“The paradox of the BBC’s strategy is that the more it spends on expanding into cyberspace the less it has to say,” writes Nick Cohen.
The BBC is preoccupied with chasing stories from the newspapers, but has yet to consider its strategy for if those papers stop producing content, he adds.
UPDATE – BBC’s Richard Sambrook on why Cohen needs to do more research.
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.
Partnership approach is best way to create new value for public service broadcasting in the UK, says Trust.
BBC Trust approves BBC Executive’s budget plan, which includes steps towards saving £1.9 billion by 2012/3.
Yesterday BBC director-general Mark Thompson said the BBC must cut its budget by £400 million within three years to avoid going over its statutory borrowing limit.
As the BBC makes some style changes to its blog format, deputy director of BBC News, Stephen Mitchell, discusses the role of blogs at the BBC on Newswatch:
Today is the MediaGuardian’s Changing Media Summit 2009. You can find the programme at this link.
There are a few Twitterers about – possibly including the event’s chair @ruskin147 aka BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones although he lost out on his Twitter hashtag of choice.
#GCM has been shunned for #changingmedia. You can follow tweets via @journalism_live.
The European Journalism Centre is trying CoverItLive for the first time:
visit the conversation here, at this link.
Twitter conversation tracked here. Follow this post with no need for refresh…
It’s interesting to note Google’s latest advertising move, as reported by the Guardian, and background summed up here, in links, at this link.
The Guardian reported: “Google is ramping up its efforts to make money from its controversial Google News service by striking deals with eight European news agencies, and launching a contextual ad service to display adverts around their stories.”
“The contextual ads will also run alongside content from existing Google partners AFP, UK Press Association, AP and Canada Press,” it also reported.
It reminded me of a chat I had with senior members of the digital team at the UK’s Press Association (PA) in early February, but never published. Now seems a good time to share that information. Colin Ramsay is head of the PA digital sales team and Chris Condron is the head of digital strategy at the PA.
They told me that selling commercial video with advertising is an increasingly important venture for the agency.
“One of the key areas is that we need to move our position up the chain a bit,” Ramsay said. “Rather than be a news feed supplier, we want to fully understand what our service can do for our customers and how we can link that commercially,” he said.
“One of the things we really want to do is develop and leverage strong relationships with traditional media, and also expand in digital marketplace. There are lots of new and emerging customers for us to have dialogue with,” Ramsay said.
The Press Association can offer content in new ways, on new platforms, he explained, adding that video is ‘a key area’.
“I think we’ve got a lot of opportunities around commercial video,” he said, which could include developing relationships with new advertisers. Blue chip companies are particularly important as potential advertising clients, he said.
More and more video ‘is a key part’ of PA’s provision, which could be integrated with different editorial packages, Ramsay said, adding that there is now less emphasis on text provision.
Different types of video and advertising provision means new as well as existing partnerships, he said.
“We’re in the process of analysing the commercial market,” he said. “For first time we’re looking at the advertising market and where is developing the most revenue.”
“What we want to be able to do is develop zones or microsites which allow our customers to attract new audiences and dervive new revenue streams and which we can share in.”
“It’s going to be a very exciting year for PA, in how it develops and competes – we then become an extra resource for our customers,” Ramsay told me.
Head of digital strategy, Chris Condron, addressed editorial issues: “One of the key things is the scale,” he said. “PA is 140 years old – the reason it was set up in first place is because it made economic sense for each newspaper not to send people to same place,” he explained, as background.
While ‘times are tough,’ he said that one of the ways PA is ‘looking to be even more helpful, or relevant’ is to find strategies the company ‘can use straight away’.
For example, provision of a news channel for Virgin Media is a different kind of service, with different kinds of advertising opportunities. “The core values remain, but it [approach] is a lot more flexible,” Condron said.
It’s not just commercial companies they want to supply video to: “The newspaper companies have showed interest in further video provision, and with the BBC not going into local video, newspapers are delivering their own video,” he said.
That’s an example of where the barriers between broadcasters and newspapers are breaking down, he illustrated.
“They’re [newspapers] really focused on where the users are, and what the users want and it’s our job to help them do that.
“I think it’s fair to say it’s tough times – we’re focused on being as helpful and useful to our core customers as we were in the past,” Condron added.
Speaking to students at Coventry University last Friday, via video link from BBC TV Centre, UK financial journalist and consumer champion, Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert.com, raised questions about the ethics of economic reporting, and called for specialist journalists to declare their bias prior to publication.
“I am an ‘agenda journalist’, my job is to support opportunism,” Lewis said. “I know that I am biased. My worry is that a lot of journalism is biased without necessarily claiming that it is biased,” he said.
Had it been Lewis himself who had got Robert Peston’s Northern Rock crisis scoop for the BBC in 2007, it would have raised ethical questions for him, he said. He would find ‘breaking a bank down difficult to live with,’ he said.
“It is an incredibly difficult question, because if you answer publicly that you are worried about one bank, you can cause the problems that you were talking about,” Lewis said.
The creator of MoneySavingExpert.com dismissed claims that financial journalists, particularly Peston, were becoming too powerful in the volatile economic climate, and said that stories had impact, but not overriding power in decisions made.
“Government has to follow the way the media is going to cover these stories, but ultimately, the people who are making the decisions are the lawyers, the people sitting in the Bank of England, at the FSA [Financial Services Authority] and in the cabinet,” he said.
Defending the future of financial journalism, Lewis claimed that there would always be a place for economic reporting, but that the significance of the reporting would depend on the methods used by the journalists involved.
“What we want is journalists who are questioning, but who also have to be respectful of the wider picture, and the impact that their journalism has on people,” he said.
The ‘money saving expert’ also insisted that journalists need an ‘ability to see both sides’ in order to avoid the potential pitfalls presented by a subject with such a large effect on so many people.
“Thousands of journalists at the BBC are to hold two national one-day strikes against compulsory redundancies,” the National Union of Journalists reports.
The focus is on cuts at the World Service’s South Asian section where up to 20 positions are at risk of being cut.
“NUJ members at the corporation voted 77 percent in favour of strike action in a national ballot,” the release said.
A motion was passed declaring that industrial action will take place on Friday 3 April and Thursday 9 April ‘in the event that further talks fail to resolve the issue’.
Bella Hurrell updates on the BBC’s development of a ‘UK fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq’ data interactive.
Originally a list of names, it then became a sortable table. Hurrell writes:
“This was followed by a dynamic visualisation of the figures in Flash. Last week we added the In Pictures page, which is an aggregation of thumbnail images of all those who have been killed in the conflicts.
“This latest page strengthens the coverage, adding another dimension that makes it far more personal, rather than purely a functional way to view the raw data.”