Where does your local BBC get its news?

Jo’s right there are other papers in Northamptonshire. There have to be limits to any research. We agreed with the newspapers how we were going to do this and we monitored three radio stations, two TV channels, two daily newspapers and one weekly plus all the associated online material. That was pretty busy and felt a reasonable volume of material. By working with the managing director of the main newspaper group we had access to both newspaper news editors and the BBC news and sports team - which was essential to get beyond the published material. Without that level of access the counting has limited value. That was clearly seen as a fair way of doing things by representatives from the papers and the BBC, those limits are clear in the report which is a document agreed between us.

You’re right monitoring the other weeklies you mention might have affected things but based on the weekly we did not monitor the effect would not have been great. The volume published in the daily papers across six days is so large that it tends to dominate the stats compared to a weekly paper, however content rich.

Radio broadcasts on Sundays and the papers don't publish. We checked on Sundays to make sure we didn't miss any lifted material and we had versions of the figures that count the material both with and without the days the newspapers didn't publish. This version seemed the most complete but it makes little difference, the level of stories in radio bulletins on a Sunday are not huge, and would not transform the overall picture.

The research did not make the assumption you suggest. We started by reading the papers and listening to the radio to work out the overlap. We then looked at the pattern of coverage and where items might have come from and then tested individual stories, and the ones that obviously might have been lifted. As one of the newspaper news editors said even by talking to them you can't be absolutely definitive - a newspaper reporter might have offered a story originally sparked by something heard on the radio or seen on the TV and the news editor might simply not know that. And the same applies in reverse but on lots of occasions we were able to chase an item back to what felt was its source.

Both at the newspaper and BBC end of things we felt we got to a reasonable level of detail to draw some conclusions. I'm quite happy to keep on discussing the detailed method but the point here was that we worked together to try to come up with some actual evidence. It's certainly not exact, but both sides agreed the overall picture was so clear that there was no point in chasing down the details to the last percentage point, and while I'm also certain there is a margin for error the issues you are worrying at are marginal to the overall findings.

What I do think is the effect of listening to the radio or reading the paper is greater than any one story. The Daily Telegraph paid for all the MPs’ expenses data and got the exclusive but all other media then covered the story in depth and at length. So there is more value in that one story than any counting would show up. But the point made again recently on the Today programme was that local radio "gets" its content from the local papers. Even if these figures are wrong by some amazing factor, neither I nor the newspaper representatives involve believe they are, what was clear in both the counting and the day to day reading and listening is that the radio station is simply not dependent on picking up the paper each morning.
Tim Bishop, Head of Region, BBC East

Hmm. So Radio and TV journalists "do nothing" but lift newspaper stories, and while despite that they do break stories, they only break "mundane" ones. I've no doubt those views are widely held in newspaper newsrooms but the uncomfortable truth is that these days for every anecdote about the pages of the newspaper being turned on the radio I can give you a pile of quotes lifted off the BBC uncredited into newspapers. With newspaper staffing under serious pressure in lots of areas things have moved on. Beware of what everyone "knows" I was always told, by a newspaper news editor, many years ago. The point of this project, run jointly with Newspaper Society representatives, was to try to look beyond what everyone believes to look for some facts.

To give you just some examples of things we found that might be relevant:

- A lot of "your stuff" that the TV runs comes their way directly, far more often than you will know. Some of your contacts are likely to be very familiar in the BBC Radio Newcastle newsroom who feed ideas to BBC Look North. At the start of this research the front page lead in the paper on the Monday looked like an original story that then went national. But the story had run first on the radio, early on the Sunday morning. And the truth is the man involved was a contact of both newsrooms and had talked separately to both of them so no-one had lifted anything from anyone else. In checking stories back to their source that turned out to be true more often than you might think, sight unseen by the journalists involved.

- TV and radio journalists are neither lazy nor incompetent, they simply do a different job. You can sit in the office, make some phone calls and run a story. If your newsroom is typical you spend more time doing that than ever. TV journalists have to go out and film the story and then edit it before it can be transmitted. The way that is done has been transformed in recent years but it still takes much more effort and time for every story. What about radio? On the first day of this project a major civic centre opened in Corby. The whole radio breakfast show came from there live. Because of ever earlier newspaper deadlines it only made Page Four of the next day's paper. That doesn't make them lazy, it's just the difference in the way the different media work.

- You cover a concentrated area, Look North covers a much wider area across into Cumbria. So in this research an equivalent evening paper covered 2000 or so stories largely concentrated around one urban area in one part of the county. In the same period the regional TV programme BBC Look East covered the whole county with around 60 stories. They are regional, you are hyper local by BBC standards. Hardly surprising you do more stuff about the area you cover, the simple fact is you are bound to.

- It was absolutely clear that newspapers and radio were often carrying many of the same stories but it was also very clear that the vast majority were being accessed by each outlet independent of the other. Go back to the example above. Radio happened to be first but just because something is first does not mean it automatically caused the other.

- We ran this research in an area chosen partly because of the relative strength of the newspapers and I suspect if we had done the same thing where you live you would have got some surprises. I've been lucky enough to work in newspapers, radio and TV. Everyone works hard, when you see what they do in detail you end up respecting all of them. And there have been huge changes in media. When local radio started it played music in breakfast, over the years it's become ever more focused on daily news, shifting its resources accordingly. At the same time many newspapers, not these ones in Northamptonshire, have run down their front line reporting teams. The balance has shifted and that really matters. The BBC has been busy investing in a new generation of local political reporters. In the project it's clear that is making a real difference.

- Lots of things would be lost if your newspaper closed but it was quite clear to all sides in this project that a BBC local newsroom in today's world does not need to rely on the local paper being delivered. Tim Bishop, Head of Region, BBC East