BBC Local Video

~ the obit ~

The BBC costed it at up to £68 million over four years and staffed it at roughly 400 people. Video journalism would have appeared on about sixty of the corporation's local websites, from the English regions out to the nations, and it would have been the biggest expansion of BBC local news since local radio. On 21 November 2008 the BBC Trust read the proposal its own management had written and turned it down.

The idea had already been tried at small scale. A pilot branded Local TV started in the West Midlands on 1 December 2005, with video journalists working out of six centers that shared offices with BBC local radio. Their reports went out on digital satellite through the red button, on page 1700, and onto the BBC's local web pages for the region. The trial ran about nine months and stopped in the summer of 2006.

What killed the national version was not the journalism. The Trust put the proposal through a public value test, and the market impact half of that test was carried out by Ofcom, which found that commercial local media stood to lose up to four percent of annual revenue if the service launched. The Trust weighed that loss against the public benefit, decided the benefit was not large enough to justify either the money or the damage, and told management to spend the effort improving the local services it already had.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pilot ~

The West Midlands trial is the part worth remembering, because it worked. A video journalist with a small camera could cover a planning row or a flooded street, cut the piece alone, and have it on a local page the same day. That was genuinely new production economics for regional news in 2005, and the BBC had the transmission path already built through the red button and the local web estate.

~ who objected ~

Regional newspaper groups were the loudest objectors, and their argument was not that the BBC would do it badly. It was that the BBC would do it for free, on license fee money, in exactly the market those publishers were trying to move into as their print revenue collapsed. The Conservative opposition took up the same case. Ofcom's assessment gave the argument a number, and a number is what a regulator can act on.

None of this reached me. It was a fight about a license fee and a public broadcaster's remit, both of which are national arrangements, and Turkey's version of those questions looked nothing like Britain's. I read about it years later as a piece of media policy history rather than as something I could have used.

~ the day it died ~

The Trust announced the rejection on 21 November 2008, and there was no appeal to make. The pilot had ended two years before and the proposal had no route back, so the money went elsewhere in the BBC's budget. Local video on BBC pages did eventually arrive, in pieces, through general development of the website rather than through a funded local news service.

The regional newspapers won the ruling and then had the worst decade in their history anyway, for reasons that had nothing to do with the BBC.

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