BBC News in 2025

With a recent report forecasting the future of news, we once again see an example of the BBC up to its old tricks, writes Raymond Snoddy.

The BBC is returning to its bad old ways and starting to pontificate about the distant future. Under the regime of the great blue skies thinker, the Lord Birt, internal studies predicting the future of broadcasting ten years out proliferated. In fact you were no one if you weren’t working at least a decade ahead of Greenwich Meantime.

To put it mildly such intellectual efforts rarely produce much of real worth, though admittedly they are fun and there is no penalty for getting the future wrong- everyone soon forgets what was said.

You can extrapolate from where we are now to any stated date in the future until the cows come home, but almost by definition you miss out on the great disruptive ideas that burst unexpectedly almost from nowhere.

Did anyone predict the arrival of social media ten, five or even three years ahead of its inception? And even when you are dealing with the known knowns, much of the trick – the skill – is in making a judgement about the speed of change and above all else the rate of consumer adoption.

The only thing you can say for Lord Birt and his love of long-term strategy is that the former BBC director-general did manage to pick up early on the future significance of the internet – no mean achievement and one that put him far ahead of his former peers in ITV.

Now it’s James Harding, the head of BBC News, who is pontificating on the future of news with the help of a raft of “additional contributors.”

By 2025, according to Harding and his contributors, most people in the UK will get their television programmes over the internet. By 2030 possibly everyone will, they say.

“The TV aerial will have gone the way of the typewriter,” the report predicts. Actually, people are starting to get their typewriters out again as the most secure form of communication in the internet age, but we will let that pass.

However, no mention of how satellites or high-speed cable communication fits into this future? Fine.

Then you will be glad to know that by 2020 – only five years away – there will roughly 10 connected devices for every human being on earth. This presumably is an average because it would be really wondrous to behold if all of the poorest of the earth each had one connected device, never mind 10.

Luckily Harding understands how difficult this future business is and concedes that you can end up looking silly trying to forecast the future. It’s not about predicting the next decade, but preparing for it.

Actually the main value of “the exercise” is about the here and now and the growing evidence of a gap between those who have access, or choose to have access, to good quality news. TV News in the UK reaches 92 per cent of the over 55s every week but only 52 per cent of the 16-34s and nearly 60 per cent of UK online users glance at the headline each week compared with 43 per cent who say they read longer articles.

So Harding is on strong ground when he argues that “the information gap between younger people, poorer people and some ethnic minority groups, on the one hand – and older people, on the other – is widening.”

Moreover, there is a problem of false consciousness. The British think 24 per cent of the population are immigrants when the true figure is 13 per cent and believe that 24 per cent of the working age population are unemployed when the real number is 7 per cent.

Yet here again is a further example of the BBC up to its old tricks. Identify a gap in the market and start expanding into it. An international expansion to take on the financial fire-power of Russia Today or Central Chinese Television with high quality impartial news is one thing.

Using the so-called information gap as a stick to beat the local and regional press and threatening to expand in local news is a way of reigniting all the suspicions of BBC motives that already exists in the minds of local publishers.

Cue furious row and one with likely political consequences.

It’s all very curious. At the Society of Editors conference in Southampton in November Harding was all sweetness, light and conciliation.

In the context of the regional press Harding said the BBC was interested in “more partnerships, more openness, more trying things out.”

There were pilot schemes in allowing BBC material to be syndicated by local newspapers and even talk, though no agreement, that BBC licence fee money might be used to enable local newspapers to cover courts more extensively, a role undermined by the financial problems of the local press.

Wow – the dawning of a new era.

And then the future intervened or at least the past according to the BBC. More than 5,000 editorial jobs have been cut across the regional and national press in a decade and the process had been uneven.

In 1999 there had been 700 editorial and production staff in Media Wales, the newspaper grouping owned by Trinity Mirror. By 2011 this had fallen to 136.

This decline of the regional press combined with devolution was creating a “democratic deficit” and a “market failure” in local news. There was therefore a real need for local news coverage.

Naturally the BBC was going to have to do more to provide local news that serves all of the UK.

News Media publishers point out that national regional and local newspapers are read by 42 million adults every month in print and online and represent 69 per cent of the total spend on news provision. Many leading local publishers believe that the worst is over and that a turning point is close.

There is also the small matter that in 2010 the BBC Trust decided that the BBC should not launch new services that were more local than its current offerings – particularly given the fact that the BBC had been required to provide financial help to competing new local television stations.

The only thing that is certain is that predicting the future is not only tricky but can easily get you into trouble.