At the risk of feeding the beast, there's plenty more trouble brewing for the BBC over its plans to introduce ads to BBC.com.
As Mark Byford, Helen Boaden, Richard Sambrook and the rest of the BBC journalism board prepare to meet today to discuss the plans, staff within the corporation are calling for director general Mark Thompson to give the industry and the public a full and detailed explanation of exactly what these proposals involve.
More than 170 BBC staff - including web journalists, senior managers and international correspondents - have been running the No-To-Ads campaign since April and now plan to step it up with another public meeting and the support of the NUJ, who are likely to begin button-holing MPs on the subject.
This week campaigners emailed 900 BBC staff to rally support, and 100 staff turned up to the last meeting with Mark Thompson and Mark Byford in July. That meeting just didn't give enough detail, or answers to a catalogue of staff concerns including whether the income from ads would be fed back into the news department.
"This campaign is not about mutiny," one BBC News staffer said. "It's about openness and debate. Our priority is to focus people's minds on having a rational and detailed discussion because we're concerned that this is something that is being rushed through."
There is a problem, he said, with misinformation within the BBC itself. Some have been told that BBC executives held informal meetings with major commercial news brands, the result of which was that no-one has any complaints. That is extremely unlikely of course, but it does illustrate the level of confusion among staff.
The feeling among campaigners is that Mark Thompson is keen to get approval for these plans at the last ever meeting of the BBC's board of governors in December. From January, the board will be replaced by the new (and probably more rigorous) BBC Trust. Patricia Hodgson is expected to be a particularly "tough cookie" over this issue.
To pick just two concerns from the weighty manifesto of the anti-ads campaign: - Foreign correspondents: Many foreign correspondents and stringers are behind the campaign - journalists that are often recent converts to the web which has given them a new high-profile platform for their specialised reports from places like the West Bank and Africa. But they worry that if the ad services fail, the focus would shift back on to core services in more generalist areas. - User-generated content: This is a major focus of the BBC News site, as it is for every major news site - but how will advertising change the dynamic of the relationship between the site and its users? Will people trust the website less, or feel less willing to submit their observations and their content if they feel the BBC is making money from it, even indirectly?
The BBC has been grappling with this dilemma for years; ad-supported international traffic was suggested four years back under Greg Dyke's tenure, but it's not getting any simpler.
I was emailed to ask why some poor English supermarket worker should subsidise the news service of a professional couple in New York. The answer from the people at the belly of the Beeb is that licence fee payers just don't care. "If you care about public service broadcasting, you just have to swallow that. The BBC is the voice of Britain abroad - that's what we do."
