In the last week alone, three stories about the media have made national headlines. The row over Celebrity Big Brother, which ended up almost obscuring Gordon Brown’s diplomatic trip to India, was the most sensational, but there was also the release of the BBC’s license fee settlement and the newly available minutes of a BBC meeting that took place in the Hutton Report aftermath. We may take our national institution for granted, but its relationship with the government over recent years has left it in an ambiguous situation, its importance only remembered when it starts to make its own headlines.

Torin Douglas is the BBC Media Correspondent. It took me a moment to get my head round this job title, and once I had, the idea of reporting on the BBC as a BBC reporter still seemed irresistibly strange. I imagined a Being John Malkovich scenario. However, according to Douglas, “It’s not as hard as people seem to think. You have to treat it the same way you would any other organisation.” Moreover, he loves his job. “The BBC makes headlines like no other organisation apart from the Government. Everyone pays for it, everyone has a view on it and it deals with issues everyone is fascinated by. It’s also a huge business and employer, with lots of competitors. It means there is always a potential story.”

After reading History at Warwick and editing the student newspaper there, Douglas started out as a trainee at The Weekly News, a DC Thomson publication “full of entertainment stories and features.” There, he wrote a Consumer Column - under the pseudonym of Anne Muir. “The name was meant to sound like a thrifty Scottish housewife who’d know how to look after the pennies”, he explains, recalling how he would have to test out cheap suits and write up his conclusions in the third-person. Little wonder, perhaps, that his father tried to dissuade him from journalism, urging him to get “a proper job”.

His father had tried to dissuade him from journalism and urged him to get a 'proper job' after university

Douglas is now, of course, an established journalist. He has only just stopped writing his weekly column for Marketing Week, which ran for nearly thirty years. “It’s recently been decided that no BBC correspondent or presenter should write a column for any publication other than the BBC’s own,” he explains. “I don’t agree with the decision but obviously I have to accept it.” After all, he probably knows the reasons better than anyone else. Douglas tells me that relations between the BBC and the government are now better, and that “it’s got a six-year licence fee settlement which, while less than the BBC asked for, still gives it a secure income”.

He explains the problem of the rise of the internet for the BBC. “It has huge power and is unleashing so-called ‘citizen journalism’ where people can send in their own reports and pictures - or even bypass the major media altogether. That’s why the BBC and all other media organisations are grappling with how best to deal with the future. It’s exciting and scary at the same time.” So it seems that we will see the media making its own headlines more in future. We have already seen the government engaged in a bitter battle against a broadcaster and now, rapid technological change is entrenching the media further into our lives. As Media Correspondent amid all this, Torin Douglas not only has “a proper job”, he has an important one.