Examination of Witnesses (Questions 780
- 783)
WEDNESDAY 24 OCTOBER 2007
Mr Jeremy Dear, Professor Julian Petley, Mr Tim Gopsill
and Dr Martin Moore
Q780 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Does it?
Mr Dear: Yes.
Q781 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
The BBC does?
Mr Dear: It has a news trainee scheme. To some
extent, it is more the newspaper and magazines industries which
have gone away from training their own staff to requiring people
to pay for their own training in advance and then coming fully
trained to the job, which costs a large amount of money for those
young students.
Chairman: May we wind up with a question
from the Bishop on local radio.
Q782 Bishop of Manchester:
I want to get clarification following the earlier evidence you
were giving about your concern over the relaxation of ownership
rules. In particular, there was a reference to Fox News and also
the net. I just wanted to press the point in relation to local
radio news as to what you feel would be the impact if that ownership
relaxation took place in terms of local radio.
Mr Gopsill: It might be argued that local radio
cannot get any worse than it is! As I am sure the Committee is
aware, there has been a direct split in local radio which is that
the BBC does serious talk radio, reporting and programming, commercial
radio is now little more than music and the talk radio is phone-ins.
As far as news is concerned, the provision has fallen and fallen
but, with the relaxing of the regulations, local radio stations
have become owned by three or four big groups who are concentrated
in regional areas and are producing their news through what they
call a hub system which is where they have one central news room
which services half-a-dozen radio stations covering a big area
and you are likely to have one or two reporters covering an area
of a couple of counties, particularly at weekends, and they cannot
cover news properly at all. Local radio news really is a problem.
In most places, you only have a handful of journalists who simply
cannot cover the news properly and any further relaxation will
be a very bad thing.
Q783 Bishop of Manchester:
Do you see any way of improving that situation that you could
recommend?
Mr Gopsill: The radio stations should have an
obligation under communications law to provide a level of service.
By the way, this is also a concern at the moment in regional television
as well as local radio.
Chairman: I have to say that the only
problem with that is that nowadays you can listen to music continuously
without having to go to a local radio station at all. I thank
you very much, indeed. We have run out of time. It has been very
interesting. If there is anything further, in particular some
of the figures you have talked about, if you could let us have
them, we would be extremely grateful. Thank you very much, indeed.
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