BBC News Brasil: a reinvenção do “soft power” no jornalismo multiplataforma, no limiar das notícias de ‘interesse público’ e do ‘interesse do público’

Abstract

In the early 2000s, BBC News went through transformations and has replaced the radio as the main means for the expansion of the Brazilian News Service. This study investigates the growth of the BBC in Brazil via the internet, the strategies adopted by the organization in a context of crisis for local journalism, and the emergence of digital platforms. From 2018 to 2020, the Digital News Report of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism pointed out that BBC News was one of the online media outlets most accessed by Brazilians. In 2018, the election year and object of this study, the British brand quintupled the number of unique accesses in the country compared to 2013: 25.9 million unique accesses. For getting closer to the Brazilians, the BBC has adopted alternative framings or strips from the Brazilian media journalistic coverage. Due to the concentration of the media market in the country, BBC established partnerships with the main Brazilian news portals, such as UOL, Terra, and IG as ‘entrance doors’ to expand its internet content and did not charge for access at its site. In the second decade of the 2000s, social networks and search engines, such as Google, became also strategic partners. The methodology of this study consists of bibliographic, documentary research on the BBC, research on theories of journalism, media economics, and political economy of communication about the profound transformations in the global media ecosystem, in addition to the critical reading of the news. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with journalists who have key positions at BBC News Brasil and with former employees like Américo Martins, current vice president of Content at CNN Brasil, who inaugurated the BBC's Brazilian newsroom in 2006 in São Paulo. The survey results indicate a structural conflict over the BBC's original public media model and its expansion on the internet. The BBC seeks to reinvent British 'soft power' in the 21st century in a multiplatform journalism operation. In Brazil, it operates in a public-commercial system and presents a hybrid news content on the internet, in which it seeks to inform and entertain, with news of public interest, but also adopts infotainment strategies, such as fait-divers, click-hunting techniques and buzzfeed (lists), common strategies in online journalism to attract niche or individual interests. The commercial revenues obtained with contracts and advertising (around 25%) are managed by the central head office and do not pay for the operation, which depends mostly on public funding. In terms of total audience, between 55% and 60% of the audience still comes via Brazilian media partners, but this percentage has been gradually decreasing. Today, 50 to 65% of the direct audience on the BBC website in Brazil is via search engines, such as Google, for example, and about 10% via social media. Note that this last percentage was already more significant, but fell by half in 2019, due to a change in the algorithmic standard on Facebook.