Friday, February 26, 2010

Now trending

A day to watch the BBC and #save6music race up the trend charts on Twitter.

The Times says the forthcoming BBC strategic review prepared by Mark Thompson will shut 6Music and the Asian Network, cut spending on US programming by a quarter, cut website spending and staffing by a quarter, close youth services like BBC Switch and Blast!, and cap spending on broadcast rights for sports events of 8.5 per cent of the licence fee, or about £300 million. It's all based on an assumption that the licence fee will be frozen in 2013 - probably a good bet, whatever party's in power.

The timing is interesting - there's a certain amount of redistribution of funds in the plan reported by The Times, toward "quality" tv programming. So it may be that there are options to be considered by the BBC Trust, and a leak leading to a firestorm may be useful to various parties.

Richard Bacon, presenter on 5Live and 6Music, has 1,325,397 followers on Twitter and is urging them to include #save6music in everything they write. Here's one of his overnight Tweets "Here's my strongest and final comment of the night: proposing the closure of 6music is naive and confuses the very proposition of the BBC". Phil Jupitus has 61,754 followers - his last tweet, at 0034, reads "drinking tequila...#save6music". More knowingly, an earlier post said he thought a final decision on 6Music was not for a couple of weeks.

At time of writing 0930 Friday, #save6music is at number 5 in this site's calculation of trends






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