Blog posts by year and monthApril 2011
Posts (56)
BBC to remember the cost of news in human lives
Journalists are by reputation busy people. Hard-bitten, cynical even. But in times like these it's obvious how much everybody owes to their courage and skill, working in war zones like Libya, and in dangerous places - especially for journalists - from Mexico to Russia. Next Tuesday, 3 May, is...
When Jeremy asked Gordon about Gillian
This is the second of five pieces reviewing the Best Interview nominees for this year's Sony Awards, the winner of which will be announced in London on 9 May. The writer is running the BBC College of Journalism's Art of the Interview season. Jeremy Vine's interview with Gordon Brown in ...
YouTube channel gives daily reports from Misrata
A Libyan citizen media outlet on the video-sharing site YouTube is publishing daily audio and video reports on the situation in Misrata. Since 26 February, the Freedom Group channel, affiliated with Wefaq Libya, has been putting out insightful information and descriptions of the battles being...
Event: Are News Interviews Too Similar?
In the Art of the Interview season, top presenters, interviewees, commentators and broadcasting executives discuss how to get the best out of interviews. Are news interviews on the BBC too similar, as producers scramble to get the best interviewees for their own output? Does the ineradicable ...
Back to the future in the school for announcers
I am in Hangzhou, southern China, on an exchange with Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, which has 11,000 media students. Yet it is only the second biggest in China: Beijing University has many more. China understands the importance of mass-media to the Party and the country. Ea...
George Martin and his celebrity interviewers
Arena's 90-minute profile of the Beatles producer Sir George Martin justified its feature length because, as it convincingly showed, there is so much more to Martin than his work with the Fab Four. By my reckoning, in this roughly chronological account of Martin's life, the part of the story b...
Wikileaks failed to deliver Bagdhad secrets
There were high expectations when Wikileaks announced that the biggest topic in its 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables was the war in Iraq. As the webmaster of an Iraqi newspaper, I imagined myself feasting on mountains of secret information. Wikileaks claimed it had over 6,600 cables from the ...
Ten years on from the 'storming' of Russia's NTV
Russian media watchers marked a grim anniversary last week. Ten years ago, on 14 April 2001, security guards and police acting on behalf of the state-owned Gazprom-Media took control of the premises of the independent broadcaster NTV. The takeover is seen as a turning point in the recent histo...
Obama meets his Facebook Friends
It wasn't how US viewers usually see politicians on television: - No commercial breaks - No interruptions or difficult questions from seasoned journalists - A stream of sometimes obscene comments from online viewers flowing along beneath the screen. Yes, President Obama's live broadcast...
Video: Reporting Local Government
BBC Home Editor Mark Easton and Tony Travers, from the Department of Government at the London School of Economics, discussed the complexities of local government. They talked about 'spending cuts' versus 'efficiency savings' and what they actually mean for councils across the UK. They also c...
