BBC 'does not want to be the last PSB standing', says BBC director-general

BBC director-general, Mark Thompson, last night defended recent job cuts within the organisation and declared that 'the BBC's journalism is stronger and more influential than it ever has been'.

As he has outlined many times in the past, the BBC will pool its resources and enter new collaborations with other public service broadcasters (PSBs) and commercial news organisations. The BBC 'does not want to be the last PSB standing', he said.

It was the inaugural Charles Wheeler Award and lecture, organised by the British Journalism Review in memory of the legendary broadcaster and to celebrate the publication's 20th year in print. 

Lady Wheeler, the late journalist's widow, presented the award to long-serving broadcaster, Jeremy Paxman at the closing event of the two-day 'Journalism in Crisis' conference at the University of Westminster.

After praising Charles Wheeler, who died in 2008 after working for over 60 years in British journalism, Thompson said the BBC still valued its journalism as much as ever. 

"The truth (...) is not just that the reports of the death of the BBC's journalism are exaggerated but that the BBC's journalism is stronger and more influential than it ever has been." 

"I believe Charles Wheeler was the finest reporter the BBC ever had," Thompson said, praising his 'his questioning spirit'.  He was 'a lone star and an enduring inspiration', he told the guests.

["Wheeler was] passionately committed to the primacy of the individual correspondent, to witness and judgement; deeply suspicious of any attempt to hedge that autonomy and personal responsibility around, with systems or checks and balances," he said.

"Charles was an intensely committed and individualistic journalistic correspondent: impartiality didn't have to mean a kind of neutered, colourless kind of journalism."

Thompson said journalism 'should remain a living, dynamic thing' rather than an 'ossified tradition' or 'rigid' set of rules.

Nonetheless, he said, the BBC was currently facing particular difficulties, with severe cuts across the organisation and in its journalistic departments.

Challenges ahead
Thompson outlined concerns held by others, outside and within the corporation: the danger of 'homogenising content' with the development of new technology; the sustainability of plurality 'in the context of acute economic instability in the rest of media'; and the risk that standards of journalism would be lowered along with recent job cuts.

"Can what is done in the names of productivity and efficiency actually turn out to mean a cut in quality? Clearly there's a risk of that," he said.

But, Thompson argued: "What we're trying to do at the BBC is to find a way to pay for services of the future (...) by delivering our same output but with fewer resources."

Defending post closures in the newsgathering arm, Thompson said: "Our commitment to deliver the best journalism in the world (...) we believe we can achieve that goal with fewer people."

'When present changes are complete' he said, 40 per cent of the BBC workforce will be in journalism.

Some parts of the world would see an increase in staff, he said, using the bureau in Islamabad as an example: "We will add a number of people on ground."

"We know no matter what technological advances there are, no matter how big the work of blogging, tweeting, interacting becomes, what the public and around the world expects more than anything is great, professional journalism," he said.

Sharing assets
As Thompson has outlined in past speeches, this will mean sharing resources with other commercial and public service broadcasters.

Just because other media organisations are 'weaker', it 'doesn't mean BBC is stronger or bigger in absolute terms,' he said, adding that the corporation is 'far smaller than we used to be'.

He referred to the speech made by BBC Trust chair, Sir Michael Lyons, made this week: "[D]istribution of existing BBC funding won't do anything to reverse net decline of PSB funding, on contrary it's a recipe for further aggregate decline and fragmentation.

"A plurality of PSBs remains highly desirable (...) to offer the British public a real choice of quality content."

Answering questions afterwards - including one from the London Mayor, Boris Johnson - Thompson referred to the 'pretty painful' experience of the rejection of BBC Local plans and said that sharing assets marked an 'enormous culture change' for the BBC.

When answering questions about the difficulties of pooling resources, he said that 'it's perfectly possible to imagine a world where some resources are shared'.

The corporation's new relationship with ITV will mean pooling studios, rushes and satellite trucks, for example. With newspaper groups and the Press Association (PA), it will mean sharing audio-visual content.

Thompson talked of a 'new consortium to make make AV content available across all sectors' and finished by outlining the latest developments at the BBC College of Journalism. 

More coverage of Journalism in Crisis 2009 to follow from Journalism.co.uk.Follow @journalism_live on Twitter. A livestream can be viewed at this link.

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