Should the BBC pay regional newspapers for content?
This week the Newspaper Society’s president told MPs the BBC should pay regional newspapers for stories it ‘lifts’ for its websites and local radio stations – but is this fair? Raymond Snoddy looks at the bigger picture.
Is there anyone out there who doesn’t want to take a slice out of the BBC’s £3.5 billion licence fee income? The latest aspirant is the Newspaper Society, the body that represents local and regional newspapers.
The Newspaper Society president, Adrian Jeakings, told the Commons Culture, Media and Sport committee this week that the BBC should pay regional newspapers for stories that it uses on its websites and local radio stations.
Jeakings went further and told MPs that “unconstrained commercial expenditure by the BBC could, if taken to its limit, wipe out the local press,” and would, unsurprisingly, be very interested in being “appropriately rewarded” for creating content for the BBC.
“Just stealing it though, we’re not keen on,” the Newspaper Society president noted.
The Newspaper Society approach is entirely understandable. Who would want to be last in the queue when it comes to salami-slicing the licence fee?
After all, a bit of lobbying, and more than a fair wind from then Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, produced no less than £40 million from the licence fee for the nascent local television sector.
The Newspaper Society approach also fits into a narrative which got a high profile outing at the Society of Editors’ annual conference in November when Home Secretary, Theresa May, condemned the BBC for undermining local newspapers by dominating “locally-significant news.”
The assertion caused more than a little surprise at the time. After all, three years earlier the BBC Trust had intervened to block plans for an expansion of local BBC websites and even set limits on the number of local stories a day the BBC could provide precisely to prevent damage to the local press.
With everything seeping onto the web it would be slightly odd if the BBC alone were to be singled out to pay”
There was also no agreement at the conference on just how much of a challenge these BBC websites actually represented to local newspapers.
Paul Linford, editor of HoldTheFrontPage, said at the time the consensus among regional editors at the conference was that most local BBC websites were so poor and so full of old news lifted from their own titles that they scarcely represented such a threat.
The real heat was generated by the allegation, which has the ring of truth about it, that the lifting happened without attribution or acknowledgement.
Alas in the internet age the lifting of stories by endless outlets constantly repeating each other happens on an industrial scale and at the speed of light.
In olden times when newspapers had a big scoop they would run with a cod splash in their first edition to try to prevent rivals getting their hands on the story until the next day. Now the life of exclusivity can be measured in seconds.
Doubtless BBC web journalists lift local newspaper stories along with everyone else. Yet if it is a decent local story it will also be carried by the Press Association whose subscribers presumably include the BBC.
But with everything seeping onto the web it would be slightly odd if the BBC alone were to be singled out to pay.
However, it is equally certain that as a public service organisation the BBC should be rigorous, and even generous, in attributing the source of a good story. Unless the BBC has done significant additional work on an article it is simply best practice to inform readers where it has originally come from.
The debate about the BBC and local newspapers is a small variant of a much larger debate on the “crowding out” theory – that the BBC and its licence fee represents such a large distortion in the media free market that the work of commercial operators is pushed to the margins by being rendered unprofitable.
Paddy Barwise and Robert Picard have made a significant contribution to the debate in a new report for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Barwise, emeritus professor of management and marketing at the London Business School, is one of those unusual individuals in the media who deals in facts rather than assertions.
The onus should now be on those arguing for a smaller BBC to provide evidence as to why this would be better for the UK public than the current situation”
He believes that no-one has ever produced empirical evidence to back up their claims that a free market without the BBC – or with a much smaller BBC – would meet viewers’ needs better than the current mixed economy.
Indeed, he challenges all those who want a smaller BBC or are arguing for further salami-slicing, freezing of the licence fee, or diverting BBC funds elsewhere, to provide evidence that their proposals would benefit the public.
Barwise and Picard have taken the “crowding out” argument to its extreme and tried to work out – based on 2012 figures – what the UK television market would be like without the BBC and its licence fee.
Their conclusions: that total content investment would fall by between 5 and 25 per cent but that investment in first-run UK content would be between 25 and 50 per cent lower. The net impact on viewers would vary but most, the economists believe, would suffer a reduction in both choice and value for money.
The total cost of UK television services in 2012 – subscription, licence fee and the indirect cost of TV advertising – was £11.8 billion, or £8.70 a week for every household. At 13.5p per viewer per hour this was cheaper than any other form of media – other than radio, and much less than other paid-for leisure activities.
Barwise argues that as BBC TV’s share of overall revenue is only 22 per cent, “it seems unlikely to have a huge crowding out effect.”
Its viewing share of 33 per cent, with more than 90 per cent of its TV spending on first run British production, gives it a low cost-per viewer hour. The BBC figure is 40 per cent less than that for commercial television as a whole.
So abolishing, or reducing the size of the BBC, argues Barwise, would mean largely replacing a relatively low-cost source of TV content with a relatively high one.
The onus should now be on those arguing for a smaller BBC to provide evidence as to why this would be better for the UK public than the current situation – “a BBC with only 22 per cent of total industry revenue but 33 per cent of viewing, despite its public service commitments and it’s market-leading investment in first run UK content.”
As Paddy Barwise says, all the down-sizers, licence fee freezers, top-slicers and closers of BBC 3 and BBC 4 have to do now is provide evidence that such proposals would be in the interests of UK citizens.
What If There Were No BBC Television? Patrick Barwise and Robert Picard, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.