Blog posts by year and monthSeptember 2010
Posts (35)
Portraying gays, lesbians and bisexuals
The problem with statistical reports is that there's usually too many numbers in them. That's possibly why my initial eagerness quickly wanes soon after I start ploughing through them. From a journalistic perspective, that's possibly a foolhardy admission, but it is transparent and it's authen...
The journalist's online toolkit
With just a few tools and minimum extra effort, the foreign correspondent of 2010 can appeal to multiple audiences, across multiple outlets, simultaneously and work with greater efficiency than ever before. As foreign correspondent Harriet Sherwood pointed out earlier this week, you might be i...
Jeremy Hunt - media ownership and localness
A model's emerging for what form future local TV might take, if the UK Government decides it's worth going ahead with it. The Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, will speak at the Royal Television Society conference, and is expected to say that an expansion of super-fast broadband will help encourage enterprises such as Witney TV. Run by four enthusiasts, the West Oxfordshire internet-based video news service started life as a sort of parish magazine on the web. But it came to prominence when one of its enthusiastic citizen journalists scooped an interview with BBC Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson. Hunt was being interviewed by John Humphrys about the Coalition's plans for the future of media - and in particular media ownership - in the UK. The question of whether local TV could be profitable, regardless of which platform it uses, is in dispute. Jeremy Hunt agreed that advertising alone isn't going to generate sufficient income, and goes on to tell Humphrys: "Yesterday I met Jeff Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, and he said that in the US his TV channels only get 50% of their revenue from advertising. They get a lot of it from the fees they receive from cable companies." A lot of income to local TV companies in other countries comes from local sporting rights ... and there is a whole local advertising and support market that we haven't developed in this country at all ... and what we want to do is to try and liberalise the market to allow those possibilities to emerge, to try and get a much stronger local voice in our broadcasting sector." Jeremy Hunt has set up an advisory panel to look into ways of establishing a new generation of grassroots TV stations.
Beware pokazukhas and zakazukhas in Russian media
"Pokazukha" and "zakazukha" are two tricky-to-translate words that sum up many of the problems of Russian journalism, especially on state-controlled television. They have also been very much to the fore in recent months. The concept of the "pokazukha", which can be roughly translated as "empty...
Witney TV: putting local video news on the map
It was founded in May and has four volunteers working on it full time, but already Witney TV is making its mark on the media landscape. It was an exclusive interview with BBC Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson that put the web-based local news site on the map, but from the outset it had a loy...
Video: Data Journalism
Making sense of data has become an increasingly important part of the work of any journalist. The release of documents through WikiLeaks, the MPs' expenses scandal and 'open government' are just a few examples of where these skills are now vital. In a BBC College of Journalism and Frontli...
'That was an exclusive' - Witney TV points the way
Take one hugely popular TV show that's made celebrities of its presenters. Give it a mysterious, masked character and sustain the mystery until the character decides to blow the gaffe in an autobiography. The row between the BBC's Top Gear and racing driver Ben Collins, aka The Stig, is a low-...
The best job in Britain ...
... is, without doubt, Controller Radio 4, in spite of the conventional wisdom that the R4 audience excels all others in cantankerous 'nein sehen'. All the ones I've known - controllers, that is, rather than audiences, including Mark Damazer who's currently handing over to his successor, Gwyne...
Video: Len Downie - Interview
Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post, spoke to the BBC College of Journalism about the US political landscape ahead of the 2010 mid-term elections. He began by explaining the significance of these elections and the impact they might have on the federal government. He also discussed...
Event: TV Journalism in the 21st Century
Tuesday 12 October, the Frontline Club, London. There is much talk of the old media platforms of news print and television being wiped out by digital platforms. But TV is still the world's dominant communication medium and it is growing year on year - TV journalism now reaches more people arou...
