The BBC needs to beware it doesn’t take for granted the loyalty of its local radio audiences.
Planned cuts to local programming have led the National Union of Journalists to announce a strike in local radio on March 15th - the “Ides of March”. The NUJ clearly sees the BBC’s proposals as a betrayal.
This dispute may prove to be emblematic of the arguments that will ensue over the future of the licence fee agreement, which runs out in 2027. Should the BBC concentrate less on services well served by the market, and more on providing the kind of public service broadcasting that the market doesn’t provide?
The BBC says it’s going to “modernise” local services. It wants to amalgamate afternoon radio shows so that 39 English stations share a total of 20 programmes. Thereby, local radio becomes less local. After 1800, that would become just 10 programmes for the whole of England.
The savings will allow further investment in local online content. The NUJ says it’s not opposed to enhancing online news, but that it shouldn’t be at the expense of local radio programming.
I may have spent the last quarter of a century at Sky News, a national and international news provider, but I understand the power and importance to communities of local radio.
In an admittedly different media landscape in the early eighties, I was news editor at a commercial radio station which launched in Coventry. Mike Henfield was its first news editor, and he taught me a great deal. The station was called Mercia Sound, and served Coventry and Warwickshire. The picture at the head of this article was taken in 1980 in Mercia Sound’s main studio.
In its first year, it chalked up a now unattainable reach of 63% listening, precisely because the people of the area were crying out for local news and programming. People were not really interested in stations that came out of the bigger city of Birmingham, 25 miles down the A45.
I had a newsroom of ten journalists providing huge amounts of local content, half hour news programmes at “drive-time”, and a weekly current affairs programme.
Mercia no longer exists as a separate entity because it’s been subsumed into the Free Radio group serving a vast swathe of the West Midlands region.
It’s been a successful business strategy for commercial radio throughout the country to form bigger groupings, provide some local content, and have strong brands, like Capital, Heart, Hits Radio, and Greatest Hits Radio, with clear music playlist policies. Greatest Hits will be the new home of BBC Radio 2 stalwart, Ken Bruce, from next month.
But what the private sector took away, the BBC can provide. In 1990 the BBC opened a station in Coventry and Warwickshire, but later — to great consternation — amalgamated it with BBC WM in Birmingham. It was the very worst thing you could do if you wanted to keep audiences in Coventry.
Quite rightly, BBC CWR was brought back as a stand-alone station when Greg Dyke was Director General in 2005. He said it had been a mistake to close it down.
The point here is that distinct communities want distinctive programming which reflects the character of their area, and which talks about the news and issues that affect the people who live there. So the BBC will need to be very careful how it shapes a new configuration of shared afternoon and evening programmes.
And it’s not as if BBC Local Radio is an insignificant player in the BBC radio stable. It collectively attracts 7.8 million listeners per week in the UK, that’s significantly more than BBC Radio 5 Live, which gets 4.8 million.
The extra firepower the BBC wants to put into local online journalism is also a matter of controversy over market provision. The local newspaper industry, which has had to move predominantly into online journalism is complaining bitterly that its advertising revenue will be affected by the BBC dominating search results.
The BBC local radio cutbacks are also being scrutinised by politicians. Forced to answer an urgent question in the House of Commons, Julia Lopez, Minister of State for Culture, Media and Sport, described BBC Local Radio as one of the corporation’s “Crown Jewels”.
“If several counties or regions are stitched together, the service ceases to be local and relevant to local people, which we have concerns about,” she told the House of Commons.
Of course, it’s this very government which has put the BBC under such pressure by freezing the licence fee, making it harder to pay for any new services it wants to provide. So the BBC will face many dilemmas in the years ahead.
It should be remembered that the BBC local radio audience is strongly C2DE in socio-economic grouping when compared to, say, Radio 4. And it is also old. 58% of listeners are over the age of 55, and often not digital natives. These tend to be people who’ve put down roots in communities over very many years, or even lived there all their lives. That’s why they care about their area, and why the BBC should continue to care about serving them.
They are also loyal. Over one million of them never listen to any other radio at all, apart from their local BBC station.
If the debate about the future of the BBC crystallises around the imperatives of what is vital in public service broadcasting, I’d say BBC Local Radio is at the heart of the public service remit. Local communities deserve to have their “Crown Jewels” preserved.
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