Friday, March 29, 2024

More yee-ha!

When someone in the Big Dark Basement of BBC TV News opens a window on the world of popular culture, it's always interesting to see in which direction they look. Last night we were told that 'country music' is booming in the UK, in a run around the houses tied to the release of Beyonce's latest album.  

It featured Chapel Hart, a trio who came up via America's Got Talent, and had a hit 2022, and the Brothers Osborne. Both groups appeared at the C2C country music festival earlier this month, spread over stages in London, Glasgow and Belfast.  The report, by Six and Ten senior producer Felicity Baker (she describes herself as 'a little bit country' on X) also featured Milly Olykan of the C2C promoters, the Country Music Association. 

Spookily, it seems country music was on the up at almost exactly the same time last year. 


Thursday, March 28, 2024

Plans

There's really not much 'plan' in the BBC's Annual Plans these days.  The first 13 pages of the latest, for 2024/25, are the current situation, market context and congratulations on a wonderful 2023/24.  14-30 are litanies of shows in the pipeline. 

Nuggets are hard to find. The BBC forecasts licence fee income to rise from this year's £3673m to £3801m.  The targets are being shifted: the new aim for "Reach of the BBC" among 16+  is 80-90% a week, compared with the previous plan's target of 85-90%.  The new target for reaching 16-34 year-olds is 'circa 70%', compared with 'circa 75%'.  The targets for iPlayer and BBC Sounds have been nudged up - from 13.5m weekly signed in users for iPlayer to 14.0m, and from 4.5m weekly signed in users for BBC Sounds up to 5.0m.

Rubber-necking

BBC DG Tim Davie tells us that "placing local and nations news at the heart of the BBC News app" is  "already driving impressive growth."

Does he know how much of this growth is the Dashcam Drive, an occasionally ghoulish selection of current crashes, one leading to death ?  For the second day running, journalists identified simply as 'England' have a video in the Top 5 Most Watched - "Police chase in Earsham crop field ends in fatal crash". 

If you wait a matter of seconds, four more pieces of police film of crashes follow automatically. 

Up Next. Motorcyclist falls from bridge after car collision (Beds, Herts & Bucks)
Ferrari crashes into city centre bike racks (Norfolk)
Watch: Driver punctures tyres at bus lane car trap (Cambridgeshire)
Car slides on roof after drink-driver crash (Cambridgeshire)

Is this really 'journalism of the very highest standards' ?

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Rogers news

Former Newsround presenter Chris Rogers is leaving GB News, where he has been running breakfast output since August. His skills are to be applied to Rhodri and Jason's new BBC Nations & Regions investigations set-up, as producer/director.   

How many jobs ?

The internal BBC feed of Director General Tim Davie's speech at the Royal Television Society yesterday went phut just at the moment staffers thought he was about outline more job cuts. He didn't.  But the staff can do sums. If cuts of £500m reduced headcount by 1,800, simple ratios suggest the hunt for an additional £200m might threaten 720 jobs. 

Multi-media competitors from the UK newspaper heritage will foam at the detail of Tim's plans. 

We will develop three online news brands to enhance our digital news services: in verification (BBC Verify), investigations (BBC Investigate) and in-depth analysis.

(Incidentally, the BBC Verify brand was deployed last night on coverage of the Baltimore Bridge. I hadn't noticed much misinformation around that needed sorting; this looked like basic reporting.)

Publishers of weekend and weekly news magazines, from The Economist, through the Big Issue to The Oldie, will raise eyebrows at this....

We will launch a new in-depth digital magazine – a destination for the best of our analysis and thought-provoking journalism online.

There looks to be one future saving the name of 'integration'. It seems the 'BBC' homepage, already very newsy, will merge with the BBC News landing page, increasingly showcasing other BBC content. 




Tuesday, March 26, 2024

David Capper

Former BBC Northern Ireland Correspondent David Capper has died aged 91.

He nearly didn't become a journalist at all.  Born in Belfast, he went to Campbell College, not far from Stormont, as a boarder. After school, he “hung about for a while” at home in Newtownards, and toyed with the idea of going into the Merchant Navy or becoming a tree surgeon. Billy Doggart, editor of the Newtownards Chronicle, came calling to interview his mother, as Lady Captain of Donaghadee Golf Club, and not long afterwards, in Autumn 1949, David was a junior reporter. 

One big story under his byline was the sinking of the Stranraer/Larne roll-on/roll-off ferry, the Princess Victoria, with the loss of 135 lives. He then spent a few years working in Vancouver and in local papers around Niagara Falls, returning to Northern Ireland to be the first editor of a revived Portadown Times in 1957, aged 23, and launch editor of the Ulster Star, Lisburn.  Then came a move to the Belfast Telegraph and finally the BBC, after several attempts, in 1962. 

At the BBC he was first a 'regional journalist', and then one of a team of reporters for the regional opt-out, morphing from "The Six O'Clock" to "Scene Around Six" at the start of The Troubles in 1968.  By the time of Bloody Sunday in 1972 he was a Uher-carrying Ireland correspondent for national radio, and his taped report of gunfire provided part of his evidence to the Saville Inquiry in 2001. 

He loved radio, after early freelance work in Canada; his daughter remembers him 'on-site mixing' a report in which he wanted to hear a marching band passing. He sat in his car recording with the window open, then closing it as he started to read his script into the mike. 

During the Falklands War, he was sent to beef up cover in Buenos Aires. He left the BBC shortly after reporting the Enniskillen bomb in 1987. 

After that came a few years travelling and teaching journalism in places such as Mauritius, Seychelles and Cameroon before home and an agreement to become Donaghadee Correspondent of the Co Down Spectator with a by-line every week and a full page of news: “It was a licence to be nosy, but also to try to do something for the town”. 

Apart from travel, his passions included golf, narrow gauge steam railways and jazz - Ottilie Patterson in particular, but other favourites included Bessie Smith, Bunny Berigan, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke and locally Ken Smylie and the Apex Jazz Band.

Chase me

BBC Director General Tim Davie wrote it himself. Who else would insert "by the way" three times ahead of delivery ?  Jeopardy came up twice: "The jeopardy is high." And "in a competitive global market, the pressure on huge international businesses to deliver efficiency creates genuine jeopardy for local IP and the telling of our stories."

In early bulletins on Radio, it was previewed as a 'landmark' speech, but someone cut that by 7am. BBC News online has picked up on "BBC to explore how to reform licence fee". 

In management speak, Tim has moved from four squares of delivery of "Value For All", to three pillars. Last year it was 'Get the content right; ensure “you are joined up and using online flawlessly”; maintaining impartiality in the face of enormous pressure; and correct use of the BBC’s commercial income.' Now it's "Pursue truth with no agenda, Back British storytelling and Bring people together". 

The new number one is a triumph of negativity creating confusing language. Imagine being chased by Deborah Turness waving, er, nothing. 


Completely dissolved

There's nearly always something elegant, crafted and thought-provoking to read in BBC job ads. 

We are looking for a Solution Manager to join the team to help shape and deliver direct-to-consumer suite of products. Working to the Solution Lead, the Solution Manager will contribute to implement the solution roadmap. 

Tim Davie and The Four Tops

"Are we simply going to drift to the point where the emergence of vast US and Chinese players marginalise us, while we put on a very British brave face as they do so ? Resigned to the fact that our culture and creative economy will inevitably be shaped by polarised platforms and overseas content. Or are we proactively going to take the steps to ensure that we tell our own stories, and remain the envy of the world ? "

Tim Dave, Director General of the BBC, 7th December 2022. 

Monday, March 25, 2024

Call her Kate

The totally-aligned team at BBC News Online are kicking themselves gently. 

They got over 5m views for first story headlined "Princess of Wales says she is undergoing cancer treatment". However, over the first few hours that the story spread, there were over 2m searches including the word 'Kate', not part of the deferential BBC headline, generating traffic that the BBC missed out on. By 0100 the following day, the headline became "Kate, Princess of Wales: I am having cancer treatment". 

And subsequent stories got the same treatment:
"Kate statement in full: Princess of Wales in early stages of cancer treatment"
"Kate cancer diagnosis rewrites story of past weeks"
"Kate cancer: Outpouring of support for Catherine after news of diagnosis"
"Kate and William 'enormously touched' by public support"
"Kate and William need time and space to heal, says former royal spokesman"
"What Kate video tells us about royal strategy"

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