The BBC’s head of news has said the number of traditional TV bulletins may be cut over the next decade as more people watch news online.
Fran Unsworth told The Daily Telegraph she thought there might only be one bulletin a day. Asked whether the News at Ten might survive but not the News at Six, Ms Unsworth replied: “Possibly, or maybe the other way round.”
The News at One is the corporation’s other major daily national bulletin. Asked by the newspaper to predict how TV news would change over the next five or 10 years, she replied: “I think TV journalism will still be around because of the power of pictures to tell a story, but it won’t necessarily be received in quite the forms it currently is.
“So I still think, ultimately in 10 years’ time, we probably won’t be consuming linear bulletins exactly. I mean, I might be wrong about that. I doubt it. There might be one [bulletin] a day, or something. I think there’ll be fewer of them. But I think that the power of how you tell stories through television, pictures, video will just be in a different space.
“It’ll be in the digital space, it’ll be on, you know, iPlayer. It’ll be on your tablet, your iPhone. We have to think creatively about what the product is, but that’s the direction of travel and I don’t think that’s changed.”
News bulletins are regularly among the most-watched programmes on British TV, with the News at Six and News at Ten usually behind only the regional 18:30 news as the BBC’s highest-rated broadcasts.
Fran Unsworth was appointed the director of BBC News in 2017The audience for news has risen during the coronavirus pandemic, with more young viewers tuning in. But Ms Unsworth said she did not expect that to last.
“They’re sitting down and watching a television bulletin in a way that I thought they weren’t ever really going to again,” she said. “So that has been what’s been really interesting about this.
“I’m not under any illusions, to be quite honest with you, because I’ve seen it in the past. You get these big peaks, the big stories like the Bataclan [attack in Paris in 2015] and London Bridge attacks [in 2017 and 19], then the audience falls off again quite rapidly.
“What I would hope is that we’ve changed our image in the mind of the younger viewer, which is that we are there to be relied on, and if they really do want to know what’s happening they will come to us to find out. We’re not just any other news source.”
Source: bbc.com
