How digital news publishers can survive in the ‘fake news’ era: Q&A with Jamie Angus

The BBC just conducted a study which found BBC World News is the most-trusted international news channel in Australia and that 71% of Australian news consumers are concerned about fake news. When we do stories around these studies though, one of the comments we always get back is “Media organisation does study that proves it is the best or strongest or safest, how surprising” – so you’re sort of doing a study that then reveals that the BBC is the most trusted and is a good platform and all of those things. So what’s your response to that when people say this might be a bit of a self-serving study for the BBC?
Well I think we’re seeing amongst our audiences that there’s a great deal of concern about fake news and the reliability of news. People can choose where they get their content online, and it’s not easy to tell whether it’s come from a reputable broadcaster, and there’s been a lot in the market and the press, a lot about that and although as you say Vivienne we’ve got a well-worn and authoritative claim to be most-trusted, we wanted to put a bit more information around this debate.

So partly we wanted to look at whether this was also an Asia-Pac issue as well as a western European and USA issue. So I think some of the higher-profile fake news stories have kind of taken place in Europe and America, particularly around the US Presidential election. And I was travelling in Asia-Pac this year and was often being asked, ‘Oh you know, is this actually an Asia-Pac phenomenon as well?’ So I think the research kind of bears that out actually, which is attitudes that we see in our audiences in other parts of the world also exist in Asia-Pac.

So partly we thought it was worth doing for that reason, but also we were just interested anyway to see interplays between people’s digital consumption and the TV channel – because TV channels are sometimes described as the technology of the past, and a legacy platform, but actually we still believe – we’ve still got growing audiences on TV platforms – I’m sure you see that elsewhere in the market – and actually one of the things the research looked into was how people check – when people see digital news, they may go and check it out on TV platforms as well, which I think is interesting and tells you something interesting about how the industry is migrating to digital, but not necessarily at the expense of TV platforms.

So I kind of hope that there is more interesting stuff in the release than that which is purely self-serving, although some of it is that as well.