Speaking to students at Salford University on Tuesday, Pete Clifton said more social media features – including the possibility of passport-type registration and user profiles – are being planned for the BBC website.

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Two questions being repeatedly raised at today’s Society of Editors (SoE) conference:

• stop talking about the nationals, how can regional media get in on the digital act?
• what to do about the BBC – or the ‘boa constrictor’ as Mail Online’s editorial director Martin Clarke called the corporation.

Guardian Media Group chief executive Carolyn McCall told delegates that there is a model for the local press, focusing on hyperlocal.

“There will be models that emerge: investing in SEO, local press have to do that. There’s an opportunity for local press to go very local and build revenue around this. There are models, but it will have to be off a very different cost base,” said McCall.

She went on to describe Channel M – the television offshoot of the Manchester Evening News – as ‘a good model’ for local media that could be replicated in the future.

The business risks associated with online and sustainable digital business models, she added, need to be shared regionally and locally.

Regional media will have to take ‘a real hit’ on their bottom line when it comes to online to if they are to maintain standards of quality journalism, she added.

Malcolm Pheby, editor of the Nottingham Evening Post, took up the regional press’ baton in explaining how the NEP had successfully integrated its newsroom with staff now trained to treat all news stories as rolling news to be broken on the web.

But the pervading theme of the day has been the opposition from regional newspapers to the BBC’s proposed local video plans.

Pete Clifton, head of multimedia for the Beeb, did his best to defend criticisms of the plans, saying that the proposals are subject to assessments by the BBC Trust and suggesting that the BBC could forge stronger relationships with other news providers.

Still it was comments from McCall and Clarke, whose affiliate Northcliffe added its voice to the debate today, that received impromptu applause.

According to both, the BBC’s plans present unfair competition to the local press

Cue videojournalism evangelist and consultant Michael Rosenblum, who promised to teach the audience how to beat the BBC at its own game. Key to this he said is embracing technology, in particular video, wholeheartedly and not incrementally.

In response to a question from a Rotherham newspaper publisher, which currently has no video on its website, Rosenblum said there was a demand for the content and the potential for partnerships with regional broadcasters like ITV local.

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Pete Clifton, head of editorial development for multimedia journalism at the BBC, has said 47 per cent of the 17 million weekly unique users to the BBC News website come from outside of the UK.

Around half of these users, he told the Online Publishers Association conference, are from the US with a strong ex-pat following, but growing interest from US nationals in the BBC’s news coverage.

The site is also popular in India and Canada, Clifton added.

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The BBC is to phase out the pop-up player that it currently uses to host the majority of its audio and video content in favour of a newly developed embedded Flash player.

The new player has been developed jointly by the journalism and iPlayer teams, so says the BBC Internet blog, as a replacement for the pop-up which relies on using Real or Windows Media formatted video.

Use of the new payer has so far been limited, but over the coming weeks embedded video is expected to become the norm.

It’s hardly surprising, last year Pete Clifton, head of BBC News Interactive, talked to Journalism.co.uk about the experimental use of embedded players across the BBC News online.

During that interview Clifton said that initial tests had shown up to a 40 per cent conversion rate, where people reading stories were also watching the embedded video.

In its standalone player format, he added, the conversion rate was about two per cent. Channel 4 News found about the same.

But he also touched on a another significant point; video embedded into stories, he added, was proving to be popular with audiences as these videos tended to dispense with the traditional news ‘package’ format, instead just showing the footage necessary to enhance the text story sitting beneath the embedded player.

Getting this right is as important as changing the technology to a more user-friendly approach.

So it’s win-win. Better standard of content and technology for the user, fewer headaches for the developers having to reformat all the video

The Crown Jewels indeed.

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