Joined-up thinking with broadband at its heart can revolutionise news coverage and bring communities together
Distant bugles sound impending retreat. It's "not out of the question" that the BBC will relent on cutting 280 jobs and �15m a year out of local radio budgets, according to its chief operating officer. The director general himself adds a phrase or two of wriggle room. A vehement staff and listener campaign against the 14% savings proposed over the next five years begins to bear fruit. MPs, of course, are formidable allies in such a cause, for MPs have local constituencies, too.
But if, in the now familiar tradition of announcing BBC cuts then rowing back through the lakes and mists of consultation exercises, we're about to see local broadcasting maintained, in part or in whole, then let's try to do a proper job this time round: for local is a concept full of little local difficulties.
Would an extra �40m or so help ease some of the job-loss pain? Of course it would. But that's the chunk of the licence fee that Jeremy Hunt, as relevant secretary of state, has requisitioned to fund the start-up and running costs of local TV (in many ways the defining big idea in his tenure at Culture, Media and Sport). In short, local radio is being squeezed ? mostly of local programming outside the peak news periods ? to help get local TV going.
And what will the 65 possible local television stations do once they're funded, up and running? They will bring "a fundamental change in how people get information about their own communities, and how they hold their representatives to account", according to Jeremy. "There's a huge appetite for local news and information the length and breadth of the country". An appetite seemingly not sated by the BBC's 59 local radio stations ? and an appetite barely reflected in the declining sales and fortunes of Britain's local papers (see the announcement last week that one of our great regionals for more than 150 years ? the Liverpool Daily Post ? is doomed to become a Liverpool Weekly Post).
So there's surely a growing case for turning the process on its head, asking, where, when and if local TV stations move into action (perhaps from next summer on), whether that fills a hole that the cuts in local radio might leave. Or vice versa. Crudely, how do we cover the country?
The link is there already. That's why the BBC is landed with paying for Hunt TV Enterprises Unlimited. The question now is whether it can be made more coherent and comprehensive.
Of course there can never be a perfect fit. "Regional" broadcasting in TV and radio defines its regions in grotesquely different ways. "Local" broadcasting, too, varies between giant metropolises and middle-sized country towns with scant logic on display. The local TV that the BBC wanted to start five years ago before local newspapers cut up rough is not quite the local university television station that Hunt now seems prepared to embrace.
Nevertheless, it ought now to be clear to everyone involved that planning ? not quasi-entrepreneurial pronouncements ? are the order of the day, especially when the department of culture is also spending nearly �600m introducing high-speed broadband nationwide. Sweeping broadband access makes a huge difference here. It offers one very cost-effective way of producing hyper-local TV coverage. It unites radio and news with pictures in a single device. It ignites social networks ? and new ways of bringing news to communities that have lost a local newspaper of their own: places like Port Talbot, once served by the Port Talbot Guardian (deceased).
In sum, all we need, from Broadcasting House to Whitehall to local papers and business investors, is a little joined-up thinking. Local papers are struggling in a world where Leveson, frankly, is totally irrelevant. Local news seems to be losing its appetite. Why not start putting the pieces together now, at the double, rather than watch the BBC go through all manner of contortions, cutting or not cutting hundreds of local jobs, when more rational answers and local news opportunities are out there, waiting for someone to pick up all the pieces?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/27/bbc-local-radio-loses-to-local-tv-comment
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