BBC 'part of headwinds' faced by local news brands

WATCHDOG IGHLIGHTS IMPACT OF ONLINE NEWS SHIFT

- DAMON WILKINSON

THE BBC is now ‘part of the headwinds’ threatening commercial local news, Ofcom has said.

For the first time the communication watchdog has acknowledged the national broadcaster is contributing to the difficulties websites such as the Manchester Evening News are facing.

Ofcom said the BBC’s move to cut back on local radio and invest heavily in creating online local news in direct competition to existing publishers ‘may be displacing commercial page views to some degree’.

“We recognise that increased BBC online local news forms part of the headwinds facing local publishers,” it writes in its Review of Local News in the UK, published last week.

But Ofcom said the BBC wasn’t solely blame for an overall decline in page views in local news. Instead it pointed to longer-term trends such as news avoidance and changes to referrers such as Google and Facebook.

It said evidence to date showed ‘weak’ links between BBC expansion and local news challenges, saying this was because it was hard to separate BBC activity from other factors, such as ‘changing attitudes to news, social media and search engine algorithms and policies towards local news’.