Chamber and committees

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?

There is a wider question about the implications for journalism with regard to the service that it performs, as well as the experience of being a journalist and the precarity involved, and about the change in the relationship between who produces what people think of as news and how it is consumed. If people think of social media influencers in the same way that they used to think of journalists whom they trusted, that fundamentally changes the nature of what is going to be produced and who is going to be producing it. If we do not regulate the broadcast media more generally in a way that has not been done to date and go beyond the traditional broadcasters, is there not a danger that we will see not just the challenges that we are currently facing with regard to disinformation and the lack of trust from viewers and listeners, but the lack of any kind of secure career path for journalists? Those problems are going to be compounded, so surely we need to look at regulating broadcasting in a more robust—and, I should say, multiplatform and 21st century—way.

If you set up a crowdfunder for that, I will contribute.

Do others have responses to the question about the degree of autonomy that BBC Scotland could or should have and how that relates to the wider regulation of the media landscape?

Do I have time for a final question, convener?

I have already downloaded the classic-era “Doctor Who”, so I am safe there.

Do you think that that sort of thing can be defined in a way that restricts it to the BBC’s economic activity, instead of its content with regard to issues around, say, economic growth being affected?