Blogging the Beeb

Public Space

In the States, even some conservatives are starting to acknowledge the importance of public space.

BBC Audience

The BBC has suffered further falls in its audience share. Still higher than John Birt feared in the early '90s though.

In response, the BBC rightly stresses the importance of its audience reach - how many people overall access its services. The reach of BBC3 and BBC4 is expanding as well.

Keep Broadcasting Public

The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom has a conference on the BBC's future next March:

The conference ‘Keep Broadcasting Public: BBC Charter Renewal’ is a joint initiative of the TUC, Federation of Entertainment Unions and the CPBF. It will be hosted by the TUC at Congress House in London and opened by TUC general secretary Brendan Barber.

Voices of Britain

The BBC has collected examples of different dialects.

Little Britain

Johann Hari hates it.

So does Mick Hume.

Praising the English

The new Archbishop of York says the English are:

embarrassed about being English.

There's more here.

Round-up

Blogging has been a bit light recently, due to real-life commitments.

The Guardian reported that the BBC White Paper would be delayed, partly due to disputes about the BBCTrust. OfComwatch reports on a lunch with BBC D-G Mark Thompson.

Sky News is preferred by opinion-formers to BBC News 24 according to an internal BBC leak.

Meanwhile, the BBC News college for journalists is getting underway. I'm looking forward to it tackiling the issue of post-devolution Britain, as BBC Controller of Nations and Regions Pat Loughrey told us it would when he came before the Assembly's Culture Committee.

BBC doesn't get devolution again

Here we go again.

Earlier, nowhere did this story refer to England, or indicate that Beverly Hughes's responsibilities as Children's Minister in DfES are principally -not wholly - limited to England. (Mind you, the DfES site is not much better, though at least its press release last week on the Childcare Bill made clear that it referred to England: has the BBC not seen this?).

Nowhere on Breakfast News this morning was this made clear. The story has now been changed, like this one was, to mention England

Birt could have gone over Diana

Over the weekend The Observer carried extracts from tonight's Arena programme in which John Birt says how close he came to being forced out by Duke Hussey over the Panorama interview with Princess Diana. John is quoted as saying of Hussey:

Having failed at that he tried to get the governors to condemn the way in which I had handled the programme and particularly the fact that I hadn't alerted him as chairman. He was on more fertile territory with that, because in a perfect world I should have informed him. But he struggled even there. And he failed to get what he wanted: a stinging rebuke which, he calculated, would force my resignation.

Some of this is in John's autobiography, and a bit is in Duke Hussey's autobiography as well. I was the BBC's Head of Public Affairs at the time - and though I knew things were tense it was only sometime after I left the BBC that I was told the story as John Birt tells it tonight - and not by him, but by someone else who was in the know.

BBC Digital Developments

Digital Lifestyles (DL) has a number of articles about the BBC's digital plans.

First it questions whether Freesat will be anything more than a spoiler for BSkyB. Judging by my constituency, where most people cannot get Freeview, Freesat is a goer, but the BBC needs to get on with it. The hostility to the Corporation's recent licence fee bid was significant: there is a real sense of injustice that those who can't get Freeview are expected to pay the same as those who can.

DL also reviews the BBC's Interative Media Player:

My verdict - I give it a thumbs up as long as a large enough library of content can be made available.

There is also coverage of the BBC's online film showcase, and some commentary on Radio One's plans for broadcasting video content on digital TV:

This is the first time Radio 1 has delivered visual content on demand for TV and takes the BBC's plans to visualise radio up a gear.