The war in Ukraine will go down in history as the moment when “live” reporting online, mostly accessed by phone, displaced broadcasting as the primary source of news on a global crisis, the head of BBC News believes.
After 470 million views of the BBC website’s Ukraine coverage since the invasion began (more than four times the site’s average global traffic), Jonathan Munro, BBC interim director of news, tells me the conflict is digital media’s equivalent of the first Gulf War, when rolling TV news came of age.
“People will look back at this as the story where [the] delivery of journalism in real time turned into a digital proposition more than a broadcast proposition.”
But with BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet and her colleagues facing growing danger from Russian bombardment in Kyiv, Munro anticipates that the war could last “for months” and that “we are in for a rather slow and potentially rather vicious period ahead”.
He says that what began as a “breaking news deployment”, expected to last for “maybe three weeks of very intense activity”, was now being categorised by the BBC as a “resilience deployment” that demands careful management of resources.
“We are now having to pace ourselves in terms of deployments to make sure we can get through these next few months at the level we need to.”
Early in the crisis, the BBC used Nick Robinson of Radio 4’s Today and the television presenters Clive Myrie and Reeta Chakrabarti to host live news programmes from Kyiv and Lviv.
It currently has the BBC News channel host Ben Brown in the field. The bravery of these familiar figures when working in a hostile environment has been a compelling reminder of the value of the BBC as a trusted news provider to audiences in the UK and around the world.
At the start of the BBC’s centenary year, its newsroom was in a bad place. Despite massive BBC budget cuts, its political opponents were questioning the validity of its public funding. It was being beaten editorially by smaller rivals on coverage of Downing Street lockdown scandals. Several star journalists, including Andrew Marr, Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel, chose to quit.
But the tragedy of the Ukraine war has been a huge opportunity for BBC News to prove its worth.
Munro says it is “the biggest event since the fall of the Berlin Wall”. Visitors to the BBC’s live online reporting have consumed on-the-ground reports from Orla Guerin, Jeremy Bowen and James Waterhouse.
But stress on teams, which include camera operators, producers, engineers and security advisers, not to mention vital Ukrainian fixers, is immense. “Even big organisations like the BBC have got only a relatively small number of people who are hugely experienced in this sort of urban warfare,” says Munro. “You always need to look ahead to the next wave; who can go in, who wants to go in, who is sufficiently qualified…”
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At a recent Royal Television Society webinar, BBC diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams, who reported from Kyiv, spoke of his “distress” at “watching young colleagues visibly upset” during Russian attacks.
Munro says that while every young foreign reporter “has got to do their first war assignment at some stage”, newcomers are always paired with experienced colleagues.
Safety is a “massive concern” and always the priority. Despite the editorial importance of the besieged city of Mariupol, “no one with our approval is going anywhere near that”.
He appeals to other media to boycott “cavalier” and inexperienced journalists who might have gone to Ukraine to make their name.
“My message to the industry is don’t encourage them, don’t buy their material, don’t allow them a market because safety and the preservation of their lives is more important.”
In Russia the BBC faces “a difficult situation” with its journalists prohibited from describing the conflict as a war. “Whilst our reporters in Moscow can’t say that because they will be on the wrong side of the law, the BBC output says that openly,” he said.
BBC services have been blocked in Russia but its Russian-language journalism has 250,000 subscribers on the messaging platform Telegram.
The BBC’s Uzbek service, addressing another part of the former Soviet Union, has increased its audience to 3.5 million since the invasion.
Recognising the soft power the BBC World Service provides, the government last week gave it £4m emergency funding to counter disinformation in the war.
While Munro concedes that Ukraine has “swallowed up” the news agenda and “other stories fall by the wayside”, he argues that coverage of this war is the essence of the BBC’s mission.
“This is so much more important than some here today gone tomorrow row about some domestic issue where we are being used as a football to kick around by both sides.”
