Director’s Blog

Rolling 24 hour news channels drive the news agenda. They are on permanently in newsrooms, government and business offices. Every country used to have an airline as a symbol of national pride, now they have a news channel.

CNN, BBC World, Sky, BBC News 24, Russia Today, Aljazeera, Al Arabiya, Press TV, and the rest provide a continual commentary on world affairs as they happen. But have they become too cliched and homongenous? Adam Westbrook suggests that the BBC should shut down News 24 and relaunch it as much more varied and interesting channel for more diverse programming:

“…how about this: a channel with short live news bulletins twice (or even four times an hour), with more 30 minute news bulletins, and the rest of the time filled with amazing documentaries, and great longer interviews with really interesting people, and some right-on analysis from all those clever correspondents. Hey, you’d have so much space to fill you could commission some riskier pieces from non-British journalists or young journalists. They might work, they might not, but it would be interesting.”

I think it’s a great idea in principle. At lunch with BBC DG Mark Thompson the other day (no, really) I suggested to him that programmes like Newsnight and News 24 should be going upmarket to differentiate the BBC, while also continuing the more accessible bulletins like the Six O’Clock News.

I have a personal interest because I was a launch producer on News 24 back in 1997 under Tim Orchard. Funnily enough, what Adam describes was akin to the original brief. We were told to ‘think outside the box’ and use the 24 hours to cover everything under the sun. In the months of preparation for launch all sorts of generic programming and special features were suggested and a few even made it to air.

KGM at the BBC

I distinctly remember one sequence where Krishnan Guru-Murthy (now C4News) showed viewers how to put a duvet cover on, live. It was beautifully done but it was neither a ratings success nor terribly important.

I was producer of the evening slot which had an entertainment slot with Liquid News presenter (the late) Christopher Price. Chris was a wonderful presenter but even he struggled to move from an item on Prince to one on the Prince of Wales.

It was a mess. And a boring and expensive mess. It is much harder than it sounds to do what Adam is suggesting on TV and make it work.

Of course, new technologies do help. I remember trying to create a slot where viewers were supposed to send in their own VHS tape reports. Only four people did and they were unusable. That would be a lot easier now with YouTube, as CNN have shown. But even so, CNN have got it right by keeping most of those UGC reports on their website.

By the time it got on air BBC News 24 was much more like Sky News and within a year it was entirely the same. Why? Partly because the BBC wanted to compete with Murdoch’s challenger which was proving a hit in terms of audience but also influence.

But also because the original all-singing  all-dancing News 24 was not working. It is much more expensive to create built-programming despite the efficiencies of new media technologies. And where a programme would be cheap enough it will, too often, by incredibly dull or niche. That stuff is probably best left to the Internet and the long tail of online broadcasting.

People turn on news channels for news. Instant news, short news, live news. By all means create different programming but don’t waste your time trying to put it on a 24 hour TV news channel.

Martin and Michael

The sudden death of singer Michael Jackson reminds us of the often-ghastly and always compelling dance between news media and fame.

The BBC News struggled to get the tone right in its description of a best-selling freak and giant of popular culture. At one point last night Sky was not sure if he was in a coma or deceased. Twitter went into frantic overdrive and some functions collapsed. The tabloids knew what the message is: Jacko Dead

He may simply have died from the toll exerted by a damaged and damaging lifestyle. Or the poison of a warped mind Read the rest of this entry »

I was lucky enough to spend today with some outstanding journalism educators from around the world at a conference at Sciences Po in Paris. This is the full text of a talk I gave. I edited down in delivery because most of these people know much more about this stuff than me and I didn’t want to  bore them. So here’s the full text for you!

Read the rest of this entry »

Polis@Sci.Po

What do you need to learn to be a journalist in a world where everyone can be a news producer? No-one taught the Twitterers in Tehran so why spend years (and a lot of money) on a news media degree?

Here at Sciences Po a group of journalism educators from around the world have gathered to justify their existence and, more importantly, work out exactly what journalism education looks like in the age of Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

I will be updating through the day. You can read the full text of my speech here. Read the rest of this entry »

People power

This was weird. I was in a hot sticky tent pitched on a car park in West London next to the M40 with the BBC’s Deputy Director General, the Executive Editor of the International Herald Tribune, the head of news at Al Arabiya and David Plotz from Slate.

Here was the global news elite in search of a saviour from the marauding hordes of ignorant and distracted world citizens who would rather consume celebrity news from a blog than pay attention to proper Grown Up International Affairs. Read the rest of this entry »

If you really want to know what is happening in Iran, go online. Tonight, the brilliant Lindsey  Hilsum from Channel 4 News had an exclusive interview with an opposition politician and great pictures of her in the heart of the swelling demonstrations. But she was unable to file a commentary or join Jon Snow live for the programme because of technical obstacles and Iranian restrictions.

Meanwhile, Sky News were live in London with their Twitter correspondent who was, at least, able to direct viewers to the plethora of Iranian correspondents linked through the microblogging service. Read the rest of this entry »

Politics, public relations and the news media are supposed to have a mutually hostile relationship. And yet we have so much to learn from each other. And we have at least one thing in common: we have all lost the trust of the public.

The Internet and its associated technologies offer a chance for all three sectors to reinvent their relationship with the citizen. In the process, politicians, PR people and journalists will have to think much harder and deeper about what they do and how they do it. It may not be time to love each other, but we should certainly swap thoughts on how to cope with the digital age. Read the rest of this entry »

I was giving my theory of networked political communications to a group of  Dutch lobbyists when someone asked a rather awkward but important question.

I had been suggesting that we are in a new paradigm of political communications in Britain where bloggers, campaigning websites, mainstream media, and political party online messaging is creating a new networked political media. I even used my parable of the Cadbury gorilla. Read the rest of this entry »

A temple bell woke me up from jet-lagged sleep in my wonderful designer hotel here in Seoul. A few hundred miles away is the border with nuclear-armed Communist North Korea. It is all a useful reminder of how journalism is situated in a global, political and historical context.

It was the global and historical context of media change that I was trying to think through in a speech to the 50th anniversary conference of the Korean Society for Journalism and Communication Studies (KSJCS).

Here’s the text of that speech which draws on my previous thoughts on networked journalism and the end of fortress journalism, but adds a more theoretical flavour of the work of Roger Silverstone, Manuel Castells and Terhi Rantanen.

I was asked to talk about ‘online journalism’, but in a sense, I think there is now no other kind of journalism. By that I mean that anyone practicising journalism anywhere in the world is, in some sense, now conditioned by digital technologies and the Internet. We are all infected, as it were, by conditions or concepts such as citizen journalism, satellite transmission, search, infotainment and hypertextuality. All these are things undreamt of half a century ago. I think of this as technological climate change.  Like global warming it is a man-made phenomenon, driven firstly by the old advanced economies and accelerated by emerging states. But, like climate change, its impacts are universal from the Antarctic to Africa. The whole world shares a new media environment and that ecology is now genetically digital. Read the rest of this entry »

Desperate newspaper companies in the US (and elsewhere) are now seriously thinking of charging for their online offerings. Guest blogger Eli Lipmen considers the consequences.

This article by Eli Lipmen.

Last week, newspapers executives from major American news agencies held a private meeting to discuss paid content.  James Warren, a former news executive who wrote about the meeting in the Atlantic Magazine, claiming that the top newspapers and news agencies in the United States have run out of options to keep their doors open and are coming together to come up with a sustainable business model to maintain centralized authority by monopolizing information and knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »