BBC Symphony shuts its newsletter
mainThis notice has gone out to BBC SO subscribers:
IS THIS GOODBYE?
Following a detailed review of BBC newsletters, we’ve made the very difficult decision to close the BBC Symphony Orchestra newsletter and sadly this is the last newsletter.
Sign up to receive the latest updates from the BBC, where you can see what we’re up to, as well as other fantastic content from the BBC.
What it means is that the Symphony’s specialist band of followers can only find out what the orchestra is doing on a regular basis by being deluged with unrelated BBC propaganda.
This has happened with a lot of BBC newsletters — certainly all the ones I took, which featured Books, Drama, and those for Radio 4 and 4 Extra. I kept getting the same prompt as at the end of the BBC SO one, and clicked yes time after time. I have yet to see a single replacement. The newsletters were not much chop, but did occasionally highlight a radio broadcast I would possibly have missed otherwise, though I use the online schedules carefully.
Cheese-paring strikes again — I can’t imagine this makes much of a dent in the BC budget. However, if it improves the BBC News online site, it will be worth it. It is not often to go-to place for what’s going on in the world (if, say, you have been off watching a movies or something for a while) any more.
Is this a physical newsletter or an email?
If it is like the Radio 3 newsletter, which has also been stopped, it’s e-mail. The supposed replacement service is so far informing me of programmes most of which are of little interest to me. Also, annoyingly, to subscribe to the new and less useful service, I had to provide yet another password. I’m rapidly reaching password saturation…
The Radio 3 Record Review Newsletter was stopped recently too. It came out weekly and used to give a detailed account of what would be discussed and played on the Saturday 9-12 Record Review programme on BBC Radio 3.
Subscribers were also promised a more generic Radio 3 Newsletter. No sign of it yet!
Reading these comments, it seems the BBC’s modus operandi is “say anything now … and figure out how (or if) to follow through later.”
Sounds like a strategy for spam advertising or aggressive product-placement, not “public-service” broadcasting. Then again, the BBC has never lived up to its ostensible “public-service” remit (for more on this, see
https://markdoran.wordpress.com/2016/01/07/close-it-down/
).
Or, maybe, the BBC, by rendering it harder to receive tailored information, is deliberately engineering a situation whereby its performing groups will see a reduction in audience engagement and/or a “failure” to meet some audience-engagement target (all based on a flawed metric selected for its bias in favour of a narrative of “failure” or “decline”), so that it then has a pretext to close one or more of them (or, to borrow a euphemism from Germany’s Sudwestrundfunk, enact a “merger” of some sort) and go even more “commercial” in its programming.
The licence-fee poll-tax must go.