Chamber and committees

This is a slightly more general question, moving away from just the BBC and charter renewal. David Smith, in some of your comments at the very start, you quite rightly drew the distinction between production and broadcasting and, on the broadcasting side, you identified clearly the growth of streamers and other online platforms and the fact that traditional broadcasting is only one element of delivery of those productions. Within the industry, is there a clear sense of how far that is going to go? Is traditional broadcasting going to remain with us, or are we preparing for a world in which it disappears—or almost disappears—and pretty much everything is delivered through other platforms? That would require a much deeper reflection and rethink on regulation than is currently on the table.

Or do we think it is going to settle at a level?

Are there any other perspectives on the long-term direction of travel?

I thank you all for your answers.

I agree with the point about the importance of media literacy in the broader sense, however we frame it.

Good morning. I have a two-part question—I will roll it together to save time. It is about the principle that you cannot change something without measuring it.

First, my experience—albeit that it was on a much smaller scale than yours—when I was on the board of a small arts festival, was that funders increasingly did not want to know about the quality or relevance of the work that we were commissioning or programming; they wanted to know how many hotel beds would be filled as a result of the festival. That sometimes created pressure to move towards work that might be relied on to be a bit crowd pleasing and to move away from work that we thought was more relevant and that was high quality but could be challenging or perhaps provocative. Do the national performing companies feel under similar pressure as a result of the requirement to report on their economic impact?

Secondly, in relation to how you report your economic impact, the research report that we have in front of us is all about the headline figures. Are you able to distinguish between the types of economic impact that you generate? For example, a—dare I say it?—crowd-pleasing performance of a very well-known or familiar piece of work in a prestigious venue might generate a large amount of economic activity that mostly goes through internationally owned hotel chains, whereas other types of work might generate a lower overall scale of economic activity but might be more likely to benefit locally owned businesses or demographic groups and geographical areas for which that economic activity would be more meaningful. Can you distinguish between the types of economic activity or benefit that you are generating, as opposed to just the scale of it?

It does, in terms of the programming element. I am not sure whether, as you move forward, you are looking to change how you do economic reporting so that you can distinguish between some large economic impact that can be demonstrated and some economic impact that will perhaps be more meaningful and make a bigger difference in certain parts of our economy.

Does anyone else have a view on this?

Thank you.

I do not think that the Parliament as a whole is adequately debating issues such as AI, intellectual property law and the ways in which they are fundamentally reshaping our society. There is a whole sweep of aspects and we could spend hours on a separate inquiry into them. However, I want to try to put the matter into some context. What we loosely call artificial intelligence, which is not at all intelligent, is only one of a range of ways in which the media, including journalism but also broadcasting, is being disrupted and changed. They include the streaming platforms, the social media platforms and changes to the ways in which people consume what they may call news, some of which will actually be news and some of which will not.

I am curious about, in particular, the NUJ’s perspective on that. Although there is potential for new forms of proper journalism and good work including, for example, fact checking to combat disinformation, there are also real dangers that we, as citizens, will end up in a sea of disinformation, with some of us desperately looking for something reliable and many of us not knowing that there is anything reliable to reach for, and that journalists will find themselves in a period of even greater precarity, in terms of their working conditions, than they are at the moment.

You have mentioned the situation that many journalists are already facing. Is there not a danger that, unless we take a much more proactive approach to the regulation of broadcasting more generally—I am talking not just about the traditional broadcasters but about the proliferation of new technologies through which people are consuming content—journalism will become an even more precarious and insecure line of work at the very time when it is most needed?