How does it feel (online)

BBC News Online's coverage of the Met Gala grows in parallel with its ambition to conquer the US market. Live reporting was edited by Brandon Livesay and Oliver O'Connell, with Nada Tawfik and Pratiksha Ghildial 'there' at the Met Gala, with contributions from Grace Eliza Goodwin; overnight it was re-written by Kayla Epstein and Scarlett Harris. 

Being 'there' allows for the important questions to be asked by the BBC.  Here's a selection. 

The BBC caught up with Beyonce on the carpet. Asked how it felt to be back, the star said, "It feels great to be here with my daughter and husband".

American tennis star Venus Williams, a five-time Wimbledon winner, also co-chaired the event.... She let out a cheer when the BBC asked her how it felt to co-chair the gala. "I'm dancing inside," she said.

[Angela] Bassett wore a pink gown designed by Prabal Gurung that was inspired by a Harlem Renaissance painting, "Girl in a Pink Dress"..... She told the BBC that fashion was integral to getting into character.

[Karan] Johar told the BBC that fashion was a massive part of his movies, which have been cemented as some of the most iconic in modern Bollywood. He added that the day had him feeling emotional.

Pop star Sabrina Carpenter donned a dress made out of celluloid film strips. When asked by the BBC what the film on the dress is from, the Grammy-winning singer shouted, "Sabrina" - possibly referring to the classic film with Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart from 1954.

Actress Sarah Paulson wore grey tulle dress and a mask fashioned out of a dollar bill, obscuring part of her face. When the BBC asked her what is signified, she simply said the "1 percent".

Matt's messages

Two weeks to Matt Brittin's formal arrival as BBC Director General, and one presumes his team are preparing his launch statements.  There is room for a few 'getting to know the issues' and 'listening to staff' platitudes, but something bolder about challenging the odd presumption of the old regime would be helpful. 

Why not try "Sixty hacks on Verify is nice, but is it really of more value than a strong BBC News UK channel, as we cede ground to GB News ?"; or, "I think we've done enough 'pivoting' from BBC local radio to local online - let's grow both"; or, "Pleased to find a strong Product Team in place, but in general, we're going to let the wider media market lead on software"; or "Our linear channels will be the showcase for all our output, and must stop over-serving the over 60s"; or "We need to show that moving science correspondents to Glasgow, business correspondents to Salford, etc has improved our content in some way more than telling a PR story". 

Painted over

Former BBC New York correspondent Nick Bryant tells his Substack readers of a day in March 2018 when he filmed Banksy just after a furtive painting exercise at The Houston Bowery Wall.  He'd tipped off his bureau chief and the editor of the 10 O'Clock News that he might have a scoop (Nick's piece has a picture of a hand with paint on the fingers). Banksy's artistic target was not Trump, but a mural in support of jailed Kurdish artist Zehra Dogan. It reads as if Banksy drove off fast before Nick could get a word. 

As Nick wrestled internally with the rights and wrongs of identifying a fellow Bristolian on air, a call came through from London.  "A senior colleague told me that his daughter had accompanied him to work that day, and thought it was wrong to unveil Banksy. We should not be the news organisation, she reckoned, to tell kids there was no Father Christmas. It was an understandable point of view, I said, but perhaps we should get a second opinion. The BBC’s then arts editor entered the fray, explaining that whenever he asked audiences if they wanted to find out Banksy’s true identity, they all cried out no. In a culture fixated by fame, namelessness evidently held an even higher currency. The BBC’s then head of news agreed. So we buried the footage."

A little coy, Nick. Name the burial party.  The BBC Arts Editor was Will Gompertz.  Director of News and Current Affairs was Fran Unsworth.  The Editor of the 10 O'Clock News was Paul Royall.  Paul Danahar was News bureau chief in Washington. 

Easing up ?

Has the new ownership of the Telegraph steered the paper away from a cascade of anti-BBC articles ?  A fellow blogger has noted a recent restriction in the pipeline of ordure from Danny Cohen and Robin Aitken. 

The Sunday edition offers only "BBC ‘covered up claims male presenter attacked female colleague’", by 'Telegraph Reporters', a summary of a Mail on Sunday 'exclusive'; Saturday's edition featured "BBC spending thousands of pounds on riot training for World Cup staff" by Ben Rumsby. 

Boosterism

Morale in BBC news teams in London, and around the UK, will not have been lifted by a piece in The Guardian. It reports a staff briefing by silver-tongued BBC News Content boss Richard Burgess:  

“Most of our savings are people, frankly. [The cuts will be] 15% of our income. Our income is not entirely salary bill as we have other things as well, although it is the majority. Ultimately, [10% is] a figure across the whole of the BBC, but that doesn’t take into account that there are areas it’s just not possible to make cuts in.

“And so, as a consequence, in the areas where it is possible to make cuts in it ends up being a slightly higher figure. Across news, that 15% figure is fairly consistent in most areas of news.”

This news of other departments impossible to cut is made more joyous by another briefing reported by The Guardian. 

"Kerris Bright, the BBC’s chief customer officer, was also asked which departments may be targeted more heavily. Bright, who is responsible for leading the marketing and audiences team and the licence fee unit, told staff that those teams bring in significantly more in revenue than they cost to run, when thinking about where cuts could hit the hardest."

Hard times

BBC News interim boss Jonathan Munro was out and about yesterday talking to the Voice of the Viewer and Listener Spring Conference. 

He'll at least be pleased with extensive coverage in LadBible: "News of savings is hard. It's hard for us, it's hard for audiences, because everything we touch or try to change, or in some cases, close down, is somebody's favourite piece of the BBC's offer to them.  So, it's not easy to make these choices, but we're working through plans and we said to our staff within news that we will be able to say more in June."

I'm sure he looked cheerful at some time in the proceedings. I was taken with a phrase by Royal Correspondent Sean Coghlan this week, which might be applied here: "King Charles sometimes has the melancholy look of someone who keeps getting disappointing phone calls."

Mr Munro is interim director because Deborah Turness resigned over the Trump edit on Panorama. For at least five months before that, both Ms Turness and Mr Munro held parallel views that  a) the edit reflected a greater truth that needed making simpler and stronger for the audience to understand a particular narrative or b) it was standard practice to jump edit political speeches.  In November 2025, the BBC apologised to Donald Trump: "We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action".

Loose ends

I've spent a bit of time last night worrying over loose ends.  Does it matter that BBC1 viewers of the Ten O'Clock News didn't see the video of the arresting policemen landing at least five kicks on the head of the knife-wielding thug in Golders Green ?  Is a sharp kick to the head usual if police, as they say, were worried the suspect may have had a concealed explosive device ?  For Six O'Clock viewers, who deemed what was to be blurred in that video ?  Did someone in the edit suite actually say "Make the coppers' feet fuzzy ?"

Let's admire the 10 for coverage of the alleged Ukrainian arsonists, but was 25 seconds really sufficient for the revelation that Nigel Farage failed to declare £5m from an ex-pat crypto tycoon ?   And let's note that the 'shotgun' carried by Trump's latest would-be assassin is now a 'rifle', and there's no indication the man in custody actuually fired a shot.

Still, there's always another bulletin.... 

Arriving at other platforms

A chart produced by Press Gazette puts BBC News at the top of a list of English language news publishers on YouTube this month, measured by numbers of subscribers. It has 19.7m in April, with 29k videos on the site, and has overtaken ABC News, CNN and Vice. A year ago, it had 17.8m subscribers and 25k videos posted. 

Piers Morgan Uncensored is outside the Press Gazette Top 20, with 4.4m subscribers looking at 2.3k videos.   

The BBC News site is not the only BBC product with a YouTube presence. "The BBC" has 15.4m subscribers, looking at 30k videos and clips; BBC World Service has 2m subscribers;  BBC Earth has 14.4m subscribers; and BBC Ideas, the James Purnell Legacy, 684k. 

What I did for clicks

I'd don't know who's dafter - the people running the BBC News website at the weekend, or the people reading it.  Here's the top three 'Most Read' items at 08.51 BST today. 

The Number One story is written by George Sandeman, in Salford, home of weekend website nonsense. This in-depth twaddle looks at relationships where one partner is much older than another. Burrowing down, we find the 'idea' behind the feature might be a reality dating show on Netflix called "Age of Attraction". 

Context

A new poll from Electoral Calculus included the following question: Who runs your council?

With local elections coming up on 7 May, we wanted to see how much people were aware of politics in their local area. We asked them "As far as you know, which political party currently leads your local council or local authority?"

Nearly a third of voters (30pc) admitted that they don't know which party currently leads their local council. Of those who gave an answer, 46pc correctly identified the leading party while 24pc were wrong.