In April 2008 the BBC took its first steps towards integrating its news departments, with television and radio moving into a common newsroom and the online team due to join them in June. Peter Horrocks, then head of the BBC newsroom, acknowledged that most journalists would go on working primarily in the medium they had always worked in.
One new job title came with the reorganisation: the “web conversion producer”, responsible for taking stories originally produced for broadcast and turning them into online content. That was the part worth arguing about. A conversion role treats the website as the last stop rather than a platform with its own demands, and the BBC News site had spent ten years building a reputation on the opposite assumption. The approach had already been tried in the site’s early years and had not worked then either.
The deeper objection was about status. A pipeline that only runs one way makes online an afterthought, picking up what broadcast leaves behind, rather than an equal commissioner of work. The sharpest way of putting the point at the time was to ask whether the BBC would consider the mirror image of the role — a broadcast conversion producer, taking material made for the web and reworking it for television and radio.