I don’t want to add too much to the bluster around Mark Thompson’s decision that in order for the BBC to be less competitive with commercial broadcasters and content producers it has to cut some of it’s low budget specialist divisions, because the criticisms are obvious and will be stated much more forcefully than I can be bothered.
The one thing that keeps jumping out at me is these cuts are a defensive move by Thompson against a potential Conservative government, one which has the support of most of the popular press, specifically Murdoch’s News International and Sky. And the thing that keeps bugging me is roughly this:
In the 2000s the BBC invested time, money and brains into figuring out this digital / internet thing. I remember after the dot.com bubble burst loads of brainy internet people found refuge at the BBC (before being poached by Yahoo et al when the bubble recovered). The BBC, for all it’s very many faults, was looking ahead and wondering what to do about the radical changes the future would bring.
The rest of the media industry… well, safe to say they weren’t, on the whole. Here’s a great quote from a Press Gazette column from a old-school newspapers editor talking to his young protege (via Jo):
“You know, Grey,” my ex-boss says, “I remember meetings back in the early nineties when we didn’t know what to do with all the money we were making. We had to find cunning ways of hiding it from the shareholders. We were hitting margins of over 30 per cent and were turning advertising away despite constant rate increases.
“The daft thing is, we all knew that it was going to end. We knew that the internet would eventually take away our ad revenue; that classified would go first, followed by property and sits vac. And yet we did nothing about it. We didn’t plan for the future or invest in innovative content and means of delivery. We just carried on snuffling up the profits like pigs around a trough.”
He paused and put his hand on my knee.
“Grey, I’m truly sorry.”
What’s shocking and radical about this quote is the humility. You’d never see anyone from News International talking like this.
And that pisses me off. They fucked up. They should pay for that. Meanwhile the BBC spent a decade or more figuring it out and, surprise, they’ve kinda successful at this digital / internet game.
The BBC haters (and if history is anything to go by they’ll be in the comments with their idiotic bile) bang on about the license fee being wasted on things that aren’t television but rather than have such a binary, consumer based view, why can’t we see this as a rare example of long term investment in the future of media? The commercial broadcasters are benefitting hugely from the BBC’s lead because the hard work has been done. They just need to copy it. Are we going to throw away the machine that did all that work? Is that really a sound investment? Or is that just pandering to fucking Murdoch.
Oh, poor old Murdoch. He doesn’t have the millions he used to. What a shame. Have a tear.







