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.Audiences see the BBC as too preoccupied with the interests andexperiences of London, and that those who live elsewhere in the UKdo not see their lives adequately reflected on the BBC.It is notacceptable that a BBC funded by licence fee payers across the wholecountry should not address the interests of them all in fair measure.(BBC Trust 2008: 7)BBC management have accepted the need to accede to these powerfulvoices from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but point out that theyhave neither the resources nor the share of the digital spectrum to deliverparallel news programmes in all these regions.But with the licence feeunder constant review and frequent attack, they cannot afford to becomplacent.Constantly buffeted by every special interest group, andaccused of social, racial and political bias from all sides, BBC News hasusually managed to remain aloof and retain an authority based upon thequality and certainty of its journalism.But the paradigm of telling peoplewhat they need to know to function in a democratic society appears tobe giving way to a model that offers people what they want when, whereand how they want it.New media have not only facilitated this change, butexpedited it.BBC Head of News Peter Horrocks sees the shift away frommass broadcasting to individualized news on demand as inevitable:People who ve got an interest in [the news] through the web,through new devices, through mobiles and whatever, are going tohave a plethora of information which they can assess for themselves,a range of opinions.But because of that kind of fragmentation ofinformation, for people who are less interested in it, they re less Fenton-3900-Ch-04:Fenton-Sample 12/08/2009 2:52 PM Page 7575CULTURE SHOCKlikely to come across it and they may just get quite an incompleteview of the world through the information sources that they will see.The BBC cannot afford to move too far towards being merely a supplyline for that incomplete view, not least because of the implications fordemocracy.A generation that elects to ignore all discourses of noimmediate relevance to themselves worries politicians who fear theirpower base may wither with the audience.For some years the Governmenthas pressurized the BBC to find new ways of re-engaging the young withthe political process, warning them that their licence fee is dependentupon serving all sectors of the community, but news is necessarilyimmune to fad and fashion.New technology has been hailed as the HolyGrail that will help BBC News reconnect.New Platforms of DeliveryWith its reach down 4 per cent from 2001 to 2008,4 BBC TV News isholding up better than ITN but is pledged to help the BBC stem theiraudience shrinkage as best it can, both by adopting the new devices andplatforms attractive to the young and by adapting their current practicesto better serve their audience s demands.The Future Media andTechnology division has a range of strategies for, as they say at publicpresentations: keeping the BBC relevant in the digital world.High hopesare invested in mobile telephony as the means for reclaiming theyounger audience, because they use their mobiles as their maincommunication and information tool.FM&T see it as the 4th screen ,after cinema, television and the internet.It is, as they say, personal, localand immediate , with the widest possible reach for keeping peopleconnected, not least to the BBC, and to essential information , such assports updates when entrapped in family weddings.BBC Radio whose news reach has remained stable at 50 per cent isalso exploring ways of aggregating content around the musicand messages people want.Already radio is being consumed throughdigital TV sets (20 per cent), internet (15 per cent) and mobilephones (10 per cent),5 and the inevitable move towards a singlecommunications portal also offers the possibility of slipping personalizednews services to people using ever more sophisticated metadata.Youmay not be interested in financial news but, for instance, if you listen tohip hop, the technology may well infer an interest in street culture.Withthe same sense of cultural positioning, the BBC runs content channels onthe leading video-sharing site YouTube and has struck distribution dealswith two of the biggest social networking sites, FaceBook and Bebo.Bythis means, not only are the more accessible stories made available to a Fenton-3900-Ch-04:Fenton-Sample 12/08/2009 2:52 PM Page 7676 NEW MEDIA, OLD NEWSwider, younger audience, but it is hoped the BBC News brand is mademore desirable.The internet remains the key platform in BBC FM&T thinking, and theBBC News website is infinitely more important to BBC News than theequivalent at ITN and Channel 4 News.Unlike the BBC, these do not runa 24-hour rolling news channel, so they do not enjoy the same closesynchronicity of a 24 7 multimedia newsroom that the BBC has nowbecome.The BBC News web team look upon the Sky News and theGuardian newspaper websites as their key competitors.Twelve per centof BBC News uptake is through the website and it is growing.They talkof the progressively empowering process of Find Play Share , wherethe audience relationship with the news is transformed from passive toactive, enabling them to contribute, challenge and correct the journalism.Some of the journalists are less excited by this new dawn, seeing a greatdeal of power vested in the hands of technical staff and feeling that theirown worth has been downgraded.Some senior BBC News executivesexpressed confidential disquiet to me at the zealotry that puts so muchbelief and resources in the mechanics of delivery platforms, at cost to thecore values of content creation:I think one of the big leaps for the BBC, which we haven t madeyet, is to understand that we are content creators, we are notdistributors.But of course the whole fibre of our being is aboutdistributing it and we are spending an awful lot of money on doingthat.I think that when history comes to be written, that will be seenas a mistake because, in fact, the people who will be really good atdistributing content will be the people like Google, who can buildserver cities.We can t do that; we haven t the money to do that; wehaven t the expertise to do it.Technology versus CreativityThere has always been a tension between the production and broadcastsides of the BBC.This division finds cultural expression in the tensionbetween creatives and techies.It has been observed that, during timesof confidence and expansion, the BBC invest in programmes and people;at other times it favours the hardware that cannot argue back.The currentemphasis on new media is the apotheosis of the techie ascendancy, withthe FM&T newspeak its dominant argot.George Orwell got his inspirationfor Nineteen Eighty-Four while working at the BBC: Newspeak was theofficial language [.] The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide amedium of expression for the world-view and mental habits [.] but tomake all other modes of thought impossible (Orwell, 1949)
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