BBC to move more roles outwith London

BBC Bristol is getting a huge upgrade so there's no doubt there will eventually be room.

https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bbc-bristols-studio-expand-huge-5200568

Yes, it seems odd that in the last few months there were job cuts of 450 in English Regions, 150 in Nations and 520 in News because of a supposed cash crisis. Now there are plans for 100 new community reporters and 500 extra apprentices along with the shuffling of hundreds of people round the country just to do the same jobs in a different location.

As an idea of costs involved in doing that - moving people to Salford in 2012 cost £224m in relocation expenses and fit out of buildings.

The average relocation cost paid per person then was £28k - and presumably that £224m total didn't include the redundancy paid to those who didn't want to go. BBC average redundancy is currently about twice that £28k sum.

I too am not sure about how much the public care about where Radio 3 is being broadcast from. If there is real commitment to regional programming then how about getting that long awaited replacement for Inside Out on air - which disappeared a year ago?

I don't imagine the community reporters will be paid a lot - probably similar to the local democracy reporter salary of about £22k outside London. I'm assuming all 100 will be outside London, and also assuming the roles will be aimed at people fairly early in their careers. (In fact, I wonder if the local paper lobby, who are milking the local democracy reporter scheme, will kick off about the community reporters or start demanding to use their material.)

Apprentices can be on minimum wage and there are grants available - it's a reasonably small outlay to help diversify the industry, and training is becoming an important part of what the BBC does for the wider industry.

Yes, already:

Industry body @newsmediaorg says BBC plans for a new network of more than 100 digital local reporters will "hurt independent local news providers at a time when they are needed by the public more than ever" https://t.co/X3pFxy5hBO

— Press Gazette (@pressgazette) March 19, 2021

I the reliance on publishing clickbait and non-stories generated by trawling Facebook groups is what is hurting local newspapers, and leaving a gap in the market for some actual journalism.

Blaming the BBC is a convenient cover for local newspapers to hide their own failings.

20+ years ago local newspapers made huge gross profit margins through classified advertising. Of course, this all went to eBay, Rightmove etc.

As most national news organisations have found, funding news through online advertising is simply not sustainable.

It's hugely frustrating how BBC local news & radio had been held back online (and to a lesser extent BBC News Online) because of complaints from the newspaper industry.

I wouldn't have thought local papers would have objected to the idea of
the proposed communityy reporters. They already have access to video material that appears on all BBC regional outlets via the BBC Newshub scheme, which regions upload to daily and (almost) everything that appears on air would be available to them, including video shot by community reporters.

In the other direction - the local democracy reporters in the local printed press, which the BBC fund to the tune of
£8m, don't seem to provide much value. I think most BBC regional newsrooms have little or no contact with them and rarely, if ever, use stories provided by them.

I’m not sure what point you are making there, that the local papers should have some How stopped people using eBay and Rightmove?

Essentially, the Local News Partnerships scheme is the result of a very successful lobbying effort to keep alive an industry whose business model went kaput years ago, but whose shareholders and executives still demand a return.

They don't really use the Newshub scheme, to my knowledge - I would suspect that it's too much like hard work for a lot of the industry to sit and review the content before taking it. I know that in London very little material makes it to Newshub, couldn't say if that is the same elsewhere though.

The LDR scheme came about because the News Media Association, the lobby group for the traditional press barons, stamped its feet and complained that it should be able to prop up its bust business models with a bung from the BBC, and got George Osborne's backing as chancellor. There's very little value for the BBC apart from keeping other people sweet. Unfortunately, when you give spoilt children sweeties, they'll only come back for more, and this is what will happen with the 100 community reporters. You never know, Jeremy Hunt's local TV stations might start fighting for their share of licence fee-funded goodies too.

The NMA is very good at lobbying for its own members' interests rather than the industry as a whole - in England, it secured the "All in, all together" public health ads during the early stages of the pandemic when the advertising market fell away suddenly. Effectively, it was a bailout - and it's continued through the later stages of the pandemic, and with advertising connected with Britain's departure from the EU. Smaller publishers outside the NMA asked the government if they could be included in this campaign - they were told to sod off. None of this stopped NMA members closing titles or scrapping print editions of their papers in parts of the country - even though these ads were designed to allow these operations to continue.

Devil's advocate (part of my work is within local news, I know some current and former LDRs and even the BBC team running it) - you could say this is a gesture to provide industry training, as many LDRs are quite early in their careers. A lot of independent publishers also benefit from and use LDR copy, and there were some tweaks made to the scheme to allow smaller publishers to employ them too (the hurdles remain very high, though) for the new contracts which start later this year. And there is a level of scrutiny which simply hadn't been provided for many years. And I think the BBC has only itself to blame for not using LDR material - there's enough there, but it doesn't even give the reporters bylines when the material is used. The LDRs are also trained to do two-ways for TV and radio, but I think that's very rare.

But the NMA basically calls the shots with the LDR scheme. They wanted pre-roll advertising on Newshub videos and were allowed them; they've managed to drop the requirement to have "local democracy reporter" on online bylines so the source of how that reporter is funded is obscured; when the pandemic happened the remit was changed to general reporting around Covid-19 and that hasn't changed, so there's a lot of fluff and press releases getting through; while there will be more LDRs when the new contracts begin later this year, they seem to have been placed where NMA members want them rather than areas which are underserved by the scheme (the London boroughs have very few reporters compared with Greater Manchester or Merseyside, for example).

And if the LDR leaves and isn't immediately replaced, there's no backfilling - so those councils just go uncovered again, or get given perfunctory coverage, even if huge things are happening, because the graft of covering council is too much when there are press releases to paste in to hit your daily target.

I think if the general public knew more about this, they'd be horrified at millions of pounds of BBC money going to prop up broken businesses which pay its chief executives huge fortunes. But the press never has been good at scrutinising itself...

While it's true to the Local Democracy Reporters were only offered £22k-£25k when the scheme started they had a very slow take up of jobs at that pay range. But the big difference is they aren't employed by the BBC but local papers with the BBC just picking up the bill.

The new Community Reporters will be BBC staff and generally those who are currently described as reporters in local TV are on a Senior Journalist grade. Even those on the basic Journalist grade who undertake reporter shifts get financial reward if they are classed as Video Journalists shooting and editing their own material, which will be expected of the new Community roles.

And to those higher salaries you can add staff overheads and the cost of the all the kit and expenses, assuming they don't get cars like district reporters.

That's a very fair point - and I think the NUJ would want a few words if people were taken on at lower pay grades. It'll be interesting to see this pans out. (I've lost touch with BBC pay grades, and think they might have changed since I was there, but I was imagining that they'd be more towards a broadcast assistant's salary, or whatever that role is now.)

The point is for years critics of the BBC have said that BBC News Online is responsible for the decline of local newspapers, when it is in fact the loss of advertising revenue to online rivals.

Whether local newspapers could have ever stopped the loss revenue to internet giants is another matter, but it's not the BBC that's at fault.