“Local Still Important” Says Andy Griffee and Alan Kirby
At last week’s Coventry Conversation, our wondrous University was host to Andy Griffee (Controller for English Regions of the BBC) and Alan Kirby (Editor of The Coventry Telegraph), who both used this opportunity to unveil new products, initiatives, and answer questions from the audience. It all kicked off with Andy Griffee showcasing a prototype for a brand new £20 Million BBC Local website, which features a map with direct links to content such as articles, radio and video for each region. Topics covered with this new site will be news, sport, travel, and weather, bringing each element down to a local level. Commenting on the service, Griffee said that it will be available “anytime, any place, anywhere”, and later confirmed that regular exclusive news bulletins will also become a major part of it. While the service hasn’t been properly decided on by the BBC Trust yet, the reaction amongst the audience was largely positive.
Following this unveiling, a challenged Alan Kirby confirmed that the Coventry Telegraph is also evolving in the online space, with a brand new website and ultra-local sites divided by postcodes. The focus of these sites will be user-created content that is relevant to more local people. Kirby also had a dubious view that “video is less popular than text for news”, but later made it clear that he is fully behind the “digital revolution” of which he is spear-heading in Coventry with the Coventry Telegraph, and wants users to start submitting all kinds of content when the new sites are launched. Griffee, sensing that Kirby was a little disturbed by the BBC’s plans, offered some words of reassurance, stating that the service is not designed to “compete with newspapers”, and later broke it down to the fact there are only 5 radio stations but there is 66 newspapers in the West Midlands.
A much more upbeat Kirby went on to talk about how the current website, IC Coventry, is doing roughly a million a month “page impressions”, and showed that newspaper sales are definitely going down, and websites are continuing to improve and grab larger numbers. However, the Coventry Telegraph is still the highest priority, and apparently exclusives that appear in the newspapers are embargoed for web use until a preset time later on during the day. Griffee took this opportunity to reiterate the BBC’s policy of featuring a story as soon as it breaks across all of the forms of media it covers, but one can imagine that with enhanced budget constraints, such a luxury would be rare.
Numbers for both the Coventry Telegraph and the BBC Local Radio Station stand at roughly 50k each at the moment, which isn’t that good in the grand scheme of things, and a definite sign that online is the way forward. The visitors both went on to explain that nearly all of their journalists are being trained in more skills, highlighting the importance of online as a catalyst for obtaining larger audience coverage. Despite being nervous, Kirby felt the need to show his reserve in the face of such stiff competition, and said that this is “one of the most exciting times for newspapers”, but looking at the figures, it’s hard to agree with him.
