I’m normally aiming to talk to you a couple of times a week, but what I’m about to say follows on from yesterday so won’t wait till next week!
As you’ll have gathered, I was genuinely baffled about the business case for some of the specific cuts proposed by the BBC Strategy Review, published on Tuesday. I focused on 6 Music in my last post, but the axe is also hovering over the Asian Network (another small digital radio station) and various web services.
So when I heard that the BBC’s Head of Strategy was going to be interviewed on Radio 4’s “The Media Show”, I pricked up my ears. A-ha! I thought. Now we’ll get some answers!
Well, no, not really.
Nothing I’m about to say is meant in any way as a slur against John Tate – I wouldn’t want his job for any salary – especially at the moment. As he pointed out in his interview with “Media Show” presenter, Steve Hewlett, the report was very much a team effort.
He emphasized that the core purpose was to streamline services, to “do fewer things better”, put more money into high quality programming and put content back at the heart of everything. Well, that’s great – but it still didn’t answer my question – why streamline by removing small, relatively low-cost niche services for which the wider market doesn’t have an obvious replacement?
Previously, said Mr Tate, the BBC had been able to “do both” – create new services whilst maintaining the existing offering. Now, he said, it was becoming a choice of “either/or”. Ok, I get that. Most of us in business during the recession have had to make those decisions. Just one small problem: the emphasis of the report seems to be on maintaining and improving existing services at the expense of new ones – but these proposed cuts are aimed at existing services. Is it me, or is that a straight contradiction?
Steve Hewlett asked if the previous digital expansion, which produced 6 Music, the Asian Network and a lot of the new web services, had actually “backfired” by diluting the offering from the core channels? After all, the report talks about taking new comedy back to BBC2 (from BBC3), along with high end factual and cultural material (from BBC4). Mr Tate disagreed though. Far from backfiring, he said, all those new digital channels had “created more space” for great programming – space which the review seems to recommend should now be reduced. He went on to say that BBC2 had changed since the introduction of 3 and 4 and the plans contained in the review included “taking it back” to some extent. Contradiction alert?! He said the place for digital media had changed. Well, yes, very soon it will become the only media we have.
On the subject of 6 Music, he said the station has “a big and loyal fan base”, but that the “listener hour” cost is relatively high, the average age of the core listenership is 37 – “Right at the heart of the target audience for commercial radio” and 85% of those listeners also listen to other BBC stations. Aside from the cost, none of that convinces me of the business case. Just because the average 6 Music listener is part of the target audience for commercial radio doesn’t mean commercial radio is serving them; and as for 85% listening to other BBC stations, I don’t doubt it. I don’t know about you, but I’m a multidimensional person who can’t get all her needs met from any single source, radio or otherwise. I want different things at different times and I find them in different places – but that doesn’t lessen the importance to me of any individual source.
Mr Tate said the choice was between growing 6 until it became the third national pop station, alongside Radios 1 and 2, or closing it and redistributing the programming. With respect to the authors of and contributors to the report, who must have done a huge amount of background work, I think they’ve missed several points here – especially the one about the radio village. That’s what 6 and the Asian Network were set up to be and now they risk being destroyed because that’s what they’ve become. It all boils down to the question: what was the measure of success set out when these networks were set up?
There’s always going to be some conflict between minority entertainment and commercial principles and between commercial principles and listener-funded public service broadcasting. We expect psb to serve minorities, but as we all know, those services have to be paid for – by the majority. It’s a really difficult balance, but one I don’t think this latest report has managed to strike. What do you think?