Impressive growth

BBC Local Director of Production Jason Horton is very pleased with his latest statistics. 

He's issued a press release saying "In the period July-Sept 2023, an average 14.8m unique browsers each week accessed BBC Local stories in England – up 2.6m on the same period last year (21%), and 1.4m (10%) on the previous quarter."

"The figures also show that an additional 745,000 unique browsers each day are accessing local stories on the BBC News site/app each day, up 23% compared to the same period last year (13% quarter-on-quarter).

"This impressive growth is being driven by a number of key factors, including some big local stories, but there is the additional investment in local online journalism across the week and the more frequent updating of stories across many areas. There have been more use of live pages for the biggest stories across local communities greater prominence on the BBC News app." [Not sure this last sentence is Jordan Kenny's best communications work - Ed]

It would be good to know what big local stories drove traffic, how much of the extra traffic comes from 'network' stories that also appear on the index, and how many more people are working on the BBC England element of the site. It looks from the outside that recruitment of the special people who can 'do online' is incomplete, and therefore entirely possible that existing staff are working a little harder...  

For balance and full transparency, could Jason supply from his own figures how much audience has been lost across 37 stations now sharing a single presenter from 10pm; how many staff working in local radio have retired, resigned or left because they failed an interview for their own job; and how much has been paid out in redundancy ? A figure for the new number of journalists/presenters/producers working at each local radio station would also remind us of the BBC's current commitment to 'local'.