There’s nothing new about young adults not consuming much news on television – or anywhere else for that matter. By and large, when we were 18 or 20 or even 25, people like me could usually find better things to do. But once we started getting partners, families, homes, and a bunch of cares we generally started settling down in front of the news, and we came in large numbers to the BBC.
Those old certainties are gone. In our review of the performance of BBC News and Current Affairs, published today, the BBC Trust shows that young people are consuming news, more than ever before, but many of them prefer to get it online and on the move, rather than from TV, or radio, or the press. Over half of 18 to 24 year olds say the internet is their main source of news, and between 2003 and 2013 the percentage of 16 to 24s watching BBC News on TV fell from just under half to a third.
They graze for news anytime, anyplace, and they define it much more broadly than we broadcasters ever did. Last week, among the BBC News website’s most read and most shared stories, one about changes to the mortgage application process vied with another about a hamster-sized deer born in Spain. For some new news providers the deadly serious sits comfortably with the mind-numbingly inconsequential: as I write this I am offered by Buzzfeed seven photos showing the deadly floods in Afghanistan and the nineteen most important Leonardo DiCaprio Pinup Poses.
News is the info you choose to talk about, and to share, whether it comes from Buzzfeed, Huffpo, Guardian online, from Vice, from Twitter, from Instagram and from a list of sites that, if I wrote about them, would be out of date already by the time you read it. BBC News Online is up there along with the best, but the market is much more diverse and changeable than anything traditional broadcasting has ever had to cope with. The internet is unregulated: high-minded analysis vies with whimsy and rumour; the unashamedly partial sits side by side with the insidiously unreliable. It is all news of a sort, and all of it has its market.
What the BBC has offered generations for the past 60 years or more has been a fundamental building block of our well-informed democracy: and a reliable, trusted, defined, regulated space. By and large, if you heard it on the BBC you could reasonably assume it would be right, it would be fair, and it would be independent of political or commercial pressure.
There is every reason to believe that this, and future, generations will cherish those values and will be open to BBC journalism that is insightful, courageous, hard-hitting, well-resourced and, above all, accurate and committed only to discovering the truth, challenging prejudice by reflecting the widest possible range of opinions. But first the BBC has to reach them. It has to reach them where they are, not expect them to come looking.
So one of the things the Trust is asking today of the BBC is to become ever more nimble in bringing fast, intelligent, impartial news with a global agenda to new online audiences through devices and apps that suit their tastes and their lifestyles. There is no danger of the BBC dominating the emerging mobile market, which is already healthy, vibrant, diverse, and growing apace. But the BBC must bring something of value to it, something “distinctively BBC”, not just reaching new audiences but engaging them, interacting with them, giving them space to discuss, to argue, and persuade one another.
It’s overwhelmingly clear from our findings that audiences across all sections of the UK rate the BBC well out in front of other news providers on trust, breadth and expertise. They are less sure that the BBC is engaging, that it understands and reflects their own lives, or that it speaks to them in their own voice. Partly this is about story choice, partly about the people they see and hear in the programmes, and partly too about the people who make them. So we think there are some changes that need to be made there too.
The BBC Trust wants not just the diversity of the journalism to improve, but the diversity of contributors to it, and of the teams that produce it. The entire industry faces a problem in reflecting the modern UK properly – and this is as much a problem for new media as it is for traditional broadcasters. But the BBC has a higher obligation. It remains the Nation’s broadcaster: it must look and sound more like the Nation.
