Talking Is Working
You can put what I know about advertising (digital or otherwise) on the head of a pin.
But I was invited to this “think tank” by these nice people a few weeks ago. So in return I’m linking to their video.
Digital Advertising for a Digital Britain: A Think Tank brought to you by VideoEgg from VideoEgg on Vimeo.
I was intrigued to read about Google introducing a new search feature for music. Here’s the Google blog post and an article from the Guardian.
And I was struck by the contrast between this and the current disagreements between government and the ISPs about illegal file sharing.
While they argue one of the world’s most powerful media companies introduces something that will push music lovers online to legal sources of music. And since it’s Google it will probably work.
It felt like a slightly chilling moment as well. Google really are very powerful and appear to know exactly what they are doing.
OK so it’s not in the UK yet. But sometimes it feels like the rest of us should just pack up and go home.
Some good things to read, watch and listen to.
1. Profile of Sir Thomas Legg on Radio 4.
2. Fascinating blog post about Helmand Province from Adam Curtis’ blog. (Thanks to Roo)
3. Nerdfighters entry on h2g2.
4. “Glamour’s Golden Age” Art Deco programme on BBC FOUR.
5. Peepshow – series 6 episode 5. It’s still funny.
As people who know me will be aware I think the present arrangements for governing the BBC (via the BBC Trust) are better than the previous ones (see my comment on Roy Greenslade’s blog from a while ago).
Here’s two topical links on this subject:
“Raymond Snoddy: The case against has not been proven”
Raymond Snoddy in his article asks one of the critical questions – if you don’t have something like the BBC Trust how exactly do you oversee the BBC?
While paidContent goes even further.
“BBC’s Regulator Isn’t A ‘Cheerleader’, It’s A Heckler”
Regardless of the rights or wrongs of individual decisions, at the moment the Trust doesn’t feel like a body which is simply going to do whatever BBC management wants…
I worked in the BBC’s Editorial Policy unit for roughly ten years. I left three years ago.
Sometimes it all seems like a strange dream. What was I doing there? Did any of it actually happen?
So I turn to my bookshelf and pick up my edition of the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines. The red one.
The only thing I can be sure that I actually did while in Editorial Policy was project manage three editions of the BBC’s Producer Guidelines which became the BBC Editorial Guidelines. There was a silver one, a purple one (I think) and a red one.
I should add that I didn’t actually write the words in them. People far cleverer than me did that. But I did project manage getting them from early draft to finished book that you could hold in your hand.
I would proof read them and do the index, which although in some ways a bit of a pain (I once spent a bank holiday weekend stuck in a room at home going through each entry in the index), meant I knew the book back to front.
(And I’m sure that there are some who would remark that my understanding of BBC policy sadly never progressed much beyond being “back to front”)
So I was amused by some of the press coverage of the new version of the Guidelines last week.
Let’s start with: “Will the tighter guidelines destroy the BBC or save it?” asks Maggie Brown in the Guardian, before picking out some of the detail including:
In future, all pre-recorded programmes must be listened to completely by commissioning editors before broadcast, and all compliance documents signed and completed.
Hmmm… as I said in comments this doesn’t seem like an onerous condition likely to destroy the BBC. If you do have compliance documents at all it makes sense to fill them in properly doesn’t it?
The referral to controller for the f-word and strong language has been exactly the same in all the editions I worked on in the past ten years, and has been the case long before that.
Adnittedly the current wording is a bit long winded – the red one refers to “Senior Editorial Figure”. In the new draft the wording is simply “output controller”. A welcome change but hardly a major one.
The stuff on products as props is pretty much the same. The stuff about opinion polls is pretty much the same.
Then there’s this: “BBC Gets Tough on Journalists Blogging”.
“Blogging”? What does that mean?
The draft guidelines, which cover everything from bad language to impartiality, state that: “Nothing should be written by [BBC] journalists and presenters that would not be said on-air.”
Some industry observers are already referring to that as the “Jeremy Bowen clause”. The BBC’s highly-regarded Middle East editor, was censured by the Trust in April for loose phrasing in a potted history of post-war Israel, which appeared on the BBC News website.
The trouble is that the Jeremy Bowen piece referred to was NOT a blog, either a BBC blog or a personal one. It was an article published on BBC Online.
And while the formulation is new, and very well expressed, the idea that BBC online content should somehow be less impartial than radio and television is obviously daft. And as my colleague Steve Herrmann helpfully points out that’s quite clear in the current edition of the Guidelines.
Finally there’s this rant from Peter Preston in the Observer:
The Press Complaints Commission code covers, at most, two sides of A4. The BBC’s editorial guidelines, duly promulgated for five-year revision by the BBC Trust, take 19 densely detailed sections to do the same job.
So Peter, which is the better regulator, the PCC or the BBC Trust?
And this:
is anybody actually expected to read and remember what the clauses proscribe as they limp into the nether distance?
Er well yes they are actually as reading and abiding by the Guidelines is a contractural obligation for BBC staff.
The main difference this time is that the Guidelines have been put out for public consultation by the BBC Trust. This is good, although asking people to read a PDF and then fill in a form is a clunky way of doing it. Should’ve been a wiki.
I’ve speed read the new Guidelines. If you take “tighter” to mean “more precisely and elegantly” written, rather than “restrictive” then they are indeed “tighter”. The section on impartiality is particularly strong. And perhaps the most significant improvement (and missed by the press reporting – surprise, surprise) is the way that guidelines about online have been seamlessly integrated into the rest of the document.
For example, I was particularly pleased by this from section 17: Interacting with Audiences, about “user generated content”:
“Content which is critical of the BBC, for example of talent, programmes or policies should not be removed unless it breaks the rules.”
If I’d have know that the book I helped publish had the power to “destroy” the BBC I would have put a secret code in the index.
I wonder who’s doing the index this time?
From Conservative Home. I particularly liked number 3:
There is an attraction for free-marketeers in making the BBC compete with others for licence fee money… However we rejected it because we believe it would make all broadcasters focus not on attracting viewers but on attracting subsidies. We need a BBC that uses the licence fee to produce programmes of the highest quality – and commercial broadcasters to keep it on its toes. The danger of the top-slicing model is that broadcasters would focus their energies more on lobbying Westminster than producing programmes that viewers want to watch.
I suspect this will be the last in the series.
There’s definitely some wierd ironies here. (Originally spotted via Blue Cat Onine on Twitter)
Ms Fox revealed details of the break-in on the social networking site Twitter.
“O bloody hell the #digitalinclusion office has been broken into and all computers taken
(,” she wrote.
I was hoping to have one hundred reasons by the time the DCMS consultation on top-slicing ended on the 22nd September.
Serve me right for going on holiday.
So let’s wrap up this sucker with a brief recap and some new arguments.
1. Top-slicing the licence fee will not increase the amount of money spent on public service content.
2. In fact there may be less spent on content as there’ll have to be some kind of regulation, bureaucracy or red tape around it which will have to be paid for somehow.
3. Once the licence fee is top-sliced for one purpose the inevitable temptation for any government will be to keep top-slicing it to pay for… well whatever it fancies.
4. The “grants for outcomes” model leads to poor quality TV made without any sense of pleasing audiences in order to tick public policy boxes.
5. The BBC has sufficient size and scale to be able to maintain a distance from government and provide impartial, independent content. Any smaller organisation funded by public money might not have enough scale to keep its editorial independence. Again it will be focused on pleasing the person doling out the money, not the audience watching the programmes.
6. It feels like a sticking plaster solution to prop up a failing broadcasting model. What we need is some new ideas rather than plugging a gap with public money that the market seems no longer able to provide.
7. Licence fee payers don’t want it. (Depending of course on who you believe).
8.Top-slicing is unlikely to encourage the BBC to share more of its resources – which, in my humble opinion – is part of the solution to the problem in local news.
Don’t forget to send your views to the DCMS!
See this tweet.
Get Radio 3 live on the internet here.
According to research for the BBC Trust only 6% of licence fee payers want some of the licence fee given to other broadcasters to provide regional news.
See this from the Trust and the research headlines are here.
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