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.

Delicatessen tools

Interim BBC DG Rhodri Talfan Davies tells us there'll be no salami slicing in achieving the next £500m of savings - but that's already what's happening. Cf Football Focus, Radio Scotland's presenter line-up (with yet another voice imported from Forth 1, Victoria Easton Riley's old patch), changing Strictly It Takes Two into a 'vodcast',  linear BBC3 in the shedding ring (Have you seen the current schedules ?), it goes on... 

Matt Brittin needs to overlay his own strategy and direction of travel asap.  The remainder of Deborah Turness' management team at News are scaring the staff with the scale of cuts to come, without solutions. Their instinct remains to bolster 'newsgathering' at the expense of output teams. It needs a new Director of News to review the scale of the investment in Verify and the USA, and fast. 

The re-merger of "Product" and "Technology" into Mediatech will produce savings. Ernst & Young's review of current BBC spending noted that, at 12% of revenue, the BBC spends more in these areas than Spotify or Netflix. But there remains a piecemeal approach to content for other platforms; each departmental hippo has a flock of oxpeckers tied to terminals making 45" clips of linear output for re-use on TikTok, Facebook Reels, Instagram and YouTube Shorts.  Online has a small factory making weekend clips of The One Show for the front page of News Online. Radio 2 has just advertised for yet another "Social Media Exec, Radio 2 Publishing".   Entertainingly, the tools they use are largely 'off the shelf', like Emplify, Adobe Creative and Social Flow. Put all the people engaged in this stuff together, and it's one hell of a cottage industry.  Is is marketing ? Is it content ?  Is it of value ?

 

Barm-y

When Sara Cox arrives at Radio 2 Breakfast in the summer, the network will offer listeners 5 and half consecutive hours of Bolton accents each weekday. Sarah was brought up in Little Lever, to the south east, and Vernon Kay in Horwich, to the north west - less than eight miles apart.  Then comes posh boy Jeremy Vine... 

Still, makes up a bit for EastEnders.... 

Gaelic short of bread

Over the years, this blog has chased viewing figures for BBC Alba, without much success. 

MG ALBA is the operating name of Seirbheis nam Meadhanan Gàidhlig, or Gaelic Media Service, which was formed under the Communications Act 2003. MG ALBA delivers the BBC ALBA platforms in partnership with the BBC, from its HQ in Stornoway. I offer these paragraphs from MG Alba's submission on the Green Paper on the future of the BBC.  

BBC ALBA has no funding mechanism. BBC ALBA is dependent on the annual, separate, funding decisions of Scottish Ministers in relation to MG ALBA’s contribution and the budget decisions of BBC management in relation to the BBC’s contribution.

This funding was frozen for 10 years which resulted in a real terms reduction of nearly 50% for Gaelic television broadcasting during that period and there is no transparent mechanism to address the funding deficit. This deficit equates to a shortfall of £10M, which has led to a reduction of almost 30% in the number of hours of new programming since 2015. The reduction in new programmes has had a huge impact on audience figures, particularly among younger viewers.

Exercise Matt

There's a range of unhelpful advice about how to cut the BBC down to size in the Sunday papers. Matt Brittin will have already formed a hypothesis, set about challenging it, and boiled things down to three BIG ISSUES. He may have idly applied GE-McKinsey nine-box matrix, ranking the BBC's activities by 'attractiveness' versus 'business unit strengths'. 

But Lisa Nandy has set different parameters: keeping aiming at universal reach, on funding levels that might match current licence fee rates without 'avoidance'.  She may be coming round to a precept from direct taxation, supervised by a Commission of some sort. 

Matt's decisions will be 'data-driven', looking to balance the audience the BBC currently holds, with the opportunities to reach more in different ways. Let's hope he makes sure that the stats for online and smartphone eyeballs match BARB and RAJAR for length and depth of engagement, and for credit back to the BBC. Too many people seem too be hiding the brand in the hunt for yoof; certainly too many people think pushing out dashcam footage is a public service.  

Matt doesn't need to make less content; he needs to make sure it's all produced at price not distorted by history ("Sit coms are too expensive" "High end drama won't work at low rates".  Podcasts started as fast, cheap and cheerful responses to current trends and events, often denied broadcast space by stuck-in-the-mud commissioners preferring a low-risk comfy life with staples that have filled their schedules for 30-plus years. Now BBC podcasts have a superstructure of a size similar to linear radio. I expect the recent move into documentaries for YouTube will suffer in the same way. 

So, Matt, make content production No 1; make sure its got genuine quality, baseline-costed, then organise it and distribute it for the 21st century.  

Failure of the state ?

 "Pass" and "Fail" are rather stark assessments in the murky world of security vetting.  It's a reasonable bet that we'll never see the Mandelson document from UKSV, but I bet it talks about risks, rather than saying "He's a spy", or "He's only in it for the money". One of the key concerns for the interviewers sent out by UKSV is the possibility of blackmail, for past, continuing or potential future indiscretions. 

With any risk assessment, it's possible to mitigate. Or accept that the benefits outweigh the risks. Security vetting doesn't assess benefits. Whatever Sir Olly Robbins read in the UKSV Mandelson report, the 'process' entitled him to endorse a political appointment clearly already made by the Prime Minister.  And you'd sort of expect that to be the case, if the vetting report is nuanced. It might be uncomfortable if the Security Service had ultimate but untransparent control over 'political' roles; Darren Jones is at risk of painting himself into a corner with this morning's 'rule change', announced on The Today Programme. 

There are many people in and out of the Cabinet Office with 'security' in their remit. Patricia Dreghorn is the CEO of UKSV, Vincent Devine is the Government Chief Security Officer and Head of the Government Security Function, Sir Laurie Magnus is the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards. Cui bono, at this stage, if Mandelson's failure to pass vetting is made public ?

PS One presumes Matt Brittin 'passed'.