Tag Archives: director

BBC annual report: executive bonuses remain despite job cuts and calls for management restructure

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The BBC’s executive directors’ pay rose by £708,000 in 2007/8 with pay for the 10 directors totalling £4,960,000, according to figures from the corporation’s annual report.

Jana Bennett, director of BBC Vision, received a bonus of £41,000, while outgoing director of Future Media & Technology Ashley Highfield received £34,000. Director general Mark Thompson rejected the offer of an annual bonus.

Both the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and BECTU have challenged the rises in light of 2,500 proposed job cuts at the corporation announced in October.

“Management should have the decency to show restraint at a time when so many BBC staff are under huge pressures following major cutbacks. This announcement will only serve to disillusion staff further,” Paul McLaughlin, NUJ broadcasting organiser, said in a statement from the union.

Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, reiterated the need to improve the management structure of bbc.co.uk before approving further investment. In May the site’s management was blamed for losing ‘effective control’ after a £36 million overspend.

More figures from the report:

  • average monthly page impressions for bbc.co.uk are more than 3.6 billion, while weekly unique users average more than 33 million;
  • BBC Mobile is the ‘most accessed’ mobile browser for news, sport and weather in the UK;
  • levels of audience trust in the BBC have remained steady year-on-year with 75 per cent of viewers rating BBC news programming as ‘fair, informed and balanced

BBC Worldwide

Analysis of BBC Worldwide (part of the annual report and separate reviews released) emphasised the importance of online in growing its global audience. The service’s online audience rose 34 per cent year-on-year. However, the review highlighted the failure of Spanish-language site BBC Mundo to meet the demands of increased internet access.

The launch of BBC Arabic came in for particular praise in the review, creating ‘trimedia’ BBC coverage in Arabic:

“With the launch of BBC Arabic television, our multimedia strategy took a giant step forward. That moment in March 2008 marked the successful culmination of a four-year journey to secure funding and deliver a high-quality television service in a vital region of the world.”

Online revenues accounted for 2.7 per cent of total sales for BBC Worldwide in 2007/8 – rising from 1.1 per cent previously, the report said. The creation of bbc.com and syndication deals with YouTube and iTunes were cited as key revenue drivers for the service.

Telegraph news recruits need to be commercially focused too, says new media director

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The world is becoming more commercial, so Telegraph editorial recruits have to reflect this shift, Alison Reay, director of new media, told an Association of Online Publishers (AOP) forum yesterday.

The integration of the Telegraph’s newsroom, she added, created a multimedia hub for the paper’s commercial interests as well as for editorial.

“People recruited in the last six to 12 months are a lot more commercially focused… It is all about how you bring the commercial and the journalists together,” she said.

Channel managers have been appointed to the newsroom to bridge this gap between commercial and editorial online. These have ‘profit and loss very close to their hearts’ without any specific revenue targets placed on them, Reay said.

For the Telegraph these roles are about finding new ways to integrate advertising online – avoiding the tradition advertorial and without compromising editorial values of the content.

“Our job as publishers is to provide an audience. But should we be judged by the number of people clicking through?” asked Reay.

Part of this – in terms of video content – has been offering in-house ad production, which has seen the publisher embark on collaborative ad production with brands and agencies.

In addition the paper has used its journalists’ existing strengths, turning them from ‘columns to camera’ to make video content a more attractive avenue for advertisers and more cost-effective for the publisher, Reay added.

PA Group appoints James Murdoch as non-executive director

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James Murdoch, chairman and chief executive, Europe and Asia News Corporation, has joined the PA Group board as a non-executive director.

Murdoch’s appointment, which was announced today as the group released its financial report for 2007, is one of a series of changes to the board with Sir Harry Roche stepping down after 20 years as a director and 13 years as chairman.

The group announced a 25 per cent growth in revenues from its digital business, but a drop of £1.2 million in its total operating profits.

The fall from £2.6 million in 2006 to £1.4 million in 2007 was a result of significant multimedia investment, the group said.

Guardian: BBC News head tipped as director of audio and music

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Helen Boaden, BBC’s director of news, and the corporation’s head of sport, Max Mosey, are amongst the front-runners in the race to replace current head of music and audio, Jenny Abramsky, who is to leave her job.

According to the Guardian, sources inside the BBC are tipping former Radio 4 controller Boaden for the job – should she want it.

Abramsky announced last week that she was leaving the corporation after nearly 40 years to chair the board of the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

Online publishers in ‘bullish mood’ despite economic downturn

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Digital publishers in the UK saw a 52 per cent growth in total digital revenues last year, according to the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) annual census of its members.

The figures show the industry to be in ‘a bullish mood’ despite holding concerns over the economy’s impact on the industry, said Ruth Brownlee, director of the AOP, in a press release.

With regards to the future of the industry, members said high speed broadband provided the greatest opportunity for their businesses, while competition from non-traditional outlets is perceived as the biggest threat.

When questioned on content distribution 64 per cent of respondents said publishers should make their content available on third party websites, as well as a range of other platforms.

The figures suggest support for this distribution model with increased investment in IPTV (up 30%), mobile (20%), vodcasting (22%), podcasting (17%) and RSS feeds (9%).

The key findings from the census include:

  • members forecast an 8 per cent total business growth with digital expected to grow by 31 per cent;
  • 80 per cent of members expect to increase the number of digital staff hired this year with 62 per cent saying cross-media skills will be significant in the future;
  • revenue from online advertising increased by 33 per cent last year and 80 per cent of those questioned said the current online advertising model was ‘a sustainable revenue stream’;
  • high speed broadband (92%) and behavioural targeting (84%) are viewed as the biggest opportunities for business – other possibilities included content streaming (70%), mobile (74%) and user-generated content (84%).

Just over half of those questioned were in favour of a standard online measurement system – which would be a focus of the AOP’s working groups, Brownlee said.

Social Media Journalist: ‘social search seems like a solution in search of a problem’ Howard Owens, Gatehouse Media, US

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Journalism.co.uk talks to journalists across the globe about social media and how they see it changing their industry.

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The future of podcasting

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Last night’s Radio Academy event on the future of podcasting proved a lively affair with criticism from Matt Wells, head of audio at Guardian Unlimited, of the BBC’s podcasting strategy and debate over podcasting’s relationship with radio.

The latter produced the following exchange between Trevor Dann, director of the Radio Academy and first speaker in the clip, and Wells.

[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/mw.mp3]

But as fellow panellist Nathalie Schwarz, director of radio at Channel 4, went on to point out: it doesn’t matter – the generation that are going be most in tune with podcasting won’t care what it’s called – adding weight to Wells’ suggestion that calling it radio is a hang-up of the traditional media.

Schwarz also levelled Wells’ views on the BBC’s podcast service: how you define success in podcasting, she suggested, should be related to what you are trying to achieve.

“The brave new world isn’t just about big numbers and mass reach – I think that’s the old style world of looking at RAJAR as a almost a trading currency to get commercial revenue.”

The entire evening’s discussion can be listened to courtesy of the Radio Academy’s website.

News videos as ringtones?

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What’s the best way for news providers to go mobile – WAP portals, Java apps, bar codes if you’re The Sun?

Not so for Agence France-Presse, which is taking a very different approach and making news footage available as video ringtones. The clips can be downloaded from the website of video ringtone service Vringo.

In a press statement, Gilles Tarot, marketing and sales director of AFP North America said the video ringtones are ‘one of the newest and most personal ways of sharing information’.

Here’s a sample clip of what it might look (and sound) like. Wouldn’t it be better with the news commentary too though?

UPDATE: [News editor’s note] Sounds like awful idea to me.

Update of Update – having watched the example clip I’m even more convinced of it.

New media rank amongst London’s ‘most influential’

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Tomorrow the Evening Standard will release its list of the 1,000 most influential people in London – complete with a brand new section devoted to media.

Roy Greenslade has had a sneak preview of the media movers and shakers, and writes that plenty of new media names make the list.

Political blogger Iain Dale, Annelies van den Belt, managing director of ITV Broadband and former Telegraph Media Group director of new media, and Simon Waldman, digital director at The Guardian, all make the 50-strong media list.

Nikesh Arora, Google’s European vice president, founder of the Carphone Warehouse Charles Dunstone and Mark Zuckerberg (not strictly a Londoner, but hey…) , founder of Facebook, make it into the top five.