It's time to kill the BBC's News at Ten
A BBC insider working at Westminster tells me that he is constantly being harried by the big legacy bulletins – always referred to internally as 'The One,' 'The Six' and 'The Ten' – to provide tailor-made content for their programmes. He regards their demands as sometimes unreasonable and nearly always a poor use of scarce resources: 'If I had my way I would concentrate more on the online stuff,' he told me 'that's where the audience is nowadays, but I'm always having to service the needs of the bulletins and it feels like a bit of a waste because no one's watching.'
That's a bit of an exaggeration. Currently, the audience for the BBC's News at Six averages around the 3.3 million mark while the News at Ten gets around 2.7 million. But it's still a far cry from the glory days of the past; in the 1980s, the BBC's Nine O'Clock News regularly pulled in 11 million.
Those were the days when the BBC's political editor, John Cole, with an Ulster accent as broad as his political understanding, was an indispensable guide to Westminster. What he said on the Nine O'Clock News mattered; today, not so much. Chris Mason, the well-respected current BBC political editor, won't have saved up his insights for The Ten; if you want his analysis, it will be available online, often hours before the so-called 'flagship' goes to air.
The BBC itself reported in September last year that online news had overtaken television news as the most used source across the UK as a whole; the BBC's own website regularly chalks up around 1.2 billion visits a month. Not all of those visits are for news, but many of them will be. That is a huge and growing audience rightly recognised by the Corporation as where most future growth will occur.
Figures out today show that ITV is particularly suffering in the digital age. A report from media watchdog Ofcom shows that YouTube is now ahead of the 60-year-old broadcaster in terms of media viewing.
Of course, the BBC is not suddenly going to abandon the time-honoured format of the big bulletin; it is an article of faith in the institutional creed that at the end of the working day, the audience will be offered an 'authoritative' round-up of the day's most important news.
And while many of us question the BBC's judgment in deciding what really should be on the news (its liberal-Left bias still sticks out like a sore thumb), a loyal, though diminishing, audience for the bulletins remains. In a recent magazine profile piece, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, revealed that watching the News at Ten is part of his daily routine. This may appear a reassuring instance of Sir Keir's ordinariness, but in fact it marks him out as a member of a dwindling band.
Why would anyone still feel the need to plonk themselves down on the sofa late in the evening to watch the BBC's (or ITN's) take on the day's news? The news is available any time of the day by computer, tablet or smartphone and that way you get to choose from hundreds of sources who provide up-to-the-minute news, not a pre-digested, pre-recorded compilation of what some television news editor thinks you should know.
I think the answer is that the main TV bulletins now cater for those people who aren't really all that interested in news. They're the sort of responsible citizens who feel they 'ought' to watch the news; to them it's a duty, like paying their taxes, and they long ago swallowed the idea that the best place to get it is from the usual suspects – either ITN or the BBC. So why is so much time and effort ploughed into a news format pioneered back in the 1950s and now in decline?
Linear news is also at a disadvantage politically. Few now dispute that Donald Trump's first victory in 2016 was achieved partly because of his astute use of social media; he was able to sideline the influence of his political enemies in the main US networks, which were all (except Fox News) against him.
There's good statistical evidence which backs all this up; the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report does in-depth research around the world and this year reports: 'The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54 per cent) is sharply up – overtaking both TV news (50 per cent) and news websites/apps (48 per cent) for the first time.
'Eight years ago, the so-called 'Trump bump' raised all boats ... including access to news websites, TV and radio, but this time around only social and video networks (and most likely podcasts too) have grown, supporting a sense that traditional journalism media in the US are being eclipsed by a shift towards online personalities and creators.'
The internet has already usurped television as the place where most Americans get their news and the same is happening here. In 2013, television was the main news source for 79 per cent of the UK population; today that figure is 48 per cent.
Print journalism has suffered an even steeper decline, while social media and digital usage have greatly increased. There is one TV outlet that has bucked the trend; GB News. The Reuters report comments: 'Although TV and radio news audience figures continue to fall for the main providers, GB News – a relatively new entrant – has seen its position grow both for its broadcast and online output in our weekly usage rankings (up from eighth to fourth in the TV, radio and print ranking).'
I am told by a senior source at GB News that the company is now 'close to break-even'; 'the numbers are very good' he told me, 'and our growth has made what I call 'non-BBC' points of view acceptable'. However, there's still a reluctance by the big ad agencies to promote their clients on the channel 'they are DEI-stricken' he says. But if the audience keeps growing, the admen will, however reluctantly, have to bow to the commercial logic of selling to its audience.
So what do all these changes mean for the traditional broadcasters and, in particular, for the BBC? The Corporation is currently suffering a haemorrhage of revenue (in the past year, upwards of 800,000 licence-fee payers stopped paying), so money is tight.
Senior BBC journalists are well aware of how the ground is shifting under their feet; a couple of years ago, the Corporation updated its 'News Priority' guidelines. For the first time, correspondents and producers in the field were told that their priority was now digital; so, on a breaking story, a BBC journalist must now write something for the BBC website before any other customers (including TV news).
That is a big and significant re-ordering of priorities and it does mean that the whole cost structure of BBC News and Current Affairs is under scrutiny; will the traditional bulletins survive in their present form? It's an open question.
Meanwhile, as the rise of GB News shows, the BBC's Achilles heel remains its perceived bias; a substantial proportion of the electorate simply don't trust the BBC to be straight with them. The BBC and ITN still dominate online news traffic in the UK but their dominance is weakening; other players, such as GB News, are growing in strength.
At GB News they like to speak of their audience as a 'community' and it is clear that people who use the station identify strongly with it, perhaps because they see their own views reflected back at them. Financial pressures on both BBC and ITV (where advertising revenue is falling) mean the day cannot be that far off when a complete overhaul of the way both organisations deliver news will become both inevitable and commonsensical. The old television order is passing away before our eyes.
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