The BBC's plans for local online video news services came under renewed attack today, as the chief executives of Guardian Media Group and Trinity Mirror told a House of Commons select committee that the proposals could put regional newspapers out of business.
Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of GMG, which publishes MediaGuardian.co.uk, and the Trinity Mirror chief executive, Sly Bailey, also both questioned the role of the BBC Trust in deciding whether the corporation's local online news plans should be allowed to proceed.
McCall said her group's flagship regional newspaper title, the Manchester Evening News, was fighting for survival in the advertising downturn.
She added that if regional newspapers are put out of business "you end up with a very strong BBC and nothing else" when it comes to providing local news.
Bailey painted an equally grim picture of the regional newspaper business, saying her company had closed 44 local and titles this year because of the advertising downturn and the industry's structural move to multimedia publishing.
McCall told MPs on the Commons culture, media and sport select committee: "The Manchester Evening News is fighting to survive - that's not a dramatic phrase. Margins in the regional press are being squeezed very hard and the issue for me is significant, not just for me because I'm a publisher but because I think this is a danger to plurality, diversity and democracy.
"I think if you start losing local newspaper local websites you end up with a very strong BBC and nothing else."
McCall also questioned the BBC Trust's role in deciding the fate of the corporation's local online video news plans. The BBC Trust is conducting a public value test over proposals by the corporation to spend up to £23m a year to create video-based news websites in 60 regions of the UK.
"The trust has made it clear to management that it's a strategic imperative to enter local," she said.
"When we then engage with the trust and say we have a real problem with local video, who are we talking to - the regulator or someone championing the BBC? A regulator should be unambiguously a regulator," McCall added.
Bailey told the committee that any BBC local online video service, regardless of limits placed on it, would draw an audience away from local services offered by commercial rivals.
"The BBC has lost sight of its strategy, it has lost sight of its purpose, it's using public money to compete in public areas where it simply doesn't need to be. All organisations need parameters and targets," Bailey told the committee.
"The problem with the BBC right now is that in its quest to serve all audiences it is clearly without parameters, as a result of that I would say to you that the management are out of control and the trust are not in control."
McCall said the development of rival services by the BBC could have a detrimental impact on the fledgling digital services of regional and local newspapers across the country 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," McCall added.
"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."
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