The press and the BBC seem locked in eternal enmity because the Beeb’s sort-of-free website harms press website growth. Is a peace treaty possible? The BBC offers to take on 100 extra reporters to help local papers report things such as council and court proceedings. Local papers decline the offer but, after a while, ask for £14m of licence fee cash a year so they can take on 364 extra reporters to do the council-and-courts stint themselves. It’s a dialogue of the deaf.
Meanwhile James Harding, head of (bad budgetary) news at the BBC, sees £80m of the licence-fee money he depends on vanishing as the over-75 squeeze comes on. What can possibly go? Perhaps the BBC News Channel, churning round the clock. Perhaps Five Live will die rather live. Perhaps local radio news must lose its sense of locality – or community. But there is another way that might also mean peace in Harding’s time, so far as the snarling dragons of Fleet Street and the local press are concerned.
The BBC’s online news and associated services cost around £170m a year. Take £80m out of that and the cash left over would still compete – and more – with anything newspaper websites can currently afford. In short, digital Auntie might be a touch constrained – but not too damagingly, because web audiences aren’t loyal like Radio 4 listeners or Telegraph readers. The BBC might lose a few next year, but it could get them back in 10 years’ time if it had the money and determination to try.
So why not, next year, carve online down to size and save the services – to communities, to the globe, to news and sport addicts – that matter most. Keep British broadcasting together? It won’t happen easily, because the corporation lumps digital and young people together as its future. But when the present is so blinking difficult, there’s a case for letting the future look after itself for a while – especially when it gets balky newspapers, hands outstretched, off your back.
