This week the BBC announced the results of its Strategy Review, with the headline grabbing closure of two digital radio stations, 6Music and Asian Network, and a reduction in, online content. Does this signal the start of a period of significant change to the UK’s media landscape or is this simply tinkering on the fringes that most consumers won’t notice?

These changes have been announced as a wider debate rages about charging for online content, with speculation that The Times will do so from 1 May, the future of media regulator Ofcom and the ongoing struggle for print media to survive. The review is significant as a response to wider pressure to justify the spending of the licence fee.

News Corporation’s James Murdoch’s MacTaggart lecture last summer accused the BBC of “land grabbing” and stifling competition. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland has suggested BBC Director General Mark Thompson has jumped before he was pushed by announcing this week’s cuts: “the BBC has decided its best strategy for self-preservation is to suffer a little pain now to avoid a lot of pain later.” The pain later is that which might be inflicted by a future Conservative government, which backs Murdoch’s view.

What does the BBC Strategy Review mean for UK consumers? Axed stations 6Music and the Asian Network demonstrate the diversity of programme and targeting that the BBC can offer and its commercial rivals can’t. Commercial radio would never create 6Music. I listen to it precisely because it doesn’t play a repetitive playlist that commercial stations do. These cuts could lead to a less diverse media with radio driving some listeners away to onto specialist services like Last.fm and Spotify.

The implications for the BBC are mixed. This week’s announcement may have aimed to meet favour with their future political masters, though Conservative culture spokesman Ed Vaizey has u-turned his initial support for the closure of 6Music in the face of a sustained celebrity, Facebook and Twitter campaign. 

Like every publicly funded body the BBC expects to face funding cuts in future years as governments try to reign in public spending. I expect that most of the BBC’s UK consumers won’t notice much difference with the changes announced this week, though I do expect that will be part of a wider series of changes affecting the UK media landscape. In the long run, especially if 6Music survives, many will forget the specifics of the BBC’sStrategy Review. The reasons why the BBC has acted are far more significant and are likely to lead to further changes that willbe widely felt as the BBC continues to be held accountable for its public role. 

The video below is a great (and short) interview from the excellent MyRagan (an online PR community generated by Ragan Communications, a US based PR consultancy). It features Adam Brown, Coca-Cola's Group Director of Digital Communications, discussing the PR strategy and benefits of 'Expedition 206' - Coke sending three of their brand advocates to all 206 countries in the world where their product is for sale. Watch it in the video clip below, or if you are reading this update via email, then head over to MyRagan's website directly to view.

It doesn't discuss the PR measurement side of the activity in much detail however. That's where maybe the PR community and I can help tomorrow (Tuesday). I will be the guest of Shonali Burke answering questions on all things relevant to PR measurement in both the traditional and new media. Fittingly I will be doing this via a Twitter chat. Shonali's #measurepr has grown to be a tremendous success with regular chats on alternate Tuesdays. Previous guests have included the excellent Sean Williams of CommAmmo and the indomitable Katie Paine of KDPaine and Partners.  

Shonali's 'Measure PR' twitter chats are always entertaining and well attended. The event should attract many leading lights from social media PR from across the globe so if you're looking for an international perspective on the latest PR measurement issues and trends, why not join us on Twitter at 5-6pm GMT (12-1pm Eastern Time, 9-10am Pacific Time).  Be sure to follow along in realtime either in MyMetrica, Tweetdeck or Tweetgrid and don't be shy, join the conversation  

Finally, if you would like to direct message me, please be sure to follow me first - find me on twitter at @richardbagnall.

I hope to see you there.

The socialisation of media has made sharing online news second nature. Some items go viral while others get left alone. A study of stories appearing on the New York Times website has attempted to show what motivates people to share news. Why do some stories spread their wings across our inboxes and others stay rooted to their homepage and quietly disappear?

Pennsylvania State University researchers Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman have suggested that readers most want to share articles that inspire ‘awe’. The study argues that awe encourages virality because “awe inducing stimuli also tend to be entertaining [and are] particularly likely to drive people to talk to others to understand how they feel.”

The study found that positive news was shared more frequently than negative. Our Metrica Numbers research shows that more good news is written about our clients than bad, suggesting that positive news is more attractive to both journalists and readers.

We will soon be publishing the results of our ongoing research into the social media debate about the UK’s political parties in anticipation of the forthcoming general election. This has shown that the reverse is true in politics than in the wider debate about brands. There is more negative comment about political parties than positive. This is likely to be because political parties are not just products or brands, despite how they market themselves, they inspire an emotional response in those who choose to write about them. We will be publishing these results soon and throughout the campaign.

Is a well shared story the same as a good news story? Not necessarily. A widely read but not widely shared story is still influential and more so, a story that isn’t necessarily widely read but is read by the right people, is heavily influential. Understanding what drives virality is useful in helping to understand what catches a readers’ attention, though this research doesn’t mean that communicators need to ‘awe’ their audience every time to be successful.

Remember to click the icons at the foot of this post to share it!

It has emerged that the Evening Standard is to charge again, for newspapers sold in the outer suburbs of London, having been free since August 2009. Is this a minor distribution shift or does it signal the end of free evening newspapers in the capital? 

London’s streets were littered with celebrity focused free-sheets every evening between 2006 and summer 2009. This resulted from a “war” between Rupert Murdoch’s News International, incarnated by thelondonpaper and Associated Newspapers’ LondonLite. This phenomenon ended after Associated sold the Evening Standard to ex-KGB officer, Alexander Lebedev and Rupert Murdoch embarked on his paid-for content crusade.The title then shifted its positioning from being London’s paid for (self proclaimed) “quality daily”, became free itself and took back the London evening monopoly it had enjoyed for decades.

Distribution soared to over 600,000 copies a day after the cover price was dropped. This is more than double the paid-for circulation. There have since been murmurings that customers in the suburbs had complained that they could nolonger get hold of the newspaper, as distribution networks focused on central London after the title was given away free. It appears that this move is a response to those demands.

Further details of the Evening Standard’s plans are yet to emerge; though it is clear that charging for suburban copies covers the additional distribution costs. On a grander scale, does the shift to charging suggest that the title is again to become paid for across London? Cynics might expect that this is exactly the plan having seen off the free-sheet competition. I’d suggest otherwise, as Steve Busfield, Editor of Mediaguardian.co.uk, outlines:

“Once Associated Newspapers no longer owned the Standard, it no longer made sense (if it ever did) for it to be fighting a free paper war with News International. Thus London Lite closed. Over at NI, thelondonpaper was costing a lot of money and it didn't really fit in with the Murdochian paywall philosophy.”

The market has opened up for the Evening Standard, giving it the opportunity to experiment with different charging models, while maintaining a monopoly. That the paper is to launch a free mobileapp, granting free access to its content online would indicate that the free model will be maintained. The Standard would not be about to undermine its hard copy mainstay. Editor Geordie Grieg told last year’s AMEC Awards that the paper would have gone under if it had not gone free.

Charging in some parts of London offers the Evening Standard an opportunity to widen distribution and little more. It is interesting to note that a quick search of Twitter today shows far more interest in the Standard’s new mobile app than the return of charging. Customers in the outer London suburbs will soon be able to read their evening newspaper for free with a phone app, inferring that charging for paper copies in outer London could be a short lived experiment. It also supports the idea that newspapers can best survive by diversifying and embracing technology.

People are always more interested in something for nothing. It is clear that the London Evening Standard is committed to the free model. This poses serious questions to Murdoch’s commitment to the alternative, something for something, paid-for model.