Tag Archives: local and regional media

BBC creates 12 new regional broadcast roles as part of new local news plans

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The BBC is recruiting the first batch of regional journalists to improve its linear services to the UK’s regions, as part of proposals approved by the the BBC Trust in July.

The 12 new political reporter posts (as advertised on Media UK) will work across radio, TV and online for the BBC’s English regions.

“In this role, you’ll be translating complex material into reports which engage with our audiences. You’ll be working for both bulletins and programmes (e.g. Local Radio Breakfast and Drivetime shows) and providing material for regional TV news and weekly political programmes on BBC One. You’ll cover the next General Election campaign,” the job ad description explains.

Following the rejection of the BBC’s plans to increase local video output, the BBC Trust tasked the executive with producing proposals to enhance the BBC’s local TV and radio services.

The approved proposals included:

  • A fund for programming in the English regions
  • Improvements to local TV and radio news, including coverage of local government

“This is the first tranche of roles that we intend to create over the next few years focused on enhanced BBC coverage of local democracy on both local radio and regional television as part of improving local linear services to regions and communities,” a BBC spokeswoman told Journalism.co.uk.

“The overall package is part of a process of re-investment from our own efficiencies and we don’t expect there to be any net increase in jobs over the whole of the package which will roll out over the next 4/5 years.”

DailyFinance: US local TV stations to take on obituaries from local press

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A local TV station in the US has spotted a gap in the market following cutbacks at local newspapers in its area – WNEM-TV in Michigan is offering two-minute, on-air and online (on ObitMichigan.com) obituaries for $100.

The station has aired more than 700 since it started doing so in August. According to its general sales manager, Jeff Guilbert, the new revenue stream could become the station’s largest on-air client within two years.

Full story at this link…

WMF: Partnerships are future for UK regional news – but who’ll be in control?

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The most salient comment in yesterday’s Westminster Media Forum on the future of local media came from Community Media Association (CMA) director Jacqui Devereux.

Having listened to presentations from several of the ‘big players’ (ITN, STV, Global Radio) interested in a bid to run the government’s proposed independently funded news consortia (IFNC) as a replacement for ITV1’s regional news service, Devereux said she welcomed talk of partnership, but was concerned about the ‘jockeying for position’ she had heard in the room.

Partnerships should not be established if the main issue is who controls that partnership, she suggested.

“There’s no reason why the bigger players and the smaller players can’t work together to make this work properly. But it will only work if there isn’t a big player in there saying we need to control this ‘because’,” she said.

Smaller players, such as the community radio stations and TV channels represented by the CMA, must have a protected place within the IFNC proposals, she said – a sentiment echoed by ITN chief executive officer John Hardie, whose vision for a ‘grand alliance’ of local media included an ‘open door policy’ to encourage smaller newsmakers to take part.

While the BBC is not bidding to run the consortia, the broadcaster, whose plans for a local video network were rejected by the BBC Trust last year, is in talks with the CMA and community radio stations about ways for working together for local news provision, David Holdsworth, controller for the English regions, said.

“The BBC can be an important catalyst in what is a burgeoning sector,” he explained.

Collaboration with ‘heritage’ media could help spur growth at this level, Steve Buckley, joint managing director from Community Media Solutions, added, suggesting that support should be found for financing a professional journalist as a mentor and trainer at each community radio station in the UK.

“The time is now – not to wait for a burgeoning sector to go into decline. We cost a fraction of supporting a Channel 3 output,” said Buckley.

However, as Devereux suggested, whether these partnerships will be iterations of the old ownership model or an attempt at a new layer of cross-media, multiplayer news providers is a decision for the government and media regulator.

In tune with Devereux and Buckley’s vision for better use of community resources and independent news organisations, former Johnston Press chairman Roger Parry shared some suggestions from his recent report for the Conservative Party on local media.

Parry’s research, which looked at production costs for local news and compared regional media in the US and Canada with the UK system, suggested a network of 80 city-based, local multimedia hubs could provide the future for regional news provision in the UK.

These centres could bring in a new local video layer to the bottom of the existing news pyramid in the UK – content which could then be aggregated up to local newspapers and stations and beyond.

But to achieve this the old divisions between TV reporters and a newspaper reporter will have to be broken down. The emphasis would be on journalists as content coordinators more than content creators, he said.

WMF: Could unversities provide facilities for new local news networks?

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While partnerships between news groups and across local media platforms was the focus of many presentations at yesterday’s Westminster Media Forum event, Broadcast Journalism Training Council (BJTC) secretary Jim Latham raised an interesting idea from the floor:

  • Could journalism schools at UK universities offer equipment, facilities and trainee reporters in the form of students to local media groups and proposed independently funded news consortia (IFNC)?

Latham reference the multi-million pound investment that has taken place at some institutions – including new centres at London’s City University and the University of Nottingham.

Speakers from Ofcom and ITN acknowledge the potential and admitted that this hadn’t previously been considered.

Are there legislative barriers to this happening? Or could higher education institutions play more of a role in the plans for regional news?

Council news round-up: ad revenue shortage for East End Life and plans for new council TV

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There’s been much debate amongst regional and local newspaper representatives in the UK about the impact of local authority ‘newspapers’ or freesheets on their advertising revenue, role in the community and news coverage.

Yet much of this debate has been difficult to frame, with exact details of staffing numbers, cost and output of these publications varying between authority.

In London, Andrew Gilligan suggested that local authorities in the city employed more staff writers than the capital’s newspapers.

This week some more stats can be added to the picture:

Press Gazette reports that Tower Hamlets’ Borough Council paper, East End Life, will need an extra £400,000 of tax payers’ money to keep it going.

According to a mid-year budget report from the authority, the freesheet is suffering from a £396,000 shortfall in advertising for the current financial year.

Deputy leader of the council, Joshua Peck, reportedly told the East London Advertiser that this lack of ad revenue would be made up for with cuts to the authority’s communications budget.

Add to this HoldtheFrontPage’s report on the cost of East End Life, which states:

“A previous investigation by the Advertiser showed that public-sector organisations paid a total of £980,000 to advertise in East End Life, making the true cost to the public purse £1.1 million a year.

“An alternative budget put forward by Tory councillor Tim Archer earlier in the year suggested the council could save £670,000 or 1pc off the average council tax, by scrapping the paper and taking out advertising with the Advertiser instead.”

Elsewhere, plans for a new TV station launched by Carmarthenshire Council (link spotted via Jon Slattery’s blog) have come under criticism.

According to a report on thisissouthwales.co.uk, the station would cost £30,000 a year to run. In a move to fund the new station, the authority is planning to drop one of its bi-monthly news magazines, which currently costs more than £114,000 to produce and distribute.

Industry groups have called on the Audit Commission to investigate the impact of local council newspapers on the regional media industry, as part of the government’s recommendations to the commission in the Digital Britain report. But the commission said such an assessment should be made by the Office of Fair Trading.

The commission will however review all aspects of council communications including press offices, publications, websites and expenditure on advertising jobs.

Scottish newspapers claw back advertising from council jobs site

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According to a report late last week from allmediascotland, several Scottish news groups will carry local authority vacancies on their job sites once more, following a deal with recruitment site myjobscotland.gov.uk – recently set up by the Convention of Local Scottish Authorities (CoSLA).

Concerns have been raised by regional media groups over local authority sites such as CoSLA’s jobs site with news groups arguing that these sites stymie a traditional revenue stream for titles by taking away local government job listings.

The latest development seems to be a step towards addressing the problems of migrating classified advertising revenue online for both local authorities and news groups.

Scottish government plans to remove government listings and statutory notices in local newspapers – therefore further impacting on classified revenues, have also been criticised by the industry.

Jon Bernstein on hyperlocal: Five steps to kick-start the local news revolution

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The strength of hyperlocal is also its weakness – disparate projects in far-flung places.

But here’s the thing. What works in KW1 – the business model, the editorial proposition – is likely to work just as well in TR19.*

So we have a choice. Wait for exemplars of the form to rise up, then copy and adapt, or give the whole process a hand by collating, sharing, talking and learning. Right now.

Let’s do the latter. Here’s a quick and dirty call to action:

1. Find out what’s out there
In the United States they are doing just that.

The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism has invited ‘bloggers, independent journalists, website publishers and entrepreneurs’ to complete a survey so it can ‘gather information and innovative ideas from across the country’.

“We want to bring facts, figures, and business analysis to the debate over the future of journalism,” it states.

Where’s the equivalent effort over here?

I’m told that there are voices in Ofcom, the media regulator, who want to collate information about all of the little community newsletters and bigger sites which could now be called hyperlocal.

If that’s the case, it’s time to get moving. Oh, and we’ll have some of that US data when it’s ready, too.

2. Share ideas
Good practice, sound business models, strong feature strands and story hooks are not geographically-defined. So share, feed off each other, beg, borrow and steal.

Talk About Local is a good start. More, please.

3. Share resources
Can you apply the franchise model to the hyperlocal? For some the answer is a definite yes.

Again Talk About Local offers a possible lead with its plan to seed 150 sites in deprived areas nationwide.

Paul Bradshaw and Nick Booth’s Help me Investigate, is another service with franchise potential.

As is Mapumental.

This is a MySociety.org concoction and, like Help me Investigate, is a recipient of 4iP seed funding. Mapumental is postcode-based tool that brings together publicly available local house price and transport data and mashes it up with a ‘scenicness’ rating .

MySociety is also responsible for FixMyStreet. Both are centrally-built pieces of software with a hyperlocal application.

Integration is the key.

4. Share content
Like franchising, syndication is another old media model that has a home in the brave new world of hyperlocal.

And there is a commercial opportunity for those who create usable aggregation models.

Take Outside.in which has just launched a service in the United States it claims ‘will allow users to quickly create a mass amount of hyperlocal news pages’.

Outside.in is coming to the UK, but why isn’t a UK start-up doing this for the UK market? Perhaps one is. Time to make some noise.

5. Engage government
There’s a crisis in the public service provision of local news. If you want proof just look at the horse-trading between ITV and Ofcom. It’s a perfect opportunity for the government to think laterally.

Yet despite the warm words – and suitable use of new media lingua franca – in last month’s Digital Britain report, Lord Carter and co failed to put anything radical in train.

Carter’s defence is that this report was a sprawling undertaking and wasn’t designed to mandate government.

If so, someone needs to pick it up in Whitehall, but also in county halls up and down the country.

Rather than fund me-too freesheets that threaten to kill off local newspapers, local authorities would be better advised to help provide the infrastructure for hyperlocal.

It’s time to free your data for postcode-based applications, create a support system for local citizen journalists and use those soon-to-be-thriving platforms to promote the uptake of online public services.

Enough of the action plan. Go create.

(*That’s John O’Groats to Land’s End, postcode fans. Well, near enough.)

Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is part of a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at this link.