How to make the BBC democratic
I did a post some months back over at Our Beeb on how the BBC could become accountable to licence payers, and today, Tessa Jowell has said something similar in the Telegraph. When I wrote the piece, it was all a touch theoretical since the BBC’s governance wasn’t a live issue. (update – The Independent’s Steve Richards suggests there might be a link) I’m still not in any way convinced that the Savile and Newsnight affairs have any real and pressing read through to governance, but as we saw with the reform of the...
read moreThe British Broadcasting Co-operative
I’ve just done a piece on how the BBC could become the British Broadcasting Co-operative, and why it should, as part of OpenDemocracy’s Our Beeb series. It draws on the references I make in my pamphlet on media ownership to the BBC. Now is absolutely the right moment to be querying the BBC’s governance. Just because people who beat up on the BBC seem to have an ulterior motive, and just because the cultural life of the UK would be much worse without it, that’s no reason for the rest...
read moreMedia Co-operatives Report Launched
I’ve been working for some months on a pamphlet for Co-operatives UK on the opportunities for co-operation in the media, and the report is finally launched today on their site, where you can download it as a PDF. It’s also been covered in The Guardian by Roy Greenslade, who kindly links to this blog; those readers arriving here from Roy’s piece can see other pieces on media co-ops (links opens all posts tagged ‘media’). It’s been great to spend time thinking, writing and researching this issue. I’m...
read moreCo-operation and Media Regulation
Visitors landing here from Roy Greenslade’s piece in the Guardian about my report on media co-operatives should visit this page first! I was very kindly asked by Anthony Zacharzewski of The Democratic Society to contribute a piece to their series on media regulation. My research on media co-operatives is mainly focussed on the how they meet the challenge of the digital age, but there’s an important dimension in respect of regulating the media for the public interest. In his...
read moreThe Ghost of Bob Lord
Last night, Darren Ambrose apparently scored a screamer for Crystal Palace in their win over Manchester United in the Carling Cup. I say apparently as I only saw that on twitter, so I went hunting this morning to see it myself. I was on the Guardian’s youtube roundup, and saw that several uploads of the goal had been pulled due to a copyright claim by the Football League. Fair enough, you might think; they don’t want people going to Youtube and giving Google content they’ve not paid for when you’d want those eyeballs...
read morePractical Options for Media Co-ops
Originally published on OpenDemocracy as part of their series examining media policy. The piece also has extra relevance given their own exploration of a membership scheme to their reader community as part of their own attempts to make their site sustainable in the medium and longer-term. For 11 years, I worked at Supporters Direct, helping to create mutual structures through which fans could run their football clubs, and in recent years, I’ve been drawn to the similarities between clubs and...
read moreMedia Reform @ Red Pepper
Red Pepper have posted a debate I took part in a few weeks’ ago under their auspices on reforming the media to better serve the public interest. I was there to give a co-op angle to a general discussion about media reform along with Dan Hind (author, The Return of the Public), Fiona Swarbrick (National Union of Journalists) and Aiden White (formerly of the International Federation of...
read moreMore Media Co-ops
The issue of ownership has been the absent part of the British media debate but there is growing recognition that the issue has to be on the table as the various strands of inquiry into the media resulting from hackgate start in earnest. I’ve written about why news should be produced co-operatively and why it would be more ethical, more responsive and more accountable, opening up new sources of capital in the midst of crisis and transformation in the economics of news. But how could it actually work, and what would a co-operative media...
read moreThe Case For Media Co-ops
Originally published on New Left Project in the wake of the hacking scandal to argue for using co-operative and mutual structures in media ownership, a project I’ve been working on with Co-operatives UK. The piece argues that ownership has always been thought of in terms of ‘who’ rather than ‘how’. It’s strange that in the renewed debates about UK media policy in the wake of the hacking scandal, the critical importance of the nature of media ownership hasn’t...
read moreWhy We Need Media Co-ops
First published on Liberal Conspiracy on the need to consider issues of media ownership in the context of how they are owned, not just who owns them, as the debate following the revelations of the hacking scandal focussed on News International and the Murdoch family. The plurality debate recognises that who owns newspapers matters, but says little about how> they’re owned; the regulation debate recognises that media need to be held to account but is focussed on external control, with...
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