For Radio 4’s Today programme, last week’s biggest story was off-air: a BBC News edict that the corporation’s correspondents should in future prioritise platforms such as TikTok and Instagram over traditional TV and radio franchises, including Today.
This policy serves to “chip away the relevance of Today to the life of the nation. This is an act of vandalism pure and simple,” foamed a show insider to the Guardian anonymously. (Although there is a lively media parlour game in guessing which presenter the quote most sounds like.)
The apocalyptic tone suggested that this might be a fatal blow to the show and, by implication, to the place of radio in BBC news. But one could argue that the clips-first approach reflects a change in how news is consumed and therefore how audiences must be fed.
So let’s imagine one of those “chalk v cheese” shout-offs in which Today has always specialised – with speakers booked to take the pro and anti line, reflecting the BBC’s editorial neutrality.
From the pro-change chair, it would be argued that, as news gathering expands, traditional outlets inevitably contract. Today started 69 years ago, before breakfast television existed in Britain and when rival radio news was regional. Then came morning television and other national radio news shows – first from the more informal 5 Live Breakfast and then the London-based LBC spreading UK-wide and finding a muesli hour superstar in Nick Ferrari. This has led to a steady decline in Today’s audiences to about 800,000 listeners per day. (Well ahead of Ferrari’s 300,000, but his figures are rising, while 5 Live’s 200,000 has also trended upwards.) Finally, the redirection of correspondents’ energies is the BBC listening to the TikTok of news moving on. And, in one sense, Today has been lucky: Radio 4’s The World Tonight, a cheaper but equally venerable franchise, is disappearing completely in the cuts.
The other side would most likely argue: look, mate, we’re the Today programme! The speaker might well repeat an example used by the Guardian’s secret briefer – after “the death of Putin”, the breakfast Radio 4 show might not now get first dibs on BBC Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg as he’d be busy with phone-bites.
Reflecting an arrogance to which the Today programme has sometimes been prone – implying that the world would most need to hear the first news of the Russian president’s demise from the Radio 4 breakfast show, assuming he even died in their three-hour slot – that example also illustrates the tension between the old and new waves of BBC journalism.
A background to the fears that Today may have no tomorrow is that BBC News is traditionally twitchy when the director general is not a journalist. It was suspicious of Tim Davie (2020-2026), whose background was in marketing, and extends this scepticism to the current DG, Matt Brittin, an operations manager by trade (though journalistic director generals – Alasdair Milne, George Entwistle, Tony Hall – may not always have ranked among the greatest.)
With Brittin, another issue is that he previously worked at Google, one of the digital empires widely viewed as the BBC’s looming nemesis. So his selection as DG is seen by more conservative internal journalists as Darth Vader joining the Jedi.
But this digital repositioning is inevitable given that the consumption of news is changing – which is bad news for Today. Because big events will happen in the 21 hours Today is off-air, the future belongs to fast-moving news feeds. Perhaps the clincher for the pro-change speaker in our fantasy Today item is that the programme’s new editor, Rebecca Keating, reportedly wants to encourage more chitchat between presenters that could be clipped for social media.
Aside from all this, the show has its own internal issues. Today has always been built around signature duos – Brian Redhead and John Timpson, John Humphrys and Sue MacGregor, Mishal Husain and Justin Webb.
After the impending departure of Amol Rajan, the hosting roster will apparently, in another cost saving, fall from five to four: Nick Robinson, Justin Webb, Emma Barnett and Anna Foster. Among these, Robinson and Barnett audibly seem to find it hard to share a studio, while only with the pairing of Webb and Foster do the egos feel equalised. And, if BBC News is future-proofing as the TikTok tweak suggests, two white men and two white women on Today feels retro. Perhaps the best move now would be to lure back Husain – a catastrophic loss by BBC bosses – from her lucrative posting at Bloomberg.
Whatever happens, Today has bigger problems – LBC, 5 Live, its presentational wars – than who comes first on Steve Rosenberg’s future to-do list.
