The meeting will give the Secretary of State the opportunity to discuss his plans for local TV with you, as well as Government’s wider media priorities including the roll out of high speed Broadband, the Creative Industries and the forthcoming Communications Bill.

The Minister will be interested in your views on how Government’s programme will impact on Birmingham and the West Midlands specifically, as well as on the county as a whole.

From a quick search on Twitter it looks like Will Perrin, Julia Higginbottom and Jon Bounds have been invited too. I’ve no idea who else will be going.

Anyone got anything they’d like me to chip in?

Travel advice aside, arts and culture will be getting a foot in the door a few times over the duration, including this lot:

• Jonathan Watkins (Director of Ikon Gallery) has been invited by Jeremy Hunt MP to speak on Sunday. His speech will apparently “highlight the cultural wealth of Birmingham and promote Ikon’s ambition for the creation of a new museum of modern art in the city”
• Screen WM are putting on a fringe event called City as a Platform (reminiscent of the much-referenced, lesser read Dan Hill post) on Monday
• Ed Vaizey MP will be off and about on Monday. He’ll be officially opening Zellig and later on checking out BCU’s Skillset Media Academy
• Rosie Kay Dance Company will be performing Double Points: K at the Symphony Hall on Tuesday

There’s probably more happening too, but those are the ones I’ve come across.

I’ve also been invited, with a bunch of other local bloggers, to go and meet Sayeeda Warsi (Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and Cabinet Minister without portfolio) and Andrew Mitchell (MP for Sutton Coldfield and Secretary of State for International Development) later today.

A couple of weeks back Will Perrin put some thoughts down, responding to government plans to encourage the development of up to twenty new local TV stations by 2015. The general gist of his post (although I’d encourage you to read it) was that there’s no need, it won’t work and, besides, the web would do the job better.

Nick Booth has built on this and claims that Birmingham’s informal, fledgling network of local, mainly volunteer-led news websites shows that people are already delivering the kind of activity Jeremy Hunt says he wants to encourage using TV stations (see Nick’s post for details).

My generally unconsidered view on this is that establishing a local TV station wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing – if someone (and I think City TV are still looking to get involved) can make the finances stack up and run something that doesn’t depend on handouts then great. It just doesn’t seem to be a particularly forward-thinking thing to spend public cash on.

If money/time/effort/attention/whatever is going to be spent on local media, I’d rather it was spent on getting people using the web and using it better – helping them access local information and publishing it themselves. There’s no reason video can’t be part of that – see I Am Birmingham for an example of someone using a website with a free template and a YouTube account to do regular-ish video content.

Also in the web’s favour – costs and barriers to entry are lower and the skills required are more readily transferrable. It’s also relevant to the government’s current strategy of closing down public services and replacing them with websites (Jobcentre Plus, Business Link and so on).

The whole ‘more TV by 2015’ thing bothers me too. 2015 is five years off. Bear in mid that YouTube is only five years old and you get a sense of  how much things could change in the intervening years.

Anyway, I feel I’m starting to edge slightly further away from CiB-land now. If you want to get involved in the debate then see what people are saying on Will and Nick‘s posts.

The other week West Midlands Regional Observatory brought out their latest recession snapshot. For the cultural sector the figures weren’t bad:

the cultural sector continued to see increases in numbers of customers through the door in the last three months of 2009, building on the unusually high increase in footfall seen over the summer.

Strong audience figures suggest the value placed on culture by the general population has only increased during the economic troubles

However, people are expecting cuts – 72% of respondents being ‘less optimistic’ about the stability of core funding compared to a few years ago. Quite right too – on a daily basis you hear politicians dodging around the c-word like [insert inappropriate simile here].

Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary, has gone some way towards setting his stall out (could The Guardian have found a pic of him looking any more smug?), saying (and I paraphrase hugely):

• arts administration costs need to be hacked back to 5% of any cash government hands over
• they’ll introduce a US-style culture of philanthropy by encouraging tax breaks on lifetime giving
• The national lottery would be returned to its original good causes (which includes arts)
• they’d get rid of audience development targets in the arts

Some might find encouragement in some of that, although he did add:

I wouldn’t say that everything that happened under the last Conservative government was good

So nevermind.

The philanthropy thing has been jumped upon and was clearly at the forefront of people’s minds on a recent Cultural Leadership Programme session, as blogged about by Friction Arts in a post called Preparing for a Cultural Nuclear Winter.

On the Stan’s Cafe blog James gives the benefit of their experience and says:

Big UK arts institutions are already doing all they can to raise sponsorship and court donors, it’s not as if a funding cut is ‘required’ to prod them into action. […]

In short, the US model is deeply flawed and we are a million miles away from being able to deliver that model as well as they do.

As things stand the figures, for the West Mids in particular, support him, the Birmingham Post pulling the numbers from analysis by Arts & Business. The headline numbers there being that in the West Mids private investment dropped 25% over the last period, while the national average was a drop of 7%.

A&B chief Colin Tweedy said that:

We would like to be optimistic but predict the worst is yet to come

Here’s the bunny: