Meanwhile

Meanwhile, I woke this morning to find "Harris started 'like a rocket' in Michigan. Now she's slipping", a long think piece by Madeline Halpert in the top ten stories on BBC News online. The headline seemed very certain, given the BBC's normally tentative attitude to polling, so I looked further. "A Quinnipiac poll last week indicated Donald Trump is leading in the swing state by three points", said Madeline.  The Quinnepiac University poll covered 1,007 likely voters in Michigan between October 3rd and 7th.  I have today's date as 16th.

I looked elsewhere. I found "Democrats on edge in critical Michigan amid fears of waning enthusiasm", from the Guardian on Sunday. I looked for a Michigan poll of polls and found this (click to go large)

 

Turnessing 4

They used to be just 'reporters and correspondents'; then they became Newsgathering, supplying news coverage requested by bulletins and programmes; currently they are News Content, deciding what to cover and how, with programmes and bulletins informed of their choices. 

This Soviet style of news production at the BBC, where everything is brilliant and a huge success, makes cuts difficult to make, and impossible to understand. It also requires back-tracking on previous commitments. 

So there will be no Royal Editor in the future; the role of the Rural Affairs Correspondent becomes part of the duties of the South West of England Correspondent; the News Content investigations team, in theory filling behind Newsnight's cuts, is itself cut from 4 posts to 1; the role of LGBT correspondent ends; the Young Reporter scheme, as promoted by Huw Edwards, stops; specialisms are re-clustered, with 'Society' (UK, Legal, Religion, Housing) joining 'Culture' (a right old rag-bag). 

And on the ordering news sausages front, the Content Production Hub becomes Planning & Impact, and On The Day becomes one operation, subsuming "Live", "Content", "Home" and "Foreign". I hope you're paying attention. Most people currently working have to apply for what look like small variations to their existing jobs. No fun, in the run-up to Christmas.   

Turnessing 3

Mmm. The BBC Board committee that used to monitor "Fair Trading" is no more, subsumed into Audit and Risk.

From next year, journalists paid for by the World Service will provide most of the overnight network news bulletins on BBC radio.  Tim Davie wants the Government to fund the whole of the World Service. I suspect commercial radio companies may make mischief with this. 

Meanwhile, to save paying for other staff doing night shifts at Broadcasting House, Radio 4 loses 'News Briefing'.  The online site will be kept going by hiring journalists in Sydney, presumably with special expertise in dash-cam footage, and video clips of animals doing funny things. 

Turnessing 2

Cutting a small team doing a news service for the BBC Asian Network is short-term thinking in terms of diversity and inclusion; making young Asians take a news service from Radio 1's Newsbeat team is probably the least worst second choice, but will do nothing in terms of serving a 'hard to reach' audience. 

Hear this from Sej, now an established documentary producer, who joined 5Live on the admin team, and blossomed producing stars of the future on the Asian Network. 

Closing Asian Network news is a tragedy. Some argue we don’t need separate outlets for Black or Asian stories, but many mainstream editors, who are often white and posh, (some) don’t fully grasp the intricacies of these communities. This is a huge loss. Sad times. https://t.co/oVXF87F5kd

— Sej 🇹🇿🇮🇳🇬🇧 (@Sejthejourno) October 15, 2024

Imagine how this young journalist feels today, having joined the Asian Network three months ago, following a development course called  BBC Future Voices World Service.

Turnessing 1

The Turness Administration at BBC News is in dire need of an intellectual consigliere. The latest round of cuts is maladroit, to say the least, making savings in the style of a small grocery chain dropping some stock lines and leaving some aisles empty.  Classy it ain't. 

HARDtalk, the half hour interview show that started with News 24 in 1997, is to go. It was sort of a British response to Larry King Live on CNN, designed to give a 24-hour news channel some heft, and something to pad out news-light late evenings and weekends. Over the years, with main presenters Tim Sebastian, Zeinab Badawi, Stephen Sackur, Sara Montague and Mishal Husain, it has found an eclectic range of guests. Not all have been frontline newsmakers - indeed, over the years, there have been fewer and fewer "big names", and more thinkers and commentators across the arts, global and regional politics.  

It would not be surprising if those driving the BBC News assault on US audiences wanted something different. The guest list majors on the UK, Europe, Africa and Asia; there is no obvious half-way house for adverts; the lead presenter is not blonde in the feminine sense. It's certainly something that makes BBC News look different to the other news channels in the United States, but then, as I have written before, the BBC in New York is selling its editorial brand down the river, paddling desperately towards an uncertain financial return. 

Against a background of high-minded stuff from Tim Davie, Keeper of the Candle of Journalism from the Dangerous Winds Blowing from Russia and China, the timing is grim. More posts follow.... 

Confused ?

I'm not sure who does Tim Davie's grid, but in the week of another big shove of the begging bowl in the faces of The Treasury, FCO and DCMS, BBC News is telling domestic staff who won't be needed beyond March 2025. 

Tim thinks the taxpayer in general should fund World Service, to protect and even develop its journalism in areas where the Russians and Chinese are taking the lead. However, in domestic journalism, the licence fee payer can make do without local radio in the afternoons and weekends, without a Newsnight that reports as well as debates, and with a news website rich in "Well I never, some dashcam stuff..." and One Show clips. And then there's BBC Studios, funding US journalists in the USA..... Think it through, Tim. 

Dippy

Quite a dip for BBC News in the monthly figures from BARB - the channel reached 8.5m over September, compared with 10.9m in August, and down on 8.9m last September.  Sky News was down to 7.1m, from 8.7m in August and unchanged from 7.1m a year ago

GB News reached 3.2m over the month, down from 3.77m in August, and compared with 2.8m a year ago.   

To the printers

There'll be a number of BBC staff looking to change their calling cards, after the revelation that DG Tim Davie has decided to ban the use of the word 'talent'. 

Speaking to Nick Robinson on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, Tim opined “We often refer to people like yourself as ‘talent’ but I’ve kind of banned that. You’re a presenter, I’m a leader of an organization, and we’re here to serve.”

A little prowl round existing job titles reveals: 

Head of Talent Acquisition - News
Director of Talent and Skills, BBC Commissioning
Football Talent Lead
Global Head of Talent Acquisition, Talent & D&I
Senior Talent Acquisition Business Partner - Executive Search 

Senior International Talent Acquisition Advisor

And then there are whole departments: "TalentWorks is a content label within @bbcstudios aimed at identifying forward thinking talent with whom it can partner."

New fees ?

Former BBC acting chair Dame Elan Closs Stephens delivered a speech to a Prix Italia audience in Turin last week.  She's presumably reasonably in touch with BBC thinking, and this part of her talk suggests maybe it's time to raise some funds for public service broadcasting from those who profit from broadband infrastructure... 

Public service broadcasters pay a heavy price for universality - for the ability to talk to all wherever they are. That price is the necessity to ride two horses – to transmit on terrestrial transmitters in order to reach everyone and to distribute on digital platforms. Some of those digital platforms are not open to everyone either through cost or through problems of the infrastructure. But our old-fashioned transmitters reach out to society as a whole. And they are an expense.

Streamers have no such obligations. They are free to provide a digital only service. And that digital only service is an entertainment library without the heavy cost of live breaking news - a very costly undertaking born by public service broadcasters in the UK. Surely the time has come for some of the cost of our terrestrial infrastructure and even the costs of our broadband infrastructure to be shared industry wide. Let me expand. National broadcasters have always contributed to the cost of national infrastructure from terrestrial radio transmitters to digital multiplexes. The UK Government has paid substantial sums to try to reach the last 5% of digital broadband exclusion. Yet, as far as I am aware, there is no levy towards the national infrastructure from those who profit from it the most. Governments in the UK and Europe have to re-assess the ideas of a completely free market – a free market that is weighted heavily in one direction. It’s time to understand the value of our national broadcasters and to provide a level field of competition.

Exclusive

The BBC has got into a habit of keeping some of its biggest audience podcasts locked into BBC Sounds for weeks, before making them available to other platforms. The obvious ambition is to drive more people into downloading the BBC Sounds app; the figure of weekly users seems to be a Big KPI on Mr Davie's dashboard. 

Does it make sense as a long-term strategy ? Former Beeboid James Cridland patrols the global public service horizon in this post, and says, firmly, No.

I've been fumbling for some sort of analogy here. If the parallel were to be magazines, could you imagine BBC Publishing trying to set up a chain of dedicated high street shops, selling only BBC magazines, and making them available via WHSmith, Menzies and independent newsagents a month later ? 

If you're not always on the big platforms, don't you have to work much much harder at discoverability ? Well, not if you're Auntie, where peaktime advertising is free. Yet the BBC is also keen on making money from the pre-roll ads that come on other platforms.  This enormous anomaly ought to come to light in any serious review of the BBC's scope and funding. Remember, at the moment, you don't need a licence fee to listen to BBC Radio or BBC Sounds. 

The BBC has yet to align and articulate its Great Podcast Surge with underlying mission statements and values more detailed than 'reaching more people'.  The BBC's other big driver is 'reaching underserved audiences'. Ofcom's podcast survey of 2024 shows 32% of regular podcast listeners are ABC1, compared with 17% C2DE, suggesting the BBC is once again 'super-serving' an existing audience.