The BBC’s online operation may be harming local newspapers, Home Secretary Theresa May told today’s Society of Editors conference.
In a keynote address this morning, Ms May revealed she had held talks with her local newspaper, the Maidenhead Advertiser, about the future of the industry and highlighted the BBC as major factor in its current difficulties.
The Home Secretary said that by becoming the dominant player in providing local news online, the corporation had prevented other operators from entering the market.
And she urged the BBC to “think carefully” about its local presence.
Ms May told the conference: “Local newspapers are having a particularly hard time. That has partly been the result of the BBC’s dominant position on the internet, and its ability to subsidise the provision of internet news using the licence fee.
“This makes it enormously difficult for local newspapers to compete. If the BBC can, as they do, provide all the locally significant news, what is left to motivate the local reader to buy a paper?
“It is destroying local newspapers and it could eventually happen to national newspapers as well.
“This is as dangerous for local politics as it is for local journalism.
“I have had a number of conversations with both the Editor and Managing Director of my main local newspaper, the Maidenhead Advertiser, about the impact of the BBC locally and the importance of keeping an alternative local news source.
“As a local MP I value the ability to raise issues in my local newspaper but also its role in disseminating information about what I and local councillors are doing in the area.
“The “Tiser”, as it has long been known, is very influential locally and fiercely independent. People read it because it tells them what is happening in their locality and it would be a sad day if the might of the BBC affected its availability.
“This is a debate that won’t go away and I believe that the BBC has to think carefully about its presence locally and the impact that has on local democracy.”
However asked by Sunday Post editor and DC Thomson editor-in-chief Donald Martin what the government planned to do about it, Ms May said it was up to the BBC.
“There is a need for the BBC to think about its own operation,” she said, adding: “We are not about to legislate.”
“The challenge is achieving a change in behaviour without banning particular outlets from operating in particular markets,” she said.
“The BBC online dominates the market in a way that prevents others from being able to come in.”
In her speech Ms May also said that people more willing to believe what they read in local newspapers than national newspapers.
And she said that whatever comes out of the press regulation debate “must meet the needs of local newspapers.”
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Don’t know what planet May is on, but where I work the BBC’s local online and TV news is woeful. On a Monday morning they’ll regularly run with stories local papers ran two weeks earier and have clearly put them ‘in the bank’. The press where I live is under more threat from social media pages than anything the BBC puts out.
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Agree with the above.
Also the local BBC news pages link to other local media websites, with a set policy on using them, so direct readers to newspapers which may have more in-depth local knowledge and coverage of an event.
Journalists on other local media are also invited to comment on stories, and in some counties at least there is a dedicated slot on drive-time radio for one paper each night to promote their next edition with a two-way interview between a news editor/reporter and the presenter about the stories it will feature.
Finally what is the BBC supposed to do – not cover something because it might be covered by a different news outlet?
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The BBC only do regional news – not local news as in concentrating on a particular town or city. Local newspaper companies only have themselves to blame for the mess they’re in.
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This situation is not the fault of the BBC. Many weekly newspapers have moved their editorials to a central location outside of these small towns. The exercise in centralising the news operation has led to management slicing the number of journalists it employs and forcing the ones that remain to cover an increasingly bigger geographic area. The news gap is evident if one takes a look at local court and or council meetings, many of which go unreported. Put together with falling advertising revenues this situation is unlikely to improve. What I believe we need to have is a Royal Commission to identify the role of local media and whether publishers should be funded to keep people in a fully functioning democracy informed and at the same time people in public positions answerable to residents. So Mrs May could exercise her energies not into blaming the BBC but asking who should pay to ensure citizens are kept informed!
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The BBC’s local online coverage is the opposite of public service.
It damages better private sector provision by taking away audience and it provides a far shallower coverage.
Despite being woeful, the BBC brand is enough to entice many people away from local press websites.
It either needs to be better funded and provide truly local coverage (which would annoy newspaper) or it needs to simply withdraw from the local markets.
A better use of the licence fee would be to support local news coverage where local newspapers don’t exist, or support local newspapers (but ensuring they provide proper council and court coverage).
I’m not totally against BBC local though. They’ll probably need to step into the gap when local papers finally go to the wall in the next few years.
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I’m a local news journalist, and the major problem here is the BBC simply nicks stories we’ve run first, doesn’t ever bother moving them on and then presents them as their own.
After putting them online, the radio teams phone up the people involved and then they run lengthy radio features using the information we’ve got and worked for and then they present it as the “great work of the BBC”, it drives me mad.
They sometimes credit us, but mostly present it as their own.
Worse still, people think because it’s the BBC, it’s us who have nicked off them.
I know there’s no copyright on news, but to have a publicly funded organisation with infinitely more resources than impoverished local newspapers actively dominating the market leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.
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The BBC is an easy target. For me the main threats to the local press seem to be:
1) Awful websites, not designed with the reader in mind, cramming as much as possible on the page.
2) Most journalists don’t seem to know how to write digital content.
3) Many people now get their local news from social media.
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I must admit I share some of your frustration with the public misconceiving where a story comes from once it has been on the BBC. I remember one instance where there’d been a lot of lead thefts. We ran a story. About three+ weeks later, the BBC ran a story about lead thefts, I contacted the police thinking there’d been another spate of thefts, and it turns out the BBC had only just got round to reporting something we’d covered weeks earlier.
Any member of the public seeing that broadcast will then likely have been wondering why we hadn’t covered it when our next issue came out, when in fact we had but we’d covered it so much quicker that the public couldn’t remember it being in the paper any more.
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May has jumped on the right-wing ‘bash the Beeb’ bandwagon. As others have said, the coverage of local news is poor and it can hardly be a threat. Even my local BBC radio station has reduced its news coverage from what it was 20 years ago.
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OK. So do the Tories now only like the notion of competition and a free, open-trading economy when it suits them or only when they’re not generate income from selling something in public ownership?
The brutal truth is that the BBC’s visible because they got their first. Local newspapers still don’t get the web and, in so doing, are writing their own obituary – I mean, have you seen a local newspaper website recently? Simply ghastly.
Let’s not lose sight here – there’s a difference between the press and the papers here. Local press isn’t struggling to output news it’s simply that the notion of the press is shifting away from companies that print newspapers towards those with the ability to publish (blog) online. The press is very much alive and kicking, what we’re seeing here is the death of a lazy business model that couldn’t be bothered to evolve.
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Have to heartily agree with most of the other posters. May is hoping to get a good write-up in the Daily Mail and is twisting the debate in the process.
The local coverage on the BBC website is tiny and the big newspaper groups should look at their own ways of operating and stop cheerleading the Daily Mail. It nicks just as many of the local press’ stories as the BBC and dresses them up as “exclusives”.
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If this had all been said a decade ago, and the BBC had listened, then perhaps local newspapers could have charged for their content and people would have paid because there was no alternate local news source.
But it wasn’t, and it’s now all too late. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
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The local press doesn’t need to blame the BBC for its decline. The greed of the big media companies, and their lack of understanding for the importance of what matters locally….both in news values and commercial terms….is doing the job well enough, thanks.
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Let’s get one thing straight. Most local newspapers are not impoverished. Their owners make hundreds of millions a year.
Just because they decide to starve their papers of the staffing and resources needed to produce a strong product has nothing to do with any other corporation’s news output.
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I agree with phil and grungebucket
bad management ,poor leadership,a yes man culture to the big bosses,a head in the sand mentality and a monopoly on print mediums in many areas has led local regional media to the sorry state theyre in now,blaming the BBC and their good local news sites for being one of the prime sources of up to date news as it happens is really scraping the barrel.
If local press concentrated more on what they are or were good at and made their print titles readable and value for money,if their websites didnt look like theyd been designed by a comittee and if the sales reps werent forced to push a web ad alongside a print ad( or instead of in some cases)then their products,print and web might be seen as go to sites
wake up guys,social media has taken over and regional press is getting left way behind,face facts,the fault lies very firmly on your own complacent doorsteps and not that of the beeb
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I’d echo many of the comments above. The simple fact of the matter is local newspapers are, by and large, run by big media companies who expect an unrealistic profit margin to please their shareholders. There has been years of cuts rather than investment, leaving local news rooms understaffed and unable to cover local news fully. There should be no way that a local BBC news department can compete with a well run local newspaper but, thanks to managerial decisions, this is what has happened.
Local newspapers are increasingly dictated to by accountants and middle management who want profit above all else (including content). Ideally they want crowd-sourced free content and then only employ a handful of people to copy and paste it together.
Ms May has fallen into the rut of BBC bashing. Even if the BBC closed tomorrow local papers would not take on more staff and increase content.
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Local press ‘harming local press’, says me.
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