April showers… in May

April showers… in May

So-titled because I’m finishing this on Wednesday 11 May and it’s really quite wet outside, for the first time in weeks. April was so dry, I had to start watering my poor potted roses. I should have fed them as well but I didn’t get around to that.

The main media news in the past month was the publication of a broadcasting white paper on Thursday 28 April – you can read the press release here.

My initial reaction was what a travesty, that the government dressed up the privatisation of Channel 4 as “a new golden age of programming” in its press release.

True, the existing legislation is almost 20 years old (the 2003 Communications Act) and when we were last debating a white paper, I was editor of Broadcast. Some things do need updating, but I am yet to be convinced of the argument for privatising Channel 4.

See this column from Jane Martinson at the Guardian about C4 privatisation and Nadine Dorries’ apparent lack of knowledge about the TV industry.

Broadcasting union Bectu said the white paper was big on rhetoric but light on detail, which sounds about right (of Dorries, not to mention the white paper). The National Union of Journalists welcomed the white paper’s plans to regulate streamers such as Netflix in line with the way broadcasters are regulated, but said the privatisation of C4 was the wrong decision at the wrong time.

Of particular concern is the protection of independent, trusted news on C4 – and in the digital landscape in general as fewer and fewer people watch linear TV.

Then there was this on Monday 9 May from the Northern Powerhouse Partnership saying the privatisation of C4 would go against the government’s levelling up agenda.

There’s a long way to go and Channel 4 is of course resisting the government’s privatising agenda with alternative plans for its future that will preserve its unique place in the broadcasting industry. We’ll all be watching with interest as the government tries to push this policy through, when it should be helping people feed themselves and pay their fuel bills.

In other news

If you read some of my posts this year, you’ll know I have a slight obsession with the nature of work and the whole question of returning to offices for those people in full-time, knowledge economy jobs.

On Tuesday this week I was in London for an in-person event. It was great to be in a room with creative people again, working but also making small talk and generally setting the world to rights. Talk turned to how many days a week various people are going into an office (consensus: three days, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) but also the resistance some bosses are encountering to that pattern, particularly from younger people.

Someone reported that in the past two years they’ve been approached by younger people wanting internships, insisting they can act as an intern remotely, working from home.

Anyone who has worked for more than 10 years knows that you learn a huge amount by ‘osmosis’ and by just being in an office with other people, tedious as that can be at times. There are pros and cons, of course.

I’m delighted to say I’ll probably never go into the same office five days a week for the rest of my working life. At least, it would take a lot of money to persuade me to do that. But I’ve been working for 30 years. And my years of working in offices – even up until the start of the pandemic in 2020 – have given me some of the best friendships of my life.

There’s an interesting dynamic at play here, as old-school bosses insist on a degree of presenteeism (while embracing hybrid working up to a point) while young people, new to the world of work, resist the routine and predictability of Monday to Friday in one place of work. I’ll be watching as it plays out.

This is interesting from The Guardian and Digital I about the slowdown in Netflix subscriptions and the possibility that Netflix could lose content to studios’ own streaming services.

I’m not typical in the TV industry in that I don’t have Sky, nor do I have Amazon Prime TV. But I think I am pretty typical of lots of people outside the TV industry who subscribe to one or two services (I have Netflix and Spotify plus I pay for The Guardian every month). I know there’s Disney+ out there, Britbox, Virgin… BT Sport. Paramount+ launching this year. Plenty of others.

I just question how many media subscriptions a typical household will have and whether there’s room for them all.

This got me a bit riled up yesterday, about sexist comments made at an Aviva AGM recently and the CEO’s LinkedIn post saying she was “used to it”. How appalling that sexist comments are now being made publicly at an AGM; truly the old guard are rattled as making their feelings known as power shifts to a more balanced, gender equal level playing field.

As I’ve moved back to working in the media industry, my monthly blog posts have become more media focussed and less about what I’m up so. If you work in the media, you are no doubt aware of much of the above. So, I’ll tell you briefly about my news.

I’m coming to the end of a year-long contract doing marketing and comms for an arts organisation in Dorset, which has been rewarding if not fantastically well paid. You’ve gotta love the arts to work in them. I’m working with ITN and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, plus doing bits and pieces for a former colleague who now does PR for clients in the fintech sector and for Wiltshire Creative, my erstwhile employer in Salisbury.

Last week I had a new business meeting with a company in Salisbury. So things are busy, which is a lovely problem to have considering I’ve only been in business 19 months.

I’m still running, once a week with the Salisbury running club (five miles on a Wednesday evening), plus parkrun on a Saturday and I try to fit in a couple of solo runs in the week. The Bath Half marathon that I’ve entered has been postponed twice and will now happen in October, so I’ll get in shape for that.

That’s about all for this month. See you in June after the Platinum Jubilee celebrations.