Is Cameron showing his true colours about the BBC?

In an editorial in today's Observer they say....

David Cameron enjoys joshing with journalists. He also, in a previous, non-political life, worked as a media public relations expert, lobbying against, among others, the BBC. So when he tells a Brussels press conference that we're all in the cuts and freeze business together, "including – deliciously – the BBC", it's probably best to leave high horses in the stable. You can make too much of a deliciously duff joke. But you also see why our prime minister needs to be very, very careful. Is he in hock to Rupert Murdoch? Labour MPs, anxious to see more of his Number 10 visiting book, want fuller disclosure here. The two main Murdochs, father and son, have been heavy-footed and loose-tongued in their lobbying against the corporation...... more

The cuts rushed through in 48 hours are not inconsequential and will have an impact on what the BBC can do. However the integration of the newsroom in 2012 will make the world wide new gathering much more effective and will certainly help the 'One BBC' including the World Service but in this digital age where less and less people will consume public service broadcasting using a TV receiver in the corner of the front room, we really do need to find a new funding model to guarantee a viable public service broadcaster for the long time. Please do not let folk chip and slice away at the BBC so that all we are left with is the Murdoch empire.

Who is going beyond the Murdoch paywall 3 months in

I posted about this at the start back in July here and here. Now Peter Preston has written in today's Observer an article about numbers and types of people venturing behind The Times paywall in the first 3 months.

Fleet Street is gagging to discover whether Mr M has shot himself in the foot. Interim answer, from the heavyweight Nielsen company: foot still attached to leg. They reckon that total unique monthly UK visitors to the Times site went down from 3,096,000 to 1,782,000 when the wall went up, and that only 362,000 – about 20% – ventured on to pages beyond the wall. You can weave webs of relative triumph or disaster from all this. The good news for News International is that those who vaulted the wall were a bit older, richer and more dedicated to scanning the site carefully. They are the "engaged readers" advertisers admire – as opposed to the click-by-night trade who never stop to buy anything. The bad news is that a few hundred thousand unique visitors sounds pretty puny compared with the 20 million or so the Times was claiming before the wall went up. If you want a guess in the fog, 362,000 "engaged" UK readers was broadly what the Mail (a believer in a web without walls) found a year or so ago when it took a 30m unique visitor monthly total and whittled away overseas callers and click-by-nighters. By those lights, the Times's great wall isn't a flop, nor yet a necessarily a glowing path to future riches. But there's something worthwhile left to work with, so start counting the ads.

Back in July I compared the two models, the paywall from The Times and the traffic driven site from The Mail. Well 3 months on into the Murdoch paywall and it seems that both models are producing about the same number of engaged users.

Labour calls for inquiry into BBC licence fee deal

James Robinson writes in The Guardian...

The shadow culture secretary, Ivan Lewis, has demanded an urgent parliamentary inquiry into the BBC licence fee settlement following the hastily negotiated deal agreed with the government last week. Lewis has written to John Whittingdale, the Conservative MP who chairs the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, asking him to hold an investigation into the six-year deal.

Lewis said the agreement "rode roughshod over the independence of the BBC, crushed any serious prospect of reform and involved no consultation with licence fee payers or parliamentarians". "The BBC is one of this country's great institutions and its future a matter of public interest," Lewis added.

Although Ivan Lewis is my own MP and a good local MP I have to say I am not confident he will get very far.

Socialnomics publish Top 10 brands on Facebook

Lauren Pelkey writes on the Socialnomics blog....

It appears Facebookers love their sweets and caffeinated beverages. Five of the top ten brands on Facebook are Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Oreo, Skittles and Red Bull. That means 50% of the top ten brands on Facebook are food and beverage. The other half include Facebook itself at number one, YouTube at number three, Victoria’s Secret at number eight, Disney at number nine, and iTunes at number ten.

For more you can read the full post on the Socialnomics blog.

BBC cuts in licence fee deal 'brutal but realistic', say corporation executives

John Plunkett and Maggie Brown have covered the BBC response in an article in The Guardian.

Senior BBC executives admitted today that staff would be stunned and baffled by the scale of the cuts in the licence fee settlement, which they described as "clearly very challenging". Peter Salmon, the director of BBC North, said it was "tough, but it is tough all round". "These are pretty difficult times. This is an exceptional settlement and it's going to be difficult for the BBC but it's difficult for everyone in the whole UK economy," he added.  "On the positive side the stuff that we are taking on board are a collection of related responsibilities, a lot of which make sense given what the BBC does and what the BBC cares about – programme-making, content-making, news," said Salmon. "The most important thing for the BBC is the fact that it maintains the BBC's independence. We are very keen on multi-year settlements, on having the kind of financial security we need over a period of time so that we can plan, and also stay at arm's length from the government and government politics. It's really important to us, it's important to licence payers, it's what's kept the BBC brave and independent all these years. It's a tough day. The staff are going to be stunned and probably quite baffled by the news. You get a sense on lots of fronts you are not immune from all the big and difficult things happening in the world. The pension gap was another difficult part of the story. These are tough times."

The BBC Radio 5 Live controller, Adrian van Klaveren, also speaking in Salford today, said the corporation had been surprised at the speed of the licence fee settlement and described the cuts as "clearly very challenging". But Van Klaveren added that there was a positive side to the deal, which guarantees the future of the licence fee for the next six years. "Clearly these numbers are very challenging and will need a lot of work," There's a process that is going to take time. It's complicated and there are a lot of options. Changes need to be made over a period of years. I think all of us have been surprised at the pace of things over the last week. Numbers have moved around and each number clearly has different consequences. It will be felt more and more as years go by. We are not talking about something that has to be achieved by April 2011. There is time to work it through sensibly."

 Go to the Guardian web site to read the rest of the story.

Union describes the BBC cuts as "appalling"

BECTU have said...


BBC staff will be left reeling at the announcement that senior management have accepted a freeze in the licence fee until 2017 at the same time as agreeing to fund BBC World Service and Welsh language channel, S4C, from these reduced resources, says BECTU. The changes, apparently agreed just today, are said to amount to a 16 per cent cut in the BBC's income, equivalent to some £550m. Only yesterday (18 October) there was speculation that the BBC was to be instructed by government to fund free licences for the over-75s. Commenting on today's announcement, BECTU general secretary, Gerry Morrissey said:

"BBC staff will be in a state of shock at the scale of today's announcements. We'll be seeking an urgent meeting with senior management to discuss the implications of this appalling news. From where we are standing, senior executives appear to have entered into negotiations on the hoof and the result will be largescale damage to the BBC's services with the Corporation taking the flak for badly judged government decisions."

Morrissey also told the Press Association: “It seems as if the BBC is now doing the government’s dirty work. They have thrown in the towel, so they will now have to justify the cuts to staff. How can you cut 16% off your costs without affecting jobs or services? Morale at the BBC is already at rock bottom, but now there is little or no confidence in the management.”

Bectu has also comdemned the decision to include responsibility for Welsh broadcaster S4C into the BBC's pot, saying it shows an “ignorance of Wales, and its people, and most importantly, of the importance of democracy and plurality in Wales”. Bectu national official, David Donovan, said: “[Culture minister Jeremy Hunt’s] statements and actions serve as a clear warning that Wales is set to be controlled once more by a political elite with no interest in its people, its culture or its language. At a fundamental level, the statements show scant regard for the democratic process. It is clear that everyone who is committed to public service broadcasting and to the language and culture of Wales has to prepare to defend these interests against this government’s actions.”

UK drops down the world rankings in new broadband league table

The survey of 72 countries analysed by the Oxford Said Business School and the University of Oviedo from 40 million Speedtest.net tests ranked the UK joint 18th in broadband performance in 2010, one place down on 2009, and three behind its 2008 rank.  Download speeds show reasonable improvement, rising to an average of 6.4Mbit/s, and latency is now also a respectable 51ms, but upload improvements appear to have barely shifted at all, rising from 368kbit/s in 2008 to 2010's 596kbit/s. Although upload speeds are less important to subscribers today, tomorrow's applications such as consumer telepresence require, by Cisco's own admission, at least 3.5Mbits/s upload throughput to work correctly. At the current rate of improvement, it could be years before this is viable on current trends.

• Third annual study from Saïd Business School, Oxford University, looks at broadband quality in 72 countries and 239 cities
• 14 countries (1 in 5) already prepared for the Internet "applications of tomorrow", compared to only 1 country in 2008
• 38 countries, 53% of the total, have conquered the digital quality divide, with less evident differences between the broadband quality inside and outside their main cities, an improvement of 58% in just one year
• Study reaffirms positive link between broadband leadership and innovation economies
• Many emerging economies are 'leapfrogging' by focusing on bringing the best broadband to their cities, acknowledging their impact on the economy
• 38 cities already have the broadband quality required for the applications of tomorrow, ready to support smart and connected communities
• Mobile broadband quality has improved significantly, with 10% of mobile broadband users already enjoying similar quality experiences compared to those with fixed-line broadband
• Broadband consumption patterns are diverging, from a basic household requiring over 2 Mbps and consuming about 20 GB per month, to a smart and connected home commanding over 20 Mbps and a consumption of 500 GB per month

There is an interactive section to the Cisco report pages that enables you to look in more detail at the data for each country surveyed.

As someone who uploads work in progress and finished products the lack of upload speed is a constant niggle now.

BBC Licence fee funding announced for the next 6 years

Wow! Earlier I blogged about the BBC offering to fund the World Service. Well they have really rolled over now agreeing to have the licence fee frozen at £145.50, pay £272m for the World Service , S4C's £102m for S4C, and pay £25m for BBC Monitoring. They really didn't want to take on the £556m a year funding of free TV licences for the over-75s. Mark Sweney and Tara Conlan have written about the deal at the Media Guardian site...

The BBC licence fee is to be frozen at the current level of £145.50 for the next six years, a 16% cut in real terms, after the corporation today concluded a bruising round of funding negotiations with the coalition government.  In addition it will provide £150m a year for the rollout of superfast broadband to rural areas from 2013 and £25m a year for local TV and online content. A further one-off capital investment in local TV and online services of £25m will also come from the licence fee and the BBC will also underwrite the rollout of the digital radio network nationally.

Well another 16% cuts in the BBC budget is going to mean even less quality public service programming. This is really scary. What will the government do next.....

BBC offers to pay for World Service to avoid licence fee raid

How this is a real turn up for the books and clearly shows if nothing else that the BBC is running scared that the government will start to eat away at its funding.

Dan Sabbagh has written about this in The Guardian.....

The BBC director general, Mark Thompson, is prepared to meet some or all of the £300m annual costs of running the World Service, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent a £556m raid on its finances to fund the cost of free TV licences for the over-75s, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal. Embroiled in crisis talks over BBC financing in the hours before the government's comprehensive spending review is agreed, the corporation's negotiators have been told that ministers are also considering whether to force the BBC to meet the costs of the World Service, which is currently paid for by the Foreign Office. That would be an alternative to making the BBC pay out £556m to fund the costs of free television licences for anywhere home to an elderly person – a bill that may force existing television and radio budgets to be slashed.

To read the rest of this article go to the Media Guardian web site.

Multi-Station Radioplayer to launch in December

The Multi-station platform Radioplayer is to be rolled out from December, launching with 50 stations, the chairman of the project has announced. Speaking at the Radio Festival in Salford, Andrew Harrison – chief executive of RadioCentre – revealed the “full consumer launch” of the online service would take place in February, with at least 200 stations including all BBC channels and Ofcom-regulated networks.

Michael Hill, Radioplayer’s managing director, demonstrated a test set for delegates.  He described it as “a defining moment for UK radio”, adding: “We hope all broadcast stations, of all sizes and types, will participate.”

Listen to Michael Hill talk about it to Mark Rock CEO of AudioBoo on AudioBoo...



Tim Davie, director of BBC Audio and Music, added: “It is a result of genuine collaboration across the industry and is the sort of innovation we need to make digital radio a reality.”

Socialnomics refresh their excellent Social Media Revolution video

Social Media Revolution 2 is a refresh of the original video with new and updated social media & mobile statistics that are hard to ignore and is based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.

It’s amazing how fast the world of social media moves!  As many of the statistics from the original Social Media video have changed, I took a moment to refresh the video with a few new statistics and graphics.  Thanks to all of you for your support in making the first Social Media Revolution and Social Media ROI videos such a huge success and I hope that you enjoy this refresh!
Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
20. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1,712.32 per hour
26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
30. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
31. Only 14% trust advertisements
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
33. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
38. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
42. Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

BBC reveals Salford timetable according to The Guardian

Tara Conlan has written an article outlining the timetable for BBC departments to move to Media City.

Three relocation "waves" have been devised as part of the BBC's "migration plan", details of which have been seen by MediaGuardian.co.uk, to move around 2,300 jobs to Salford, starting in May next year.

"Wave 1" runs between May and July 2011 and those due to move then include BBC2 hit Dragons' Den, Question of Sport, many CBeebies and CBBC staff, marketing and finance employees in children's and sport, Learning production management and staff in comedy and drama who are already based in Manchester.


Those who will relocate from London to Salford in "wave 2" between August and October 2011 including Newsgathering London and Leeds, some Radio 5 Live management and commissioning staff, most of the BBC Academy, children's show Newsround, CBBC drama and acquisitions, and the Mobile Apps team.

Among the "wave 3" departments set to move in November and December 2011 or in 2012 are the remainder of Radio 5 Live management and commissioning, future, media and technology homepage staff, digital distribution operation North and BBC Breakfast, which the migration plans says is "likely Easter 2012".

For the details then you can find the article here at The Guardian web site.

Interns could claim unpaid wages

According to the How Do web site an Employment Tribunal ruling means that unpaid interns could now be entitled to claim back the national minimum wage, even if they originally agreed to work for nothing.

The National Union of Journalists is also calling on fellow unions and organisations opposed to free internships to join its campaign to end them.
“We will play our part in the campaign to bring exploitative employers to book, using minimum wage legislation and other legal means, to steadily change internship culture from one of exploitation to one of genuine learning opportunities,” said NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear.
The crucial case came in November last year, when the Reading Employment Tribunal ruled in favour of an intern who worked for a production company in London. Despite agreeing only to receive expenses, she later decided to seek payment after the internship ended. The tribunal recognised that a worker is entitled to the National Minimum Wage - whether or not they have agreed to work for nothing.
It potentially opens the door to anyone who has worked as an unpaid intern, to recover up to £232 per 40-hour week.
Interns could claim unpaid wages “This practice continues to exploit dreams and exclude new talent, undermining the diversity of our profession, just when we should be nurturing and supporting the people coming into the industry,” continued Dear.
To recover the minimum wage through an Employment Tribunal, you would have to make the claim no later than 3 months after a payment would have been due.
Should you fall beyond this, yet within 6 years of finishing the internship, you can apply through the county courts.
This ruling does not apply to students on work experience placements.