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Sky’s the limit for BBC thrift
BBC director general Mark Thompson’s MacTaggart lecture last Friday at the Edinburgh International Television Festival was defensive and contained few surprises. But that’s understandable.
Last year James Murdoch took the same stage and spent much of his lecture bashing the BBC.
This year Mr Thompson called out Sky for its ”lack of investment in original content” and suggested that the satellite operator pay retransmission fees to other broadcasters. He rounded on critics of the BBC, claiming that it was more popular than ever.
“Systematic press attacks on broadcasters, and especially on the BBC, are nothing new… but the scale and intensity of the current assaults does feel different,” he said.
He’s spot on. It is different. This is why the BBC must change or risk a rising wall of criticism from all-comers, not just other media.
The changes taking place in the UK media are nothing short of a revolution. Meanwhile media owners and hacks look enviously at the BBC with its guaranteed income year-in-year-out.
Everyone must change, including the BBC: it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of by how much and when.
Herein lies one of the fundamental issue that Thompson failed to tackle on Friday. In a multi-channel environment why should consumers pay to negotiate a media paywall when they can access BBC content for free?
Pundits reckon that the BBC will survive the next license fee negotiation. There’s no doubt that the £146.50 fee per household represents extraordinary value, but the business model is an anachronism and leaves the BBC open to attack on all fronts.
Thompson is a moderniser, no doubt, and an incredibly savvy political operator. “Radical and rapid change inside the BBC is… essential,” he said.
The BBC is being trimmed, the pension scheme is under scrutiny and Mr Thompson has suggested that the corporation could forgo planned increases to the licence fee.
But ultimately this isn’t a fight that the BBC can win. Media and technology have evolved too far since the BBC was founded in 1927. And so Thompson puts up a good fight, but inevitably his response last Friday was defensive.
It would be a brave individual that led a discussion about a funding structure beyond the licence fee but maybe that is now inevitable. But for Thompson that’s a taboo he doesn’t seem to want to go near.
Related articles:
- Mark Thompson’s case for the BBC (guardian.co.uk)
- Murdoch and the BBC: They Both Lose (newser.com)
- Stephen Glover: Thompson’s attack is more than it seems (independent.co.uk)
Deleted Tweets make great news stories
Deleted celeb-Tweets make great fodder for stories for mainstream media. The spontaneous format of the platform, makes it all too easy to tweet-in-haste, and then subsequently delete.
Here’s an example of the genre spotted by The Guardian by cricket star Kevin Pietersen after he was dropped from the England squad today.
TweetMeme developer Chris Alexander suggested that the process of spotting deleted tweets could be industrialised by storing tweets for a few hours and then comparing them against messages that are subsequently flagged as deleted. But that would break Twitter’s terms and condition according to Alexander.
Spoil sports.
On hols, off grid
I’m off on holiday for a couple of weeks. No phone. No email. No blogging. And no Twitter. Maybe.
I look forward to returning in time to hear BBC Director General Mark Thompson’s McTaggart Lecture. It promises to be a highlight for the media industry for 2010 given the BBC’s ongoing strategy review and the fact that James Murdoch had the gig last year.
Old pros are learning social media techniques to build personal reputation online
In a comment via Linkedin in response to my post on getting ahead in digital, journalist Clive Couldwell noted that it isn’t just graduates that are using social media to promote their career.
“Even 30-year veterans who haven’t rethought their CV in 10 years have to get their act in gear and be seen to be doing it. With the tools now at their disposal, the medium is fast approaching the content specialists. So we’ll be back on top very soon,” he said.
Building your personal reputation online (and getting hired) – lessons from recent graduates
Individuals that want to get ahead in digital PR should use social media to build their personal reputation. At least that was the conclusion of the CIPR Summer Social workshop that I led last week on getting ahead and getting hired in digital.
I included examples from recent graduates such as Ben Cotton, Jed Hallam, Laura Tosney and Matt Watson that have used digital techniques to build their personal reputation during the last two to three years.
Their experiences getting hired into some of the UK’s leading PR and social media agencies are inspirational and worth sharing more widely. Each story shows that irrespective of the economy there is always a market for smart, proactive and motivated individuals.
It’s traditionally been tough for individuals to break into careers in journalism and PR because it took time to build networks and opportunities were limited to the number of pages of newsprint published each day. Networking relied on being invited to the right parties or getting in front of people at conferences and events.
But the web has removed all constraints to content and truly democratised personal networks. Anyone with internet access can become a publisher via a blog, Flickr or YouTube and build a network of followers on a network such as Twitter.
Video job application: Laura Tosney
Laura Tosney developed a beautiful video job application in order to get the attention of 33 Digital managing director Drew Benvie. I challenge you to watch it and be anything but utterly charmed. She got the job.
“Social media allowed me to show a future employer a lot more about my personality and work attitude than I felt I could with a traditional CV. [...] It presents you with so many ways to show people who you are and what you can do, if you’re willing to go after the opportunities,” said Tosney.
Facebook campaign: Jed Hallam
Woflstar’s Jed Hallam created a Facebook page to get the attention of his future employee and persuaded people in his network to leave recommendations. And of course Wolfstar managing director Stuart Bruce invited him for an interview and he got the job.
“[…] the key to starting out in social media was finding platforms that I was comfortable on. For some people this will be podcasting or shooting videos but for me I found Twitter and blogging gave me a comfortable outlet full of supportive and generous people,” said Hallam.
Building reputation through networks: Ben Cotton and Matt Watson
Ben Cotton works in the digital team at Edelman UK. He studied personal online reputation as part of his degree at Leeds Metropolitian University and so you could say that he had a head start.
“Whilst social media may seem daunting at first, providing you are authentic, which means being open, honest and transparent in your conversations, there is a host of opportunities and knowledge out there ready to be tapped into,” said Cotton.
“I’m constantly surprised by the tremendous level of goodwill I’ve encountered from people, who I’m yet to meet in person, but have been willing to answer questions, offer advice and let me know about potential openings,” he added.
Matt Watson used this tactic to build relationships with PR agencies including my own when he was looking for a job two years ago. During his final months at Huddersfield University he reached out to PR agencies that were working in online and social media. Three weeks later we hired him. The rest of the story, as they’ll say in the future, is searchable via Google.
Your social network as an editor (Twittertim.es, Paper.li and Flipboard)
The last few weeks has seen the rise of a series of tools that take content recommended by your Twitter network and presents it in a newspaper-style format. Your network takes on the role of an editor.
Twittertim.es is the first instance that I discovered. It assembles content tweeted by your personal network and friends-of-a-friend network to create a crude web page summary. Stories are promoted based on how many times they have been tweeter.
Paper.il uses the metaphor of a print deadline to generate an online newspaper that is emailed to you once a day. Content is organised using semantic analysis into difference sections such as media, business and technology.
Flipboard is an application launched three weeks ago for the iPad. It collates articles, images and videos from URLs and organises them into a beautiful electronic newspaper that squeezes every bit of graphic and navigation functionality out of the iPad.
And to prove the point that my Twitter network has become my personal editor, here’s a story that I received via my network yesterday (via @markpinsent) from Mashable about how news consumption is shifting to personalised news streams.
Blogger.Ed: excellent new community resource for bloggers and PRs
Here’s a blog to plug firmly into your RSS reader.
Its Sally Whittle’s new site called Blogger.Ed. It launched this week and is shaping up well, tackling topics from getting started in blogging, such as SEO and basic HTML, through to trickier issues such as copyright, naming and shaming, and transparency.
There’s also plenty of educational content for PRs seeking to engage with bloggers and a forum where participants can seek out technical information and PRs can connect with bloggers and vice versa.
Go and have a look for yourself. I highly recommend it for bloggers and PRs alike.
Web traffic to BBC consumer titles impressive but tough to defend
ABCe figures released today for a clutch of BBC consumer web sites almost certainly support the view that says it’s time to cut the BBC down to size.
Top Gear, Radio Times and Good Food websites recorded ABCe figures for June 2010 reporting 108,930, 84,086 and 71,013 daily average unique browsers respectively.
These are huge figures, in relative terms, for what are special interest publications. You’d be very hard pressed to make a case that the BBC brand and television tie-ups didn’t skew the market for consumer magazines and online sites.
According to Speed media-watcher Nick Bishop:
“The BBC’s defensive strategy appears to be to limit how much its reach is cut by demonstrating its scale. Accept they’re going to lose some battles but make sure they win most.”
