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- Wednesday 27th March: The BBC's director-general is not fit for purpose
Wednesday 27th March: The BBC's director-general is not fit for purpose
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Tim Davie’s tenure as director-general of the BBC has been pretty dire. If you actively sought out someone to tank the corporation’s credibility and undermine its business model you’d be hard pressed to find someone more suited than Tory Tim, whose chief qualification is failing to get elected as a Conservative MP two years on the bounce.
But even a broken clock is right twice a day, and when Davie calls for licence fee reform you have to acknowledge that the broadcast landscape has changed a lot over the past few years. A halfway-decent DG would have already been neck-deep in plans to ensure the BBC’s commercial viability while also defending its value-for-money proposition, mind you, but you go to war with the army you’ve got — even if they are incompetents like Davie.
At the same time, Davie’s testimony at a Royal Television Society event has riled up News Media Association chief executive Owen Meredith. Meredith believes that the half-baked commercial plans set out by Davie will negatively impact local news providers in the UK: “The public should be in no doubt that this appears to be an aggressive strategy, designed to strengthen the BBC’s hand at the expense of others”. Strong words!
The Onion has been hang-gliding over hell for as long as I’ve been reporting on it, constantly on the verge of closure. As one of the foremost online sources of cutting satire, though, it would be enormously missed if it got closed down. Now its parent company G/O Media — fresh off selling A.V. Club and The Takeout — is reportedly shopping it around. Meanwhile, former G/O property Splinter is being revived under the aegis of Pasta magazine.
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There’s a wonderful Dylan Moran bit about how your potential is like your bank balance — you should never check it because there’s always less than you think. This article from Jacob Donnelly argues that publishers need to bite the bullet and actually look at how well the content they publish just because they’ve always done it actually performs, regardless of its potential. It’ll be painful to learn that some of your storied series don’t attract much of an audience, but in the end everyone needs to grapple with that.
Oh if only there were a German word to express how I feel about this news! Look, it’s genuinely tragic what has happened to X (née Twitter) and the communities that found one another on there. But it’s been a horrendous few weeks, alright, so you’ll forgive me feeling a little German-word about the fact that under free speech abolitionist Elon Musk its userbase has absolutely cratered. Just let me have this!
