Fair play to anyone who can get 15 million people, most of whom have had their attention spans destroyed by an overheated attention economy, to sit through a four-hour video on a really niche, arcane subject.
I haven't got a fully worked out take yet but I'm a bit sceptical of the "phones have destroyed our attention spans" thing. I mean, it's partially true (exhibit A: Me and Twitter), but now we binge 10 hour miniseries instead of films and I love a three hour long podcast.
This is actually not 1000 miles from what Ian Katz effectively wanted. Obviously, we were doing 40+ mins of TV a weekday, but his big thing was “can we make the show actually be a thing beyond the time slot?”. So we had a BBC sport style liveblog during elections, had a pretty active YouTube channel and stuff like that. We used to break stories in the mid-PM online and did a full day of live events after the 2016 referendum, mostly not for broadcast.
I really liked the Katz era - the Thriller dancing, Paxman's contempt for the weather, etc, I think could have built more of an outright 'fandom' for the show which news programmes typically don't get – perhaps analogous to how these days with a slightly less dry approach to the news, Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell can leverage the audience relationship they've created to sell out the Palladium (!).
I wanted to repost your Paddy McGuinness joke, but my courage failed me. Someone must admire his body of work, after all....! Great piece generally, but as my daughter just made it onto Newsnight last week as a paper reviewer, I hope the BBC gives it another week or two before they adopt your proposal.
I think there are two problems with this proposal that are beyond even your powers to fix James:
1) the 'Youtube documentarians' are interesting and "fun" in way that Kirsty Wark will not be - is there a tension between sober and trustworthy 'journalism' and watchable 'entertainment', in the sense that the more captivating something is the less we should trust it as journalism?
2) the standard of BBC journalism is declining. Admittedly, this is a gut feeling but I think the degree to which people trust the BBC is not as strong as the numbers show. And, relatedly, the quality of a lot of what the BBC call 'news' (especially online) is shocking. Is there even capacity in the BBC to do a three-hour expose on the asylum system, or proposals for Scottish independence, or British foreign policy in the Middle East? Or, if there is capacity, can it tackle those topics in a way which doesn't leave it tarred as 'biased' and so undermine the point?
Agree these are both challenges! On the first one, I think there's definitely a tension there, but it can also be reconciled with skill - look at how Jon Stewart was the most trusted newscaster in America after Walter Cronkite.
On the standards of BBC journalism - not sure I'd agree it is "falling". Though it definitely faces the separate challenges of both reduced budget and resources (which will lead to more mistakes if staff are overstretched), and the challenge of navigating a more polarised news environment. (We're not as polarised as America but the tenor of politics post-Brexit has for sure changed.)
As for the BBC News website, there has definitely been a conscious shift in editorial direction over the last few years and I'm... not an enormous fan.
We might need to agree to disagree but I have noticed a definite shift in the BBC's mainstream journalism (Laura K, Ten PM news etc). It struck me during the Brexit/meaningful votes debacle, when the news was focussed more on the 'narrative' and who was winning and less about the detail of what was in the package.
Once I noticed, I cannot help but notice that a lot of news coverage is through the prism of who wins and who loses, rather than if this is a good thing in and of itself?
I thought for a bit there that you were going to reinvent Weekend World, but as a half-hour slot. My only concern about "throw away timeslots, just do it when you want" is that it becomes hard to justify the budget, and also big news doesn't run to a timetable. How many three-hour things has Mr YouTuber done? Just the one? The relentless slot of generating Big News needs a lot of people, and it is easier to do a Brian Walden-style interrogation on <insert topic>. If they mostly avoided politics it could actually be useful. (And they could reuse the Weekend World music, which was amazing.)
Fair play to anyone who can get 15 million people, most of whom have had their attention spans destroyed by an overheated attention economy, to sit through a four-hour video on a really niche, arcane subject.
I haven't got a fully worked out take yet but I'm a bit sceptical of the "phones have destroyed our attention spans" thing. I mean, it's partially true (exhibit A: Me and Twitter), but now we binge 10 hour miniseries instead of films and I love a three hour long podcast.
Conversely, I am totally Haidt-pilled on this subject, so I'd like to see your take on it one day...
This is actually not 1000 miles from what Ian Katz effectively wanted. Obviously, we were doing 40+ mins of TV a weekday, but his big thing was “can we make the show actually be a thing beyond the time slot?”. So we had a BBC sport style liveblog during elections, had a pretty active YouTube channel and stuff like that. We used to break stories in the mid-PM online and did a full day of live events after the 2016 referendum, mostly not for broadcast.
I really liked the Katz era - the Thriller dancing, Paxman's contempt for the weather, etc, I think could have built more of an outright 'fandom' for the show which news programmes typically don't get – perhaps analogous to how these days with a slightly less dry approach to the news, Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell can leverage the audience relationship they've created to sell out the Palladium (!).
I wanted to repost your Paddy McGuinness joke, but my courage failed me. Someone must admire his body of work, after all....! Great piece generally, but as my daughter just made it onto Newsnight last week as a paper reviewer, I hope the BBC gives it another week or two before they adopt your proposal.
Haha! Congratulations to your daughter!
I think there are two problems with this proposal that are beyond even your powers to fix James:
1) the 'Youtube documentarians' are interesting and "fun" in way that Kirsty Wark will not be - is there a tension between sober and trustworthy 'journalism' and watchable 'entertainment', in the sense that the more captivating something is the less we should trust it as journalism?
2) the standard of BBC journalism is declining. Admittedly, this is a gut feeling but I think the degree to which people trust the BBC is not as strong as the numbers show. And, relatedly, the quality of a lot of what the BBC call 'news' (especially online) is shocking. Is there even capacity in the BBC to do a three-hour expose on the asylum system, or proposals for Scottish independence, or British foreign policy in the Middle East? Or, if there is capacity, can it tackle those topics in a way which doesn't leave it tarred as 'biased' and so undermine the point?
Agree these are both challenges! On the first one, I think there's definitely a tension there, but it can also be reconciled with skill - look at how Jon Stewart was the most trusted newscaster in America after Walter Cronkite.
On the standards of BBC journalism - not sure I'd agree it is "falling". Though it definitely faces the separate challenges of both reduced budget and resources (which will lead to more mistakes if staff are overstretched), and the challenge of navigating a more polarised news environment. (We're not as polarised as America but the tenor of politics post-Brexit has for sure changed.)
As for the BBC News website, there has definitely been a conscious shift in editorial direction over the last few years and I'm... not an enormous fan.
We might need to agree to disagree but I have noticed a definite shift in the BBC's mainstream journalism (Laura K, Ten PM news etc). It struck me during the Brexit/meaningful votes debacle, when the news was focussed more on the 'narrative' and who was winning and less about the detail of what was in the package.
Once I noticed, I cannot help but notice that a lot of news coverage is through the prism of who wins and who loses, rather than if this is a good thing in and of itself?
I thought for a bit there that you were going to reinvent Weekend World, but as a half-hour slot. My only concern about "throw away timeslots, just do it when you want" is that it becomes hard to justify the budget, and also big news doesn't run to a timetable. How many three-hour things has Mr YouTuber done? Just the one? The relentless slot of generating Big News needs a lot of people, and it is easier to do a Brian Walden-style interrogation on <insert topic>. If they mostly avoided politics it could actually be useful. (And they could reuse the Weekend World music, which was amazing.)