Interactive online teen dramas like The Cut will be, er, cut.
The BBC’s new strategy has taken a bit of a media battering today, which is not surprising given its announcement that it plans to axe two much-loved music stations – 6Music (the digital embodiment of the spirit of John Peel) and Asian Network. It also intends to halve its web content, and give a quarter of its website staff the shove.
The news wasn’t well-received, and it was delivered even more badly. Web editors staring into the black hole of recession-era unemployment were given the verging-on-bitchy explanation that the BBC now wants ‘justified and purposeful’ web content rather than the ‘extraneous or encyclopedic’ guff that it’s overspill web staff apparently create at the moment. That’ll make them feel better.
Ok, it’s sensible to kill off some of the BBC’s digital deadwood. There are plenty of programme-related microsites that do little to enhance the corporation’s web output, and trimming these off from the core site could do it wonders. But what role will the site play in multi-platform content in the new age of Quality?
A lot of the multi-platform has stemmed from teen-focused digital services Switch and Blast, both of which are unfortunately to be closed. Mark Thompson has decided that Channel 4 should do all that teenage stuff (in which case, shouldn’t Channel 4 be given the relevant percentage of the licence fee? That’s if the licence fee still exists after the next election…).
When it comes down to it,‘Putting Quality First’ actually seems to mean ‘putting TV first’. There is no talk of creating innovative, high-quality, multi-platform content that utilises the various strengths of the BBC’s different service platforms. Instead, there’s a sense of, ‘what are all these websites doing here? Get rid of half of them, then there won’t be so many, and we’ll have more money to spend on TV dramas’. It’s hard to see how the BBC intends to face the digital future armed only with ‘Enders and Moyles.
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