Ofcom and the future of TV news

Writing in Amer­ican journalism’s gil­ded age, Charles Dud­ley Warner offered this assess­ment of the worth of a news­pa­per:

Not all news­pa­pers which make money are good, for some suc­ceed by cater­ing to the low­est tastes of respect­able people, and to the pre­ju­dice, ignor­ance, and pas­sion of the low­est class; but, as a rule, the suc­cess­ful journal pecu­ni­ar­ily is the best journal.

The reas­ons for this are on the sur­face. The impe­cuni­ous news­pa­per can­not give its read­ers promptly the news, nor able dis­cus­sion of the news, and, still worse, it can­not be independent.

This simple Dar­winian rule applies equally to tele­vi­sion news. The cheapest is usu­ally the worst. I should know, I’ve played my part in sever­ing news­gath­er­ing flesh from budget­ary bone. There is one key dif­fer­ence, though between Warner’s news­pa­per world and the world of TV news. Reg­u­la­tion. For every­one that isn’t the BBC, that means Ofcom.

News was an impos­i­tion on broad­casters. It was the price they paid to extort large sums of cash from advert­isers on air­waves that were in scarce supply.

Now as every­one in tele­vi­sion knows, the air­waves are about to stop wav­ing. TV will arrive via wifi, satel­lite or fibre-optic cable. Audi­ences are frag­ment­ing, and advert­isers are no longer quite so will­ing to hand over the cash. In such a cold hard world, will news still find a prime­time place on the major channels?

A BBC–com­mis­sioned report claims to provide three crumbs of comfort.

1. The oppor­tun­ity cost of news is going down. That’s the cost of news factored against the cost of other pro­gram­ming you could run in its place. News is high on fixed costs. The more you run, the cheaper it gets. But that argu­ment relies on cur­rent volume quotas stay­ing in place. If broad­casters had to run a lot less, you guessed…so it’s not a pos­it­ive reason for broad­casters to run news.
2. The second reason is related to the attract­ive­ness of news to upmar­ket view­ers. This is why car­makers chose the break in News At Ten to advert­ise their wares. But their very isol­a­tion from the rest of the channel’s wares was why BBC Trustee David Lid­di­ment dumped the pro­gramme for a chance to advert­ise to a big­ger aggreg­ate audience.
3. News is import­ant for a chan­nel brand say audi­ences. Well, some audi­ences. Sky One hasn’t felt the need to put a news show into its mix. And five cut its prime­time half-hour to fif­teen minutes in 2005. So the report might be right, but exec­ut­ives aren’t vot­ing with their sched­ules. And audi­ences like telling poll­sters how much they value the news, but then seem to like watch­ing some­thing else.

It’s all well-meaning stuff, but it’s not going to last long in a real negotiation.

If news is to have a future on ITV and five, what can Ofcom do to force or incentiv­ize their man­age­ments to run it? On the regulator’s coer­cive or per­suas­ive powers rests the future of tele­vi­sion news bey­ond the BBC.

It will be a poorer future, whatever hap­pens. The reg­u­lator has watched as long-term news con­tracts decline in value, or have more pro­gram­ming squeezed out of them. In its Future of News dis­cus­sion paper, Ofcom reminds PSBs of the import­ance of high qual­ity news pro­vi­sion. The industry awards garnered by broad­casters like Sky and ITN indic­ate that there are indeed moments of very high qual­ity in their news provision.

But cuts mean threaten the con­sist­ency of qual­ity. No organ­iz­a­tion but the BBC main­tains per­man­ent cor­res­pond­ents and news­gath­er­ing oper­a­tions cov­er­ing Britain’s two wars in Iraq and Afgh­anistan. The reason for other’s absence is simple – money.

So what can we expect from appeals for cash or sub­sidies with which to run such ser­vices? To quote Charles Dud­ley Warner once more: “An editor who stands with hat in hand has the respect accor­ded to any other beg­gar.” Thank good­ness news has a future besides television.

Tagged as: ITN, Sky, UK journalism, UK Media