Another hectic day for the BBC News channel yesterday. More Boris Johnson – there’s always more Johnson; more charting the twists and turns of a government in a downward spiral; more on Prince Harry and the royal true-life drama; more on protests in Greece and military spending in China; more on a historic deal to protect the oceans. All slickly and calmly done, this is the BBC, but the backdrop is turmoil.
Coming at a time of great political and technological upheaval, when viewers, especially young ones, are losing faith in journalism, the pressure is on for the launch of the new BBC News channel in April. The revamped service will combine and replace BBC World News, aimed at international audiences and funded by adverts and subscriptions, and the BBC News channel, a domestic service funded by the licence fee. The ancestors of the two channels were established in a blizzard of channel launches in the 1990s – a time when they said things could only get better.
Few inside the BBC will talk openly about the changes, but one veteran of a domestic channel watched by 12 million people calls it a “shitshow”. Older presenters, often women, look to be losing out, suggesting that the BBC has learned little from the equal pay furore. The Times quoted one journalist saying: “It’s going to crash and burn like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s experiment.” Unlike in the 1990s, when the founders of the first rolling radio news service talked of having “a pot of money and a blank sheet”, this time there is very little money and a lot of angry people.
It is a mess, but one not wholly or even mainly of the BBC’s making. The plans also happen to make sense.
Let’s be clear: the merger of two channels meant to serve two very different audiences is mainly due to cost cutting. Successive Conservative cuts mean funding for UK services is already 30% lower than a decade ago in real terms. After George Osborne’s licence fee settlement in 2010 shifted the burden of World Service news on to the BBC, the hammer blow was delivered by Nadine Dorries. The short-lived culture secretary-turned-TalkTV host froze the licence fee a year ago, leaving the BBC with a £400m-a-year funding gap by 2027 in a period of increasing inflation.
It is fair to say, as a former BBC head of television news has, that BBC number crunchers had been eyeing the duplicate costs of running two live news channels for a long time. Slashed budgets and the declining numbers of viewers caring whether video is carried on a channel or online has finally allowed them to have it their way.
The new channel will be mainly funded by the licence fee, and there will be advertising for viewers outside the UK (although as rolling news has never really made much money, the point could be moot). As a result, the biggest criticism of the new channel has been that licence-fee payers will be forced to subsidise a worse service.
This is not just a matter of meeting viewer demand but the BBC meeting its licence fee obligations of universal news provision for the public good. The sort of stories the BBC has to do to fulfil its public purpose – from showing the impact of the Northern Ireland protocol to evidence of the cost of living crisis a year on – could be lost if the managers of the new channel are distracted by news from the US that advertisers prefer. Ofcom has so far said very little about the planned service, but it will be the job of the media regulator to make sure those obligations are met.
The technology does exist to provide separate live feeds for domestic viewers when national news needs more focus. But, as ever, the proof will be in the pudding. “How is it going to work when it’s no longer the breaking news international viewers want but it still really matters in the UK?” asks one BBC veteran, who called the proposals “heartbreaking”. British viewers still care when floods in Cumbria leave villagers without a bed for the night, even if floods in Bangladesh have killed thousands.
A rare positive voice among former BBC news executives is Richard Sambrook, who says that the corporation should be able to “make a success of a channel with a higher proportion of international news – that would be a public service and differentiate it further from other commercial channels in the UK”.
The brilliant public service television provided by the current BBC news channel and its dedicated staff deserves more money, and in an ideal world would not be paired with one supported by commercial sponsorship, but we are far from living in an ideal world. This plan could work well if done in the right way: globally facing live news coverage is needed now more than ever, and not just for younger audiences. World News provided some great coverage, but it never quite made sense as a standalone beast with its own team.
Another focus, as ever when looking to the future, is on the young. Figures from Ofcom show that while a quarter of all adults watch the BBC News channel, making it the fourth biggest news source after BBC One, ITV and Facebook, just 17% of 16- to 24-year-olds do, after many other sources including Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and WhatsApp.
Of course, the quest for young viewers does risk making BBC executives look a bit sad. In 1997, BBC News 24 (the former incarnation of the BBC News channel) made corporation history, not for launching Auntie into the brave new digital age, but for the appearance of the BBC’s first jacketless news presenter. Gavin Esler, in a dark blue shirt and white stripy tie, was one of a roster of new faces trying not to look like a corporate suit in order to attract younger people.
Twenty-five years later and BBC managers are encouraging reporters on the new channel to dress down, this time to improve trust. Naja Nielsen, digital director of BBC News, reportedly told staff that “sweaty and dirty” looks more “trustworthy” than those who look as if they’re at an awards ceremony. Smartphone camera reporting is encouraged for the TikTok generation. Witness the BBC’s enthusiasm for Anna Foster filming the devastation after the earthquake in Turkey with just her mobile phone.
Trust is a key challenge for all journalists in an age of deep fakes and political upheaval, but particularly for the BBC, whose history and funding make it important both for the British people and as a means of spreading “Britishness” overseas. Its public service at home has helped make it one of the most trusted news brands in the US and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the domestic BBC News channel is watched by 12 million people in the UK and was up for a Royal Television Society award for its coverage of the queen’s death. A very different channel will record the king’s coronation in May – the challenge is to convince the naysayers that the only way is not down.
Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist
