BBC journalism and what journalists write about the corporation.

BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles

BBC, Under Criticism, Struggles to Tighten Its Belt on April 23.

Interesting bits:

“As Mr. Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government embarks on a grueling austerity program, it has accused the BBC of “extraordinary and outrageous waste.” Media companies — especially those of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, the BBC’s chief competitor — have been quick to join the critical chorus.

Much of the criticism has to do with the license fee of £145.50 (about $240) that is levied annually on every British household with a television set. The fee brings in £3.6 billion a year, about 80 percent of the BBC’s total income.”

“Just as Republicans in the United States have complained that National Public Radio has a left-wing bias, so do conservatives in Britain complain about the BBC’s political leanings. (A threat to remove NPR’s federal funding has remained only that so far.)

Members of Parliament are outraged at BBC executives’ high salaries, like the 2010 compensation package of £838,000, or about $1.4 million, for the director general, Mark Thompson; that total is set to drop to £619,000 this year. Its employees — it had more than 21,300 at the end of 2010 — are worried for their jobs, angry about a plan to relocate many of them from London to a suburb of Manchester, and unhappy about cuts in their pension plans.”

“Every week, more than 97 percent of the British population watches, reads or listens to something produced by the BBC, which operates 10 TV channels and 16 radio stations domestically. Through its World Service radio network, it has a weekly global audience of 180 million.

“The BBC is a bit like religion,” Mr. Grade said. “It’s an article of faith; you either believe in it, or you don’t. I happen to believe in it. But it can’t do everything that it does now.”

That is the consensus, even within the BBC, which is now going through the painful process of deciding how to find £1.3 billion (about $2.1 billion) of cuts in the four-year spending plan ending in 2017 — from back-office expenses, from the internationally celebrated World Service, from its online operations, from its news and entertainment divisions and, possibly, even from coverage of quintessentially British television events like Wimbledon.”

Lord Patten attacks BBC managers who ‘expect to be paid like bankers’ http://bit.ly/dG7kF6