A review into how the BBC should be funded has been launched by Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer, as new action is taken to reduce the impact on licence fee payers in these hard up times.
At the same time the corporation needs to grasp that reinventing its news and current affairs content to keep the trust of its audiences is critical to its survival. Innovate or die.; this is the simple message to the journalists working for the BBC’s News and Current Affairs division. Their smart, new-ish boss, Deborah Turness, clearly gets the need for the state-funded broadcaster to adapt to big changes in an atomised, digital era. Adapt to straitened economic times, too. Yet those Turness leads at the BBC don’t appear to understand the need for a reform of the licence fee, a regressive tax.
The uproar in November 2023 at the proposed changes to Newsnight was testament to the sclerotic, toxic, antiquated attitudes of many of its employees. It was rich, given Newsnight’s blunders in 2012 over the Jimmy Savile investigation and then the Conservative peer, Lord McAlpine, who was wrongly implicated in child abuse. These were some of the biggest editorial mistakes made in British broadcasting history, along with Martin Bashir’s deception over the interview with Princess Diana in 1995. Trust matters. The future of BBC journalism is far too important to be entrusted to BBC journalists.
Here is 10 point plan to ensure its news and current affairs services thrive in the future.
Decide on a new purpose
Nearly 102 years since its foundation, the decision-makers at the BBC need to find its purpose and how best news and current affairs services support that purpose. How about this for a starter? The BBC sets out to be the glue of this fractious kingdom, offering distinctive, ambitious, high quality independent news and analysis on radio and TV to enable its subjects to make informed decisions about the UK’s future.
Win back public trust
Getting the news right matters so much to the BBC’s future survival. Can it be trusted? It’s that old £5 note analogy. News is a thin strip of metal in the fiver which validates the brand and gives it credibility. BBC journalism has made some big mistakes over the past 30 years: the Andrew Gilligan Iraq report in 2003; the Jimmy Savile debacle in 2012; the Sir Cliff Richard helicopter coverage in 2014. In the future, the BBC has to ensure both its editorial standards and its people are faultless. Commercial organisations might not have survived the shocking blunders that BBC journalism has got away with.
The BBC media machine claims it is the most trusted news organisation in the UK, but that is not quite right. Recent news consumption surveys by Ofcom suggest Sky News beats the BBC on trust and accuracy. Awkward reading for the establishment. Let’s hope the much-marketed BBC Verify initiative is more than an expensive marketing initiative.
Cannibalise at pace
BBC journalists need to grasp that what has made it successful in the past will not sustain it in the future. The BBC needs to transition from a broadcast news organisation that also produces mediocre digital news to a digital news powerhouse that also produces high quality broadcast news. It will be a critical, difficult and, at times, painful transformation that will require its people to rethink much of what they do every day.
Put digital journalism first
Reliable news on TV and radio is necessary but not sufficient. The BBC’s digital news services need to be the home of dazzling journalism; at the moment they are stolid and solid, failing to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities for visual storytelling that contemporary technology has created. There are exceptions: BBC Eye’s 2022 investigation, “Finding My Torturer”, is a brilliant example of how to do digital journalism well.
Journalism is changing fast. Watch how key developments in the war between Israel and Hamas have been reported over the last few months; not with carefully crafted TV packages for the evening bulletins, but with rapid-paced, fast-changing WhatsApp messages. The future is digital.
Invest in eye-witness journalism
Champion the reporting of superb correspondents like Orla Guerin and Jeremy Bowen; it’s the BBC at its best. But much of its domestic journalism doesn’t illuminate. It’s prosaic, pedestrian, ordinary; on-the-ground journalism matters.
Invest in data journalism
The pandemic made clear the importance of data and how journalists can use data to both diagnose problems and suggest solutions. Data visualisation, says the Financial Times John Burn-Murdoch, “speaks a thousand words in a second” and he’s right. Simple charts tell clear stories.
Aim for less news
What is also true is the majority of BBC news budgets are spent on people’s salaries, not on story coverage. This means many jobs will need to be cut on screen and off, careers blown off course. Painful. It’s the big downside of working in an industry undergoing tumultuous change as technology changes audiences’ consumption habits.
But these changes also offer new opportunities to develop careers in digital journalism. Time for change. That “thin strip of metal” I wrote about earlier has been hammered too hard. Too thin. There is too much ordinary news on the BBC. Aim for less news, fewer TV and radio bulletins, much better digital journalism.
Innovate
Artificial Intelligence offers journalists a golden opportunity to build on the BBC’s reputation for evidence-based journalism compiled at speed. The BBC needs to focus on this critical tool that will redefine journalism in the years ahead. AI is an opportunity, not a threat for newsrooms. “You can’t invent the future if you’re spending 80% of your time on legacy operations,” as Mark Thompson, a former BBC Director General said when he took over at the New York Times.
Rebut disinformation
In a world of constant disinformation peddled by hostile governments, teenage scribblers and menacing mavericks who promulgate lies and half-truths online, the BBC — like other serious global news brands such as Reuters, CNN and Sky News — has a big opportunity to stand out as a beacon of diamond-hard truth. The BBC World Service is at the forefront of this.
Since 2014, the World Service has been principally funded by the licence fee. The British government should acknowledge the BBC’s extraordinary latent soft power and take back the cost of fully funding the World Service to pay for its role as an ambassador for the UK, a force for freedom and a rebutter of propaganda.
Adapt, adapt, adapt!
The licence fee is a regressive tax out of kilter with the news consumption habits of the UK’s public. Decision takers tasked with finding alternative funding models should remember it is not the strongest nor the cleverest organisation that will survive in the future but the one most adaptable to change. Those lucky enough to work at the BBC should cherish working at the institution, but accept radical change. Innovate or die.
This article is an edited extract from the book “How do we pay for the BBC after 2027?”
