Monday, July 19, 2010

The BBC must stop trying to do everything Mark Thompson Comment is free The Guardian

The BBC has one mission: to inform, teach and perform audiences with programmes and services of high quality, newness and value. It strives to do this mission not to serve any domestic or blurb interest, but since the British open hold that concept entrance to ideas and informative practice of consequence and aspiration is a great in itself. The BBC is a square of open space since the open themselves have put it there.

Public space is an open and enriching environment. There are no paywalls in open space. While blurb media companies have to allot opposite values to opposite aim audiences – favoring the affluent, for example, or the immature – in open space everybody is as critical and as profitable as everybody else.

There is no place in it for censorship or bias. Citizens have the right to embrace just and correct news, to confront and rivet with the full range of opinion. Government and state perspectives are there to be explored and scrutinised similar to all else, and do not suffer special privileges or vetoes.

The digital age should be a golden age for open space. The equates to of formulating and disseminating calm of each kind have been democratised – each day people reach thousands of others with their ideas and opinions. But open space is being disrupted too. Fragmentation of audiences and have use of is weakening normal media"s capability to await peculiarity content, from general newsgathering to inland play and comedy.

Nor is the tellurian democratisation of perspective and evidence as candid as it appears. Above the blogosphere, veteran media energy might essentially combine in fewer hands. Societies around the universe could be left with fewer arguable sources of professionally certified news. The risk of disposition and misinformation, and in a little countries of state control, might grow.

So, what should the BBC"s purpose be?

First, the BBC should action as one of the main guarantors of open space. It should have use of the open purposes and the payoff of the looseness price to safeguard an undeviating upsurge of investment in to high-quality calm and in to the growth and success of the majority appropriate British talent. It should safeguard that the multiple of the resources and the values equates to that audiences have entrance to headlines and report they can trust. Its programmes and services contingency reach as extended an assembly as possible, formulating worth for all sections of multitude and portion all licence-fee payers.

The BBC should additionally assistance pledge access. While record and placement contingency regularly be equates to and not ends for the BBC, it has a special purpose to rise and behind open platforms and standards. It should urge the public"s right to select rather than to have choices done for them, and we should thus go on to deposit in open promote platforms.

Second, the BBC should combine some-more than ever on being a author of quality. It should concentration even some-more than it does currently on forms of calm that majority obviously set up open worth and that are majority at risk of being abandoned or confronting underinvestment. It should take poignant serve stairs towards construction the distinctiveness and aberration of the programmes and services. It should have the concept accessibility of the programme living room a key design over the subsequent 10 years – joining audiences with the majority appropriate of all the BBC has ever made.

Third, the BBC is singly placed to assistance alternative institutions reach the public, and to assistance the open find and get the majority out of those institutions themselves. Partnerships with alternative informative and county institutions should no longer be ad hoc, but vital and executive to the BBC. The new partnership in between the BBC, the British Museum and hundreds of alternative museums opposite the UK to emanate A History of the World in 100 Objects shows the approach forward.

But the BBC can usually grasp these goals if it becomes most clearer about the own boundary inside of open space. Given the joining of technologies, the BBC"s boundary need to be demonstrably formed on the open purposes and to be spelled out. Clearly the BBC needs the space to develop as audiences and technologies develop, but it contingency be far some-more pithy than in the past about what it will not do. Its blurb wake up should assistance account and actively await the BBC"s open mission, and never crush or succeed that mission.

Where tangible or intensity marketplace stroke outweighs open value, the BBC should leave space transparent for others. The BBC should not try to do everything. It contingency attend to bona fide concerns from blurb media players some-more delicately than it has in the past, and action earlier to encounter them. It needs the certainty and distinctness to stop as well as to begin you do things.

The due changes we are announcing tomorrow are not a square of governing body – they are secure in a transparent prophesy of what the BBC exists to do. It is additionally not a plans for a small BBC, or a BBC that is in shelter from digital. That is the last thing the British open want. They wish – and I wish – a BBC that has the certainty to combine on what it does best: that is to broach services of superb peculiarity and newness and to be a guide of creativity and value for audiences everywhere.

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