BBC signals an end to an era of expansion
This from an article in The Times (prop: R. Murdoch), which may potentially be seen as a means for one of the BBC’s fiercest critics (R. Murdoch) to exert pressure upon the corporation.
It’s also, to my mind, unusual for “Trust sources” to leak the conclusions from a consultation several weeks before the report is due.
Further, it’s not necessarily true that the BBC has seen an “era of expansion”.
Still, let us take the claims at face value.
There are some aspects of these cuts which aren’t necessarily a terrible thing. In fact, some I’d actually — on balance — agree with. I am biased. I don’t have the benefit of the big picture across all of the audience demographics. BBC Switch is something which makes me feel old (in that it garners a reaction of “what? are you talking that way for real?”), Blast! is something I have no idea of, but from my white middle-class observation point BBC Asian Network appears to have been a moderate success.
(I refuse to be drawn into the 6Music debate).
But, on the flip-side…
“The corporation’s web pages are to be halved, backed by a 25 per cent cut in staff numbers. Its £112 million budget will also be cut by 25 per cent.”
I don’t know what this means, and I build web sites for a living. People I know who build web sites for a living don’t know what it means. People who work for the BBC don’t know what it means. Nobody knows what it means because it makes no sense at all. How do you “halve” web pages? Is URI count the principal measure of a site’s size? Or is it the amount of content? How much of it is generated automatically from things which the BBC has internally anyway? How much of it is user-generated? Once you take away News, Weather, iPlayer, the blogs, the message-boards, H2G2 and /programmes, what do you have left? Maybe the educational stuff should go? Or the games on CBeebies (as much as I dislike Flash, my three year old shares no such derision)? What about the BBC Food content? Sport? Where must the axe fall?
“It is also pledging to include more links to newspaper articles to drive traffic to the websites of rival publishers.”
Didn’t those publishers get really quite uppity when Google did that? Confused. dot com.
“The BBC will also try to calm the nerves of local newspaper groups — who are suspicious of the corporation after its aborted plans to develop video-driven local websites — with a pledge not ever to produce services at a “more local” level than is currently the case.”
“Local newspaper groups” are increasingly the same as “national newspaper groups”, for those who haven’t been paying any attention. What does ”more local” mean anyway? I mean, the BBC goes really quite local for me (it once used one of my photos, for example), but I wouldn’t rely on it for anything important that was happening locally. Social media has killed the news in that respect for me (especially now that local authorities are getting in on the old social game).
On the numbers: I don’t honestly know if they add up. They could be plucked out of thin air just as easily as they could be dead-on for all I know.
