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Fry renews calls for BBC cap on local stories

A leading regional publisher has renewed calls for a strict cap on the number of local stories the BBC can put on its websites.

John Fry, chief executive of Johnston Press, said in a national newspaper interview that the limit should be set at three stories per day.

He says that unless the BBC’s local ambitions are controlled, regional newspaper groups will never be able to charge for digital content.

The demand for a cap was a key plank of the Newspaper Society’s response to the BBC’s strategy review earlier this year.

Mr Fry told the Daily Telegraph he had written to the BBC Trust calling for it to limit the number of local stories it can publish on the internet in a geographical area.

“We’ve not got a response yet, as it is part of a wider review. The danger is that it could be pushed into the long grass,” he told the newspaper.

His comments echo those made by Stephan Phillips, managing director of Archant Norfolk, at the WAN-IFRA conference in Hamburg this week.

He said: “As long as we have competition from the BBC, with the publicly-funded nature of this service and its known ambitions to expand in local markets, it will be impossible for us to have a viable charging mechanism.”

However Mr Fry appeared again to rule out erecting paywalls on JP’s newspaper websites following the abortive experiment experiment earlier this year.

Instead he again suggested that charging for iPhone and iPad apps were the way forward, echoing comments made in an earlier interview with the Daily Mail.

“We’ve had 15 years of free. We’ve educated the audience that news sites on the internet are free. And so, with technological change, particularly in the mobile arena, I think that gives a different platform for consumers.

“It is partly a cultural thing. So, if everybody’s paying for it, it’s easier to work within that context. If everyone says it’s free, then it’s difficult.”

As part of its strategy review, the BBC issued what it claimed was a firm pledge not to introduce news services at a more local level than currently exist.

But the NS has already argued that the corporation’s so-called ‘contract for local’ does not go nearly far enough.

6 comments

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  • October 15, 2010 at 10:59 am
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    So Mr Fry wants to ration the number of local stories on the BBC. What absolute pap. Far better surely, to improve the quality of his own products by investing in them with quality journalists enabled to do their job properly. The great British public will then make up its mind where it wants to hearits local news, and I’m afraid Mr Fry that force-feeding them regurgitated press releases is not going to win them over.

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  • October 15, 2010 at 12:11 pm
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    Welcome to the real world! The British Broadcasting Corporation thats where my license fee goes for the content I wish to read.

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  • October 15, 2010 at 12:34 pm
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    The licence fee is likely to increase temendously if the BBC’s local ambitions aren’t curbed. And we all know it’s hardly a fair game with the BBC involved – it has a constant and guaranteed income from licence-holders, while the rest of the business has to rely on advertising in the current economic climate. The two commenters above should educate themselves.

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  • October 18, 2010 at 8:54 am
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    What utter pap. The BBC is, and always has been, crap at gathering local news. It has always leeched from its local evening/weekly and paid for contact details if it wants to follow up. It was ever thus. Mr Fry can’t put his local papers behind a paywall because they are garbage and no-one will pay for the thin content. The papers are bad enough, but the web pages are piss-poor. The searches don’t work; the classifieds are shoddy but prohibitively expensive and the news content is sparse in the extreme. Johnston Press takes good, local papers, asset-strips them, drains the blood and raises the cover price until the formerly loyal readers give up in despair. Mr Fry, you are killing the geese that used to lay you the golden eggs and there is no-one left to blame but yourself.

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  • October 18, 2010 at 10:34 am
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    Never mind the web – it’s the way the regional newsrooms lift our exclusives and then fob off the viewers with the impression that THEY did all the work. They don’t even bother to verify the facts now (presumably because they know we are spot-on).

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  • October 20, 2010 at 9:42 am
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    Digital has a future but not on weekly paper websites. Let’s be honest. Who would pay for the sort of worthy but largely dull stuff that makes up a large chunk of weekly paper copy?

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