Plastic Bag Beeb

Tom Coates writes a damaging critique of the BBC’s New Media restructuring. Damaging, specific and - who knows - maybe libellous.

Coates points out the BBC’s all-mouth-no-trousers promises that fill conference schedules but which result, practically, in nothing. He says,

there’s nothing here that’s even vaguely persuasive compared to Yahoo!, Amazon or Google. Flickr - a company that I don’t think got into double figures of staff before acquisition - has more public APIs than the BBC, who have roughly five thousand times as many staff

and then he goes on to blame an individual, someone called Ashley Highfield. It might be true, though, that the promotion of Highfield and the lack of production of stuff from the BBC compared to the tremendous work done by Yahoo, Google, Flickr et al stems from the same sclerotic, publicly-funded nature of the BBC. No customers to answer to, in effect, and no proper measure of success or failure other than the way their schemes are talked about and written about in conferences, meetings, trade journals and tame newspapers.

Remember, the BBC is funded through the most regressive tax you could imagine, it’s mandatory, non-payment is punishable by imprisonment and the guy in charge of New Media apparently can’t rotate a photo.