In response to Paul Geater’s opinion piece - BBC takes easy option to cut East Anglia's service (published Thursday, 13 April) - BBC Senior Head of Content Production for East and London, Robert Thompson, writes that plans to modernise the BBC’s local services will offer more value to communities in the region and better serve its audience...
'Our plans to modernise the BBC’s local services have just one aim: to offer more value to communities across England as audiences increasingly turn to digital. We want to strengthen our local news online service with more journalists, deliver hard-hitting journalism and invest in new audio output for BBC Sounds.
It is about striking a balance between our existing and much-loved broadcast services and investing in an exciting portfolio of local online services that we believe will offer greater value to licence-fee payers.
We are not cutting our spend but we are planning to move 10% of our funding towards strengthening our local online services and the impact of our storytelling.
Of course change isn’t always easy and we have to make some tough decisions but we are maintaining overall investment and staffing levels in local services. But change is essential.
We know our audiences are living in an increasingly online and on-demand world and that means we have to adapt and change to remain relevant.
Our audiences expect a service from the BBC which is more than our local radio stations and our regional TV news programmes.
It is essential we are available to all audiences when and where they want us, not just providing content when our schedules allows it.
In the East our teams delivered live, on-demand content as the March tides hit Hemsby.
Our reporters were there that dramatic Friday night as homes were threatened.
More than three million people came to that online content which was delivered in the form of a live page, online stories and videos. And of course content was created for BBC Radio Norfolk, Look East and BBC Sounds.
We’ll soon be premiering an iPlayer documentary which takes an even closer look at the community, available on demand whenever the audience wants it.
In Cambridge, our debate on the city’s planned congestion charge ran across all of our platforms as did a debate on the future of Corby. We know this content is making an impact as audiences find it and engage with it.
I want the BBC in the East to be a truly digital-first, multimedia operation that will harness all our amazing content.
My ambition is to grow the impact we make and we’re building a team of investigative journalists in the East who will do just that.
As audiences change the way they consume media we also have to change and continue to invest in these areas.
As your columnist rightly explores, we have to move beyond our network of transmitters and we are doing that by ensuring we are exactly where the audience is which is in that crucial digital world.
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