Nicky Schiller
Senior Broadcast Journalist, BBC (over looking news on BBC3 and the
forthcoming one minute news bulletin on BBC1 at 8pm)
How does the problem of younger viewers not watching television news
impact on you?
To a certain extent my audience is already watching the channel, in terms of
when I’m doing BBC3, because I have a younger audience who are already
watching, whether it be Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, a Doctor Who
repeat or anything, and my overriding aim, which is strange in news, is not to lose
the channel an audience at that time. I always say I’m there to give them some
information but my audience is never going to tune in [to BBC3] for the news, my
audience is going to find the news when it’s there and I hope to give them some
information but it’s not an appointment to view, whereas all other news tends to
be stuff where people know the Six O’Clock news is on so they’ll tune in for it.
Younger audiences won’t do that in the same way as older audiences do.
Is that idea, that younger audiences won’t come to appointment to view
news bulletins, a recent thing at the BBC?
Well we’ve always had that as BBC3, even when it was the early days of BBC
Choice. Our bulletins are definitely something that you…they’re not even at the
same time every day, they come in at the end of a film, which can be at 8.20, it
can be on the hour, it’s very variable, so it’s really something that you understand
the audience is there but you know that they’re not necessarily tuning in for [the
news] so you have to write and target the news for them in a different way than
you would if you knew they were just there to get news.
What about Liquid News, which had a regular position in the schedule?
Liquid started off on News 24, actually, as Zero 30, when News 24 first launched
and they did an entertainment slot. It them moved when BBC Choice was there
and Stuart Murphy was in charge, he liked Christopher Price and he liked the
show so they managed to sell it to Choice and that turned into BBC3, but that
was very entertainment orientated, again targeting the same profile of the people
watching the channel. But then the channel went through an evolution process
and decided it was going to do less entertainment and go down another route so
Liquid stopped. We carried on doing another news programme which was on for
about another year after Liquid finished and then for various reasons, budget
reasons, they decided not to put news on the channel in terms of a half hour
programme and just leave our bulletins.
I think maybe we were slightly ahead of our time in terms of the stuff we did. It’s
quite interesting, some of the things that we did are now being used in the
mainstream a lot more, the style of things has actually percolated through to
mainstream and actually a lot of what we did is where we’re looking at now in
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terms of on-demand platforms and I think we’ve skipped perhaps a generation
whereby a lot of the people we would want to target are now actually on-demand
type people and they’re getting their news in a different way. So we should be
looking at how we get it on to [on-demand], whether that be MySpace, whether it
be YouTube, whether it be what we provide on the news website, or what Radio
1 provides, where we know there’s an audience looking at what Chris Moyles is
doing. You’ve just got to give it to them in different ways rather than the
traditional let’s sit down for half an hour. Some people will watch that
[appointment to view news] but I think perhaps effort is better spent on different
areas that they’ve already progressed on to.
Is it not really a problem then that young people don’t want to watch
traditional terrestrial news bulletins as long as there are other ways for
them to access the news?
There’s a difference between not watching news in a traditional way and not
being interested in the news, they’re two different things. Yes you can look over
the figures for the last five years and see there has been a decline in younger
audiences and also C2D audiences who are watching the traditional television
news, whether that’s BBC1 or elsewhere, but I don’ think that means they’re not
interested in news. I think it just means they’re not people who are going to sit
down and watch the 6 O’Clock news because they’ve got other things and they
get their news and information from other places. Where this audience is
interested in the news they’re just not people who would sit down to an
appointment to view bulletin because they are living in an on-demand world
where if they want to find out what the football results are they will log on or use
their mobile phone to do it, and we have to change how we provide them with
that news as well as keeping the traditional audience happy at the same time.
For a long time there has been an assumption, a complacency, that while
young people were never really interested in watching television news that
wasn’t a long term problem because as they get older they’d migrate to the
news eventually. Is the worry now that younger generations now will never
come to the news even as they get older?
I don’t know, that’s something we’re going to have to wait 20 years to find out
whether it’s true or not. I know from my own news consumption that I get news in
a different way. I use my mobile phone quite a lot when I’m out and about to get
news information, I’ll use WAP or 3G to take a look at stuff, so I don’t know is the
answer. We have the problem that we can’t not serve them because if in 20
years time they don’t come back to us then we’re a bit stuffed as BBC news so
the fact that we have to do these new areas and try and target them in a different
way is sensible because not everybody sits down to watch the 6 or 10 O’Clock
news, particularly younger audiences.
Is there not competition between traditional news media and new media in
terms of resources and what the BBC should be concentrating on?
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I think that comes down to individuals. Some people have worked in traditional
areas all their life and of course they are very protective of their programmes or
areas and outlooks. We were very protective, I went through the BBC deciding to
decommission the half hour of news [on BBC3] and it was a painful period where
you thought, ‘we’re doing something really, really good here’ but for various
reasons they decided, no, this is not going to happen. We don’t know whether it’s
going to work, that’s part of the problem, but I think to not do it would definitely be
wrong because we know that there is an appetite in these on-demand areas for
material, particularly in a younger generation who are much more savvy in that
sense.
A lot of people say that in order to reach younger viewers you need to
redefine what news is on television, is that something you’d agree with?
There can be a very traditional view of what ‘news’ is, which tends to be and
older and more middle class view of what a news story is. Younger generations
don’t think about news in the same way. So, for example, stuff like Britney
Spears being in trouble today is just as newsworthy to them as a political
development. They don’t see it in the same way as older generations who see
entertainment as fluffy, light and of no consequence at all. I think the younger
generation take a much broader brush. It’s the same with sport. Certain sports
things are just as newsworthy to them as what we would class as traditional
news. Certainly on BBC3 we take a view that entertainment and sport are just as
important as traditional news. I would quite happily lead on a sports story if it
were of interest to that target audience. I would lead on an entertainment story.
They also have a different thing that they like to be entertained as well as
informed, so quirky stories, that lots of people would say ‘what’s the point of
doing that?’, they take as part of the whole package, they want to see something
funny as well as being informed. I think they have a more open mind as to what
they see as being classed as news than a very traditional sense of the word
news, which is tough for some people. I find it quite easy to say an entertainment
story is just as important as a political story but I know that in a traditional sense
that’s quite hard for some people to think that it is just as important.
Is that difference of opinion over what news is or should be reflected as
much within the news broadcasters as the audiences?
Yes, often. It’s a battle. It is something where people who work in the BBC are
very much traditional journalists, a lot of them, because they’ve done it for years
and there is a culture thing again. Because I’m slightly younger I think slightly
differently, and we’ve always done that on BBC3 and it’s percolating through a bit
more to other areas. But having said that you cannot be stupid about this. The
younger audience is absolutely…they notice when you do stupid things, so they
have a view on what they think of Britney and you have to still put your
journalistic hat on when you’re doing a story and still question it and say, ‘wasn’t
she stupid?’ and all the rest of the things that they’re thinking, so it’s not just a
puff or entertainment story, you have to be journalistically sound because this
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audience is as well. They understand what is a puff is and what is a news story
so you have to be quite careful. It’s like being knowing, I suppose. It’s easier for
people who understand the entertainment or sports world than for people who
are trying to seem like they know it. I think that’s quite key in what BBC news
does in having the specialisms within those areas to know when it’s a puff story
and when it’s actually a creditable story that we should be covering. You have to
have that knowledge to be able to do that.
Formally, the presentation of the news seems very conservative and slow
to change. Is it difficult to introduce changes?
I think it’s changed generally over the years. If you turn back five years and watch
what was on the 10 O’Clock news to what is on the 10 O’Clock news now there
has been a change, there has been a cultural change in the country generally to
not necessarily doing it in the same way, whether that be because of technology,
because of the way we do things and just the whole packaging of news is much
more in your face now than it has ever been and that’s very much a young
generation think, I think, that has come up in the same way that pop videos has
changed so news has changed to become much more trendy in the sense that
it’s much more produced than it ever used to be.
The plan to broadcast a one-minute news show at 8pm on BBC1 has been
criticised by some people after its trial in the Midlands. Much of the
criticism seems to come from people seeing this as a threat to general
news standards.
Everybody is entitled to their view. I come at it as this is more news on BBC1,
we’re not taking anything away from anybody, so it’s not going to change what
Newsnight does, it’s not going to change what the 10 O’Clock news does.
Everybody pays their licence fee within the whole social and age range, so we
know we have a percentage of audiences under 45, younger people and C2DEs,
who are not watching as much television news as they did. We know they’re
interested but some of the stuff we do doesn’t appeal to them, so all we’re trying
to do is appeal to this audience and give them news in a slightly different way.
You mentioned earlier that younger people have a different way of taking in
news. Just as Radio 1 will write a story in a different way to Radio 4, it’ll be the
same story but written in a totally different way because we understand what the
target audience is. So we have to engage the audience with the content that
you’re doing, so the job of what I’m doing on the 8 O’Clock is to take material that
is news but make it engaging to an audience that currently is not engaging in a
traditional sense in the way they do it. I understand that some people in certain
areas might see that as dumbing down but actually it’s much harder to write a
complicated story in 10 seconds for somebody to understand than it is to give me
a minute on Radio 4 to say the same story. So actually it is about sharpening up
what we do and taking the story and saying, right, what is this story all about and
how do I explain this in a way that a mass audience will understand? That’s quite
difficult but it’s something that we have to do otherwise we’re shutting off this
whole section of the audience.
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Is the reaction against it coming from the fact that people don’t like it being
done per se or they don’t like the BBC doing it?
I honestly don’t know is the answer. The research we’ve done amongst the target
group is that people do like it, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing,
so you have to see that in the future there are going to be different versions of
BBC news, there won’t necessarily be one size fits all and that may annoy some
people who’ve traditionally always had that one size, but just as I do different
things on BBC3 and Radio 1 does different things, the difference is that television
has traditionally been that one size fits all, particularly on BBC1. This is just
saying that at this particular time in the evening we know there’s a certain
audience watching so we’re going to be slightly different in how we tackle doing
that rather than it just being one size hoping to fit everybody.
Is this basically going to be the same as 60 Seconds news on BBC3?
There’s quite a lot of difference actually because 60 Seconds on BBC3 I know
my target audience is 24-35, perhaps becoming younger, 18-24, so there’s a very
specific age group that I’m targeting. It’s also on a niche channel, it’s not a
mainstream channel like BBC1 so the programming around it is all of a certain
kind. I’m targeting an audience that is used to having lots of things like pop
videos, they’re used to doing six things at once and still being able to take in
information. So I can target them with lots of tickers, I can target them with music
underneath, with boxes, and they can still take in all that information I’m giving
them. BBC1 is very different because it’s a mainstream channel of which 50 per
cent of the people watching at 8pm are going to be over 45. So I can’t annoy
them because they are paying their license fee as well, but I have to try and
attract the people who are under 45. So the thing we’re doing on BBC1 will be
very different from what we do on 60 Seconds in its style, in it’s pace, but still with
the same thought that I’m trying to target a specific audience while not annoying
another audience.
Will the news agenda change, will it be different stories for BBC3 and BBC1
viewers?
It will be slightly more traditional, because you’re on a traditional channel
whereas on BBC3 I would happily lead a lot of the time on entertainment or sport,
it will be different on BBC1. It will be the main news stories just told in a different
way. But just as the 6 O’Clock news may lead on a different story to the 10
O’Clock news the same will apply to what I do.
By putting a 60 second news show in primetime BBC1 that’s short enough
not to make too many people switch over, it could be said that you’re just
ticking boxes, enabling you to claim a certain audience has watched a
news programme without actually choosing to do so.
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The fact that they all pay their licence fee is very important to what we do. I
personally think that if you are paying we should be serving you in some way and
if we’re not, and the figures are showing they’re going down, then we should be
doing something to address that. I don’t think it’s ticking boxes in that sense. A lot
of what we do is leading them into other things we do. You have to take BBC
news as a whole, so whether it will be that they would then look online or
elsewhere. I certainly would never expect, when I’m dong 60 Seconds on BBC3,
to tell everybody everything, that’s not what that bulletin is about, that’s about
giving them an idea of what’s happening and then they are quite sensible enough
– people think they are not sensible and not intelligent but they actually are – to
then go and find out more themselves, to think, ‘oh, I’d quite like to find out more
about that and I know I can find it on the BBC news website or I know I can find it
on another source, whether that be Google or whatever’. It’s not like that is the
only bulletin they are going to see or the only news they are going to take in.
Whether they listen to Chris Moyles in the morning and they hear news on Radio
1, whether they surf past the BBC news website or some of them may sit down
and watch Paxman on Newsnight. You know, this is not the only place, it’s just
adding to our portfolio.
Within broadcasting there seems to be two messages coming through in
terms of what younger viewers want from the news. On the one hand some
people say they just want short stories, headline updates, the Metro style
editorially free bite-sized news. On the other hand some people say they
want more background, more in-depth stories, they want things explained
more. What’s your understanding of what young people want from the
news?
I think they want both. Again, they are intelligent people so sometimes all they
want to know is ‘has anything happened in the last hour, do I need to know
anything?’ That’s what those 60 Second bulletins are designed for, perhaps to
leave you with a smile on your face as well. If you want in-depth then the BBC
does a lot of in-depth stuff elsewhere. If you want your 10-minute pieces then
Newsnight will always carry on doing those pieces and you will always be able to
find that in-depth side of things. There may be an argument that we need to do
more in-depth things for a younger audience. News 24 has been experimenting
with Teen 24 and there are different projects in the BBC to try and do more things
for a younger audience of depth and in a long form, but you only have to look at
the viewing figures and the demographic of Panorama now that it’s moved into
Primetime and is on for half an hour and in a slightly different way, that is getting
a younger audience that is watching those sort of programmes than has done in
the past. There is an audience for both, I don’t think it’s one or the other.
One of the reasons young people say they don’t like the news is simply the
way it looks, it looks formal, authoritative and simply not for them, made by
old people, presented by old people, for old people.
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For me it’s about accessibility. Do you switch people off by what you’re doing?
Certainly on BBC3 we don’t wear ties. We look smart, we would look like a young
person would look going out for a smart dinner or whatever but we are not tied up
as if we were going for an interview or something like that because we don’t think
our audience wants that. It’s more like somebody they know telling them what’s
going on in a friendly style. The problem is that on something like BBC1 you are
actually talking to a mass-market audience and a lot of thinks alienate older
people, one of them is people not wearing ties.
Do they really care about that?
Yep. There is a tradition that people expect their newsreader to be older, with a
tie, sitting behind a desk. It’s something that we grow up with that that’s what
somebody reading the news does and it’s something psychological about it but
there is something about you have often an older man sitting behind a desk with
a tie and that’s who tells you the news. And if it’s not somebody like that some
people think you can’t take them seriously, even though they could be the best
journalist in the world, because they’re not wearing a tie and sitting behind a
desk, there’s something not right about that. It’s a psychological thing I think. I
don’t understand it and to a certain extent it is an older generation thing but there
is something psychological even amongst younger people. I did some research
that said that psychologically they think that their newsreader is shirt and tie
behind a desk.
Young people often say that one of the things that they hate most about the
news is the way stories about young people are invariably negative stories,
they are often portrayed as a problem of one sort or another. Do you think
young people are badly represented in the television news or is it the same
for everybody?
When we did some stuff for Teen 24 we spoke to some people and they were
quite split into some of them saying that’s what the news does, in that journalistic
side of shootings, stabbings whatever there’s bound to be a negative side and
that is what the news is about. There’s the other side that says you don’t often
always see the positive side of things. I think we could perhaps be better at
representing people a lot of the time. I know we’ve tried getting them to do the
reporting and I think that helps because it brings a different perspective. I use the
analogy quite a lot in what we do generally that it’s of the ‘dad in the disco’ thing.
Sometimes with certain subjects the person doing it seems like your dad trying to
be young and funky and they’re not. We have been guilty of that in the past and
we’re trying to get better at it but often that is the case that it’s people doing stuff
quickly and turning it around because it’s news might not have the same
knowledge that they should have, and it’s not just young people it applies to other
areas as well.
Is it about putting more context and background into stories?
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I think it’s more about having that representation within the stuff we do in the
sense of some of the time we don’t have necessarily a young person’s voice. It’s
often quite hard to do that because there are campaign groups set up who
represent parents and it’s an adult talking about the kids, whereas what you want
is a kid who represents the group, a young person saying what they think, but
there aren’t that many young organisations, there’s the youth parliament and
things but there aren’t the same number as there are on the negative side who
are wanting to complain about young people in the same way. I think it’s about
developing those contacts to be able to put their point of view across in the round
about some of the pieces we do. It’s not easy and I know we’ve been trying to
get more younger voices on. It’s when you see a story about exam results and
you have old men talking about it. At some point you have to go, right, let’s get
the people that this effects actually on and talking about it. The same with school
meals and things like that, often it’s adults talking about it rather than getting kids
to actually do it. At BBC3 we tried really hard if there was a story about turkey
twizzlers or something we had a 10 year old in the studio telling us what they
thought rather than having an adult telling us what they thought children thought.
Newsround is very good at doing it with a younger audience where they very
much treat their younger audience as adults and their points are valid. I don’t
know whether that transcends yet into the more mainstream news.
At the moment on the BBC there is Newsround, which targets an audience
up to around 12, and then all news programming is aimed at adults, there’s
nothing in between. Is it feasible to have news programming created for a
younger, predominantly teenage audience?
Yes, the teen project, Switch, is actually looking at how we do that and I think
there is definitely an area for development there where after Newsround you’re
expecting them to go straight to Newsnight and there isn’t much in between.
What we used to do on BBC3 was a mid-point between the two but that half hour
news doesn’t exist anymore so I think the Switch project has a role there to try
and work out what you put there. On radio we have Newsbeat who go to that
slightly older age and a re very good at saying this is a story that matters to our
audience so let’s look at it. You’ll often see a very different agenda on Newsbeat
than you will anywhere else because they’ve gone, this is what matters to our
audience, this is what we should be leading on and what we should be talking
about, which is often you’ll find very, very different from what mainstream
television news is doing. I think the problem is we need a television version of
what Newsbeat is doing, and Switch is looking at how they integrate that stuff,
but there is only a certain limited amount of output in terms of what the Switch
project is doing.
Of course, Newsbeat is part of Radio 1, it has a young, mass-market
audience already ready and waiting. Is the problem for television that there
is no equivalent of Radio 1 on television where you could place a Newsbeat
style programme?
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There is a difference always between radio and television. On radio you can be
Radio 4 and you can be Radio 1 and those are two ends of the spectrum. You
have a much harder job when you’re talking about BBC1 which is hugely mass
market. I’m lucky on BBC3 in that I can be quite targeted in what I do, but I don’t
have masses of airtime so I’m targeted in my 60 seconds as much as I can be
but there is a place for that other stuff, whether that be a combination of what
they do as part of Switch and also what we do on-demand, I think that’s the area
that younger audiences are going to go to. What we provide for them on-demand
is quite key.
At a time when budgets, particularly in news, are being cut can the BBC
afford to invest in so much new media stuff that a lot of licence fee payers
don’t use or have access to?
If you look at how the BBC has worked over the years, we’ve always been quite
pioneering in going into things, whether that be doing the news online website 10
years ago before anybody else was doing it, whether it be doing children’s news
like Newsround, it’s not something where people would instantly go ‘we must do
this’, but we have done and I think the on-demand is the next stage forward
whereby we know there is an audience out there that wants that and that will in
some cases be different from what we do on the television.
How do you see new media news working alongside more traditional
television news?
There isn’t always a case for turning the television around and putting it on the
web, it needs to be what the on-demand audience wants and that’s slightly
different from what a traditional television audience wants and we are, as part of
looking forward, looking at how we do the on-demand media. Because ondemand is quite strange because whenever you’re watching something you are
probably reading text around it so you don’t want the video content to be
repeating what you find from the web page because what’s the point, so it needs
to be complimentary and how you make it complimentary while telling the whole
story is what I think on-demand will look towards doing and it necessarily be a
traditional television package that you would see on the 6 or the 10 O’Clock
news. This audience understands that they get things from different outlets, so if
it is a raw feed of pictures they understand that and they’re on a medium where
they can watch that. You wouldn’t just put a raw feed of pictures out on the 10
O’Clock news without any commentary or anything like that but you can in an ondemand world because they have the text around it to know what it’s about and
sometimes all you want to see is the pictures. You don’t need a meaningless
commentary to go with certain pictures so why not just put those pictures up? I
think that’s the next stage forward and what BBC news provides won’t
necessarily always be what we’ve been doing on the television in the on-demand
video content world. Of course there will often be chances where you can give
something longer, so often in a TV package you’ll see a ten second clip of
somebody. You may be really interested in what they’re saying so you can give
them the three-minute full interview on demand and they can watch it if they want
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and it’s a balance between the two. We’re slowly starting to do it. Yesterday there
was a piece on Kate Blanchet’s new movie, of which the actuality of her probably
added up to about 35 seconds. But there was a full, longer interview and at the
end of each time it was played on the television we said if you want to see the full
interview it’s on demand. I think that’s the way forward, it’s a balance between
the two and telling the audience that there is more there and that they can get it
because they understand that there are different things for different platforms.
Looking further ahead do you see the audience for terrestrial TV
appointment to view news bulletins just getting smaller and smaller?
There will always be a six O’Clock and 10 O’Clock news. Well, I can’t see it dying
out that quickly. Everybody said, oh, the internet’s going to be the death of this or
that and it hasn’t happened in that sense, there hasn’t been a death of a medium,
television didn’t kill radio and the internet hasn’t killed television or newspapers.
There will always be a certain proportion of people who want to sit down and
have somebody tell them these are the most important stories of the day. There
are other people who will go, I’ll make my own decision about what is important
and I’ll go and find it myself. That’s two sets of licence fee players just with
different ways of doing things and, yes, we have to serve both and an on-demand
world means that one person can go and find out about what they’re interested in
and another person can sit down to the 10 O’clock news and be told here’s what
the editor of the 10 O’clock news thinks are the most important stories of the day
today. I’m very much like that. Every now and then I will very much want to watch
a built bulletin but a lot of the time I will just go and search the bits of the web that
I want to find out stuff about. But it’s not like I just want one or the other, I think
people want different things at different times.
Some broadcasters, including the BBC, are looking to see what stories are
most popular on the web and using that information in deciding on their
news agenda. Is there a shift here from the wisdom on the editor to the
‘wisdom of crowds’ in who sets the agenda?
I think it’s about having an understanding of what that audience is interested in a
lot of the time, so I come back to that point that to that audience often an
entertainment story will be just as important as a news story and it’s having that
understanding. Again it’s something that Newsbeat are very good at. I think it’s
about having the people to understand to be able to produce those programmes.
Having the online stats is a phenomenal resource, to be able to go ‘this is what
people are interested in’, but you have to understand that this is people who surf
the web and have web access and what they are interested in will be different to
what my mum and dad, who don’t surf the net like I do, are interested in. So you
will always find to a certain extent that stories that are watched online if they’re
technology related they tend to rate higher, if they’re about the web there will be
more there because that’s the sort of person who is surfing the web, so what you
have to do, as a journalist, is to take that into consideration along with all the
other factors that you would do as a journalist in deciding what’s important. I think
there’s always a balance between the two. Sometimes you can be very explicit
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and say ‘these are the stories that you are looking at online’, and you’re as open
about it as that so that people know that this is where they’re coming from, they
know in whatever way it’s skewed because it’s people who are surfing the
internet and if you’re honest and open with the audience you can say these are
the top five stories that people are looking at at the moment. It wouldn’t
necessarily be at that point what you would say was the most important story of
the day, because often a quirky story will be number one most read because it’s
quirky and people are going ‘have you seen this?’. So if you just went on what
the stats said your bulletins would be very strange because that’s the nature of
the web. The ‘man marries goat’ [story] was hugely successful for weeks on end
because it was one of those stories that people forwarded on to their friends and
looked at, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s the most important story. So you’re
always going to have to have somebody going, ‘ok, let’s look at it’, and just as the
Six O’Clock news will go, well, this is the audience that is watching at this time
and what do we think is the interesting and important story for them, just as
Newsnight will say the same.
So the editor will always be the editor?
I come back to the point that some people like to just sit down and be told what
somebody else…they trust the BBC to go, ‘ok, we’ve looked at all this news and
here’s what we think is important to you today’, and tell you. Just as we like
people to do things for us or make things for us, that’s it, we understand. But we
totally understand that if we want to go and find out something else we know
where we can do that and there’s going to be places where we’ve got that on
offer.
A few months ago Peter Horrocks said that too often the BBC was seen as
being part of the system, on the side of and representative of authority. Do
you think there’s a problem with the BBC ‘brand’, particularly for young
people?
I think it’s about the representation of those people on our airwaves. Everybody
pays so we should be able to represent those people. It’s not necessarily us
saying this is it, it’s about giving them the voice to be able to say something so if
that means having younger people saying what they think on Radio 1 it’s about
letting them have that platform. Yes I do think some people see us as
establishment and stuffy and out of touch, and sometimes we don’t help
ourselves in those circumstances and we can be like that. But we are a huge
organisation and every now and then that’s going to happen but there are
masses of bits of the BBC that are targeting and serving those different
audiences.
If you said Radio 4 to a young person they would think one thing and they would
think something totally different about if you said Radio 1 or Chris Moyles to
them. So there is a difference, but if you flip it round, old people, if you said Radio
1 to them they’d go, ‘oh, that noise’, and if you said Radio 4 they’d go ‘oh, lovely,
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I love the Archers and World At One’ or whatever. I think there will always be
that.
Do you think viewers/listeners think of the BBC in terms of channels and
stations rather than as an overall organisation?
I think often when you say BBC people have an image of what they want to think,
whether they love us or whether they hate us, there is going to be that view. I
think when you drill down a lot of people like the BBC more than they think they
do because they don’t always associate what we do with the BBC. So they won’t
necessarily associate some of the community projects that might be done in local
radio with ‘the BBC’, that doesn’t always happen. That will always be the case
that people have an image of the BBC and they don’t necessarily understand
what we’re doing. Just as you can say the BBC news website and most of t he
time it comes out as the top news website in Europe, etc, etc, but people won’t
always think like that but if you question them they’ll go, yeah I really like that, it’s
really comprehensive, it’s updated, I rely on it, and they don’t necessarily connect
the two.
It’s often said that younger people are more promiscuous and less loyal in
their use of media, they’ll switch from one thing to another and use and mix
different sources with ease. Is that something that the BBC, like all
broadcasters, just has to accept?
I think we do. I think as long as we have it there and they’re able to find it. They
are living in the on-demand world already so if they find something through
Google that’s how they find it. If they find it somewhere else then fair enough.
The fact that Google comes out as being in the top five of news providers when
Google doesn’t provide any news at all means that people don’t understand a lot
of the time how news is provided. They think that Google provides the news and
it doesn’t, it aggregates what else is around, but people will put Google news as
a way of finding it. I find it strange when I watch somebody who works in the BBC
go to Google to find the BBC News site, they’ll type in ‘BBC News’ in the search
engine to bring up what I know is BBC.co.uk/news but that’s how people find it.
So the way we do things has changed. Google and the others are a default to
news for a lot of people, that’s how they find news, when in fact it isn’t, it’s our
site or CNN or whatever but they access it by typing in Google and that is a
difference.
So if you want to reach a younger audience does that mean that you have
to allow and promote BBC news content to appear ion other platforms,
even if those platforms belong to competitors of one sort or another?
I tend to subscribe to that view that we should be in as many places as we
possibly can be and if that means that we are on a YouTube channel because
that’s where that audience is, fine. I don’t mind how people see the product that I
produce, if they see it they see it. That’s great for me and the more people who
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can see it the more value from the licence fee, etc, etc. So I produce a product
that may be an on-demand product that goes on the web, it goes on News 24, it
goes on the BBC big screens around the country, anything that can be done in
different places it seems to me is a good idea.
If you take it back to basics, if you get a digital television signal you get it on
Freeview, you might get it through Sky, you might get it through Virgin Media.
Just because it’s coming through a Virgin Media box doesn’t necessarily make
you go ‘this is Virgin Media’. You still understand that this is a BBC channel, it’s
just the new way of getting things, whether that be YouTube, MySpace or
whatever, it’s a portal to get stuff and I think we get hung up on these things
sometimes. We already provide stuff through commercial places and my main
aim is ‘how can the most people see it? If that means it’s a BBC channel sitting
on YouTube that’s fine by me. I do think people still have to understand that this
is a BBC product somewhere, that doesn’t have to be sticking a huge ‘BBC’ on it
but there has to be some idea otherwise people won’t understand where it’s
come from but I don’t have a problem with it being available to as many people
as possible on the widest number of platforms, that seems quite sensible to me.
How do you see the role of user-generated content in the context of
attracting the younger audience?
I think it comes back to my point that it gives people a voice a lot of the time
because it’s them that’s produced it and they are able to put their voice on it.
Some of the stuff that’s on YouTube you know is produced by a young person
and it’s their voice. I think there’s a balance between if you have too much UGC
material then it’s not going to work, if you don’t have enough then you feel like
you’re not representing people. To me some of the UGC material is the
equivalent of writing a letter or making a phone call in the old days, it’s a new way
of providing your views and getting your views on air.
What kind of material is being sent in to the BBC?
A variety of things from what I’ve seen. I have to say that I don’t work in the UGC
hub so I don’t see everything that comes in but you get things from pictures of
people’s dogs to whatever. It’s a wide variety of things but UGC has meant that
we’ve been ahead of the game on news stories over the last couple of years
because people are there instantly and are ale to send stuff, so to not use that
stuff would be stupid.
But is it used more for exceptional news stories rather than in day-to-day
news reporting?
Yes, but some of the stories we’ve done, like the one that looks at
accommodation problems for British forces, their wives and things over here, that
purely came from the UGC material, from people going, do you understand what
we’re going through, have you looked at this? So, often there have been story
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ideas that have generated actually very big subjects that have come literally from
people sending in emails and people have gone, actually that’s an interesting
story, we should look more into that. Often a lot of the case stories have come
from UGC, so whereas before we had tremendous trouble often finding
somebody to illustrate a story, now you can instantly find people who have been
effected, whether it be a story about drugs or diabetes or whatever, they’re there
and they’re listening to you and they’re able to instantly say ‘this is me, I’ve got
personal experience of this’ and that then brings that to the wider audience, thus
making your piece much, much better. So there is a way of using and
encompassing all of that material, but yes there’s bound to be lots of stuff that
isn’t going to get on air but there’s lots of stuff that does.
What have you seen from other broadcasters that has impressed you in
terms of news programming aimed at a younger audience?
I think it’s harder for certain organisations today because of the commercial
pressure on them. Channel 4 News does get held up a lot among a lot of
audiences who see that as being good and credible. I think Jon Snow does help
that massively, he has a cult following in among a certain audience and they
relate to him. Jeremy Paxman has it to a certain extent on Newsnight, that same
image amongst younger people. There is an attitude to somebody like Paxman or
Jon Snow whereby young people think that they’re actually quite cool because
they are different and they stand up for things and they are prepared to say their
minds. Whether that be asking Michael Howard the same thing 14 times or
whatever, younger audiences get that and they think this is somebody who I can
think, yeah, this is somebody I can understand where he’s coming from and he’s
not going to shy away, or he’ll say what he thinks. Both Snow and Paxman fit into
that and so therefore have credibility amongst younger people who therefore go,
yeah, I can get into that, I can relate to that. I think elsewhere, it’s harder. ITV is
very mass market and not necessarily targeting young people directly. It is one of
those things that the BBC is quite unique in doing in a lot of ways, whether that
be Newsround or Newsbeat or switch further down the line and I think that the
others are very much more mass market. Sky is very orientated at breaking news
and they have a market place that they go for. America and the rest of them,
again, it’s very much divided, some focus very much on local news and others
split and maybe their entertainment stuff is targeted more at young people but I
don’t think there is anybody doing specifically stuff that makes me go ‘wow’.
Have you seen Current TV?
I haven’t seen a lot, the bit I was UGC related stuff. There is a growing area for
unmediated stuff in the same way on YouTube if you want to go and just see
something you can go and do it and there may be an argument that the BBC
looks at being a portal for that stuff but I think there will always be a case for
people wanting somebody to tell them ‘here’s something that’s interesting’.
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So what, apart from the 8pm news bulletin, can we expect to see in terms of
news programming aimed at a younger audience?
I think you will see part of the Teens project, Switch, will bring in some stuff.
There’s work going on. They’ve only just appointed the people who are going to
do the journalism side so further down the line I don’t know what it’s going to be.
Certainly Radio 1 is about to be much more multi-media so expect to see more
video on the website, Newsbeat are about to re-launch their website and make it
a whole lot more video content and as a portal to other material. Also there’s a lot
of things going on in different areas. We have a lot of younger audience listening
to the Asian network. We use a range of things to target different audiences, ondemand is one of those areas, expect to see a huge growth in that over the next
year to 18 months of which a percentage of that will be targeted at younger
audiences. Entertainment we know that there is a demand for entertainment
video content that we don’t give necessarily on the traditional channels and we
have the material around so there is a chance to use that in an on-demand
arena.
Will the recently announced cutbacks in news budgets affect plans for
targeting younger audiences, or is that a prioritised and protected area for
the BBC?
That’s probably for somebody above my level but young people are the future of
the BBC and the Switch project there has been funding dedicated to that so it is
seen as an important area.
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