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Tag: BBC

What would happen if we stopped the BBC news? Nothing or anything?

Published September 29, 2009 by Jo Jordan

I listened to the 11 o’clock news as I drove home today.  I counted 9 items.

  • One item was news – the value of the Footsie Index.  But they don’t announce that everyday, so why today?  Anything happened that was different from yesterday?
  • Another item was past tense but vague.  A woman pleaded guilty . . . no information on when, where or the context other than the charge.
  • Two items were advertising – one for BA and one for the Labour Party.
  • A handful were information from the National Statistics Office that rightly belonged in commentary as the data describes events of months ago.
  • And some filler stuff intended to be titillating.

What would happen if BBC became an honest filter and said “Nothing happened in Britain this morning that is worth bothering your head about.”

1.  They’d get back to the work mandated in the Reith vision.

2.  We’d say, Where did the news go?  My favorite part of the day!

3.  We’d realize that the BBC are not that good anymore and stop paying our license fee.

4.  We’d say cool.  Wake us up where something happens.

5.  Other

The test today is to fill in the Other scenario!

Or, pick one of the others and elaborate –

  • I am old and listen to the radio a lot.
  • I am young and rarely switch it on.
  • I am a journo and I am not going to bite the hand that feeds me.

I want BBC to live up to an ideal that is in my head.  Be the best filters in the world.  Provide structure to ideas in the top 20% of any profession.  Is that too much to ask?

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BBC should be the ‘filter’ it knows it can be!

Published September 24, 2009 by Jo Jordan

I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘institutional voice’ – and the relationship between ‘institutional voice’ and social media – since my interchanges with Paul Seamen about the distinction between bloggers and PR people

And that has helped me understand what, I think, the BBC gets wrong.  And quite possibly, what many organizations get wrong.

BBC is heard globally

The BBC seems to forget that it has an audience. Now, I am not talking about customer-service here. I am talking about a world-wide, global audience.  Britons pay for the BBC.  But the world listens to the BBC.  And what the BBC says, is in their ears, Britain.

BBC should represent Britain as a global-player

Slagging off the government in the hope of gaining a little audience share in the UK is, to use an old phrase, peeing in your own pond – contaminating your own water supply.

Going on and on about Gordon Brown not getting a one-on-one meetup with Obama when the US President is dealing with healthcare, redirecting efforts in Aghanistan, re-moulding American foreign policy in his first speech to the UN, negotiating the climate change agenda, referring the Israel-Palestine dispute . . . well do I have to spell it out?

Sniping to gain advantage at home is not the role of a major media house – and certainly not the role of an institution which is paid for by the tax payer. Leave the minor issues and sniping to the blogosphere!

You should framing the discussion at the right level. This week the big question is where the world is going and how Britain is taking its place in the shaping of history.

To leave that story for the diary management of Presidents and Primeministers represents us as petty.  It represents Britain as a country which does not deserve anyone’s time.

Leave blogging to bloggers! Your job is to filter NEWS!

If a blogger picks up a minor issue that turns out to be a symptom of something bigger, you will find out soon enough through the ‘trending‘ you have set up on top of your Google Alerts.

BBC is not there to peer through windows and rummage through waste baskets. 

BBC is there to filter the news and to give it perspective.

At least, that is why I thought you were given taxpayers money through the license fee.  Wasn’t that the Reith vision?

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