A recent Buzzfeed report referenced by Press Gazette shows how the work environment of aspiring young journalists can be very harsh.
In January we covered how the BBC spent £8m attempting to improve “local democracy” reporting. These efforts are likely to do little to improve actual local journalism but will manage to enrich large and un-localised corporations, such as Johnstone Press, Newsquest, and Trinity Mirror.
Buzzfeed now highlights further examples of how BBC systems have been gamed, most notably by That’s TV. Workers have been left exhausted on zero-hour, minimum wage contracts.
That’s TV is a conglomerate of local TV broadcasters often found on Freeview. With a huge decline in local print journalism, there’s a genuine need for the kind of content that the BBC claims to encourage and to which That’s TV aspire.
However, in return for £3m and 14 broadcast licenses, all the BBC have managed to secure is channels with viewership that often barely scrape into the dozens. Fresh content is minimal. Most of the schedules are padded out with incredibly old films.
One of the prime That’s TV channels is That’s Manchester, a channel that basically replaced the function of the local station, Channel M. Channel M was far from perfect but it was more independent, better known and produced more original content. That’s Manchester also produced more fresh content in early days but has seen severe cutbacks.
Meanwhile, the employment conditions of presenters, producers, and engineers are woeful at best and completely unsustainable, as they lead to high levels of churn and consequent inconsistency, the Buzzfeed report notes:
“The company uses tiny teams of one or two young, under-trained staff working on zero-hour, minimum-wage contracts at each station to produce 85 stories a month to hit the BBC quota and keep the subsidies coming in. One station brought in media studies students to help achieve the numbers. One former employee is upfront in declaring the operation ‘a scam.'”
Are license payers being ripped off while the BBC boasts of supporting grassroots journalism?
How much better could this money be better spent if this money were not going to cynical corporate vultures? The BBC millions could be used to pay hundreds of journalists properly, including those currently working for That’s TV. They could do much more of the reporting on local councils, community and culture that is so lacking in the “news deserts” that have spread while local papers have closed at an alarming rate.
Instead of local independent journalism, the BBC have seen our money siphoned into poor content, capitalist profiteering, and appalling treatment of young workers in a profession that’s already extremely tough to break into, especially for working-class people and people of colour.
Stephen Durrant
