The future of PSB in Europe

Unfortunately, I feel as if we have slightly neglected looking at public service broadcasting in other countries around Europe and the world. Some details may have been mentioned in passing, but we have not gone into too much detail about other countries that use PSB.

Here is an article from 2005 that gives an outline of the future of PSB in European countries:

The Future of Public Service Broadcasting in Europe and the Commonwealth

It may be slightly dated in terms of its publication, but nevertheless provides an important overview of what was planned for PSB in Europe over the last 6 years.

User generated content: love it, or hate it?

In the world of journalism and the media there seems to be an increasing fear – at least amongst trainee journalists like me and my colleagues – that user generated content (UGC) is going to begin to weigh in more and more on the industry and take away part of the difficult trade that we are trying to perfect.

Personally, I originally only saw the bad side of this – news organisations able to get pictures and stories without the use of a journalist. Now, this seems a slightly far-fetched assumption. Having talked to Tim Hubbard from BBC Radio Cornwall and from looking deeper into the prospect and the future of user-generated content it seems an increasingly promising aspect of the media industry. The BBC , for example, have a very select filtration process in which they use only the best pictures they receive, as well as double or even triple checking stories before they are published.

UGC is unlikely to ever take away a journalist’s job, more likely it will only serve to aid them. This content can provide pictures and stories which might not otherwise have been found. In my eyes UGC is more a source or contact for news that is occasionally used if the pictures are amazing or unavailable otherwise.

Take a look at these videos from BBC employees to see what they think and then make up your mind:

Video shot on a camera phone by Rory Cellan-Jones and an interview with Matthew Eltringham, Head of User Generated Content at the BBC:

Matthew Eltringham, discusses UGC and social media in news:

The presentation: a look back

Well, I finally got around to going over our presentation, admittedly not with a tooth comb – that’s for the rest of you guys who had to watch us doing our thing…

It’s difficult to write something like this without being obviously biased – which obviously I would never be… – but I feel that overall it went as well as it could have done given the time constraints that we imposed on ourselves. In all honesty we left putting together the presentation until a bit late. Jess and Lucy did a fantastic job filming and putting together our opening video which I think I would be right in saying went down well with the audience? It was possibly a tad on the long side, but in the grand scheme of things I think that it really drew everyone’s attention.

Had we made it shorter  we may have been able to have delved deeper into the subject in the presentation, but we felt it was best to just outline the main themes, ideas and conclusions surrounding our question and leave the further details for the blog. I don’t want to go on too much about it as ultimately it’s up to the audience how well it went. What I will say is that I think we could have managed our time slightly better in the build up to the presentation, but I think that everything on the day went as smoothly as it possibly could have.

A short hand out may well have benefitted the overall understanding of the presentation, but then again it may well have detracted from it by people focusing their attention on that as opposed to the actual presentation.

Hopefully the sweets added a bit of flavour (you get it?) to the presentation as well.

agree, disagree? let me know….

The BBC: The struggle to maintain quality and diversity

It seems difficult to see how, given the major changes being made, the BBC will be able to maintain quality and, even more so, diversity in their output.

The most recent and pressing issue comes not as an issue in Britain, but will seriously affect the worldwide following the BBC. The corporation has been able to maintain levels of around 130 million listeners around the world thanks to the grants-in-aid funding of the service prior to this year.

Meanwhile, over the last few years at least, in Britain they continued to raised the price of the license fee in order to focus on output in our country whilst presiding over a World Service that funded itself. I have to admit that I have never really followed much of the output from the World service, but by the sheer numerical value of the listeners it receives you can see how important it is to the rest of the world. You can read into the story more here.

‘Further cuts’

Prior to the World Service cuts the BBC announced they would also be ceasing to provide a number of services online, such as Switch and Blast, as well as community sports site 606. Full details on the cuts can be found here.

Quality and diversity are two words that can be defined varyingly according to who you are asking. For instance I may not be too fussed about seeing Switch and Blast cut from the BBC services, but I’m sure there are plenty of teenagers who will disagree with me entirely. Output diversity is for me, I imagine, entirely different to someone from Newcastle, or someone who is not of British origin but is a British citizen; it is almost certainly not the same for men and women, or children and adults either; or for differing religions for that matter. This means that to provide true diversity in their programming the BBC’s output has to cater for an extremely heterogeneous population: all of whom expect very different things.

Secondly, quality: another word that can take on a variety of meanings depending on who you ask. Quality to one person may be a high quality drama or soap, whereas to another it may be fantastic sports coverage; or indeed it may be a high quality debate on a programme like Question Time.

‘Difficult’

In a period where cuts are being made across the country, the BBC have been placed in an increasingly difficult position with regards to maintaining the high levels of quality and diversity in their output. Without money and funding the BBC are surely going to be unable to provide the quality and diversity they have done in years past. The lack of funding will have a noticeable effect: the licence fee has been frozen, the corporation is having to take over a proportion of the World Service funding, and, like most businesses in this economic climate they are struggling to keep up the level of service that has become synonymous with the corporation itself.

It will be interesting to see if the cuts that have been made recently will have a positive impact on maintaining the quality of its core output; or, whether the dismantling of its fringe services will just lead to discontent as fewer people in the growing British populous find themselves catered for in specific niche markets.

Citizen’s Coalition for Public Service Broadcasting

A ‘broad mix of  civil soci ety groups, char i ties, com mu nity groups, unions and arts organ isa tions who believe pub lic ser vice broad cast ing is a pub lic good.’

http://www.publicservicebroadcasting.org.uk/

 

 

Latest BBC cuts

It seems that the quality and diversity of output from Britain’s sole provide of public service broadcasting is set to be heavily affected over the next few months as the BBC continue to search for ways to save money in the continuing economic downturn.

The latest in a string of cuts across was announced yesterday evening (Tuesday 25th of January) across the BBC’s website and was officially confirmed today by the corporation that they would be cutting 650 jobs from the World Service.

‘Extremely Tough’

Peter Horracks (click here to read his blog post on the matter), the BBC’s global news director, described the changes as an “enormous shift” as well as commenting that it was “a difficult and sad day both personally and professionally”.

Reductions had to be made following a 16% reduction in Foreign Office funding; and during a period when the broadcaster has been essentially forced to freeze its license fee prices, cuts to certain services were no less than inevitable.

‘Losses’

The company has estimated that the redundancies would amount to a loss of around 30 million listeners worldwide given that it is cutting five foreign language services entirely. These are Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, the Caribbean and Portuguese services for Africa.

Director General Mark Thompson, according to Peter Horracks, has pledged to reverse the cuts when the corporation takes over the funding of the service in its entirety in 2014.

The BBC also announced earlier this week that they would be cutting around 200 websites in an attempt to reduce the amount spent on its online output. More information can be found under the online section at the top of the page.

It seems increasingly likely that these cuts will have an effect on how the BBC manage and attempt to maintain quality and diversity across their output spectrum.

 

Public Service Broadcasting: What is it?

As an introduction to the question we are exploring, it seemed necessary to define and to highlight the parameters of the question. As a result here is our understanding of what Public Service Broadcasting is:

The most simplified, categorical definition for Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) is broadcasting made, financed and controlled by the public, for the public. It is neither commercial nor state-owned and realistically should also be free of political interference.

‘Purpose’

The aims and principles of PSB are to inform, educate and entertain the public which pays for its upkeep and output. Alongside this, universality of service, diversity of programming and provision for minority audiences including the disadvantaged are synonymous with this form of broadcast.

Currently the only provider of PSB in Britain is the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), who collect an annual charge of £145.50 (as of April 1st 2010) – which has been frozen for six years in a bid to keep the public satisfied in difficult economic times.

By law, UK residents who watch or record TV as it is broadcast are required to be covered by a TV licence. This includes DVD/video recorders, TV on computers, mobile phones, and other devices. Non-live programmes are, however, available for free consumption on the latter three.

‘Worth the price?’

According to the company’s ‘About the BBC’ section of the website, licence fee payer’s money was spent predominantly on TV (£7.85 per household per month) and radio programming (£2.01 per household per month). The total breakdown can be found here. The charge has been rising steadily year-on-year and will certainly be a topic covered over the coming weeks.

As it stands the UK licence fee is the fourth cheapest in Europe, being bettered only by R.O.I, Italy, the Czech Republic and France.

The expectation upon erection of the BBC was that the ‘corporation would emphasize serious, educational, and cultural programming that would elevate the level of intellectual and aesthetic tastes of the audience’ (information courtesy of

Of course it is not only the United Kingdom that have the availability of public service broadcasting. Other European countries such as Switzerland, Denmark and Germany. Outside of Europe, Canada, Australia and America all provide their own models of the PBS system.