Olympic Media

It has been commented on by many that the biggest winners of the Olympics were the BBC.

The coverage on the BBC has been absolutely phenomenal. That they were able to cover every sport – most live on one of 24 channels and the rest available on-line, to catch up with as you choose – is a spectacular achievement. Couple this with good background information via the (albeit slightly clunky to navigate around) website and they really have excelled themselves. An information page for every sport and biography for every athlete is no mean feat in itself, before you consider the audio-visual content, feeds, tickers, apps etc.

But…

I speak from a biased position. I’m going to nail my colours to the mast here: I’m a Beebophile. (Note this is a very different thing to a Beiberphile).

I love the BBC. I love pretty much everything about the BBC. I would be a pig in clover

I actually struggle to understand people who have a problem with the licence fee. The current licence fee costs around £12 a month. Considerably cheaper than any of your Sky, BT or Virgin Media packages, and with those you still get bombarded with advertising. For the BBC fee, you get uninterrupted, high-quality programming (though with a 3 ½ hour opening ceremony you actually could have used an advert break).

I don’t know of any other organisation that is funded by the public, and yet fiercely independent of any political interference. It has the highest quality journalistic standards around. And it isn’t just about the news either. The BBC was set up with a remit to “Inform, Educate and Entertain”. This isn’t just a teacher talking to you – this is playtime included. And no other organisation commits as much to the creative industries in this country as the BBC, whether in-house science, nature or historical factual programming, or whether commissioning quality independent drama or comedy.

And this shows, not just from the investment in the Olympic sport and news broadcasting; but in the cultural run-up with specials including Twenty Twelve and the Hollow Crown series of Shakespeare histories, as well as the Hackney Weekend music festival. They are catering for more than just the sport.

Now, it is very possible that the coverage was ‘too much’. After all, during the day you could only watch sport and children’s television. In the evening there was some respite on BBC2 with non-sporting content; but otherwise the channels weren’t just dominated by sport, they were practically exclusively sport.

But, with an event such as the Olympics, you have to make that investment. And non-sport viewers have to make that compromise: it is two weeks of programming, every four years.

So, the cost to the viewer? Around £6. That’s how much of your licence fee cost for that fortnight. You can’t buy a DVD for £6 these days. That is value for money.

And the timing helps, of course. Parliament has broken up, so there is little if any politics to report. Indeed because of the Olympics other news stories dry up – it isn’t that they still happen but are replaced; people are too busy watching the Olympics to do anything newsworthy.

Indeed, the only real complaint levied on the BBC was that the coverage was ‘too British-focused’. For a corporation whose name is the British Broadcasting Corporation? And being obliged to the British public? This seems a bit of a grasp at a very short straw.

And of course this effect is not limited to the BBC. Flick through any tabloid over the last couple of weeks and you would have been hard-pressed to find and more than half a dozen non-news related stories.

One of the things that it has highlighted is the vast cultural shift in the way we access and consume breaking news. The BBC Sports pages registered over 55 million hits. People were watching catch-up clips on smartphones whilst sat in a park watching live action on the main screen. This is a far cry from the days when you listened on the wireless or read the newspaper the next day. This is immediate. And it leaves newspapers scared. Unless they shake-off the ‘paper’ bit of their title, they are going to get left behind.

Newspapers though (and this may be one for a separate blog post) are more viewspapers these days. People turn to them for opinion or the particular style of an individual commentator, more than the cold, hard facts of a story. And the pictures are critical – viewspapers have to be very visual. Finally, the one differential behind print is the tangibility. Special souvenir supplements, bumper editions, something to keep and show your grandkids; rather than a screenshot off a computer. Even in this day and age, physicality has a value.

The traditional newspapers were in a difficult position in the run-up to the Olympics. On the one hand, they had to have news; some sort of scandal to shift the papers off the stands. Good news and ‘everything is as expected’ doesn’t sell. But, on the other hand, if they are too overtly doom-mongering then they risk the public turning. Either the public mood turns against the Olympics, and suddenly a paper that was looking at a full two weeks of sporting coverage has to convert each story into how every event was an over-budget, mediocre or even controvertial non-event; or alternative (and much more likely) public sentiment turns against the newspaper. We’re trying to get all excited and enthusiastic about the greatest Olympic games ever, and all we are getting told is about how the wrong Astroturf has been fitted? Time to move on to someone that tells us the stuff we actually want to read.

It’s a fine line, and one which could be exploited almost with brilliance over the G4S shambles.

It is long established in the newspaper world that G4S = “bad”. G4S is the company that – as newspapers would have you think – are privatising work ordinarily undertaken by public sector workers, whether it be prison officers or probation officers. This is a prime bug-bear of the press: that public taxes are lining the pockets of the shareholders of a company which is not held to public account.

Add to that the occasional loss of a prisoner and the press goes into uproar. So the problems that they had recruiting and training security personnel for the Olympics were a gift: there is a story and an existing baddie! Thrown in the rescue of the day by the nations sweethearts, the army (you know, they go out fighting for our right to be free, doing what they are told to protect the nation etc.) and a happy ending (no security threats detected over the fortnight) and everything works out rosy! The Olympics happen! It isn’t the organisers fault! The army are darlings! A private company makes a loss on the contract! Many photo opportunities of army personnel being generally charming and lovely!

And for once the press aren’t the baddies; because if the Millie Dowler / phone hacking revelations have taught the press anything, it is that the public can turn from ennui or ignorance to fierce anger within a second. Whilst the only phones being hacked were of a few celebrities, no-one cared. An innocent victim of a brutal murder? Suddenly the press were as bad as Bellfield himself. Well nearly.

They also had a sort-of story to cause a controversy around the opening ceremony: the animals. Various groups seemed to be in uproar that animals were to be seen within the stadium. This is despite reassurances that they would be treated humanely. But that story promptly disappeared once it became clear just how fantastic the ceremony was, and how tiny a part the animals actually played: people barely noticed them.

However, the press didn’t always get it right.

For example the story about the 21 school playing fields being sold off. Nice, simply statistic, nice simple headline, something along the lines of “whilst government wants school sports to be a legacy of the Olympics, they have rather shot themselves in the foot by approving the sale of 21 school playing fields.”

Only more snappy.

But it is wrong.

Firstly, there are 20,000 primary and secondary schools in the UK. So selling off 21 playing fields is around 0.1%, assuming each school has one playing field. And that’s a wild assumption to make. One of the 21 playing fields was a surplus playing field because the school already had more than one. Then we find out that a further 14 of them were sold because the schools had closed down, whilst four of the fields could be sold off with no undue effect on students because schools had amalgamated. So the stark headline of breaking promises and legacies is very misleading.

Unsurprisingly in the ‘wrong’ camp is the Daily Mail’s Jan Moir. In my opinion there is probably no more odious a person in the country. And she stratospherically misjudged the mood of the nation when she described the closing ceremony as ‘chaos’ where ‘vehicles … drove around the track for no good reason’. If the public didn’t already hate you Ms Moir, they do now if only for urinating on our Olympic spirit.

And then this Olympics has been the story of the ‘other’ media.

Social media.

The athletes who are writing the stories as well as being the stories. The

My Twitter feed regularly exploded with people who clearly thought that they were either the first to report a result, or the most reliable person to report the result.

But there was also the darker side of social media and the people who still haven’t quite gotten the hang of how public a publication method it is. Again, this will be something to be considered in a separate blogging; but a notable example was @rileyy69 who received a warning and had his account suspended after a malicious communication to Tom Daley, which @rileyy69 claimed was a heat-of-the-moment vent of frustration and not intended to be malicious.

Then the Twitter account of Guy Adams disappeared after he posted a complaint about NBC’s coverage, along with the publically available email address of an executive to whom to complain. The account was subsequently reinstated with a rather obscure apology from Twitter. But that got commentators commenting as much about the impact social media was having on the commentators and the athletes as much as they were about the sport. But then all journalists – even the technology ones – needed an Olympic peg to hang there story on, otherwise they wouldn’t get a look in.

And Matthew Mitcham gets another honourable mention – for getting told off for Tweeting scores. Despite the fact that any man and his dog within the stadium could Tweet scores, he as a competitor could be suspended. That the Olympics had in place a social media policy at all shows that it is at least aware of the problem; but that it is that short-sighted may be a slightly overbearing and unwieldy policy for the future.

And heaven help anyone who would Tweet about a brand that was not an Olympic partner. But branding is for another day…