In a speech given to Cardiff’s Business Club last night, BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons added more weight to suggest more regional news partnerships between the BBC and competitors are in the pipeline:
- More on partnerships: work is ongoing on partnerships in regional media with ITV; and between Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide.
- Could BBC enter into an IT-sharing agreement with S4C and ITV in Wales to reduce operational costs?
- Revamp of Broadcasting House in Wales could benefit local media with technology sharing arrangements.
- “Perhaps even Trinty Mirror could have a role to play too [in partnering the BBC for regional news provision], given their journalistic presence in Wales and their significant online operation.”
- And, just in case you doubted it: “The BBC local video project is dead. We have told BBC news that it must come up with a different solution.”
Here’s his comments as a Wordle:
But, a note of caution from Lyons on partnerships:
“What we’re not interested in are proposals that simply transfer value from the BBC to other players in the market (…) Let’s make sure that we don’t inadvertently turn the BBC into the Lloyds Bank of the media world.”