Latest entry
- John Cary
- 13 May 08, 03:05 PM
The first thing to say about the winner of Speech Broadcaster of the Year at the Sony Radio Awards is that he knows when to shut up. It was five minutes of silence that probably swayed the judges in favour of Simon Mayo, Radio 5 Live's weekday afternoon presenter.
Last December, Ricky Gervais was in to talk about the Christmas Extras special, and the Archbishop of Canterbury was waiting to start his own interview. The two of them got talking about their shared loved of The Simpsons, and Simon had the confidence simply to let them get on with it. Watch what happened for yourself.
Simon won the Sony DJ award in the early 90s during his stint on the Radio 1 breakfast show. There were doubters at first when he switched to 5 Live seven years ago, but now, according to Woman's Hour's Jane Garvey (formerly of 5 Live herself): "Simon Mayo performs more intellectual somersaults in half an hour than most Radio 4 presenters do in a fortnight."
For me, the award comes as I say goodbye to editing Simon after five years. I'm moving the next programme along in the schedule, Drive, which I guess will keep me too busy to listen live to Simon each day. Time for me to sign up to the programme's clutch of podcasts, showcasing Simon's best interviews, the weekly books panel and, above all, the Friday movie wittertainment with the incomparable Mark Kermode.
John Cary is editor of the Simon Mayo programme
Recent entries
- Ceri Thomas
- 12 May 08, 02:40 PM
Political blogs are running hot this morning with suggestions of a "stitch up" - a conspiracy between Today and the Labour backbencher Frank Field to distract attention from the launch of a government consultation on how we pay for social care. The accusation runs that we deliberately held back some comments from Mr Field in order to ambush a cabinet minister with them this morning.
Here goes with the mundane truth: Frank Field gave an interview to the BBC World Service yesterday evening in which, among other things, he questioned whether Gordon Brown would lead his party into the next general election. (You can listen here.)
We on Today failed to spot it - and the BBC system which monitors our multitude of outlets for news stories didn't pick it up either (possibly not anticipating a domestic UK story breaking on the World Service). So it wasn't until someone involved with the original programme wondered why we weren't making more of the story that we were aware of it at all, and that was at precisely twelve minutes to eight this morning. At that point we listened to the interview and decided it was worth a place on Today - and at around eight o'clock we told the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, that as well as talking to him about social care we'd get a reaction to Frank Field's comments. (You can listen here.)
Small cock-up on our part for not picking up sooner on the World Service interview. No conspiracy at all.
Ceri Thomas is editor of the Today programme
- Jon Williams
- 12 May 08, 11:30 AM
Last week I wrote about the difficulties of reporting from Burma. As you may know, since last Tuesday, my colleague Paul Danahar has been reporting from Rangoon and elsewhere, against the wishes of the Burmese authorities. His reporting on the website, the World Service and on our global TV service, BBC World News as well as for the UK based programmes has shown the true impact of Cyclone Nargis, as well as the limited response of the regime. But it's a story the generals who rule the country would rather you didn't know about.
On Saturday, we became concerned for Paul's safety. He'd entered Burma on a tourist visa and was reporting illegally. We don't do these sorts of things lightly. However, I believe there were - and are - genuine public interest reasons for us entering Burma without permission. Yesterday, Paul was deported from Burma - less than a week after Andrew Harding was also expelled after he'd also tried to enter the country. Despite the staggering numbers of dead and injured, the Burmese authorities had diverted significant numbers of people to try and find Paul - presumably, people who otherwise could have been deployed to bolster the aid effort. Is silencing those telling the world of the catastrophe unfolding inside Burma, really more important than helping those most in need?
Paul was not alone in defying the wrath of the generals. A number of reporters are also operating inside Burma. But don't believe everything you see on television! While the BBC and most other UK broadcasters are reporting from Rangoon or the Irrawaddy delta, this weekend one news channel set foot across the Thai border, many hundreds of miles away from the areas worst hit by the cyclone, and claimed to be reporting from "inside Burma". It's not a lie - but it is misleading. Burma is a big place - "day-trippers" are allowed to go to some tourist parts of the country. But it doesn't equip those who travel there to comment on what's going on elsewhere. The truth is not always as it appears.
Jon Williams is the BBC's world news editor
- Derren Lawford
- 12 May 08, 10:05 AM
I'm just starting a new job looking after the multi-media presence of the BBC's longest running investigations programmes, Panorama, and I'd like to ask you for some help.
It's been a big 12 months for Panorama, covering a wide range of topics from corruption in the UN to teenage sex for sale in the UK and everything in between.
We've also seen our past stories hit the news again, most recently with Princes, Planes and Pay-offs coming back into the fore following a review into business practices at defence firm BAE Systems.
One of my responsibilities will be completely relaunching the Panorama website. In the next few months, I hope we will be bringing you a new and very much improved site. That's why I'd like to hear from anyone who already uses it, what do you rate and what do you hate? Your feedback here will help us as we set about redesigning the way it looks and works.
It's also clear to me on starting the new position, however, that as a team we don't always know how our stories affect people. Do they alter people's perceptions of the world? Do they change their behaviour? Do they stick in the mind for days or weeks after broadcast?
So please let me know about how past Panoramas have affected you or your thoughts.
Derren Lawford is editor of the Panorama website
- Peter Barron
- 9 May 08, 11:15 AM
We've often had debates among the staff (and presenters) of Newsnight about the value of user generated content (watch Jeremy Paxman's views here). In general we think our viewers don't particularly want to hear the views of other viewers on air. And they don't want to decide what goes in the programme. They want to leave it to us to come up with good material. But where does that good material come from?
On Wednesday we led the programme with an exclusive story about a loophole which means that foreign criminals can work airside at UK airports without undergoing criminal record checks. That story came from a viewer who was concerned about security at the airport where he works and sent an email to the BBC's UGC hub, who passed it to us.
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After the report aired, several further viewers wrote to us with their concerns and we followed up with a report on Thursday's programme.
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One viewer wasn't happy. He wrote: "I would prefer it if Newsnight reported the news and stopped asking us viewers to grass on people to help your program."
I think that would be a pity. These days there are millions of potential sources for news stories we could never have got to in the past. On Newsnight we won't often put your opinions on air (though you can leave them here on the website) but if you have a good story which you think should be told we'd like to hear it.
Peter Barron is editor of Newsnight
- Steve Herrmann
- 8 May 08, 01:10 PM
The results have been announced of the 12th annual Webby Awards and I'm delighted to say that the BBC News website has won the People's Voice award in the News category.
This award is decided by public vote, so THANK YOU to everyone who voted for us. It means a great deal to everyone working on the site - journalists, designers, developers and others - to know that you appreciate what we are doing.
Congratulations, too, to the New York Times, which won this year's Webby award for best News site (an accolade which we've been the proud recipients of in the past) as well as both prizes in the category for best newspaper website.
For the BBC News website, this year has seen some fairly big changes, and there are more ahead.
Behind the scenes, we've changed things around quite a bit organisationally, merging the online department with TV and radio news last October to create a multimedia newsroom. That has meant a lot of change for people working in our editorial teams - new bosses, different meetings, wider editorial discussions, and a physical move of the main online news desks to the new combined newsroom, which happens next month. There have been some early dividends from all this for the website, for example a clearer remit for all BBC correspondents and producers out reporting on a story to be thinking of and filing for the website as well as broadcast outlets.
Other changes on the site in recent months have included the launch of a new look and wider pages (these changes are still rolling out across the various sections of the site), the introduction of advertisements on the site when viewed outside the UK, and - most recently - the inclusion of embedded video clips on stories, which has already significantly driven up usage of video.
It is not the first time we have won the Webby People's Voice award, but in the midst of all these changes, and with more developments to come later in the year, it is especially appreciated now, so thank you again.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website
- Mark Coyle
- 8 May 08, 09:00 AM
There was a slightly surreal element to the experience of watching three Scottish judges delivering the Nat Fraser murder conviction appeal ruling.
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Surreal in the sense that only in exceptional circumstances - such as the Lockerbie trial - have cameras been allowed into our courts.
On this occasion, BBC Scotland had been given permission to record the Fraser decision being announced.
A number of their lordships, we were told, were keen to demystify the work of the courts and make what goes on there more transparent.
Certain ground rules were laid down in advance. We were only able to show the three judges and we could not show Fraser or any of the lawyers involved in the case.
If there were any interruptions from the packed public benches, we were prohibited from including this footage online or on television. In the event, there was none.
The judges rejected Fraser's claim that there had been a miscarriage of justice in finding him guilty of murdering his wife Arlene, whose body has never been found.
The ruling delivered, a tape was taken from the court in Edinburgh and beamed from a satellite truck to Glasgow.
BBC Scotland was the designated "pool" broadcaster, meaning that we supplied the footage to other media outlets as well.
Once received, the entire hearing, lasting just short of 18 minutes, was put on our website and excerpts were used later on television.
Between about noon and midnight on Tuesday, this video was viewed 7,400 times. A second, shorter clip was viewed 5,329 times.
But there was another act still to come. As he was led out of court, handcuffed to a custody officer, Fraser was walked past the waiting media. This too was captured on camera and the resulting footage was accessed 3,829 times online.
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The questions rang out: "Has justice been done?" "Where's Arlene, Mr Fraser?"
Fraser stopped and replied: "The fight will go on, as will the, the..."
The custody officer was pulling him towards the waiting prison van but Fraser wanted his moment.
In his North East dialect, he told the officer: "Hud on a second..." in the same way he might have asked a friend to wait for him while he chatted to a third person.
Before the officer's persistence won and Fraser was hauled towards the van, he stated: "...as will the fight to get to the truth." And then he was gone.
On a footnote, we hear through the grapevine that their lordships were pleased with the way their proceedings were handled by the media. It may be that more cases will be opened up in this way.
It transpires that shortly after we put the first video clip online, a grandchild of one of the judges rang him to say they'd seen him in court.
M'luds are, after all, human like the rest of us.
Mark Coyle is BBC Scotland's continuous news editor
- Jon Williams
- 7 May 08, 11:10 AM
It's the iron law of newsgathering - stories happen in the least convenient places. After two months of dodging the authorities first in China and then in Zimbabwe, we're at it again - this time in Burma. The country is one of the last "closed" nations on earth. But unlike Zimbabwe, it's not just the BBC that's banned from Burma - all foreign journalists are unwelcome there.
Reporting natural disasters are difficult at any time. Our teams endure the same conditions as the people affected - operating without electricity and clean water, sometimes without shelter. Most of the time, we're able to take our own supplies into the affected area - but in Burma, our team has had to pose as tourists. So reporting the devastating aftermath of Cyclone Nargis is even more difficult than usual. Particularly when the reporter is deported on arrival.
BBC reporters are recognised all the time - most of the time, they enjoy it. Our Asia correspondent Andrew Harding arrived in Rangoon just hours after the cyclone hit on Monday morning. But after passing through immigration, an eagle-eyed policeman spotted our intrepid reporter in the baggage hall. Andrew was put on the next plane to Bangkok. Despite everything else going on in Burma, Andrew's deportation was considered sufficiently news-worthy to make the evening news in Rangoon last night.
So it is, that Paul Danahar - more used to being behind the camera as our Asia-Pacific bureau chief rather in front of the microphone - finds himself as the only British broadcaster inside the country. Paul is normally based in Beijing and has spent the past six weeks leading our coverage of the protests in Tibet, and the aftermath. During the Iraq War, he ran the operation in Baghdad, braving the coalition air strikes and the wrath of Saddam's regime. As South Asia bureau chief, he led the BBC's response to the Bam Earthquake in Iran, the Asian Tsunami and the Pakistan earthquake. So when it comes to natural disasters, he's got form. Leading the Today Programme and the BBC News at Ten - well that's a different matter!
The UN says it's still waiting for visas for its aid workers. We hope the regime may relax its restriction on western journalists. The aid agencies argue they need the coverage to generate donations to fund their relief efforts. At its best it becomes a virtuous circle. Without it, the danger is that hundreds, maybe thousands of those fortunate to survive may not do so.
Jon Williams is the BBC's world news editor
- Peter Knowles
- 2 May 08, 03:47 PM
The BBC is hosting three lectures in a series about the role of public service broadcasting and first up was Sir David Attenborough, in a speech delivered on the evening of 1 May in London.
BBC Parliament has developed a two hour slot in its schedules - 2100 Saturday evening - for speeches and lectures of a broadly political and historical nature. This one fits the bill. But, to be honest, if it had been David Attenborough reading out loud from a plant catalogue, I would probably have gone with that. Next in the series are lectures from Stephen Fry and Will Hutton.
Sir David spent some time describing the physical characteristics of the early TV studios in Alexandra Palace, when short stories were declaimed to camera by men in comfy armchairs. Having knocked the microphone off his lapel, the first three minutes of the lecture found us unexpectedly re-enacting some of the limitations of those early years.
David Attenborough gave a very short definition of public service broadcasting in the modern era: "programmes with small audiences".
Sir David fears the effect of reducing the habitat of a genre to just one or two occasional programmes and makes the point that the world-beating units - the Natural History Unit in Bristol being the prime example - have size and continuity on their side. His dislike of faddish popular genres, such as the makeover shows, is expressed clearly and was picked up in news coverage of the lecture:
He argues that niche channels haven't done too well for audiences and that they therefore miss the point of broadcasting.
So I'm not entirely sure whether the broadcast of this lecture on BBC Parliament 'counts' as public service broadcasting, by Sir David's definition. We're showing it (or hiding it, depending on your point of view) on a channel which reaches more than a million viewers a month. But not, as you may have guessed, all at the same time.
Sir David's vision of public service broadcasting is that it must be appropriately funded and played out on a whole and coherent network dedicated to the purpose. And it must have a healthy audience.
He describes what he sees as the toxic effect of foisting publicly funded public service programming onto a commercial schedule where, inevitably, the programme would be treated as a pariah by the scheduler.
I hope you find the time to watch the whole thing at 2100 BST on BBC Parliament and then on iPlayer. If you feel that your Saturday nights have, for too long, been given over to hedonism, you can follow it with a lecture by Baroness James of Holland Park on Police And The Public In The 21st Century (2135 BST) and round off the evening at 2215 BST in the company of the Archbishop of Canterbury, lecturing on Religious Faith And Human Rights to the London School of Economics.
All three lectures were delivered this week and they offer first-rate public discourse that you won't find anywhere else. Saturday nights are never going to be the same again, are they?
Peter Knowles is the controller of BBC Parliament
- Kevin Marsh
- 2 May 08, 11:17 AM
Another week, another book about journalism.
This one - Can We Trust The Media? by Professor Adrian Monck of London's City University.
Anyone interested in British journalism should read it - not because it gives the right answers to its title: it doesn't. But because it asks the right questions. And at least it's been written by someone who's actually worked in a newsroom.
Prof Monck's purpose is unambiguous: "What I aim to do in this book is burst the trust balloon. I want to question just why it is we want to trust the media and lay out why that will never be possible."
Two things: one, he portrays the BBC's promotion of trust to value number one as an act of choice, not the (welcome) inevitability it is for a publicly funded broadcaster. Two (for different reasons and by a different route) he's joined me in diagnosing 'the story' as the malignancy in journalism's sick body.
Journalists want to be trusted, broadly in inverse proportion to the trust in which surveys say they're actually held. But there's a missing proposition in the question normally asked. Trusted to do what? Portray the world as it really is? Not possible - any account of the world can only ever be a subset of all the facts. Trust resides in the journalist's motivation in selecting the facts he/she does and in the realisation of that motivation.
Prof Monck tells us that "trust is not important. Not being trusted never lost anyone a reader or a viewer". And, he adds, it's journalism's job to aggregate facts and "get the entertainment values right". This may well be a description of the current state of journalism: but it's not much of an aspiration for the institution of journalism that - still - plays the defining role in the public sphere.
And it's simply not tenable for a publicly (and more or less universally) funded broadcaster like the BBC to accept Prof Monck's lowest common denominator description without some aspirational pushback. Nor is it possible for the BBC to be in the same game as the commercial press which can, say, choose its facts to suit its readers.
Even if it wanted it - and it doesn't - the BBC can't choose to make its way in the world by mimicking the exhausting diurnal anger of the Mail ('woe that the 1950s are gone') or the hand-wringing of the Guardian/Independent ('woe that global warming/capitalism is taking us to hell in an organic hand-basket').
But the really big thing in Can We Trust The Media? is this: journalism itself isn't the problem. The problem is journalism's fetish - 'the story'. And so it's no bad thing that 'the story' is dead... or dying.
That's an awkward paradox. 'The story' - in the sense that journalists mean it rather than the broader idea of narrative - is the source of all that's great in journalism and all that's vile in it.
On the credit side, you can go from Russell of the Crimea through Hersh of My Lai, Woodstein of Watergate to Peston of Northern Rock. In all of these, 'the story' has been the only way journalism could happen. The only way of handling the information asymmetry, the inevitability that power has information and journalists (on behalf of citizens) have to spanner it out, chunk by chunk.
On the debit side, all those things that make journalists seem untrustworthy. Why this story and not that? Why these facts and not those? The lure of the unusual, the rogue (and unreliable) data? Sensationalism, half-truths, self-fulfilling prophecies.
'The story' can easily become the journalist's way of evading responsibility. 'It's only a story' equals 'I don't need all the facts or even the best selection of them'. 'The story' can be no more than waypoints in a convincing narrative... convincing, so long as the reader looks no further than 'the story'.
Which is why 'the story' is dead. The people we journalists used to tell our 'stories' to, with a 'trust me' wink, now routinely look beyond 'the story'. And we help them. Websites like the BBC News website are built on the basis that users will look out their own subset of facts, context and background.
More than that, news websites blur the distinction (a distinction that was only ever really relevant to journalists) between 'news' and 'information' while news aggregators make no assumptions about any individual's news agenda in the way that 'the story' has to.
In other words, the process of selection that used to be the province of the journalist - the process we used to call 'storytelling' - is now the province of each member of our audiences. Good.
This is where Prof Monck and I are in total agreement. He doesn't quite put it this way - but the death of 'the story' is part of the answer to the trust conundrum. Now journalists can get on with increasing the access of the people formerly known as the audience to the information they need and in the way they need it.
And that hand journalists once used to polish 'the story' can instead be held out to guide readers, listeners and viewers through their selection of facts, context and background and not ours.
Kevin Marsh is editor of the BBC College of Journalism
- Jon Williams
- 2 May 08, 09:33 AM
Tomorrow, 3 May, the United Nations marks World Press Freedom Day. Granted, it's not in the same league as World Aids Day, or as widely supported as flag days for Cancer Research or the hospice movement. But I hope you'll forgive me if I take the opportunity to reflect that journalism is a dangerous business - and getting more so.
In Zimbabwe in recent weeks, we've seen the dangers faced by reporters, arrested for simply trying to tell the world what's going on inside that country. And in many places, journalists face far worse. This week, the Committee to Protect Journalists - a US based campaign group - published what it calls an Impunity Index, a name-and-shame list of countries where governments have consistently failed to solve the murders of the journalists.
The war in Iraq makes Baghdad the most dangerous place on the planet for reporters. But most journalists who've died there were killed not in combat, but rather, were targeted for professional reasons and murdered. The vast majority are Iraqis - 79 deaths remain unsolved.
While Iraq tops the Impunity Index, followed by other war-torn countries such as Sierra Leone and Somalia, the most sobering statistic us that the majority of the 13 nations named are established, peacetime democracies.
This week I was in Mexico. There, reporters regularly investigate drug trafficking, organised crime and official corruption. Too many pay a heavy price. The families of seven reporters murdered in Mexico are still seeking justice. Also among those named-and-shamed are India, and its South Asian neighbours, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
I confess a personal as well as professional interest. Last October, a young journalist, Alisher Saipov, was shot dead in the city of Osh, Kyrgyzstan. The politics of Central Asia are murky and dangerous. Osh is on the border with Uzbekistan - a country where dissent about the regime of President Islom Karimov is not tolerated.
Alisher had worked for the BBC and other international news organisations - he was also the editor of an opposition Uzbek newspaper. He had just finished working on a film for Newsnight when he was gunned down as he left his office. His family and friends believe he was killed by an Uzbek gunman, hired to silence him. Alisher was 26 years old. His wife has just given birth to their first child.
Six months on, no-one has been brought to justice in Kyrgyzstan for Alisher Saipov's murder. Indeed, the investigation into his death has twice been suspended, despite assurances to the BBC by the Kyrgyz authorities that they would spare no effort in hunting his killer.
Journalists don't deserve special treatment - but the friends, families and colleagues of those who die doing their job, do deserve answers.
Jon Williams is the BBC's world news editor
- Rome Hartman
- 1 May 08, 02:20 PM
For many years, the BBC has had a very important and productive partnership with public television stations in the United States. As you may have read in the last couple of days, that relationship is going to change over the next several months; what will NOT change is the simple fact that millions of Americans will still be able to see the work of BBC journalists around the world on their local public TV stations.
We will simply have a different, very strong partner station, KCET in Los Angeles, the second-largest public television station in the US KCET will replace WLIW, one of several public stations in the New York area, which has been our partner for the last decade.
PBS, the Public Broadcasting System in America, is not a network in the traditional sense of CBS or NBC or ABC. There is no central network office directing or ordering local stations to run certain programmes at certain times. Each station is free to make its own daily schedule, from a large 'menu' of material. Larger PBS-affiliated stations often act in a 'lead' or 'sponsoring' role for programmes; either programmes they produce themselves, or programmes that they acquire via purchase and/or partnership.
That latter arrangement (a distribution partnership with WLIW) is the way in which BBC News programs have appeared on PBS stations across America since 1998. Beginning this Fall, KCET will be our new partner, and we're confident they'll be a very good one, working hard to see to it that strong daily BBC News bulletins air on strong public stations, in prime time slots. WLIW has decided to attempt to produce its own daily bulletin of international news, though that station doesn't currently have any newsgathering capacity of its own, and has not yet announced who its international partner might be.
Of course, the BBC DOES have an incredibly able and robust international newsgathering operation, AND we already HAVE a US-based nightly news program focusing on international events: BBC World News America, the program that I produce. We've been on the air for seven months now...airing in the US on the BBC America and BBC World News channels...and we're proud of what we've been able to accomplish, including winning a coveted Peabody award in our very early days. I'm convinced that the combination of this flagship US program, AND BBC News bulletins airing on PBS through a new partnership with a very strong station, will help the BBC to continue to grow - both in influence and audience - in America.
Rome Hartman is executive producer of BBC World News America
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