I took him up on his offer, and sent him some stories that seemed just too similar to ones we’d done not to have been sourced from one of our sites. He forwarded them to the relevant department and we received a really condescending reply from the head of dept. that made it clear that his site was run by “experts” – unlike ours (although this particular site is peopled almost entirely by journalists who write for the broadsheets).

Anyway, the whole thing was depressingly arch and pompous, and he finished by saying “On a wider point, it is our policy is to link to sites beyond bbc.co.uk and to recognise the best content the wider web has to offer.” So there you go – obviously we’re all just imagining it.

On a similar note, we can’t get hold of review copies of TV shows for TV Scoop (which currently gets just under 10,000 uniques a day and growing steadily) because the BBC refuses to acknowledge blogs as credible websites. Again, our editor is a well-known journalist.

/whinge