All the BBC news that's fit to embed…

I was intrigued to hear BBC Radio News this morning using its own airwaves to “report” its decision to supply video content to a number of newspapers for free.

Not a corporate announcement, of course, but a news story of sufficient importance to warrant its place midway through the main bulletin during the peak period of listening on Radio Four’s Today programme.

This is a service which is currently undertaken on a commercial basis by ITN (which makes Channel 4 News). Good old BBC, you may very well say, for making a similar service freely available to the newspaper groups which have been increasingly vociferous critics of its online expansionism.

In the same spirit of fair and impartial reporting that was in evidence in the BBC’s reporting of this news this morning, it’s worth posing a number of questions the BBC may wish to address.

1. Is it a good use of licence-fee-payers money to supply a service for free that newspapers are happy to pay for?

2. Why should the licence-fee-payer then, by implication, subsidise a commercial news outlet?

3. Why should licence-fee money be used to undercut and thereby undermine the viability of a commercial rival?

4. Does this activity increase or reduce the diversity of digital/video news provision in the UK?

5. Given all the above, what exactly is the BBC for, and whose decision was it that the information above should be presented as a BBC Radio news item?

Answers on a post card please.

PS I have the obvious interest to declare: I work in the private sector in direct competition to the BBC making programmes for ITN, which some might feel disqualifies me from reporting on this issue, but I’m not sure that that neutralises my capacity to ask the above questions.