Fran's future

Fearless BBC News leader Fran Unsworth seems to have engaged in an interview with #defundtheBBC front, The Daily Telegraph, forecasting a slow digital transition for her output over the next decade. 

"I think TV journalism will still be around because of the power of pictures to tell a story, but it won't necessarily be received in quite the forms it currently is. So I still think, ultimately in 10 years' time, we probably won't be consuming linear bulletins exactly. I mean, I might be wrong about that. I doubt it.

"There might be one (bulletin) a day, or something. I think there'll be fewer of them. But I think that the power of how you tell stories through television, pictures, video will just be in a different space. It'll be in the digital space, it'll be on, you know, iPlayer. It'll be on your tablet, your iPhone.

"'We have to think creatively about what the product is, but that's the direction of travel and I don't think that's changed."

On the recent large Covid-driven audiences for bulletins on BBC1, she's bearish. "I'm not under any illusions, to be quite honest with you, because I've seen it in the past. You get these big peaks, the big stories like the Bataclan and London Bridge attacks, then the audience falls off again quite rapidly.

"What I would hope is that we've changed our image in the mind of the younger viewer, which is that we are there to be relied on, and if they really do want to know what's happening they will come to us to find out. We're not just any other news source."

A ten year drift to a single BBC1 daily bulletin (the Newsround model ?) doesn't come soon enough to sort Fran's budget problems. Back to the office, Fran, quick, to pick up the flack for Lewis Goodall's helpful insights in the New Statesman, as noted by Darren Grimes......