Coverage of the BBC’s strategic review in March 2010 went almost entirely to the scrapping of 6 Music and the cuts to BBC Online. Further inside the document, in a passage on public space in the digital age, sat a phrase that read like big media talking about the internet a decade earlier: the “vast and unruly world of the blogosphere”.
The word choice was the objection. Unruly is defensible up to a point, but vibrant, lively or boisterous were available and would have carried none of the dismissal, and the corporation under Mark Thompson was itself part of the blogosphere it was describing, running dozens of blogs of its own. The Forrester analyst Nick Thomas made the sharper version of the same complaint, arguing that Thompson did not get digital in the way that even his much-maligned predecessor John Birt had.
The odd part was that the review said the opposite elsewhere. It called the internet the BBC’s third core medium and stated plainly that it was not an optional extra but the corporation’s future. What followed that was not investment but refocusing: spending on BBC Online was to fall by 25 per cent by 2013.