Robert Peston, then the BBC’s business editor, used his Dunn Memorial Lecture at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival in August 2009 to argue that “the traditional distinctions between television journalists, radio journalists and print journalists are quite close to being obsolete”. His reason was audience behaviour: it was increasingly clear, he said, that much of the audience did not care whether information reached them via a blog, another internet channel, television, newspapers or radio. A BBC survey on where people in Britain got their news about the economy found 84% turned to television, 53% went online, 52% to newspapers and 37% to radio.
The lecture set his own working week against the one he started with. Early in his career he wrote one or two stories a week on a mechanical typewriter; by 2009 a typical day meant five or six blog posts, appearances on the Today programme and the Ten O’Clock News, and up to twenty other programmes and channels in between. “Hacks like me increasingly have to become total journalists,” he said, and his advice to anyone entering the trade was to acquire every skill rather than choose a platform. His competition was no longer other broadcasters but the Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
He put his blog, Peston’s Picks, at the centre of that practice, calling it the bedrock of his output and crediting it with letting the BBC own a big story and gather a community around it.