In a report slipped out last week with little fanfare, the broadcast regulator Ofcom made a subtle but significant declaration: the BBC is now part of the mix of headwinds threatening the very future of the local news industry.
To understand the importance of that statement, we need to rewind a little bit. It’s more than three years since the BBC launched its Across The UK project: a programme of modernisation and decentralisation initiatives that it said would “better reflect and represent audiences and boost production across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland”.
Whole departments and functions would be moved away from London into new homes in Salford, Cardiff, Birmingham and other provincial cities. And in the sphere of local news, another major departure, but this time of a financial nature: funding would be withdrawn from localised radio programming, in favour of a huge expansion in local online news provision.
For the local commercial news sector, this crossed a line. The advent of online publishing had brought the BBC into direct competition with commercial publishers in a way that had never previously been the case.
The BBC’s charter could differentiate cleanly and clearly between broadcasting and newspapers, but the race to explore the emerging possibilities that came with the growth of the internet blurred that dividing line. By the time a digital future had taken shape, it was too late to force the genie back into its bottle, notwithstanding the debate over whether that would indeed even be the right thing to do.
Nonetheless, for the majority of the last decade or two, the competitive threat from the BBC to local publishers – in England, particularly – remained fairly low-level. While the Beeb has operated regional news websites for some time, they have been precisely that – regional. The news content tended to be fairly sparse, and tied to stories being covered on broadcast bulletins. It was a good fit for the layout of its regional transmitter maps.
Then came Across the UK. Putting aside the justification for the abandonment of the BBC’s local radio audiences, the dramatic expansion of digital publishing in both volume and scope is undeniably an act of direct competition. Hundreds of new jobs have been created – with new recruits often being drawn directly from commercial newsrooms – and thousands more local news stories have been published.
So what’s the problem? After a decade when the number of journalists working on local news has decreased markedly, shouldn’t we be applauding anything that starts to reverse the trend?
We should – but not at the expense of plurality. And make no mistake: the path the BBC has set out on leads directly to a world where it could be the only mainstream source of local news content in the UK. It has enormously increased its volume of local news content, but it has done little to grow the breadth of stories available to readers.
Recent analysis of BBC output showed a vast proportion of the local stories it produced duplicated those published in the commercial press, but without the necessity of running advertising alongside. As local news publishers joined together to say earlier this year, the BBC has undeniably become the “neighbour from hell”.
That is why Ofcom’s new report is so significant. Local news is under major threat from a cocktail of challenges ranging from societal news avoidance to the overwhelming market dominance of the major digital platforms, chiefly Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and Alphabet (Google), which sweep up a huge percentage of all the money spent in the local digital market.
[Read more: Ofcom says BBC has become hindrance to local news commercial sector]
To date, the BBC has defended its expansionist plans by pointing to prior Ofcom conclusions that they wouldn’t harm commercial news providers. In the local news sector, we never believed that to be true. And now Ofcom doesn’t either.
“We recognise that increased BBC online local news forms part of the headwinds facing local publishers and there may be some local areas where BBC viewing is displacing commercial viewing,” it writes in its Review of Local News in the UK, published last week.
While the regulator’s change of narrative should be regarded as a momentous moment, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it continues to underplay the scale of threat posed to the commercial sector.
The user research conducted for the report found that one of the reasons users enjoyed BBC content was the absence of paywalls and advertising. Not only does this make it likely that an enlarged offering of local BBC news will be inherently more appealing to a large swathe of the audience, but it also further stifles the avenues available to publishers to drive essential revenues.
If the BBC can establish an expectation that users can access local news across the nation without having to endure any advertising at all, nor provide even so much as an email address by way of value exchange, what avenues will commercial providers have to build the revenues required to pay for their journalism?
The BBC’s competitive advantage extends beyond user experience into the realm of algorithms. Ofcom’s report notes that referrals from Google to BBC England news have risen from 14 million a month in 2022 to 45 million in June this year. This reflects what we consistently see on an anecdotal basis: BBC local news stories dominating local news slots in Google, driven by the BBC’s ability to show an ad-free, fast product experience which Google prioritises in search.
The report also shows clear evidence that the areas where the BBC has placed significant editorial focus – Bradford, for instance – have seen them gain significant page views. There’s no reason to believe that further expansion wouldn’t have the same impact elsewhere.
It’s encouraging to see some level of agreement on this point – along with the prospect of the next stages of growth being re-examined. “In addition, it is possible that future BBC changes will have a different impact on commercial publishers,” the report says. ”For example, our qualitative research noted that if the BBC provided more localised online content, people might choose it over alternative online sources, suggesting greater potential for substitution. Therefore, some future BBC changes may require further consideration by the BBC and Ofcom.”
Despite all these factors, Ofcom still appears reluctant to go further than saying there’s only “weak evidence that an increase in BBC page views is having a negative impact on commercial page views”, although its acknowledgement of any evidence at all is very much a step forward. It goes on to add that “it is possible that increased BBC page views are somewhat contributing to the broader decline in commercial viewing, and the impact may be more significant on publications in some local areas.”
Let’s be clear: the BBC should not be actively pursuing any kind of policy that contributes to a decline in commercial viewing. Its actions here are a clear overreach of its licence fee obligations, and come at the expense of local radio audiences who have been abandoned with no clear alternative.
Now that it has independently been verified that the corporation has joined the ranks of those threatening the organisations threatening the very future of independent local news, we urge the BBC to row back from these aggressively competitive plans, and seek a relationship with commercial publishers that can help repair the damage of the last decade, rather than add to it.
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