The first headlines – broadcast and print – of the AirAsia crash told us there were 162 souls on board, including “one Briton”. The first equivalent dispatches on the Greek ferry blaze put “four Britons” (including a “British showjumper”) on the lost-and-found list. Now, of course, both stories developed over passing days, gaining wider dimensions. But initial reactions count. Brit media outlets, Brit passport holders at risk… What does it mean for the “Future of News”?
That “Future” project, you may recall, is a grand BBC initiative – drawing in testimony from far and wide – to discover what audiences will want in 2017, 2022 and 2027. There’s an open day of discussion promised in a few weeks’ time. But meanwhile, concentrate on 2015 and the latest thoughts from James Harding, head of BBC News. Then scratch your head a little.
One key Harding theme involves the BBC World Service (now paid for by you, the UK licence-fee payer). On the one hand, he wants to use its size and expertise to serve home Brit world better. Cue a good list of correspondents he wouldn’t have had without it, bringing us frontline testimony and insight from Pakistan, Nigeria, Syria. In short, BBC foreign coverage is great because of these resources: the fee buys you quality.
But is this the future, or just a rationalisation of the inherited past? For Harding swiftly shifts hands and lauds “Britain’s best loved and most respected export”. Why, “we should build it up, not tear it down: a global news service trusted, respected and relied upon by 250 million people”. Look out Russia Today, al-Jazeera and the rest. Get ready, North Korea, we’ll be beaming trusted stuff to you too soon. Half a billion, here we come!
So “the primary role of the World Service Group is… to serve audiences outside the UK” (while, almost in the same breath, Harding is half-offering to bail out suffering British local weeklies by helping subsidise their coverage of court cases). Mission creep, or mission confusion? Time for feet on the ground in any case.
His Future of News deliberations feature “three interwoven strands: technology, stories and people”. They also require brain engaged – over the Greek ferry disaster, for starters. If you’re sitting in Britain, you’re told that the Brits on board have come through OK. If you’re in Canada, though, Toronto’s Globe and Mail headlines “Canadian-born woman and family conquer flames”. Even global disaster tales need their local fix. And so much news, on examination, carries scant global resonance.
We have a globalised economy, and global economic news services following its twists and turns. There’s a clear global celebrity market, most of it run from the US and UK, featuring movie stars breaking up or making up, models displaying their “ample cleavage” and famous mums working out in a post-natal fury. Mail Online nears 200m uniques a month along this route. Films open simultaneously around the world. Taylor Swift’s latest album is there in a flash. TV sports rights in the Premier League or La Liga are a global commodity. Talk Man U revival in bars from Rio to Reykjavik. And the BBC, of course, wishes to peddle its own wares worldwide.
There are streams of certain types of news and gossip that circle the Earth. And there are great disasters – floods, earthquakes, famine – that bound across national boundaries, just as there are security crises and wars that eventually rivet attention everywhere. But that’s about it.
Britain’s pending general election is small potatoes in Idaho (and Boise congressional contests don’t count for much in Birmingham either). Healthcare or education systems across the EU are mutual ignorance 28 times over. Scotland floats away from London on an ocean of incomprehension. The north simmers because it ranks about as much southern-England coverage as North Dakota. Ebola is a horror told in terms of Brit nurses, brave and sick. Irish pop bands may have had a great 2014, but Irish politicians are lost without trace. Ed Miliband barely rates a selfie outside the White House. Entire agendas do not connect because audiences, different people in different circumstances, don’t connect either.
Where does that leave the Future of News? Perhaps as a still more homogenised product, concentrating mostly in celeb/economic markets because they’re not so labour-intensive. (See how the BBC can attack Australia by hiring a couple of journalists to retune its dotcom offering there). Perhaps as a tangle of disenchantment because “the news” itself has been wrenched too far away from telling the stories of ordinary life that “people” relate to.
The BBC and James Harding had a good 2014, delivering some memorable reports, to be sure. But 2017, 2022, 2027? That, for broadcast, print and digital, may be a challenge of vaulting ambition too far – a future that leaves real news behind.
