BBC magics money for local news?

The front page of the current print edition of the Press Gazette carries the interesting news that the BBC will go ahead with plans for ultra-local news coverage online.

This is not new news - the idea has been mooted for some time and we have already covered this issue here.

PG's detailed report suggests that quite a lot of money is going to get pumped into the BBC's micronews venture, although no figures are mentioned. Unsurprisingly, industry bodies such as the Newspaper Society are gearing up for a fight, citing unfair competition that will duplicate existing local news services provided by the regional press and local radio.

One wonders where the money is going to come from. The licence fee awarded to the BBC in 2007 for the next few years, which was less than the amount asked for, has triggered a lot of cuts. Many BBC news journalists are facing the possible loss of their jobs. A number of planned BBC local radio stations, including one for Cheshire, were axed. And Hugh Berlyn, head of News Online, told me himself that the licence fee cuts meant we cannot expect a solitary dedicated news page on Aunty's website.

This begs the question - if BBC News Online does not have the funds to provide a dedicated news page for Cheshire, which we calculated would cost a fraction of £0.002 a month, how on earth do they propose to pay for a network of 60 ultra-local news websites?

And more intriguingly, if the BBC had already earmarked the budget for this proposal at some earlier date, why cannot it use that £0.002p or less per month to create a Cheshire news page now?

Week-old news is not news!

BBC Online - please take note, if a story is more than 24 hours old, it's not news (unless you are running an update to an earlier story.

The news that the road around Chester railway station has no markings is old hat. It was published in the Chester Chronicle on Friday 11 January. That's a full 7 days ago. It's not news.

Bad enough that the BBC publishes so few news stories from Cheshire, but there is really no excuse for running a story that is no longer a story.

Newlove news

A small flurry of activity on BBC News Online this past week.

Almost all of the Cheshire news reported recently has been about the Newlove trial. Garry Newlove was kicked to death outside his Warrington home last summer. The trial has been ongoing since November at Chester Crown Court and the jury took almost two weeks to reach a verdict, which was finally announced yesterday. The link above will take you to a number of related pages, plus this one.

A sad tale and one that deserves the heavy coverage it has received, if only to illustrate what now seems to be a fairly typical kind of violence in many of our towns.

2008 - a poor start

Since we last blogged, the BBC has reported just 15 Cheshire news stories. Yes, that's 15 in 39 days. Not even 3 stories a week.

Yet things have not exactly been quiet across the county. For one thing, the massive row about the government's decision to split Cheshire into two unitary authorities has only just started to kick off, after simmering a few months. This deeply unpopular decision has been front page news on most local papers around the county. It's a massive change that will cost millions and affect almost a million people. But Aunty doesn't think it's worth reporting.

Looks like there's no policy change at BBC News Online for 2008, then. In other words, no news is, well, no news (for Cheshire, anyway)...