Guiding the UK’s public broadcaster, and one of the world’s largest news providers, through the maze of an increasingly digital news ecosystem is no small challenge but it’s Naja Nielsen’s focus as Digital Director at BBC News.

Naja sat down with Jim Egan, Principal at FT Strategies, to discuss what a global multiplatform newsroom serving audiences in the UK and around the world looks like to the BBC. She covered the challenges and opportunities of reaching younger audiences and what broadcast news organisations can learn from newspapers’ experience of pivoting to a primarily digital model. 

What role do TV rolling news channels and bulletins play today at a time when TV news audiences are in decline?

“A lot of people are still tuning into bulletins – especially the older generations - and often people already know the stories but are tuning in to see the BBC’s take on it, to understand the context. TV news still reaches the most people on all the platforms, in fact over the last year programmes such as Newsnight and BBC News at One have grown in audience due to the constant development of our offering. However, digital and streaming are growing fast and will at some point overtake the lead position. For younger audiences, social media is often the place where they first learn about a news development. However, I expect TV will remain big for years to come, especially around big shared moments like the outbreak of a war, the UK and US Election, the Olympics, Glastonbury, a big weather event, or similar.

We have shifted a lot of investment into digital because it’s where most people of all ages look for news. The UK audiences deserve as good service and as high-quality journalism on their mobile phones as they have traditionally been able to get on their TV. They might very well also look at a TV programme or listen to a podcast, but the mobile phone is increasingly the first place we all look. As these platforms coexist, we are joining our services up. This means when more than 60 million browsers come to our US Election live page where they can follow our reporting and analysis by all our best journalists, they can also watch the Election TV programme as part of the experience.”

People like to say that broadcast news organisations are facing the same challenge that newspapers did 20 years ago, is that the way you see it?

“I’m taking a lot of inspiration from newspapers because of course there are many similarities. For a number of years, there were some newspapers who were hesitating to develop a proper digital offering or a proper digital subscription model because they wanted to protect the past. This has rarely worked out very well, instead, it is the news media companies that decided they wanted to win the future that are still standing and growing. I learn a lot from newspapers that have become primarily digital businesses such as El Pais, the New York Times and the Financial Times for example.

That said, there are also big differences. Most former newspapers have more specific target audiences and are often focused on serving more affluent audiences that want to pay for news. We are here to deliver maximum value to everyone and that means we can’t just copy what The New York Times is doing. As impressive as it is, it’s still a niche medium in terms of who they target and reach with their excellent journalism. 
We also differ from a lot of former print businesses by being squarely rooted in our commitment to not taking sides. We are here to pursue truth with no agenda, whereas many other media are successfully building their business around a specific community with a specific world view.”

The implicit risk of ‘digital first’ is that colleagues working on other outlets feel secondary, in broadcasting how do you avoid people feeling like second-class citizens?

“Any media company now has to be digital, it may well do other things, but it has to be fully digital. I am personally not a big fan of the term digital-first, even though I have used it myself recently. To me, it’s almost something we say when we know we are not digital enough yet, but it’s a sign of intent and direction. 

A fully digital organisation knows why it is here and what problem it is here to solve for the audiences or customers and then uses data, testing and innovation to constantly try to solve that problem for the audiences in whichever way works best for the audiences. BBC News is here to inform everyone and help them understand the world around them. Being digital runs across everything we do, including broadcast, as we seek to constantly improve, innovate and learn from audience feedback. Everything we do has to be good enough for the audiences to choose to spend their time with us, they have to experience real value from our offers. We have had such a clear focus on delivering value for all the past years, that our numbers of both consumption and quality as well as impartiality scores are still very high.”

"A fully digital organisation knows why it is here and what problem it is here to solve for the audiences or customers and then uses data, testing and innovation to constantly try to solve that problem for the audiences in whichever way works best for the audiences."

What lessons has the BBC learned about adapting to multi-platform news production in the digital age?

“Number one is the journalism, the story has to decide the publishing strategy. The multi-platform element is to make sure that all audiences get value from a story. For example, when Steven Rosenberg [the BBC’s Russia Editor] takes on Vladimir Putin live in press conferences, as he did last month, this is not produced solely as a television package. Of course, it is used on our news channel but also across podcasts and our digital outlets. Another one is the Al-Fayed investigation from BBC Current Affairs which in the not-so-distant past may have lived mostly as a TV documentary. Whereas now we take a multiplatform approach from the outset that gets the story to the widest possible audience via text, audio, video, radio, TV, social media and so on.”

Presumably for stories like the ones you refer to the success of those is the product of some quite difficult decisions about organisation structure and story coverage and the way things work?

“Yes I know this is a bit simplistic, but to me, journalism over the past few decades, or at least in my lifetime, has moved on from the Watergate syndrome of the lone wolf and everyone competing with one another. Journalism is now a team sport, you need so many different players with their own expertise. You need Steve Rosenberg but you also need excellent video footage, excellent writing, editing, publishing, data specialists and product specialists. You need all of that. I think what we've learned is to actually play as a team.”

You would think broadcasters would be good at digital audio and digital video, but can their broadcasting experience actually hold them back from being innovative online?

“I often hear that, but with all respect, we must separate fact from what is a good industry story, because the fact is that we and other former broadcasters are doing incredibly well on digital platforms. If you look at us, ITV, CNN and Sky News, for instance, we and other broadcasters often do very well on digital platforms. I think it’s because we know not only how to edit video but we have a long history of having boots on the ground, talking to people affected by the stories, holding powerful people to account in interviews and over the years building a really strong ability to report a story as it unfolds live. Because of the video factor, we have always needed to go where the story is and be where it matters when it matters, and that is a strength when producing content for modern digital consumption. However, when it comes to being the most innovative, I absolutely believe that we have been slow but I think we are getting better by seeing other people launching new and innovative ideas which inspire us to improve. Most of this innovation has actually come from the public, from people making YouTube or TikTok videos. If you look at their storytelling, I think they have smashed the rule book and created new ones for how to do video and audio successfully which we then have then learned from. The huge competition in the digital spaces has led to many problematic aspects, but also to a fantastic creative explosion that has helped us develop too”

"The huge competition in the digital spaces has led to many problematic aspects, but also to a fantastic creative explosion that has helped us develop too"

Podcasts have proven to be a great way of reaching younger audiences, but is there much thinking these days about what TV news should mean for these young audiences?

“Younger audiences, and this is a surprise to some people, really want to follow the most important and consequential stories of our time. They are coming in their millions to our live pages on our web and app to follow big events and breaking news, and when they're doing that, they also get explanations, analysis, and context. They're following the conflict in the Middle East, they're following the US election, the summer riots in the UK. They often come to these stories as they are unfolding on their mobile phones and doing so in the way that they choose, which could be audio or video. 

Where older generations have grown up with the idea of consuming the top five news stories of the day, younger people are used to living in an age where information is coming from everywhere at all times. They sometimes express it to us as they feel themselves as being in a river, where a lot of things are happening, they know that every story they engage with is a choice and that there are many other important things happening at the same time.

Video in many shapes and forms will be a key part of the offer for younger audiences too, and we are doing a lot of different trials to figure out exactly what the right formats for streaming are. But let’s not forget, the TV bulletins are some of the most watched programmes on BBC iPlayer, and when the whole family sits watching telly on a Friday night, the young people in the room will watch the news too.”

"Video in many shapes and forms will be a key part of the offer for younger audiences too, and we are doing a lot of different trials to figure out exactly what the right formats for streaming are."

How about other media organisations, who do you look at and admire?

“In short, I take care to look at a lot of different markets and media and find inspiration in many places. Everyone usually does something better than your organisation, if you look for it. You can also learn a lot from other media’s mistakes, and I think it is important we share insights, successes and failures with each other. The tech scene has always done that, and sometimes better than us, who sometimes have been too focused on competing with each other than on expanding the market. 

In terms of media companies, I really admire the New York Times and the Financial Times and other companies that are now subscriber businesses. I think it is interesting how the digital subscription business has made a lot of former newspapers much better at actually serving their customers as well. I think that's very inspirational. Also, the Norwegian Schibsted Media Group is a constant source of inspiration because it's even written in its mission statement that they are determined to walk into the future without knowing what it is. They were some of the first to really move into the digital era in the ‘90s and they are now relatively much more successful in Norway and Sweden than most newspapers around the world.

In terms of broadcasters, I always love the energy of Sky News and their absolute love for live and breaking news. I admire ITV News for their determination to go after the story, which we saw with Partygate. I'm very curious to see what CNN will be like under Mark Thompson. I think we'll get some good competition and inspiration from there.

I have also been hugely inspired by visiting a number of media and start-ups in India and by El Pais’s expansion into the Latin American market.

Also, I am from Scandinavia and I admire how several news organisations have managed to make podcasts work for very big audiences, not least audiences under 40. In Sweden, the biggest podcast is a documentary from a Swedish public service radio. In both Denmark and Norway, they've got daily podcasts that are so well edited, the storytelling is so sharp. These two markets are very different from the UK market in that they are protected by language, whereas competition around content in English is almost infinite, but I think there could be something about doubling down on good storytelling and sharp editing with so much on offer.

My final point that I really want to make is that in the past when I was younger, we spent too much time thinking about how we could compete with each other. The new industry isn’t a finite pie, it's a pie that we can shrink or grow together as a media industry because we're mostly competing with everything else people do on their digital platforms. The more people know, the more they want to know, the more they want to engage. So, in a way, it's on us as a business, and an industry, to make sure that the amount of time and money people spend on news and media is growing.”

About the author

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Jim Egan, Principal

Jim has worked as a news business leader, investor and regulator. Prior to joining FT Strategies, Jim was Chief Investment Officer at Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF), a specialist fund which provides debt and equity investments for news companies in countries where press freedom is under threat. Between 2012 and 2020 Jim was Chief Executive Officer of BBC World News and bbc.com - the BBC's commercially-funded TV and online news services for audiences outside the UK. Earlier in his career, Jim was part of the launch management team at Ofcom, the UK's communications and media regulator, where he was Ofcom's first Director of Strategy. While in the public sector Jim also spent a year as Specialist Adviser to the UK's Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.