Telegraph loses £10m
More evidence that newspapers are (mostly) financially unviable unless they are financed and supported by rich businessmen? This supports my view that an organisation like the BBC could never be replicated by the market and it should be seen as a public good.
| Post to del.icio.us |
Filed in: Economics, Media
No, they just blew £100 million on iPlayer. That could *never* be replicated by the market.
I agree on the iPlayer – a waste of time and money.
I don’t think it was a waste of time but yeah not knowing fully what you’re getting into means going over budget all too easily.
The BBC is not a public good by the definition you linked to, as people can be excluded from watching it if they do not pay the BBC tax.
Secondly, the Telegraph lost money because its owners were trying to make money from it, by dragging it into the ‘digital age’ and making loads of journalists redundant. I agree that sometimes proprieters are happy to fun papers at a loss, but this particular incident is a very different kettle of fish.
Yes, in no way could the BBC be considered a public good under the economists’ definition.
Rumbold,
A possibly minor point, but the BBC is not just telly. I doubt if I watch more than four or five BBC programmes a week, but could a commercial operation come up with Radio 4? Or the World Service? And R4’s Listen Again website is my default background listening for mundane chores.
I’m sure the BBC would do a perfectly good job of selling itself to Murdoch or some other rich guy if the current owners decided to sell up.
After all, Northern Rock used to be a sleepy small-town building society, look how much better it has been doing since it freed itself from the dead hand of mutuality and launched into the seas of commerce.
The best part is the PR campaign to get the owners to part with their multi-billion assets at a knock-down price only need cost about 10M or so.
as people can be excluded from watching it if they do not pay the BBC tax.
Rumbold, the definition isn’t about that. It is about the fact that consumption by one person does not limit the ability of someone else to consume that same product.
Sunny:
So DesiBabes xxx uncut (or such programmes) are public goods? Is ‘The Sun’ a public good? If a public good is simply one that is not dimished by the numbers using it, then isn’t the definition irrelevent to your point in this case?
Don:
Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe the newspaper industry structure is geared toward loss making: printing presses etc involve a super high fixed cost, and as competition enters so it may make sense to operate a pricing policy where only the variable costs are recovered (eg: think Eurotunnel). Just a thought.
Wiki has a nice piece on the Beeb: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC
I’m conflicted about the Beeb. It is an important institution but we need to truly ask what it is for, because when we start thinking in terms of opportunity cost it isn’t coming cheap (£3.1 bn in tax payers money)
If the Beeb is responsible to the people then should it give the public what they want, or should it give what the Beeb thinks is in their best interest, or should it be a mixture of the two?
That means that currently no broad or ex-broad in this country can pay its own way. The Times is subsidised by Murdoch, the Indie by Tony O’Reilly, the Grauniad by Auto Trader and the Torygraph by the Barclays. There’s going to a come a time when either the owners are going to pull a plug or one or more is going to go fully online. That I think threatens the plurality of the media in this country more than anything else at the moment.
But how well are ethnic minorities represented on the BBC?
Consider the views of the writer of TV drama Cracker, Jimmy McGovern. When he was interviewed by presenter Simon Mayo, he was asked about racism.
McGovern said:
“I have got to say this, you will not like this. But I’ve worked a lot in the BBC, you know. I love the BBC as an institution and as an organisation and you do see lots of black faces in the BBC. But you see them in the canteen. You do not see them in positions of power. It would appear to me that one of the most racist institutions in England is in fact the BBC.”
In March 2007, Jonathan Ross said during his live Radio 2 show that too many black people at the BBC were in low-paid jobs.
“How many black people have they got working on proper shows there? You know the BBC still haven’t really come up to speed. I mean they are trying, God bless them. Most of the guys you see there are either working on the door, carrying a cloth in there and cleaning up. We haven’t really made the effort yet.”
In 2001, after being appointed director general of the BBC, Greg Dyke accused the corporation of being “hideously white”.
And where are Asian/black presenters on Newsnight?
Going by yesterday’s revelations in The Guardian of how banana companies “lose” money for tax purposes, I’d thinkthat’sprobably true of papers too.