March 2010
“Ben Terrett’s Newspaper Club won in the Graphics category in the Design Of The Year thingat the Design Museum. Which I’m especially pleased about because, if anything, what we do is remove the graphic design from things.”
—Russell Davies, in 1966 weeks, his weeknote.
Licence Fees Across Europe
After reading one too many commentary pieces on the fall-out of the BBC’s Digital Strategy Review, and hearing the odd friend suggest that the British didn’t know how good they had it, I decided to complile a Google spreadsheet of TV licence fees across Europe.
Once I had a first version out, Chris suggested that I should add a column stating whether there was an ad-free state broadcaster, and that’s there now; there’s also a heatmap visualisation.
Unfortunately, the GBP Equivalent column seems a bit fragile- Google Finance hiccups every now and again and it doesn’t work. Publishing also seems not to allow nice formatting (‘£145.20’ not ‘145.2’), so I’m linking directly to the editing page. Still, hopefully there’s stuff of interest for people there.
The British Junk Food Report
rentzsch wrote an interesting post on some of the junk food he tried while in the UK for NSConference:
The absolute most-important thing for a U.S.-based traveler to the U.K. is knowing what junk food you should load up on while there. Here’s our report:
Kit Kat Chunky: DON’T BUY. There are far better things to spend 260 (!) calories on.
Really? I love Kit Kat Chunky, although I have a particularly soft spot for the allegedly limited edition Caramel variant. Maybe I’m just dull, or perhaps the mix of biscuit and chocolate is just more my sort of thing.
Wispa: BUY. This was the least-interesting bar to me, but came up the biggest winner.
Its very concept didn’t appeal to me: an “aerated” chocolate bar. More than anything, it seemed like a hack to give you less chocolate for the same price.
If you try only one chocolate bar while in the UK, I recommend Wispa.
Wispa has a competitor, Aero, which is more air, less chocolate. It also comes in a mint version. Personally I find them a bit too light, but occasionally they’re right.
Wheatabix: BUY. Apparently these are State-side, but I never noticed or tried them until I arrived in London. They’re like a fine-grained Shredded Wheat that dissolves much more rapidly in milk. Yummy, if you’re the kind who likes soggy shredded wheat (I do).
Minor correction: the product is called Weetabix. I don’t eat breakfast cereals, though, so I have no other comment.
(Tumblr is stripping the style attributes from the span tags. Sigh.)
“Tories might reread Labour’s 1983 manifesto and accept that although the big economic argument of that year (private ownership or public ownership?) has been won, the big sociocultural argument (Christian traditionalism or secular pluralism?) has been lost. Given its stress on economic planning, Labour’s 1983 manifesto does look archaic. But so does the 1983 Tory manifesto, given its stress on marriage-based households and its reluctance to admit alternative family structures.”
—Richard Kelly, writing in New Statesman in 2003: Not as daft as you thought, on the only Labour general election manifesto while Michael Foot was leader.
“The BBC’s own Public Purposes, stated in its own charter [all] bellow for investment in network internet content, which will increasingly, inevitably, ineluctably do a better job of achieving these purposes than TV, whether broadcast or on-demand. […] Rather “the Internet” is again and again stated to be core to the future of the way the BBC reaches its audiences — but only if the output of the BBC is restricted to linear programming and the internet is a new pipe for this linear programming.”
—Paul Bennun at Somethin’ Else posting a Our Response to the BBC Strategic Review.
“The [report] is a concession to the whiskery rightwing argument that the BBC should meet only those needs that are not provided for elsewhere. If the BBC has no need to address teens because C4 already does that, why does it bother with sport, given that Sky does that; or news, since there’s always ITN? Follow that logic, and the corporation would end up exactly where its commercial rivals want it to be: as a subscriber service for a handful of tiny audiences whose niche tastes are so unprofitable no one else will cater to them.”
—
Jonathan Freedland, in a comment piece for the Guardian: The BBC is caving in to a Tory media policy dictated by Rupert Murdoch.
Some would argue that this is a reductio ad absurdum argument, but I think it gets to the heart of why I’m worried about the report: if the BBC is shrinking, where will it stop?
(My main disagreement with his piece is the blithe acceptance that online content can be scaled back, but I’ve covered that elsewhere.)
“How can the BBC say, with a straight face, that the internet is “the future for the BBC” while cutting its budget by 25%? Exactly how do you improve the site’s quality and consistency by closing half the sections? If it were that simple, why not cut everything the BBC does by 25%?”
—Adrian Hon: Back to the Future: The BBC is still dead.
“while consumption of media continues to evolve with the rise of on-demand content across different platforms (as we shall see in upcoming Forrester reports) the BBC’s response seems lacking in conviction. Where the BBC once led fearlessly, it now seems fearful and curiously out of step.”
—
Nick Thomas on The Forrester Blog, in a post titled “
Does the BBC still believe in digital?”
Birtspeak 2.0
The BBC should also make a step-change towards simplicity in its operations and structure, dismantling the remaining elements of its traditional hierarchy and replacing them with a flatter, more dynamic and flexible structure that reflects the nature of the BBC’s new challenges: wholly focused on serving the public with fewer management layers; better team-working and pan-BBC collaboration; and stronger performance management.
Sigh.
“The BBC Trust’s recent review of Radio 6 Music confirmed that it is popular amongst its fan base and its music offering is distinctive. However, although it has achieved good growth in recent years, it has low reach and awareness and delivers relatively few unique listeners to BBC radio. And whilst 6 Music does not have a target demographic audience, its average listener age of 37 means that it competes head-on for a commercially valuable audience. Boosting its reach so that it achieved appropriate value for money would significantly increase its market impact. Given the strength of its popular music radio offering from Radio 1 and 2 and the opportunity to increase the distinctiveness of Radio 2, the BBC has concluded that the most effective and efficient way to deliver popular music on radio is to focus investment on these core networks.”
—The BBC Strategy Review on 6music, which will be assimilated by Radio 2, so their “distinctiveness” can be added to the older station’s own. It remains to be seen whether resistance is futile.
