Out With A Bang

Tis only Thursday; so Tuesday’s gathering of the great and the media good – and me – in Committee Room 14 of the House of Commons is still relatively fresh in the mind.

Given it was all conducted on Chatham House rules and given my knowledge of licence fee slicing and switch-over surplusses is sketchy at best, it probably needs to be a case of broader brush-strokes anyway.

The stage, by and large, belonged to the big beasts of TV; that – to me – appeared to be one of the primary concerns of the gathering; to work out who was ever going to fill the 6pm regional news slot on a ‘Channel 3′ – the one that used to be the province of many an ex-Evening News pal on Anglia TV.

Fortunately, the man from OfCom has a plan – a plan that he sketched out before us; and would repeat again elsewhere…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/28/ofcom-ed-richard-local-tv-news

He even had some numbers; a £40-£60 million price tag… money that the BBC today swiftly tried to ring-fence. It ain’t coming out of our pot… was the thrust of the BBC Trust’s argument.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/30/bbc-trust-michael-grade-itv-local-news

All of which had me thinking back to Mark Potts’ recent piece on ‘Herding Cats’…

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2009/04/herding-cats.html

How the notion of bolting the BBC – in, of course, their new-found spirit of ‘co-operation’ – in alongside whatever rump is left of the ITV’s regional news arm and then splicing in whichever of the regional newspaper groups ‘fits’ with that particular, regional TV fiefdom in the hope that they’ll all somehow get on, appears a mite fanciful…

Why not throw in some content from the local councils and complete the ’set’?

These people don’t get on; they don’t mix. And I’m not even sure that when faced with a climate of ‘Adapt or die…’ they’ll be able to bury the hatchet anywhere else but in eachother’s back.

Certainly that was Mark’s experience of trying to work with newspaper consortia… And I’m not sure ITV, the BBC, ITN, Press Association, or whoever else came along to the party would prove any different to AN Other newspaper group. It’s not in their genes to mix.

‘Getting newspapers to agree to work together on anything is well-nigh impossible,’ Mark recalls.

‘I worked for New Century Network… Nine big newspaper companies that could barely agree on when and where to meet, much less on the substantive issues that have turned out to be increasingly fatal to the print business.

‘After that, I worked for Classified Ventures, another newspaper consortium, and saw the same fractious behavior torpedo best-laid plans. It’s just the way newspaper companies are. They don’t play well with others—even within the same ownership group, much with other newspaper companies…’

And TV companies?

But I have a bigger problem with the whole notion of “independently funded news consortia” riding to the rescue of regional news.

Cos, for me, the web doesn’t do regional; it does not recognise such parochial boundaries as Anglia, TyneTees or Granada. And nor does the punter want regional.

Or even ‘local’. Given that my current ‘local’ news on be it either BBC or ITV stretches from Beccles to Bedford and all points of the East Anglian compass in between… when all I’d probably watch would be the odd, five-minutes of Loddon TV. With a dash of Norwich TV and Beccles TV sandwiched in between.

For me, thinking that six or seven regional news ‘patches’ supplied by six or seven local media consortia can ride to our rescue is simply a case of big media and big Government trying to find a solution that fits with their ‘big’ view of the world. And imposing that ‘big’ answer on the rest of us.

And that’s what you can’t do. Impose. Not on MySpace. My web space. My web life.

Don’t dictate to me. Or decide for me. This is what you’re getting. At Six O’Clock. On Channel 3. News from Bedford when you live in a sleepy town just outside Beccles.

Big is bust; big is broken.

Small is the new big. And what the web embraces, encourages and empowers is the individual – ask Susan Boyle. By the end of that week she was a bigger ‘brand’ than both ITV and Britain’s Got Talent. Because 19 million individual YouTube viewers had taken her to their hearts.

It is a lesson that HM Government needs to grasp quickly – and use to its advantage.

Because individual empowerment comes cheap; we can empower and enable a new army of village and postcode ‘TV reporters for £50,000; not £50 million. Tis the price of one starter pack.

A ‘home-brew’ kit for every NUJ and UNITE member out there who fears for both for their family’s future and for the future of an industry that they still love.

It’s cheap because I already own a mobile phone; makes me a producer of video content. Likewise I own a lap-top. Makes me a digital broadcaster.

No, I’m not a news reporter. Football’s my thing. But Linda on www.darwenreporter.com does news; so does James at TowcesterNews, etc, etc…

It’s just them, their hyper-local community, their mobile phone and their lap-top. And no herding cats.

For me, all concerned need to go back and read Anthony Lilley’s visionary piece on a now-aborted Public Service Platform…

http://www.openmedianetwork.org.uk/anewapproach/default.htm

Commissioned by OfCom, therein lies some big, 21st Century truths; telling insights that don’t bode well for anyone thinking that there is a ‘big’ answer to our small news needs; that we can re-impose ourselves on what was once our audience… that those in possession of ‘closed technologies’ will form the centre-piece of local news survival…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=26

This is telling; about how any new ‘consortia’ imposed upon us all from above would have to clear new hurdles in terms of its brand development…

“Traditionally, the development of a well-established brand in the media ecology has been a slow and expensive process [er, between £40-£60 million...] - particularly where direct to consumer propositions are concerned.

“However, more recently, brands such as Google and eBay have developed not simply as a result of external marketing and branding exercises but as a result of the way in which they have offered services which have effectively harnessed and resonated with the essential participatory nature of the interactive, networked media…

That line is worth repeating: ‘resonated with the essential participatory nature of the interactive, networked media…

Networks that don’t stop at the border between TyneTees and Yorkshire; what resonates with people these days? Being empowered to participate in the conversation that is news; to join this new, small cottage industry that the likes of Linda at www.darwenreporter.com are pioneering out of one small town in Lancashire.

Last September we again let Anthony Lilley and his Magic Lantern shed some light on the current gloom; backpackdave08 was that month’s Susan Boyle…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=143

Once again, the lessons were there to be had…

“The availability of low cost digital production and post-production technologies is driving an unprecedented surge in creation, modification and remixing of content by the people formerly known as the audience… “

‘Low cost digital production…’ That’s a mobile phone.

‘Post-production technologies…’ That’s YouTube. [And it's Mark and Matt from bestbefore.tv; it's AudioBoo, etc...]

‘By the people formerly known as the audience…’ That’s backpackdave08. [And Susan Boyle... ]

There is one, final point to this idea that the future of news is small; and is networked; and never in a month of Sundays needs £60 mill to fulfill.

It’s which way, I, as politician would want to lean.

Because backpackdave08 and those of his FaceBook generation ilk are, in every likelihood, the kind of constituents who hold the key to my re-election.

It’s the whole Obama thing; that you have to digitally engage with your voters; get to where they are currently leading their lives without us.

And if I was, say, Andy Burnham, and someone in my Greater Manchester constituency opted to take a leaf out of our Linda’s book and – perhaps with their GMG redundancy cash – took the same leap of faith that we all have and launched www.leighreporter.com, I’d be very interested in digitally engaging with that audience…

Particularly if I knew that I could, say, add a # tag to a Leigh postcode and one #WN7 Twitter later, I was publising my every policy thought and voting deed to the people who really mattered to me – my constituents – I’d be looking at the virtues of small in a wholly different light.

Because faced with the choice of trying to get my say once a month on some unwieldy ChannelM/BBCNorthWest/Trinity/PA type consortium or participating in a daily, digital conversation with the community that could gather around the EveryBlocks that make up www.leighreporter.com I know how I’d spend my time.

And it wouldn’t be herding cats.