel environment. People are moving their viewing to YouTube, their listening to their iPods (other mp3 players are available) and are getting their news from the online social spaces they inhabit. The BBC is part of this media environment but in no way dominates it. You might be sent to a BBC news page from a blog or forum or watch something on the iPlayer at a time of your choosing, but you’re lightyears away from the days of watching a BBC television channel for 6 hours all evening.
The notion that the BBC is going to dominate the online space is ludicrous. No-one can dominate it. The reader/viewer/user curates the space themselves either proactively or by grazing. So when I hear Marc and others bitching about the BBC coming in and stealing their eyeballs a scenario evolves in my mind.
A new world has been created. Money has been abolished and the economy is based on sharing and other hippy-ish ideals. A couple of old bankers are walking the streets, their suits slightly tatty, their faces gaunt. They don’t understand this new world. Everyone else seems happy but they just can’t join in. It doesn’t make sense.
Suddenly a glint in the gutter catches their eye. It’s a gold coin that someone has discarded. They both make a dash for it and tumble into the filthy puddles, clawing and kicking each other for this reminder of what once was. Meanwhile the rest of the world carries on regardless.
A bit extreme maybe, and on reflection not at all accurate. I guess I got a bit carried away. But it does seem to me that the way the newspaper people are attacking the BBC on this issue is to rather miss the point. It’s a big internet. Another player entering isn’t going to reduce your audience. If anything it’s going to raise the game and make online local news a better place meaning more people read the news over watching YouTube or whatever. That can only be a good thing, right?
Totally. Did you listen to Trinity Mirror head Sly Bailey’s speech uploaded on Jo Geary’s blog? My thoughts were not at all dissimilar to yours: http://catherinebray.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/joanna-geary-sly-bailey/
I don’t pretend to have an overview on the rights and wrongs of BBC vs BhamPost but, if I worked for either, I’d also want to stake my territory/protect my patch so fair play if they want to go at it.
However, I am also having to unlearn the way of thinking that there is a local patch that can be served my any one specialist.
Being rather gloomy-minded about my profession of late, I can’t help seeing a Tiswas studio floor full of editors doing the dying fly.
Having read Marc’s article this morning I was more than a little bit annoyed by it.
If the Post is good enough then people will continue to read it. As you rightly point out people are no longer wedded to a single news source. If I hear of a story I look across a range of sites to try and get a feel for a number of views.
I have to say that if that story relates to Birmingham then the Post is unlikely to be on that list of sites. The main reason for this is that it has seemingly given up on news and replaced it with puff pieces about businesses and pictures of women in posh dresses.
I welcome the move to create local BBC sites simply because it might give me better news and might force existing players to raise their game.
As someone who used to have the BBC west midlands news feed in his reader I really have to wonder if the Birmingham Newsies have even looked at what passes for local coverage. A 5 year old with chalk crayons drawing on the sidewalk can out compete the BBC in terms of local news coverage.
I ditched the BBC after they ran a story that said “Man found in Canal”. The detail of the article was that a man was found in a canal. Nothing else. Alive, dead, drunk, murdered, in a long boat? Who knows? I still don’t. I wondered if there some sort of restriction on the Beeb that said they could only provide one of the journalistic Ws, and only partially at that, in order to not compete.
I won’t even go into midlands today’s cutting edge investigative journalism pieces on OAPs with leaky pipes in the front garden.
If you can’t compete with the BBC on local news then your dead already and just haven’t realized you’re a ghost.
Internationally and for documentaries the Beeb is worth the license fee. For news inside the UK that is not related to strictly come dancing they are a complete waste of ether.
@srboisvert I think you’ve hit it there. The BBC has always been good at the one-to-many broadcast model where many=millions. They are not so good at the narrowcast stuff because it’s not in their DNA. So the idea of them blundering into ultra-local news, no matter how huge their budget, being a threat to those who are supposed to be at home in that environment is laughable.
@Daz “it has seemingly given up on news and replaced it with puff pieces about businesses and pictures of women in posh dresses.” I believe that’s known as going for your niche. ;)