Why is the BBC talking about expansion?

There’s something strange going on at the moment, which is quite difficult to get your head around, writes Raymond Snoddy.

The BBC is desperately strapped for cash, thrashed to within an inch of its financial life – we have been led to believe – and yet here it is suggesting paying for 100 new journalists to make sure courts and councils up and down the land are properly covered.

Then there would be a new data journalism centre and a News Bank to make available all pieces of video content produced by regional and local news teams to other media players.

There are even more ambitious plans for the future of the World Service with a dedicated radio news service for North Korea and enhanced services for Russia and India.

Both the plans for local and international news provision are both desirable, even admirable, although Her Majesty’s ambassador in Pyongyang could be rather busy once the North Korean service is launched.

Yet is it less than three months since the BBC had to warn that not just BBC Four but also BBC 2 was at stake unless the government backed down on the plan to impose immediately the £650 million cost of free licence fees for the over 75s?

Of course the director general, Lord Tony Hall, insisted at the time that the concessions eventually made by the government would be fiscally “neutral” over five years, although not everyone is convinced he is right.

But expansion? How come there could be expansion in such circumstances? The BBC wants to look new, imaginative and innovative in the run up to the Charter renewal debate before setting out the consequences later in the year in terms of services and jobs.

Lord Hall admits that there will have to be cuts to existing services to pay for the new ideas, although the BBC has been keen to play down initial hints that BBC Four was in jeopardy.

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“There are no plans to close BBC Four,” insisted James Purnell, the BBC’s director of strategy – which does not mean that the channel is safe.

You can have no plans one day and plans the day after, in response to inclement weather on the financing front.

The BBC should be very careful how it handles BBC Four.

Its fate will be seen as a litmus test. The channel is one of the best things the Corporation does and the one that most obviously exemplifies the BBC’s public service remit.

It is what BBC 2 used to be like.

Kill it off and many people who would call themselves supporters of the BBC – despite everything – would simply lose the will to live.

Strangely the most difficult and problematical issue is the apparently selfless determination to help out the local and regional press with 100 public service reporters producing material that would be made available for free to local newspapers.

A commendable piece of collaboration, just what the local press has been calling for, surely?

Not according to Ashley Highfield, vice chairman of the News Media Association (NMA), chief executive of Johnston Press and former director of technology at the BBC.

The problem is that the network of 100 public service reporters would be run by the BBC and the BBC would itself be able to “compete to win the contract.”

This, Highfield thundered, would be nothing other than BBC expansion into local news provision and recruitment of more BBC local journalists through the back door.

There seems to be an element of mistrust there based on history – the BBC’s tradition of lifting local newspaper stories without attribution and being generally arrogant with potential collaborators.

Instead, says Highfield, the BBC should tap into the existing pool of local news through a system of arms-length commissioning “along the lines of independent production quotes.”

What on earth is going on here?

Just below the surface is the claim – wildly exaggerated – that somehow the BBC has been responsible for the current straitened circumstances of the local, regional and even national press.

Through the internet the BBC has become a publisher competing head-on with the press.

Naturally both sides call up their favourite consultants to bolster their arguments.

The BBC cites Enders Analysis, which has the merit of being independent, which argues that the BBC has had no discernible impact on the difficult plight of the press.

The BBC does not take advertising and it is the internet and its impact on classified advertising that had done the damage. The evidence is there for all to see. In countries with no BBC equivalent the impact of the internet on newspapers has largely been the same.

Others have pointed out that bad management, over-exuberant takeover deals at the top of the market and trying to cling on to unsustainable profit margins by shedding editorial staff made matters worse.

Competition has also intensified because of the launch of a seemingly endless range of alternative news providers including Vox and BuzzFeed, Upworthy and Business Insider.

Naturally consultants Oliver & Ohlbaum, commissioned by the NMA, take a different, though cautiously worded view.

O&O notes that the BBC’s earlier Future of News warned of a significant drop in the supply of commercially funded news, particularly at the local level.

In an argument that infuriated the regional press the BBC went on to argue it would have to compensate for that market failure by expanding its own news provision.

According to O&O there is another more benign scenario – that the commercially funded news sector will find a way “to transition to the digital age” with new business models.

Pre-emptive and competitive action by the BBC could even drive the very market failure that the BBC warned about.

The O&O plea for greater, more transparent, collaboration between the BBC and the commercial newspaper industry to “create a durable, vibrant and plural UK news market” is the right way to go for both sides as long as the BBC can set aside its traditional arrogance and also find the money to fund such collaboration and the regional press can overcome its suspicion and paranoia of the BBC motives.

The industry should pay attention to David Montgomery, chief executive of Local World, who is not a man to turn his back on 100 “free” reporters.

Assigning a proportion of its news budget to independent local news provision, says Montgomery, “would be a significant enhancement to its public service remit and we welcome the BBC’s constructive thinking in this regard.”

Maybe something good really can come out of the current round of bickering.