Reimagining Ros Atkins..

Someone's given BBC Analysis Editor Ros Atkins a glow-up.  First, the February look, with full Verify branding, jacket, and the traditional backdrop of the Temple of Doom Newsroom...

This week's look; t-shirt, no Verify, and groovy podcast-type set. 

Back off

The new Director of News might like to take a look at the number of "Political Editors" the BBC is running, and their work. 

First, Chris Mason, on duty days, is omni-present. Not only reporting on the 'story of the day' but usually bookending with both a live introduction and thumb-sucking back anno on both the Six and Ten on BBC1. It's a throwback to the days of Laura Kuenssberg as Chief Political Correspondent, when David Aaronovitch coined the term "Kuenssbergovision". 

Political Editors of previous centuries - David Holmes, John Cole and Robin Oakley - allowed others to do the running round, and only appeared when they deemed stories to have accumulated sufficient weight to demand their presence on screen. 

Laura Kuenssburg is still required to opine on weekend Newscasts, and a weekly newsletter.  Her Sunday output is 'news', today, Thursday. 

  

Alan Milburn's full report making headlines today - our interview with him from this weekend https://t.co/8Ly8pCROnK

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) May 28, 2026

And another former Political Editor, Nick Robinson, modestly shared his opinions of his own interview all day yesterday... 

 

On the @BBCNews Channel: former PM Sir Tony Blair says the Labour government has no "coherent plan" for the country. @bbcnickrobinson spoke to us after interviewing him 🧵 pic.twitter.com/qR7Ax4xeO2

— Luxmy Gopal (@luxmy_g) May 27, 2026

Transfer talk

The news that new BBC DG Matt Brittin had decided to base himself on the seventh floor of New Broadcasting House has created some anxiety amongst those functionaries who clustered around Tim Davie on the fourth floor.  Doesn't Matt like us ?  Doesn't he need our advice every day ?  Are any of us going upstairs with him ? What have you heard ?

Equally, the television commissioners of the seventh floor might have to start worrying a bit more about presenteeism.  The Tuesday after the Bank Holiday was particularly poorly attended... 

Equal opportunities

Not long to go before the departure of BBC deputy chairman Sir Damon Buffini, who joined various BBC boards in 2022. The gap leaves an interesting challenge for Samir Shah. For diversity targets, he needs to find another person of colour, ideally with big business experience, so that they can keep an eye on BBC Studios. 

If Matt Brittin accepts his targets too, the new Director of BBC News ought to be a 'diverse' choice....

Comedic

BBC Three Creative Brief:  "At BBC Three we're looking to celebrate what it is to be young and British today, and all our content must appeal to a young, diverse, UK-wide audience."

That must be why this Saturday, and on forthcoming Saturdays, the peak-time schedule was packed with repeats of Miranda and Mrs Brown's Boys...

Radio winners

Sometimes it's possible that awards judges are trying to send messages. At last night Audio Aria awards (the Sonys, in old money) the winners in the Best Speech Breakfast category were Radio Bristol, Radio Ulster, and Radio Oxford. 

In Best Factual, gold went to Hits Radio, silver to the Daily Mail, and Radio 4 took bronze. 

In Best News, gold went to Hits Radio, silver to Mishal Hussein on Bloomberg Radio, and bronze to a Newsbeat contribution to 1Xtra. 

The Radio Times Moment of the Year went to Mishal Hussain for provoking Nigel Farage into “Listen love, you're trying ever so hard”

Wrong way

I've got one or two documents I'd like to pop into Matt Brittin's weekend reading bag. 

We all knew that Matt was a gospeller for AI, but extracts from his first address to BBC staff have been heard by Jake Kanter of Deadline... 

"He said the BBC could deploy technology to analyze its news and content to establish patterns in output. Brittin said this could mean assessing how often the BBC uses certain words, or analysing the types of contributors appearing across its programming.

“Stories and data together are the way to understand the world..... not to audit people, but as a kind of sat nav around bias or sat nav around these topics … So that’s where I think I’d try to complement our brilliant expert teams.”

So first in his man-bag, The Asserson Report, of 2024, commissioned and shaped by the head of a Tel Aviv HQ'd law firm, and produced with Dr. Haran Shani-Narkiss, who calls himself a "Computational Neuroscientist". 

Second, the Centre for Media Monitoring report of 2025 "We employed Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a state-of-the-art language model that has demonstrated strong performance on the MMLU-Pro benchmark designed to evaluate the multitask capabilities of language models across diverse subjects, achieving 88.3% accuracy."

Both have lots of data, but the textual analysis has parameters set by humans, and both use so called sympathy assessments to come to what many would call their preferred conclusions. This is a dangerous and distracting path, Matt. 

Broader societal trends

The BBC Board made the trek to Salford for their January meeting, and even the minutes suggest it was an uninspiring session.  If it wasn't for the Celebrity Traitors.... 

6.5 The Board discussed audience performance for October-December 2025. Audience
consumption of BBC content had improved this quarter. The Celebrity Traitors was a key
driver of this, with the average audience for each episode standing at over 15 million
viewers. Consumption of online content had also improved with 64% of people now
coming to the BBC online. However, despite improving levels of BBC usage among
young audiences this year, performance remained below target this quarter.

6.6 The Board discussed the perception metrics among audiences to the BBC. These had
remained at a low level overall, although audiences had reacted more positively to BBC
News. The Board noted that research was underway to gauge the extent to which these
falls were part of a broader societal trend and how they might be addressed. The Board
would discuss this research further.

Events

Remember in March that mild media ruckus when it was revealed that the BBC planned to reduce its Royal events team from six to just one ? 

More quietly, that rolled over into a short-notice decision by the BBC not to provide its traditional outside-broadcast coverage of the State Opening of Parliament a week ago - causing stress amongst the administrators at Westminster, and more than raised eyebrows in the Royal Household. 

Yes, there was a programme on BBC1. But the BBC programme covered the carriage procession from Buckingham Palace with existing locked-off cameras and a hovering helicopter, with commentary from a panel in the BBC's Westminster studio. At the last State Opening, back in 2024, there were live cameras tracking the carriage en route as well as the helicopter, the panel was in a grand House of Lords side room, and a roving reporter talked to participants in the Commons lobby ahead of the event. (You can check all this because the 2024 Opening has got to YouTube - though it's not still on the BBC iPlayer)

When it got to the internal processing and ceremonial, the Parliamentary Broadcasting Unit and their preferred supplier Bow Tie Productions had to provide coverage "with just a few week's notice", setting up 25 camera coverage that the BBC decided to duck.  Nice. 

More of the same ?

21st Century BBC DGs have talked a lot about moving at speed, leading change, etc. Let's look at the history of 'personalised recommendations' on iPlayer. 

The BBC officially launched iPlayer in 2007. In 2010, they offered sign-up to a BBC ID, claiming "Now, as soon as you've played a couple of programmes, our recommendations system has enough information to guess what you may like and offer personalised programme recommendations for you, and so when you next return to the iPlayer home page you'll now see two extra zones: For You and Friends". It was 2017 before they made 'sign in' compulsory, in theory exposing us all to 'personalised recommedations'. 

Alongside this, in 2015, there was talk of a 'public service algorithm'; the idea that, instead of giving you more of the same, or pandering to your already demonstrated preferences, the BBC should 'educate' viewers and listeners by more tangential recommendations. James Purnell promised that, in 2019, the new BBC Sounds app would “pop your bubble”.  He won the approval of Amol Rajan, then BBC Media Editor "An algorithm designed to promote scepticism rather than reinforce prejudice will not have the same commercial appeal as those that make, for instance, YouTube what it is. But, depending on its efficacy, it could potentially have a public benefit: Namely, to replace time-wasting with education". 

DG Lord Hall followed up with the promise of something similar for iPlayer to "break the echo chamber of suggested content".  

Scroll forward to today, and my own line of "Recommended for you" on iPlayer. I should explain that on our various tv, nearly every, wife, daughters and grandchildren, sign in as me, which must confuse things. Today, I am pointed to 1: The Cage, which it should know I'm already up to the last episode; 2: Amandaland, which my partner is already watching, and I find too agonising; 3: Sort Your Life Out Unpacked, a video podcast spin-off aimed at my partner; and 4: Beyond Paradise, which we've both tried and neither of us can stand. 

According to the well-informed Jake Kanter, new DG Matt Brittin told BBC staff this week of his own experiences with iPlayer:  "He noted that after watching breakout comedy hit Small Prophets, he would have liked iPlayer to recommend Detectorists, another series written by Mackenzie Crook. Brittin added that when he went to watch Silent Witness, he was served the very first episode by iPlayer, rather than the latest season."

There's a fundamental conflict constricting iPlayer. There are the data scientists still trying to machine learn 30 years of output, to create some majestic and encyclopaedic yet undesignable gateway; and there are the schedulers, curators and creators fighting for their time and space on the 'front page'. Common sense calls, like linking Small Prophets and Detectorists, go by the wayside in this hand-to-hand struggle. 

Personally, I'd like to see a space for the unsung Programme Index on iPlayer.  Using Radio Times' listings, it currently offers a route to over 361,516 playable programmes, searchable by date, time channel and key words in the listings.  Alongside, create a UK editor for the iPlayer front page, and let him or her lead us away, using human intelligence, from 'more of the same' recommendations.  It should be a joy to see it change much more often...