Up just a touch today, but well within normal fluctuation range, so I won’t get excited about it.

Today’s pictorial extra is a nice bit of reflection:

Reflections

The light was just right for this kind of thing yesterday.

I’ve mentioned the BBC’s excellent digital station 6Music a few times over the last six years or so. It’s quite unlike any other radio station I’ve heard – it’s got presenters who know about and care about the music they’re playing. It plays an insanely eclectic range of music, and has introduced me to a lot of the music I’ve been listening to in recent years.

So when it was reported last week that the BBC, in some odd cost-cutting measure, was planning to close the station, I became a little concerned. But working on the basis that it was just a rumour, I didn’t get too worried. Until this morning, when the BBC’s Director General, presented the Strategy Review. If you look at the BBC News page in the link, and you can see the video where you are, you’ll see him argue that:

1. We’ve got Radio 1 and Radio 2 and they’re popular, so we’ll just use them for music
2. 6Music is really good and distinctive, and has a loyal (if small) audience
3. As it’s a small audience, it’s not good value for money[1]
4. But we can’t increase the audience because we’d be running into commercial stations[2]

This makes very little sense indeed, and I have to wonder if this whole review is a pre-election offer to keep the next government well-disposed to the BBC.

There’s a lot more in the review, which you can read about here:

BBC Strategy Review

Whether you wade through all that or not, you can take part in the consultation:

BBC Strategy Review Online Survey

You might want to leave that for a day or two, though, as the server its running on appears to be overloaded, judging by the number of times it displayed a database error instead of the next page.

If you’d like to support the campaign to keep 6Music, there’s the inevitable Facebook group, which currently has 93,000 members, an online petition, which also opposed the proposed closure of the BBC Asian Network, you can use the Twitter hashtag #save6music, or complain to whoever might listen.

[1] As opposed to the ludicrous sums they were paying Jonathan Ross to be annoying once a week
[2] I’m not sure what the photon he means by that. If it would be bad for 6Music to compete with commercial stations, surely the same applies to the bigger BBC stations