Two hugely significant media mountains moved last week. Facebook began to run stories from the Guardian, BBC News, the New York Times and a few other major players direct on its site: no links, just instantaneous access. Verizon, the US’s biggest telecoms player, paid $4.4bn for what’s left of AOL – now with added video content and knowhow. And – oh yes! – way down the scale in molehill Britain, we wallowed in yet another debate about the future of the BBC licence fee as nightmare No 10 briefers seemed poised once again to defenestrate Auntie.
The Facebook experiment is a leap in the dark for newspapers and broadcasters alike. Instead of linking conventionally to the content providers’ own sites, so driving traffic and ad revenue their way, Mark Zuckerberg’s legions – 1.4 billion of them around the globe – will be able to call up those news stories and features seamlessly (with some or all of the ad cash generated offered in return).
Inevitable questions follow. What happens when Facebook changes its algorithms and thus the whole slant of news? What happens when the race to maximise money made from “instant articles” alters the nature of news selection, and thus of coverage? What happens to individual websites down the track if Facebook sucks the life from them? Why is the tiger smiling?
Verizon’s move comes in an adjacent part of the digital forest. Facebook needs content because mobile advertising space is already harvesting $11bn of its $15.5bn ad take this year. Mobile giants, in turn, need ad technology expertise and video – staples that AOL is well placed to supply. A mighty, number-crunching game of corporate thrones is joined – with subsidiary, barely break-even properties such as the Huffington Post left awaiting a billion-dollar bid or two. “Any company that doesn’t see change as a weapon… will be blown over,” chants the boss of AOL.
But where on earth does that leave the BBC and its new supposed public enemy number one, John Whittingdale , MP for Maldon and finally secretary of state for culture, media and sport, a policy patch that he has made his own over two decades of shadowy specialist and committee chairmanship? Whittingdale will now preside over the negotiations for BBC charter renewal in two years’ time. His old all-party committee recommended ditching the licence fee when it reported just before the election. He has said the fee is worse than the poll tax. Cue apprehension right along Portland Place. Cue Tory MPs thirsting for blood and Tory leader writers claiming their pound of proprietorial flesh. Cue one more “defining issue” of Cameron victory.
Cue, also, rather too much fear, loathing and incipient hysteria. The licence fee is supposed to defend BBC independence. How does it do that when the prime minister was able to freeze it in a single one-on-one meeting with the director general five years ago? The deep chill is back again today, either modestly indexed or frozen solid at £145.50p. There’ll certainly be an end to prosecutions for licence evasion, which may cost the corporation £200m a year in lost revenue – but will mean 200,000 or so fewer cases gumming up the courts.
The fee system (born 1922) is viscerally divisive because the commercial foes of the BBC – or at least those among them who also own newspapers – habitually reach for it as a lever-cum-cosh. Defending the fee therefore becomes a matter of champions versus predators.
But there’s a dimension here that doesn’t really work any longer. How can it be right, in logic, for the corporation to produce Newsbeat content for its own youth website, and turn this over instantly to Zuckerberg Inc in return, sooner or later, for ad revenue from outside Britain to help fill up the licence fee pot? The Facebook experiment, remember, is there to help Facebook first and foremost. Why is the BBC part of the testing crew?
It’s there because, of course, the world – and BBC Worldwide – spins on. Because more or less everything digital is connected, one way or another. Because youthful audiences are vital. Because 1.4 billion users are a force far beyond Cameron’s reach. Because mobile (at least for the moment, because everything digital morphs constantly) is where the cash flows most freely. Because content, whether from print or broadcast newsrooms, is valuable, and Facebook and Google don’t do it for themselves. Because the means of charging and collecting subs is now as infinitely various as your latest iPhone bill.
The BBC isn’t some sleeping giant in this new world. iPlayer isn’t the end of its road. But the debate over the licence fee, thus far, has been fatally stagnant, as enlivening as a traffic jam outside a magistrates court. You can be a true friend and admirer of the BBC and still reckon that – over the next dozen years of political angst – it has to define why and how it exists in a transformed environment, explain where the boundaries of non-TV and radio services lie, and propose better ways of safeguarding its independence.
Politicians can’t set subscription rates. Politicians can’t rig a pell-mell market of change. Politicians have to listen when innovators come forward to tell them what a world of opportunities offers. Tony Hall, the director general in the hot seat, is dead right: “The BBC should be prepared to be bold and inventive about its future.”
Front foot, not back foot. Leading reform, not traipsing along behind.
