Am I alone in thinking that local and regional newspapers have only themselves to blame if the BBC’s planned local online video services deliver the coup de grace and send them under?
For years, regional publishers milked the cash cows that were local newspapers and failed miserably when it came to investment. There were exceptions to this - some independently-owned groups continued to invest in local journalism and saw the potential of the web. But, overall, the story of the last decade in Britain’s local press has been one of complacency as groups paid lip service to the explosion of readerships online and continued to strip profits out of their newspapers.
The chief executive of Guardian News and Media, Carolyn McCall, told a House of Commons select committee this week that the BBC’s plan could put its Manchester Evening News out of business. She said the development of rival services by the BBC could have a detrimental impact on the fledgling digital services of regional and local newspapers as it did not have to justify developments commercially.
“You can’t have a local website without video; it has taken local publishers a long time to get the investment to do video and to actually do video on a return-on-investment basis.
“We are having to go to quite a lot of pain to justify the capital expenditure required to put video on websites, because at the moment websites don’t have return on investment commercially, so you have to take risks.
“The BBC would be able to do local video much more quickly with much more deeper pockets and they would be able to leapfrog the regional press in terms of what they can do and that is going to be unbelievably damaging for local media that might not be able to survive that kind of onslaught.”
Sorry, Carolyn, but it has been apparent for at least five years that video services will play an important part of any web-based news offering - regional, national and international. When times were good, virtually every one of you chose to suck profits out of regional organisations rather than make serious financial investments in digital media. Now that times are bad, you’re all casting about for scapegoats for your own corporate failures.
Look elsewhere in Europe - particularly Scandinavia - and you’ll find regional papers that have invested in online media, particularly video and user-generated video. The result has been a huge growth in both users and revenues.
Here, the BBC is doing what it has always done - extending its public service reach onto new delivery mechanisms. It did it with TV, it did it with text-based web services and, now, given ITV’s virtual withdrawal from local TV news, it is doing it again.
It is an investment that newspaper publishers could and should have been making four or five years ago.
Justin. It’s a fair point to criticise the way media groups have or haven’t invested in digital strategies, but extending that into giving the BBC carte blanche to do what the hell they like is stretching logic beyond the limit.
Are you saying there should be NO boundaries to what the BBC can do? Local online services, magazine publishing, exhibitions, events. What next? Financial services? Travel agencies?
And, much as it pains me to leap to the defence of GMG, far from sucking profits out of the business, they have invested consistently in innovative, market-defining digital services in both their regional and national brands.
It dismays me that so many people are happy to support the use of public money for initiatives that can only lead to a reduction in plurality and competition in the media marketplace. Are we realy prepared for a state-funded media monopoly in some of our regions?
It’s hardly stretching logic to the limit to allow the BBC to deliver local news on local online video networks, Marc. Video is what the BBC does. More and more of us are watching video online. Why shouldn’t it use public money to bring its content to this medium?
Nobody is arguing that there shouldn’t be limits to what the BBC does. But how can you credibly argue that this is any different to local news delivered over the analogue broadcast network?
Like ITV before you, the regional press failed to get its act together as a vacuum developed. The BBC is, rightly IMO, filling that vacuum. You have nobody to blame but yourselves.
This is why google purchased youtube.com - user generated video content the writings been on the wall that this was the way to go for five years easily. How much would it cost to pay a programmer to write a flash based video player, an upload page and a display page? That’s all youtube did - did it first and got rich!
You are of course right, Justin.
It is the fault of the newspaper groups for not seeing the light early enough. But what about the people working on those papers who are battling to create decent content, to change the thinking of the 90 per cent of people who are still hostile, without the benefit of the investment the BBC has?
What are we supposed to do? We ARE years behind, and that IS because we took a long time to come round. And hopefully this threat from the BBC will force a radical change in outlook. But we’re not the ones who made the decision not to invest.
Giving the BBC carte blanche to do what they like, at this moment in time, will probably mean a massive decline in regional press output.
How is that a good thing for the consumer? I don’t want the BBC to be my only source of news. You seem to be saying that it will serve ‘us’ (by which I assume you mean all regional journalists?) right if it is.
But we aren’t the only ones who will suffer - it will be our audience too.