Bi-Media - A Strategy for Radio?

6 February 2002
Printable version

Text of a lecture given by Jenny Abramsky, News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media 2002 at Green College, Oxford University.

This speech was third in a series of four.

Lecture one

Lecture two

Lecture four

Please check against delivery

I am going to paint a bleak picture, but I have to admit it’s a rather one-sided one.

In the summer of 1996 producers in BBC Radio suddenly found that their comfortable world had been turned upside down. No longer were they working for a Radio Directorate, working for Radio Stations, overnight they had become part of a new Division called Production. Every television and radio producer in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol was affected.

But it was not only the producers who found themselves in a different world. The teams running the radio networks now found themselves as part of another new division. This was called Broadcast.

Production, as a directorate, was just what its name said. The place where all the producers of television and radio programmes were managed. But what was Broadcast? The division consisted of all the Controllers and commissioning teams of Television and Radio, plus everyone who worked in Local Radio, Regional Television and the Nations, even if they were producers…

The structure at the top of the BBC was changed. The Managing Directors of Television and Radio were replaced with Directors, who no longer sat at the top table of the BBC - the Executive Committee - they were represented instead by the Chief Executive of Broadcast.

This was upheaval on a grand scale. And the loser was Radio.

I said, in my first lecture, that the BBC formally set one half of the business against the other... that was certainly how it seemed for much of the staff.

The money, and therefore the power, went to the Broadcast Division. Producers in the new, vast Production Division were suddenly mere ‘suppliers’, competing with the Independent sector for work within the BBC.

And what did this mean for Radio?

Radio producers now found themselves in huge bi-media departments where the local management, expert in the cost of television programmes - between £80,000 and some £500,000 per programme - could not see the point of putting similar effort into gaining a commission for a radio programme only costing £5,000 - the average cost of a radio commission.

And the new structures gave the radio networks no sense of obligation to nurture production talent.

So the Broadcast/Production split, as it became known, led to departments declaring war on each other as they battled for commissions to survive. It did not matter if another production team was damaged, so long as you got the commission and therefore kept your job. It did not matter if the subject was out of your speciality - so the Science Department could put forward ideas that might previously have come from Religion, and Religion could trample on the toes of Science.

No-one seemed to realise that every department that gained an extra commission did so at the expense of someone else’s department and sometimes someone else’s job.

This was, in some cases, a fight to the death.

I became Director of Radio in January 1999. I had heard stories of the impact the new structures had made but, in the protected silo of News, had been shielded from its affects. What I found shocked me.

Radio stations are what their producers make them. They make the programmes the audience listens to. But there was no sense of connection, of ownership.

Within a month I visited Manchester. Manchester had been the major centre of Radio production outside London. Two previous Heads of Network Production in the city had become Controllers of Radio 4, David Hatch and Michael Green. Manchester had nurtured writers and drama producers. Manchester had been the home of great programmes like A Word In Edgeways. It had been a force in the history of BBC Radio.

The Manchester I found in 1999 was far from that. Producers felt abandoned by the very networks they served. There was no coherent Radio production department left, only small teams fighting to stop each other winning commissions and therefore undermining each other. They had lost their way and the new structures had given no-one the responsibility to help them find it again. I was told that the next day it would be announced that over 50% of the radio staff would be made redundant. There was no work for them. A month in my new job I pleaded for a stay of execution, but this was denied.

I went round every production department and the story was the same. A sense of disillusion, no-one from Broadcast Directorate talked to them. Producers felt unvalued, some felt they were being treated with contempt.

And they all felt they were drowning in huge departments, where the managers, however good, were overwhelmed with the problems of television and unable to devote the time and energy necessary to understand and champion this new medium for which they had been given responsibility.

The 18 new departments, with one exception, had Television Heads. All had to deliver significant efficiency savings - after all that was the purpose of the restructuring.

They also had to deliver profits - after all these were now competing businesses. So, in Radio this meant long-standing Editors were made redundant as programme teams were amalgamated and layers of production staff removed.

This was an unhappy time.

Radio commissions only 10% of its output from Independents, compared with 25% in Television, so BBC Radio production staff should have felt confident of their future, but they didn’t. The uncertainty every six months, as they battled for the handful of commissions available, led to safe programming and abandonment of risk. Why risk a challenging idea which might not be commissioned, if a formulaic one guaranteed success?

All this affected the music as well as the speech programming. It was a radio structure unlike any in the world. The producers of Radio 1 programmes worked to a bi-media Head of Music Entertainment, who could use their profits to finance television programmes if he so wished. The Controller of Radio 1 had no say in their development. The same was true of Radios 2 and 3. No other radio organisation in the world had all its producers answerable to a separate management.

Running a station like Radio 4 became a nightmare for both producers and commissioners. The desperation to get commissions made departments submit numerous ideas for every available slot, rather than concentrate on developing two or three quality ones. Each producer in the Drama department spent an average of 14 weeks of the year working up proposals - 90% of which were never commissioned.

I said I was going to paint a bleak picture. For some it really was that bleak.

But not for all. Others saw that the new systems brought benefits. Departments, that long had felt excluded from Radio 4, won commissions for the first time and the Nations, Scotland in particular, felt a more level playing field had been established.

Independents now had more opportunity to pitch to Controllers and in drama important commissions were won. Controllers felt they had a better opportunity to pick and choose the best programmes. They saw a chance to make the networks more audience focused. No one had a right just to make the programmes they wanted.

So like all good BBC stories there were winners and losers, but this time the losers were the majority of the BBC’s creative staff.

Let me tell you another story. This one concerns BBC News. A few years ago the then Secretary of State for Health made a statement about Viagra. How did the BBC respond to Frank Dobson’s announcement?

Well, on the day, 20 different parts of the daily news machine rang the BMA asking to be faxed a copy of the BMA’s drug fact sheet! Twenty calls for the same thing. How mad you might think... this must have been in the distant past, before the BBC had got its act together and merged its Television and Radio newsgathering operations.

Well, no, it wasn’t. This story formed part of an assessment, in 1999, of how bi-media was working in BBC News. Was it the right way forward? Had it achieved the efficiency predicted when introduced in 1992?

Bi-media... funny word. What does it mean?

If you were to ask producers in the BBC today they would all give different answers, but those answers would have one thing in common, a belief that, and I quote, "bi-media was more output, less resources".

For News reporters and correspondents it came to mean "long hours, particularly in the field".

For radio producers it came to mean "we are second best, at the end of the chain".

Now those responses were invariably biased, but there was a kernel of truth behind each one.

Bi-media was a byword in John Birt’s BBC in the Nineties, when it was rolled out, first to News, next to the Regions and onwards until, as I have said, it embraced all BBC Production in 1996.

So the concept affected the whole of the BBC, and its legacy remains.

But now, in 2002, much of its structures have been dismantled. Why? What have we learnt? Was it all a waste of time?

In my first two lectures, I tried to show how central News is to the remit of the BBC, how central it is to Radio.

Radio is equally central to the News Division, delivering over 58% of its audience.

So why, if Radio was so important, were systems imposed on the medium that left its practitioners feeling sidelined and misunderstood?

I wish I could give you a simple answer.

Bi-media came to dominate thinking in News in the mid-Nineties as it faced increasing competition both globally and domestically from CNN and from Sky News. What did News gain? What was lost?

Bi-media – the idea that Radio and Television can be combined, that News producers and reporters can be in the same team - was not new when the BBC introduced it in the early Nineties.

The word was new, but if you go back to when Television started after the war, News reporters worked for both media. They were in one department.

But as Television grew in importance, it needed more dedicated teams to provide for its needs. So a separate Television team was established and although links between the two services were never totally severed, Radio by and large went its own way.

In the years that followed, Radio management invested considerable sums in Radio News and Current Affairs, in correspondents around the world. There were two correspondents in Moscow, two in Washington, one in New York. There were correspondents in all the western capitals of Europe. In the Eighties they expanded to Eastern Europe with Tim Sebastian in Warsaw. There were correspondents in India, Mark Tully knighted in the New Year’s Honours list, correspondents in South Africa and East Africa. In the Eighties they added Peking and Tokyo. And of course throughout this time there were correspondents in the Middle East and Jerusalem. This was a formidable newsgathering machine.

Domestic Radio worked closely with World Service, whose extensive band of stringers and producers ensured that Radio covered the Globe. They shared facilities and people. BBC Radio was a significant global newsgathering force.

But Radio’s investment did not stop there. Over the years they had recruited a raft of domestic specialist correspondents. The list included education, health, social affairs, arts, community relations, defence, legal, science, industrial, media, economic. There were correspondents in all the Nations and in particular Northern Ireland. Radio recruited journalists like Niall Dickson, now the BBC’s social affairs editor. Specialists like Joshua Rosenberg were able to provide much more than short reports for News bulletins. They added depth to current affairs programmes and some presented specialist programmes on Radio 4.

Only the political correspondents worked for both Television and Radio when John Birt joined the BBC in 1987.

He found a television service where there was only one correspondent on the mainland of Europe – in Moscow, and four correspondents abroad, mostly in the USA. Of course the Radio correspondents routinely provided reports for their television colleagues, but they lacked the skills of Television, and filed only after they had finished their radio responsibilities.

John Birt was determined to improve television’s newsgathering capability and authority. Radio's extensive network of foreign correspondents and specialists at home could be used effectively across the BBC, on Television as well as Radio.

So the debate began. Would combining our Radio and Television reporters and correspondents be a better way for BBC News to face the world, and would it ensure an improvement in quality on television?

These ideas were more acceptable to Television managers than to Radio ones, myself included. We believed the two media had different needs, required different skills and we feared that because Television is a more complex medium technically, demands time, Radio would become a poor relation if it was submerged into a bi-media department.

Others worried about the effect on reporters. One of the BBC’s most respected broadcasters, Charles Wheeler, warned that reporting standards would be threatened.

So in Television and Radio there were misgivings. But such siren voices were not heeded and in 1992 reporters, correspondents and News planners were merged into one department. At a stroke Television gained a formidable foreign newsgathering capability. At a stroke all the BBC's domestic correspondents now found themselves working in new environments.

The education correspondents swapped first. I remember Television’s Education Correspondent at that time was Mike Baker, and he had not worked in Radio for years. So bi-media brought some immediate benefits to Radio, as good journalists returned to the medium.

Over the next six months a number of specialists exchanged the delights of West One for the wasteland of White City and vice versa.

The Television Media Correspondent Nick Higham swapped with his Radio colleague Torin Douglas. They both wrote about it.

From Nick Higham’s point of view working in radio offered "the luxury of airtime." Radio programmes enabled him to cover stories not at the top of the day’s agenda. He was allotted time to tell them.

And, as he put it he was "freed from the tyranny of pictures." He found it quite un-nerving.

For Radio’s Torin Douglas it was the tyranny of the pictures that concerned him. Only occasionally did pictures take a back seat. He was glad to get back to Radio - he could deliver more stories, had more opportunities. He believed that "Radio allows correspondents to go into a story more deeply."

But Nick believed "Radio News (couldn’t ) match TV News for impact."

This belief was all too prevalent in BBC News.

In 1997 all News was brought together at Television Centre and bi-media was imposed in earnest. Reporters and correspondents now worked across both media as they had done in the Fifties.

How far could the concept go? There were people arguing that it could go a very long way indeed. I remember one senior manager claiming that one team could edit the Six O’Clock News on both Television and Radio! A view not shared by any in Radio production and fortunately by few in Television.

It was not only the reporters and correspondents who were affected by this new approach to broadcast management. In the mid-Nineties News production followed newsgathering and become bi-media, with programmes like Today, and The World At One placed in the same department as Breakfast News and Newsnight.

The move to Television Centre enabled Newsnight and The World Tonight to work in the same open plan office, Breakfast News and Today in another.

This, they believed, would foster collaboration and co-operation. Synergies would emerge and the BBC would ensure that it spoke with one voice.

The programmes teams did not agree and neither did I. In my opinion Today has little in common with Breakfast News.

What did all this do for the programmes, and more important what did it mean for the listeners?

To start to answer that, I have to go back years.

I am going to look at how BBC Radio has covered momentous events for its audiences, and how it does this today.

In the first of these lectures, I looked briefly at the BBC in World War Two but more at the programmes it was broadcasting than the way it covered the conflict.

The war established the art of first hand, front line radio reporting, and established the status of the broadcast reporter.

The BBC had gradually developed outside broadcasting during the Thirties. In 1935 it moved to disc-recording - on machines, which cut grooves on aluminium discs that were instantly ready for playing.

By 1936, they had converted a laundry van, fitting it with a small studio and twin turntables for continuous recording. It weighed six tons. Roving reporters, as I said last week, were called Mobile Topicality Assistants... in deference to newspaper publishers.
The BBC became more agile in 1939, when saloon cars, rather than laundry vans, were converted for broadcast use. These cars had room for only one turntable and four minutes recording. But by now the output could be fed back from any telephone line.

Radio was becoming mobile. From 1940 the BBC Regions were equipped with recording cars or vans plus secret lists of transmitters and telephone lines in the UK, so if London were occupied, the BBC would stay on the air.

All this did not make it easy for the Radio reporter. You needed considerable technical as well as editorial skill. If you were Godfrey Talbot in North Africa you probably had to type your piece before recording it, so that the censor could see it, because if you recorded directly onto disc, and the censor didn’t like it, the disc would be wasted.

Once you had recorded the disc, a despatch rider would take it to the Egyptian State Broadcasting Studios in Cairo to beam it to London.

The BBC, during the war, established its reputation for honesty and accuracy. If the BBC was honest about disasters, such as the fall of Singapore, it was more likely to be believed when the news was better.

Words don’t win wars. Churchill knew that. As early as November 1939 he said of German propaganda - "if words could kill we would be dead already".

But words do convey stories, events.

In the early days of the war there had been some reporting, but not much, from North Africa and from bombing raids over Germany.

What made the difference was D-Day. But, even then, life for a reporter was far from easy.

A recording device called the Midget had been developed in early 1944, just in time for D-Day. It was spring-wound, and had two recording positions, one for the reporter, one for battlefield noise. There was a clip-on mike.

There were 12 double-sided 10-inch discs inside the lid... enough for 72 minutes of recording. Hardly a midget, it weighed 42 pounds. It was the machine on which most of the drama of 1944-5 was recorded. And they were transmitted back to the UK via three-ton recording trucks.

For the correspondents, and for the millions who heard them, it was all about being there.

Being there was at times unbearable and conveying the enormity of the horror placed extraordinary responsibility on the shoulders of those covering the war, as Richard Dimbleby all too often showed.

The writing, the sparse use of words convey, even today, the nightmare he had encountered.

What has this to do with bi-media?

Those great war reporters set standards that reporters on Radio and Television have tried to live up to ever since. They were great writers, chroniclers, surveying the events that engulfed them, telling their audiences what they saw in front of them.
This ability, to paint a picture in the listeners’ mind, is needed as much today as it was 60 years ago. It has been needed many times during the last 60 years.

Remember the Falklands?

Brian Hanrahan, famously accurate, and using simple words to convey true facts. There is a skill in such reporting. It sounds so easy but it is not.

The Falklands War was not a television war, although it took place at the beginning of the Eighties. There was no ‘live’ television capability – pictures took weeks to reach our screens.

It was a difficult campaign to report. Reporters faced tight censorship, had Ministry of Defence minders and the MOD controlled the means of communication.

I was the Editor of the Radio 4 programme The World At One at that time. One day rumours circulated that there had been a serious setback, an attack on a ship that had caused considerable loss of life. We waited for one of the two broadcasting opportunities our reporters were allowed each day.

Then I remember vividly Brian Hanrahan filing this despatch.

His words were so powerful, so evocative that when, weeks later, the pictures arrived, they did not match the power of that original radio report.

I have said a number of times during these lectures that Radio paints pictures, conveys images, gets inside your head, stimulating your imagination. Hanrahan and Richard Dimbleby famously before him did just that. It is a Radio skill essential for its success. And it takes time to acquire those skills.

Great radio reporting uses sound to convey the sense of place.

You can feel the water in this despatch from Robert Fox, as he clambered down with the first British soldiers as they set foot on the Falkland Islands at the start of the land battle.

I could give numerous examples over the years, of that blend of sound and word.

So again, what has this got to do with bi-media? I must explain.

Writing, words, sound - Radio. For Radio to soar, it must have the skill to exploit all three. The impact of the rigid bi-media years has left Radio, in my opinion, lacking some of those skills.

Of course there are still many more than capable of using the medium to its full potential, as John Humphrys did on the Today programme the morning after Lockerbie.

But attempting that kind of coverage is now all too rare.

However the loss of one skill should not alone colour judgement. Should not undermine the benefits that such a concept could bring.

The concept was and is very attractive.

In News, on paper, the cost savings in newsgathering and production would appear to be obvious. Two (or in the case of online services three) broadcast mediums working together, sharing resources and staff to deliver a top quality end product.

When John Birt took charge of BBC News in 1987, he had been disturbed by the numerous examples of the BBC sending several reporters to cover the same story. It was damaging for the BBC. He hoped bi-media would ensure such things never happened again. As the 1999 report about News and Viagra showed, it did!

In 1992, many journalists saw bi-media could have benefits for them. They could develop a broad set of skills. Being able to move between Radio, Television and online would mean new opportunities for career development and progression. For many it did lead to that.

Unfortunately it led to other things as well.

The bi-media News production department in 1997 took the concept too far when it tried to introduce a new system of management. Editors were to be downgraded and super editors responsible for groups of programming created.

Yet another internal battle ensued. As I have said often, the BBC is splendid at tearing itself apart, and in public. The editors, producers and presenters were horrified.

As the Mail on Sunday put it: "Last week’s extraordinary events at the BBC... compare... to Mutiny on the Bounty. Star named presenters like John Humphrys, James Naughtie and Anna Ford found themselves cast in the unlikely role of Fletcher Christian leading the lower ranks in revolt."

The proposal would have damaged both Radio and Television programmes and BBC News swiftly reversed most of the proposal. The Editor of Today is as much the editor today as he was yesterday.

As BBC News expanded – with services like Radio Five Live, BBC World, News 24 and World Service Two – enormous demands were placed on the journalists. And those demands could not always be met.

Far from taking out duplication of programme resources, the different cultures and ways of working between Radio and Television made them uncomfortable bed-fellows.

The fears correspondents and journalists like Charles Wheeler had predicted were being realised as evidence grew of the staggering burden on some correspondents. If they had to be constantly available for a "live" interview about the story, when would they gather material and find out what the story was? One correspondent worked out that taking all the television and radio programmes he was expected to service over one hundred different outlets.

And for Radio this became more damaging, as Television’s perceived importance grew and many staff, wrongly, began to look on Radio as the poor cousin. It appeared at times to be at the end of the chain.

The BBC’s Media Correspondent, Torin Douglas, writing in The Times in December 2000 said: "Those who predicted that Radio would take second place have sometimes been proved right. Despite the undoubted influence and size of the BBC’s radio audience, particularly at breakfast time, Television had first pick of correspondents."

Stories were being inadequately covered to meet these new demands. The audience was the poorer.

Radio journalism, I have shown, is wonderfully mobile. Radio can get in at the heart of the action in a less intrusive fashion. But, to quote one radio editor, "there were numerous occasions when correspondents were too busy writing scripts for their TV pieces to be available."

Radio needed to "be there", but on many occasions correspondents were in the wrong location, away from the actual story, half a mile away, trapped in a TV edit van editing the piece for Television.

Programmes, and news networks, were forced to respond in different ways, often reinforcing their production staff, thus undermining much of the original aims of bi-media.

And for Radio there was a recurring problem of sound quality: TV would get brilliant pictures and perfect sound, but the truck was radio-incompatible and Radio was left with the phone or a poor-quality radio car.

But it wasn’t only Radio that suffered. Television did as well.

I have talked about the importance of craft skills in Radio, but craft skills are just as important for television. There were many bi-media correspondents who had no TV craft skills, and couldn't construct packages or were awkward on camera.

If Radio wished that reporters, out for Television, would carry a minidisc, there were television colleagues who wished radio people had taken a DV camera!

But bi-media had spread its tentacles wider than News and Production.

The BBC in the Regions had also embraced bi-media, as resources grew scarcer and it seemed the only way forward. Like News and Production this led to problems in Radio - this time Local Radio.

And the pace of bi-media was fastest at those Local Radio stations which shared newsrooms with BBC Regional Television – nine out of 39. They were the big city stations, where competition was fiercest.

One senior manager remembers some disastrous experiments with a "big rota". What was a "big rota"? In Bristol, for example, staff were deployed for both Television and Radio according to the ever-changing demands of the day. At its worst, it led to a decline in radio package-making skills, as hard pressed reporters focused on their television report and left Radio to have to do a live two-way or to dub the (inadequate) sound from the camera. Often they asked someone else (always more junior) to prepare the package for drivetime radio programmes.

Such close "co-operation" between Television and Radio on the same site also led to a brain-drain, with the most talented reporters and producers moving through much more quickly into pure television jobs than they previously would have done. And the team spirit in Local Radio, essential for its continuing health, was eroded.

The brain drain was also repeated in News and in Production, as Television cherry picked Radio’s talent.

So that is the negative side of an experiment. Radio apparently being sacrificed for Television.

What of the positive?

There were successes.

In Production, some television producers made radio documentaries for the first time and with a fresh eye produced memorable programmes. Roger Childs in Religion, a former Everyman producer, left his television programme to produce John McCarthy’s moving Bible Journey.

In the Regions, television reporters became more aware of Radio and the introduction of specialist correspondents gave Local Radio access to a depth of coverage they had not had before.

In News, National Radio, particularly in the early years, gained reporters of the calibre of Justin Webb, Bill Turnbull and Matthew Amroliwala, who all came from Television to work on programmes like The World At One. Without bi-media this would never have happened.

John Simpson became a regular broadcaster on Radio again - a medium he had left years before.

And correspondents, like Bridget Kendall, demonstrated, day by day, that it was possible to serve Radio and Television effectively.

But by the end of 1999 it was clear that, despite these successes, bi-media was not delivering effectively for either medium - not for the majority of their producers, not for their reporters and not for their programmes.

News, the first to embrace bi-media, was the first to address its problems and shortcomings.

Television needed News programmes with clear identities and one way to establish the flagship programmes was to give them their own set of correspondents.

Television needed to improve its continuous news services, BBC World and News 24. A dedicated television management, focusing solely on the medium, was needed.

So in January 2000 separate Television and Radio News Production departments were again created in News. Its ironic that the same reasons that had led to separation in the Fifties led to separation now - the needs of Television.

In 2000 Greg Dyke became Director-General of the BBC. He dismantled the Broadcast and Production Directorates and restored Radio and Television to the BBC’s top table. He also added production heads from Sport, Features, Education and Drama.

He saw that collaboration, not destructive internal competition, was needed to make a creative organisation thrive. He saw that Television and Radio had different needs, related differently to their audiences.

His restructuring, in Spring 2000, enabled Radio to embrace its music production departments once again. Radio 1 producers now worked for the Radio 1 Controller, the Radio 2 and 3 producers for theirs. No longer were production and commissioning in opposition and each service could concentrate on delivering the best for their audiences. Radio was becoming more joined up.

Last month it was announced that the studio managers, Outside Broadcast engineers and technical staff would rejoin Radio in April. All this will ensure that Radio can concentrate on making the best programming, rather than on complicated business practices that get in the way.

And last month Radio rebuilt the production base in the north with a £600k investment in Radio production in Manchester.

The commissioning relationships have changed. Radio Producers have guarantees of output, so no longer need fear that loss of one commission will lead to loss of employment. Now they can take risks, to be less safe and innovate more.

I have painted a very negative picture of bi-media. Is there any legacy worth talking about?

Yes, there is.

Let me dwell on its strengths, on what it has given the BBC. What it has given to Radio. What it can continue to give.

In Local Radio, there have been some very positive legacies. Bi-media woke up regional managers and editors to the benefit of cross promotion between Radio and Television and now Online.
It also led to some of the most popular BBC television presenters, who were/are big names in their parts of the country, returning to present radio programmes.

And bi-media also delivered a better quality of specialist correspondent journalism into BBC Local Radio, at a time when budgets had been stretched to damaging limits.

In Production, whilst abandoning the excesses and the dogma of the Nineties, the BBC has embraced the opportunity where it works.

In Drama - in writing in particular - the BBC has seen the sense of nurturing and mentoring new writing talent for all its broadcast media, not just one.

Initiatives, like Northern Exposure, are developing new programme ideas for all the different BBC platforms. This is a new approach to bi-media.

And initiatives, like Northern Exposure, are also helping repair the damage caused by the contraction of the Northern Production Department in Manchester in 1999. Today, if you live in Liverpool, you could win one of five writers awards for a year’s mentoring and development across Radio, TV, Film and Online. If you are in Newcastle you could be a radio writer in residence or enter a comedy writing competition. If you live in Manchester or Leeds there are writing schemes for you.

Without this kind of bi-media, projects like these would lack ambition and scale. Offering masterclasses and mentors for writers across five cities in the North is ambitious.

In Comedy, the opportunity for talent like Jon Culshaw and Jan Ravens of Dead Ringers to work with Television, to develop new formats that exploit their skills is an important part of public service broadcasting. Without this form of bi-media, this would not happen.

And, in News, there have been many occasions when Radio has benefited from its access to the best reporters and correspondents in the BBC.

Very often Television and Radio should share resources and now they do. I think of John Simpson in Belgrade and most recently entering Kabul.

John Simpson famously liberating Kabul for the BBC!

But bi-media only works when it recognises that Television and Radio work differently with their audiences and place different, but no less exacting, demands on people in the field and on the production desks. When bi-media is imposed dogmatically across a creative organisation then the concept is flawed.

So how do I sum this up? What have we learnt?

There was and is some logic behind the bi-media idea, but it was inevitable its blanket implementation meant that Radio was going to be the loser.

Radio is about painting pictures, Television is about shooting them. Pictures can make it easier for Television, but those who argued for a blanket imposition didn’t realise Television and Radio were two different arts.

The changes in production made efficiency a more important priority than creativity. Creative people, by their nature, will always be inefficient, but if you harness that creativity with effective leadership, then you will get some great programmes. And if you put creativity first then you have to give teams the focussed leadership they deserve. Huge bi-media departments undermined leadership, in particular in Radio and Local Radio.

Not everything has been or should be discarded.

Newsgathering in the BBC, rightly, remains centrally managed, but the dogma of the Nineties has gone and most reporters and correspondents are able to concentrate on their respective media, learning its skills, its strengths, its needs.

But some important things have gone.

In Local Radio, bi-media, coming as it did after a relentless focus on more speech for radio stations (which was too often interpreted as more news and journalism), developed a phase in which the best creative radio skills were less cherished and, in many places, lost.

Some critical roles were lost, producers who were creative entrepreneurs, exploiting both talent, individuals and innovation.

Local Radio has recognised this and are trying to find these individuals/leaders again. Commissioning programming like The Century Speaks and Sense of Place is a first step.

But it will take a long time to rebuild this critical creative element in Local Radio output.

And in News the legacy of those great war correspondents is less prevalent, in danger of being lost. The use of sound, the power of words. These are skills not easily re-established.

So we have recognised the short-comings. But all is not bleak. There are still reporters able to describe events with power and impact. Gordon Swindlehurst did just that for Radio Cumbria when he flew above the funeral pyres during the Foot and Mouth epidemic.

That is what Radio must aspire to. Reporting like that must set standards for others to follow and radio producers must demand more and exploit their medium more. Blending sound and words, using writing to create images. Without these skills Radio the medium, and its listeners will be the poorer.

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