BBC’s Attempts To Make Local News Bearable Scuppered By Ofcom

Yesterday Philip Green voiced his frustration at the BBC being publicly funded and not having to deal with the blasted business of profit generation (still not sure about that Phil), but joining his “it’s not fair” gang-show are local news services around the country.

The BBC announced in the summer that it wants to spend £68m on a network “hyper-local” news sites called BBC Local, providing 10 on-demand video news stories a day plus live feeds and other goodies. Faced by diminishing revenues, local newspapers and radio companies are opposing the plan because they’re not anywhere near as good, as are ITV, who didn’t think of it first. Well you’re in luck guys, because the BBC Trust chucked the plans out this morning. Ofcom decided that it would have reduced the revenues of rivals by 4%, and that wasn’t cricket.

The government were also naturally not happy about the prospect about lots of potential job losses, and so would have tried to intervene had the Trust passed the plans; Andy Burnham has the reserve power to do so, but was not sure if he could use it. Sounds like a storyline by Marvel.

So the BBC was in a very interesting position, where it could basically decide to shaft the UK media or not, and may or may not have been stopped by the government. What they were mooting was to postpone the plans until the economy (and advertising revenues) are healthy again, which simply highlights the impervious position the BBC were in. They’re scrapping BBC Local out of the goodness of their heart rather than being governed by market exigencies or law; Burnham said that he hoped the trust would “do the right thing”, which doesn’t sound like a man with a firm hold over the Beeb.

And shafted the local news would have been. Revenue from newspaper display advertising is forecast to drop 22%, classifieds 19%. A drop in circulation triggered by the BBC would send that even lower.

But is anyone going to miss local news as it is, and will Ofcom have done enough to save them? I admit that a loss of printed media in seriously deprived areas where broadband isn’t an option would be a serious problem, but let’s face it, audiovisual output by the likes of Johnston Press and other local news outlets is woeful. For just one example from many, check the school-play delivery with accompanying keyboard tapping sounds from our man at the Newcastle Chronicle:

One of the reasons why the BBC’s proposals were thrown out was because “it is clear from the evidence that, although licence fee payers want better regional and local services from the BBC, this proposal is unlikely to achieve what they want”. This stuff gets my inner Darwin a-raging. Surely it’ll be better than the above clown? Why is the BBC having to be held back in the face of deeply inferior product? Hopefully in more economically stable times coupled with broadband penetration becoming cheaper and ubiquitous, the BBC will get to launch something that will finally make local news bearable, and kill off the stale financial models of Johnston Press and co.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | November 21, 2008 1:37PM |