BBC all ears

The BBC Internet Blog has been reviewing coverage of the BBC Trust's decision not to go forward with local video news online. We have a mention, linking to yesterday's post here, which is good. We await responses with interest.

Watch this space, as this issue is unlikely to be tomorrow's chip wrappings just yet...

The end of BBC local news plans?

A couple of days ago, the BBC Trust announced that it was vetoing a £68 million plan to provide a network of 65 hyper-local news sites providing video news content. On the face of it, it seems that any possibility of Cheshire's licence-fee payers finally getting some dedicated content have been abandoned. However, closer examination of the Trust's statement reveals that the money must be returned to central funds and may be used only with the Trust's agreement. So, the cash has been ring-fenced - at least temporarily. The statement also makes it clear that the BBC needs to look again at existing regional news provision and find other ways of addressing the gaps, and it has been invited to put forward new proposals to the Trust.

We await new developments with interest, as the Trust's announcement does not mean that there will be no Cheshire news site on BBC.co.uk at all, only that there will be no video news service.

Journalist Dave Lee points out that the real losers are the viewers and listeners, and notes that the regional media needs to up its game.

Regional newspapers are , as expected, heaving a huge sigh of relief. It's understandable as the BBC's video news proposals would undoubtedly have had an impact on local news provision. However, they should not feel threatened by the addition of one single web page to Aunty's sprawler of a site. They now have an opportunity to get their act together. If they are so worried about the BBC muscling to provide local news, then they need to provide it themselves in a more consumable form than they currently do. Robert Andrews has also raised some interesting ideas about how the BBC could offer local content in a manner that would enable the regional media and BBC to work together to offer useful content.

The biggest problem the regional press in Cheshire needs to resolve is frequency of delivery. In a large, mainly rural county most local papers are weekly and those that have websites tend to update them only weekly, instead of when news breaks. Coupled with many local FM radio stations that buy in their news feed from London and thus offer no localised bulletin, it is clear that the media Cheshire has a massive service gap to fill.

If they want to stay ahead of the BBC, those newspaper websites need to be updated daily to offer a genuinely local service to readers. Dave Lee has identified some of the major problems regional news websites need to tackle. Newsquest and Trinity Mirror should, I sincerely hope, being closely examining the issue of differentiation. It's understandable that these huge local media conglomerates want to push a brand identity but it should never be at the expense of their end-users, who want local news round the clock in a useable format.

The regional media and the BBC are probably never going to sit comfortably together, but there is a real opportunity now for both to do what they can to improve localised news provision.

In the meantime, the campaign will be asking the BBC if the axing of the local video proposals affects the proposal to offer Cheshire licence-fee payers equality of service on the website.

BBC online budget scandal - the truth at last

News broke yesterday of the BBC Trust's review of bbc.co.uk, the corporation's gargantuan website, of which News Online is a major part. The results make interesting reading and have been widely analysed in the media.

First up, even the press release offers some intriguing statistics.

In 2006/7 the BBC spent 3% of the licence fee on bbc.co.uk compared to 70% on television channels and 17% on its radio services, yet it is now the BBC's fourth most widely used service.

Right - so it gets a snippet of the cash available... But wait - there's much more going on. Scroll down the press release and you'll see an appended table detailing the budget, the overspend and misallocation costs, accompanied by a very dry statement.

It fell to the Guardian to get stuck in. Its PDA blog made a scathing analysis of the financial mismanagement afoot.

The world's biggest news and entertainment website breached its 2007/2008 budget by a staggering 48%. About two-thirds of the £35.8m overspend was down to "misallocation of general overheads and costs'' - accountants at the BBC had, apparently, failed to include costs such as the buildings that house its digital teams. Then there was the £3.5m in unauthorised overspend and a further £7.4m in overspending that - bizarrely - is permitted under generous BBC rules that allow for "10% leeway either side of the target,'' as a spokesman put it.

So who gets fired? Well, no one. In part, because no one, it turns out, is in charge of the sprawling BBC.co.uk network.

Shocked? There's more:

How will the Trust rein in the spending? They won't. Instead, the Trust's recommendation is simply to accept the overspend, integrate it into the budget and add an extra £4.4m of additional padding. So the baseline budget for 2007/2008 of £74.2m is bumped up to £114.4m - a healthy 54% increase at a time when the BBC's private sector rivals are feeling the full whiplash of a global credit crunch.

Journalism.co.uk was also scathing of the figures.

From the point of view of media rivals, that sounds threatening. But it's not the place of this blog to detail the long-running war between Aunty and regional news outlets that feel threatened by the BBC's dominance. From the licence-payers' standpoint, it's mixed - bad that things ran over budget but good because it's still committed to investing in what is, after all, a heavily used site.

Sitting here in Cheshire, I can only look at the report from the angle of value for money for us licence-payers in the county. It is quite staggering that the BBC can throw licence-payers' money around like this - losing control of budgets, no one apparently in charge, spending at least £3.5m on "additional content", etc. Yet, the BBC continues to claim that there is no budget as yet to provide dedicated Cheshire content (either news or other regional content) and a million residents in the county are still expected to wait until January 2009 for the BBC Trust to give official approval to provision of equal coverage for Cheshire...

Personally, I'm not massively surprised at the financial waste - stories abound of vast budgets being spent on pilot TV shows that are scrapped before transmission. Neither am I surprised that no one was "in charge" of the whole sorry mess. But let's be frank - if the BBC was a modern plc, it would be a lean, mean, fighting machine accountable to shareholders and expected to rein in costs. Us licence-payers are sort of shareholders but without the control, so this kind of profligate waste continues to abound while the very people that this world-renowned public broadcasting service is to supposed to serve renain unserved.

A scandal? You bet.

More coverage

Some unexpected coverage of the campaign has popped up on the internet, in an unusual quarter.

Garden design experts Real Oasis, based in Cheshire, appear to have seen the TV debate on News24 last week, and subsequently written about it in their blog. Thanks, guys. Spreading the word is even more important now - it's time to keep the pressure on so that the BBC Trust approves the proposals.

Trust and money

Aunty's new governing body, the BBC Trust, has unveiled proposals to give BBC audiences greater involvement in its decision making.

This is welcome news but it remains to be seen whether such measures will have any effect in providing deprived licence-payers with they actually want. Here in Cheshire, we are well used to broken promises - witness the recent abandoning of plans to provide us with a BBC Radio Cheshire...

The BBC Trust will only earn credibility if it can ensure that people are given equality of service. It's all very well promising to listen to people's views. The real test is whether the Corporation is willing to translate that into action.

The financial breakdown of the licence fee makes interesting reading. The cost per household per month for the licence is £10.96. Of this, £0.75p goes to funding 40 local radio stations - Cestrians are paying that for county stations all over the UK except in Cheshire. And the BBC's 240-plus websites cost a mere 49p a month, yet they claim they cannot afford to provide one measly news page for Cheshire because of the recent budget cutbacks. Yet it would cost not even £0.000000001p per month to give us a Cheshire page on BBC News Online.

If you want to let the Trust know how unfairly you think you are being treated as a licence payer, get in touch with them.

This campaign will be making an official representation to the Trust, but the more individuals who make their views known too, the better.

Misplaced trust

Tell us something we don't already know!

The BBC Trust has acknowledged that Aunty does not do enough for licence-payers outside London. Sadly, we are well aware of this in Cheshire, where our county does not appear on the BBC's website map of England, we have no news page there and we also have no county radio station (plans for BBC Radio Cheshire have now been axed indefinitely).

The campaign will be making official representations to the BBC Trust over these issues. Watch this space...