Mark Pack

Earlier this week the Electoral Commission published a new report, The completeness and accuracy of electoral registers in Great Britain, looking at how electoral registration is working in the UK. Although it's been widely covered, the coverage has been very similar - taking the top line figures from the report and covering press release without digging in to what the report really says. So if we venture in to the inner reaches of the report, what do we find? »

The BBC itself reports: Cornwall MP Julia Goldsworthy says the BBC should consider scrapping Radio 1. The Lib Dem communities spokeswoman was responding in a BBC3 debate, First Time Voters’ Question Time, about the BBC’s strategic review… But Ms Goldsworthy said: “They should be looking at other areas where there is already competition in the market, like Radio [...] »

The BBC's website regularly feature in the lists of the ten most popular websites in the UK - and are usually the only ones in the top ten from a British organisation. So the BBC's plans to refocus and shrink its web presence are likely to be widely felt. The 79 page strategy document ranges over all [...] »

We’ve covered before the habit of BBC Question Time of dropping a Liberal Democrat from the panel (three times in four weeks most recently) and also of loading up the panel with a far from politically balanced set of non-Parliamentarians. But it’s not only Question Time where that’s a problem. BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? has [...] »

The BBC has just published a draft of the internal guidelines for its election coverage. The 14 page document is similar to the guidance at previous elections and includes a set of sensible rules which other media outlets would do well to emulate, including: There will be no online votes or SMS/text votes attempting to quantify [...] »

A follow-up to my post When is it ok to ban a journalist?, about the habit in football of clubs banning journalists who say things they don’t like (can you imagine the uproar if a public sector body tried to do the same?): Sir Alex Ferguson will have to end his six-year ban on giving interviews to [...] »

Cross-posted from the Mandate blog: The Newspaper Marketing Agency's latest (September) figures (PowerPoint slides) for the sources of web traffic to newspaper websites paintsa useful picture of which social media sites really matter - and which don't. The top ten domains that referred UK traffic to newspapers during the month were: Google Yahoo MSN News.bbc.co.uk Facebook AOL Wikipedia Ask Twitter NewsNow There are several lessons to be learnt [...] »

That's the question PR Week posed to a selection of people from across the PR industry, myself included. My answer as to the next Twitter? The BBC: Although there's been confusion over various media reports, the BBC has confirmed that significant changes are on the way, including allowing people to comment directly on stories and tapping [...] »

The BBC Trust is running an online survey asking for views on its plans for a new complaints procedure for Party Election Broadcasts. Although the BBC generally steers clear of the content of PEBs – leaving that to the parties in question – there are often issues around who gets how many and when they [...] »

Here’s how the BBC describes its new Democracy Live website, which covers the Westminster Parliament, the European Parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly: It brings together for the first time in the BBC, live and on demand video coverage of proceedings in our national political institutions and the European Parliament. [...] »