Can we be your friend?

It reminds me of the last time the ITV regional franchise for Wales was up for grabs (and how long ago does that seem!). Rival bidders seeking to get Cardiff's Centre for Journalism Studies on-board to demonstrate their commitment to journalism and training.

This time it's the second regional radio franchise for South Wales that's at stake. Two of the consortia seeking the nod from Ofcom (bids have to be in by December 12th) are knocking at the door. Both are planning heavily speech based bids - UTV (big in Swansea quite apart from Talksport etc.) are apparently going for an all speech format. Town and Country Broadcasting (who own stations from Pembrokeshire to Bridgend) are going for an 'older audience' but still with a predominantly speech mix.

I would have thought the BBC's Radio Wales already had the older audience pretty well sown up but maybe they don't mean quite that old.

Nonetheless the stakes could be high. There's a north and mid Wales regional licence coming along soon so the possibility opens up of an all-Wales commercial radio operator.

Now that would be competition for BBC Radio Wales which has alone, since its inception over 25 years ago, been able to claim to be a national voice (along with Radio Cymru of course).

I hope the eventual winner does have a strong commitment to quality speech and news. It can only broaden and deepen democratic processes in Wales. And along the way, I'd hope, provide employment for a few more young Welsh journalists.

Oh - and when HTV did win the ITV franchise all those years ago, they set up a couple of scholarships for young journalists to study at Cardiff - I think the first of the ITV regional companies to do such a thing. Sadly, but not surprisingly, today's ITV News has seen fit to delete the Welsh language one.

It's happening everywhere

Last week in our online lecture series in Cardiff, Pete Clifton - Head of BBC News Interactive, aired some of his thought about how his online journalists might in future get closer to the rest of the BBC's journos. He's apparently developing a strategy for future integration which might, quite conceivably, be a strategy for deleting his empire; subsuming it into the general run of what BBC journalists do.

How interesting that today's speaker, Sarah Radford from NewburyToday - the award winning web presence of a weekly Berkshire newspaper, brought along a video of her boss, Martin Robertshaw, describing almost exactly the same organisational, managerial issue.

From one end of the online spectrum to the other - the issue is the same. And I'm sure neither Sarah nor Martin, with their twenty or so journalists, would mind being described as being from the other end of the spectrum to the BBC with its thousands of hacks.

How do you integrate the online operation into the traditional "day-job"? Those who get it right will have a profound impact on the working lives of all today's journalism students.

HAIR

I think I've found my first niche TV channel. Someone shaving all the hair off an endless stream of willing victims. Fascinating stuff. Why are the victims allowing this to happen? What do they think this is doing for them?

It appears to be BBC3's contribution to Children in Need. And it's miles better than Wogan on some sort of souped up embalming fluid.

I'm interested because I know I recognise people by their hair rather than their face. It may seem odd but psychologists tell me I'm not alone, lots of us rely on hair for our primary recognition algorithm.

As a journalism teacher, every year I need to get to know fast a large number of faces. Every year I get fooled once they start pulling on beanies etc. when the cold weather sets in.

When I was 20-something hair mattered, it defined you. There was even a musical called "Hair".

One of the most iconic images of 'loosing your personality' comes in the opening sequence of Kubrik's "Full Metal Jacket" as recruits are given a #1.

So you see why I do find it hard to understand why so many men today wish to voluntarily surrender this 'pride and joy'.

As a child I was regaled by family stories about how my father was bald by the age of 21. As it happens I survived obvious baldness till about 50.

These days old freinds don't recognise me when I wear a hat.

The 'newsroom of the future'

Thanks to Richard Sambrook for drawing attention to an interesting memo from Gannett CEO Craig Dubow posted on one of the Poynter forums outlining the company's plans to roll out 'information centres' - or probably centers.

It pays to follow the 'continue' links which lead to much more informative FAQ style pages.

It would be interesting to try a pan-diploma experiment with something like this in Cardiff. Given the will, and the co-operation of all (including the PR people), I think we could make it work.

On a not very different note, I was interested in what Kevin Marsh had to say to the Society of Editors this week (reported in the Press Gazette) on the subject of blogging. 'Replace columnists' - well maybe. He's reported as saying:

"The future journalist - if such a thing exists, and I very much hope it will - will be distinct from the ordinary citizen armed with the same publishing tools."

And he said the distinction journalists will have is "trust".

Absolutely. Plus, I would hope, the good professional skills that we teach in Cardiff which are the source of that trust.

Convergence

So the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) and the Broadcast Journalism Training Council (BJTC) are to work more closely together (couldn't find an equivalent article on the NCTJ website).

In many ways not before time. The trick will be for each body to learn from the best aspects of the other.

Here in Cardiff we have a problem with the NCTJ and could possibly give up NCTJ accreditation for our newspaper Postgraduate Diploma. As Peter Preston wrote in last Sunday's Observer.

It’s basically a question of exemptions, from the public admin and legal bits of the courses. Why should long-suffering students be required to sit exams twice over, with a pile of shorthand thrown in? And why should the finest academic essayists have to play tick boxes and short, sharp answers to start on a local weekly at £13,000 a year? If Cardiff, say, were to go it alone, would any of their students really suffer?

City University have already abandonned the NCTJ and the University of Central Lancashire are also close to pulling out too.

The BJTC has so far not attempted to introduce its own qualifications. It has based its accreditation of courses on observed outcomes along with a set of guidelines to which it expects courses to conform.

This approach suits the wide variety of academic institutions which offer BJTC acccredited courses though, most agree, cracks are beginning to show.

A wider variety of courses from a wider range of course providers seriously challenges the BJTC's approach which was developed in response to a handful of pioneering University based postgraduate courses.

Now similar University courses are challenging the NCTJ approach which comes from a very different starting point.

There is massive room for a meeting of minds here.

Cats and dogs

Much the most striking analogy that has emerged from our 'Online' guest speakers this year has come from ex-editor of the Telegraph online, Richard Burton.

He characterised traditional newspaper readers as loyal 'dogs' and online users as fickle and cynical 'cats'.

Probably been around for years - but I haven't heard it before.

Jon Snow and those poppies

Is sporting a red poppy in the run-up to remembrance day really something that compromises the impartiality/objectivity of a journalist?

That seems to be what Jon Snow is saying.

Interestingly the BBC's Controller Editorial Policy got himself into a right tangle on Radio 4's PM this evening when asked to defend what appears to be a long-standing and, importantly, unquestioned policy of allowing (encouraging even?) newsreaders and reporters to wear poppies - a more or less unique privilege allowed to this charity.

World War One has now passed out of living memory, it won't be long before the 2nd World War follows it into the history books. How long can it be before the whole paraphanalia of official remembrance on November 11th each year follows?

It will be a while yet I suspect. But as the parades of veterans diminish, the question has to be asked.

The trick is going to be to find a new way to honour the sacrifices made by members of the armed forces in smaller and less universally popular causes.

"Project North" - has the BBC gone mad?

On the one hand this is pretty esoteric stuff - of interest only to broadcast journalism educators and their accrediting body, the Broadcast Journalism Training Council (BJTC).

On the other, it seems to be a case of some folks (as Dubbya would say) in the BBC following some new regional initiative right out of the window and into realms that would probably be illegal if proposed in Wales or Scotland.

What the BBC is apparently saying is that only people born or educated in the North can be considered for work placements - the key to entry level jobs - in BBC North (the area north of a line from Liverpool to Grimsby - not including Scotland, they add helpfully). But to most people living in north east Wales Liverpool and Manchester ARE their natural big city hinterland - is north Wales also 'not included'?

If this just covered the BBC's local journalism in the North it would be bad enough. But it goes wider.

Manchester is already home to UK-wide BBC production units - religion is the most obvious example. There are plans to move many more vital bits of the BBC's national remit north. I thought this was a good idea - once. If it's going to be subject to this kind of shoddy chauvanism - better stay in London.

Even more alarming is the promise that this nonsense is to be 'rolled out across the country'. So - if you're born in the West and want to work for the BBC, best train as a natural historian.

For the record, here's the full text of the email about this I received from BJTC secretary, Jim Latham.

Dear all - another issue on placements which may cause some short term problems but potentially could bring massive benefits and reduce the grief you get from your students over BBC placements.
This will take some explaining so bear with me and just 'cos you're not in the North Region don't think this won't affect you - if this pilot works it could roll out across the BBC
The BBC will launch Project North in February - in effect redefining the relationship between the Corporation and its customers, particularly in education.
The Region stretches from Liverpool to Grimsby, south of the Scottish border (but not including Notts, Staffs etc. There are deals being struck with every institution producing people from every occupational sector the BBC might be interested in for the future.
Ethnic and Social diversity are very big headlines, there's a big premium being placed on institutions doing outreach work to improve their diverse intakes - placements are an important part of this.
Project North will control placements in this region - for broadcast journalists it means the region will opt out of our central agreements with the BBC - and this starts at Christmas.
The tutors from the accredited courses in the North and myself met Margaret McLelland, the Project development exec in Manchester last week and cleared a lot of air.
The headlines are: placements not just in local radio but in tv, programming (entertainment, reliigion, politics) - agreed numbers of places for each of our accredited courses in the North - agreed numbers of places for students from the North who are on courses elsewhere in the country and who want to return home for their placement - these numbers may be modified by the level of commitment and outreach work being done by individual institutions and courses - no mention of any 50/50 deal - nominated BBC staff to become first-call liaison between our accredited courses and the nearest BBC newsroom - a need to get a clear idea of streaming placement demand across the year (we need to watch the Customs and Revenue stuff on this as well).
This could take a lot of pressure off the remaining central agreement placements and it has to be said will probably replace the personal contact arrangements which have survived thus far.
Clearly those courses early in the placement year - City and Westminster could be affected by this - whether to apply to the central scheme or to the North.
My view is that they should continue to apply to the central scheme if only because full staffing on Project North is clearly not yet in place.
I also think though that by Feb/March we should have the new scheme in place and I will pursue detailed arrangements on that and will arrange a briefing for the January plenary.
We obviously need information now from the institutions OUTSIDE the North region - apologies, I know this will be a pain - could you please give me numbers of students in their placement year (ie PG's and whichever year of the UG courses go out on placement) with home addresses in Cumbria, Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, North Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Merseyside, Cheshire.
Armed with these figures I can go back to Margaret to get the numbers she's allocating per course.
Many thanks
Jim

Jim, I believe you're losing the plot here. It is NOT the BJTC's job to do the BBC's bidding, even if you do think there are 'massive benefits' and it makes placements easier.

This is a bad idea which a body like the BJTC should be resisting on behalf of those for whom it exists - its academic members.

But their influence has been weakened in recent years - the last BJTC meeting I attended was a vast table lined with industry representatives plus a pathetic cluster of academics in one corner.

The whole thing is out of kilter and the craven "it's all for the best" line doesn't convince me for one moment.

The BJTC has got to learn how to stand up to the industry bully - the BBC.

Self-censorship

A colleague drew my attention today to a piece in Saturday's FT by John Lloyd, "An Insult to Reason".

Lloyd writes about attending a session organised by the BBC governors for senior BBC staff and a few outsiders on impartiality.

He says that what struck him most forcibly were stories from senior journalists of a tendency among younger BBC journalist to self-censorship.

Helen Boaden, the director of BBC News and Current Affairs, ... recounted a story that, when she was in charge of the Radio 4 Analysis programme, she had to encourage producers who had discovered that most bullying in young offenders' institutions had been done by black on white inmates, to reflect that result in the programme.

Boaden and other executives with similar tales had said: if this is true, it should be broadcast - squashing what they saw as self-censorship instincts of their juniors, who presumably felt they might be regarded as racist or at least be providing ammunition for racists, had they broadcast what they had discovered.

I think anyone involved in journalism education will be familiar with this reluctance on the part of young journalists. They are, by and large, decent people who worry greatly about things like this. The world they often find is very often at odds with the liberal, soft-left world view they, even the Thatcher generation, have grown up with.

But Lloyd is right. Perhaps much of the alienation so many people feel with politics and the mainstream media is precisely because they don't accurately reflect the reality of the world many actually live in.

And it also underlines the need to attract into journalism people from a greater diversity of social, ethnic. religious etc. backgrounds.

Another thing to worry about

Woke up this morning to BBC Radio 4 telling me I am wasting energy by leaving my mobile phone charger plugged-in without the phone attached to it.

Went guiltily around the house and found three such devices plugged in and doing nothing - a phone charger, a portable radio power supply and a regular battery charger. That's another £30 a year saved (some hope!).

Then I began to wonder why this is so. Can't say a bit of Googling has answered that question but it did yield this nugget from fool.co.uk.

However, after reading Rebecca Ash's book "The New Spend Less Revolution" I was embarrassed to discover that only 5% of the energy used by my mobile phone chargers is used to charge my phone -- the rest is wasted when I have it plugged in at the wall without a phone attached to it. Ash's book is packed with 364 other great tips to help you spend less, and I recommend it highly. But it is the wastefulness of phone chargers that caught my attention.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the average microwave uses far more energy powering that little LED clock than it ever does cooking things.

There's an interesting little gizmo out there that purports to tell you just how much electricity your home is actually using and how much it costs. It apparently costs £350 - so needs to find an awful lot of phone chargers to pay for itself in any reasonable time.

What's need are devices that automatically turn themselves off completely, but which can be instantly revived by, say, a sharp tap or maybe a spoken command.

Jarvis vs. Fincham

Apropos of my own recent musings on internet TV - Jeff Jarvis takes on BBC1 Controller, Peter Fincham, again today. The issue is, of course, the disruptive potential of internet TV.

Jarvis starts gently:

I suspect that Fincham and I disagree only by a matter of degree — though that may be like missing by five degrees when building a bridge from either end, meant to meet in the middle. He believes in the value of linear TV channels and seems to think that the internet is a nice complement. I believe that television has the opportunity to grow in untold new ways — in programming, distribution, choice, interaction — and that the old channels are becoming the complement to the new.

Thereafter the chasm grows. The bridges are missing by miles. But then this is a case of two people coming from opposite ends of the spectrum - and little light is usually shed on a subject when this is the case.

What I do like though is Fincham's robust defence of the idea of a traditional linear TV channel at a time when so many in the BBC seem to be embracing the brave new world with an almost self-destructive enthusiasm.

When we've lost the distinction between terrestrial and digital, it will be replaced by a new distinction – between channels that originate, and channels that don't.

And between channels that have range, and channels that are niche.

Because we take these mixed genre channels for granted, I don't think we treasure them enough. Because they've been around for years, they can sound like something from the past. They're not.

When I was growing up – this isn't an exact analogy, but it's got some similarities – department stores were sorry places. The world seemed to be passing them by. You could have been forgiven for thinking they were in terminal decline. No, they weren't.

They just needed refurbishing, refreshing, they needed to be made modern. Now look at them. Try getting into Selfridges on a Saturday morning – you're trampled to death in the crush.

The equivalent of Selfridges on a Saturday morning, you might say, is a mainstream channel on a Saturday evening. Seventy per cent of the population have access to up to 400 channels, but for the last two Saturdays more than 15 million people have come to two of them as BBC ONE and ITV1 take position and fire arrows at each other.

Robin Hood versus Ant and Dec, Strictly Come Dancing versus the X Factor – these are the high street battles of modern television.

My own view is more ambivalent. At the moment, for the vast majority of people, internet TV is still viewed in 'lean forward' environment of the PC or laptop while traditional linear TV enjoys the 'lean back' world of the sitting room. The battle will only be truly joined when these two worlds converge - as they surely will.

That's the point where we'll really find out if that so-called 'lost generation' of younger TV viewers has really evolved into a different species of viewer.

First Head of BBC Journalism Foundation Scheme

Andrew Wilson - one of the bosses at BBC Bristol has landed this job, which could be pretty important to us toiling in the vineyards of journalism education.

A week or so ago we had a chat about the BBC and the Journalism College and the real world.

Andrew emailed me today to say:

"Your input was very useful. In fact, I used a big picture of you in my
presentation for the job."

My mind is still boggling.

Envy

My colleague here in Cardiff, Simon Williams, brought in his new digital camera kit today.

I'm old fashioned and can only think in 35mm terms - but a 28-200 zoom, racked right out, 10 megapx pic, 15th sec exposure and hand held, but PIN SHARP.

Unbelievable.

Want one. But I know I'd never take it on holiday.

I comfort myself that in a year or two this performance will be available from a vest pocket camera costing £200 - which I WILL take on holiday.

And that poses the equally interesting question - will there always be a distiction between professional and amateur equipment?

Manufacturers have long been able to charge vastly more for professional gear. It's possible that some of this differential pricing has been justified (lenses are a case in point) - but I suspect much of it hasn't.

This digital convergence is making it tough for us all.

So it goes...

Might even post that 'unbelievable' 10Mpx photo.

Pro-am television

Yesterday's discussion about the internet TV channel 18 Doughty Street raised yet again the interesting issue of what constitutes 'professional' standards in the age of anyone-can-do-it television.

Iain Dale said he wanted Doughty Street to lie somewhere between where it is now (a bit rough) and the BBC.

But what does that mean?

In a few weeks we will, for the first time, set about giving basic video skills to all our postgrad print journalists. But what should we be attempting to teach? Emulating the best craft skills of TV news - or something different?

My own sense is that it should be something different - not inferior, but different. I've seen on newspaper websites examples of video that I've found highly effective that would never pass muster in the newsrooms of ITV, Sky or the BBC. More YouTube than Wales Tonight. More from the heart than a 50 year tradition of craft TV skills.

The BBC has already wrestled with these issues with its local TV pilots. I think we in Cardiff should be thinking a lot harder about what it is we are striving to achieve with these TV for print journalists sessions.

More soon!

What Iain Dale actually said...

We (the staff) often characterise our postgrad journalism students as ruthlessly careerist, tending to reject any aspect of the course that doesn't obviously relate to their immediate career goals.

Iain Dale might have fallen foul of that. He didn't, and I think the reason he didn't is because he was so obviously 'one of us' - Iain comes over as a journalist first and a politician second. He is, of course, one of the new breed of 'citizen journalists' that so troubles students like ours.

And well it might - they are adding mightily to their debts to pay to become professional journalists - and here we are saying 'anyone can do it'.

Of course we're not. For one thing, Iain Dale isn't anyone. More importantly, this is the world they're going to have to cope with - a world I believe will have an even greater need for professionals with the skill to pull it together, context it and reflect it back.

I've looked throught many, but by no means all, of the student blogs about Iain's talk. This is the one that's struck me as the most pertinent I've seen so far (it comes from the modest Ollie Hawkins).

Iain Dale goes missing

Iain Dale made it to Cardiff yesterday (and our thanks to him for finding the time to make the trip) to talk to our postgrad journalism students.

Apologies to those trying to get in touch with him or find out where he was speaking. As luck would have it the one member of our university department's admin staff who had the full details was off sick yesterday.

Of course no one (err... me) thought to brief anyone else. Nothing like being part of a school of communications.

18 Doughty Street

The UK's first internet TV station, 18 Doughty Street, launched last night and I wasn't watching.

The reason is simple - I don't have broadband. The reason why I don't have broadband is much less simple. I might inflict it on you one day!

But I did watch the recorded version on the web from my office this morning.

Oh dear.

Errr...

Iain Dale is coming to speak to my students next week. What can I say?

Is this a video blog or a TV channel? Even with limited resources, how can a first night be so technically inept? Surely the profits of 'yougov' can do better than this.

I'll watch again, in the office 12 hours late, tomorrow.

Soldiers, policemen and firemen

Forgive the sexist title.

This is prompted by an item on the BBC 10 o'clock last night on the pay of soldiers serving in Afghanistan.

I, like so many of us do, saw this with half my mind. I do remember thinking "soldier £14k a year, policeman £30k. Can this be right?". Then it was time for bed.

But that's what the BBC said.

All credit to my colleague teaching on the Cardiff course, Ros Bew, who picked that item up for her session today with our postgraduates.

It took no more than 30 seconds before 30 aspiring broadcast journalists had googled their way to a number of sources that showed the BBC story to be, at best, a half truth. The BBC was comparing the best of one with the worst of the other.

Huw, Craig I hope you read this.

A new academic year (2)

Two weeks into the new academic year and welcome to the COLD.

Is it just me or does every teacher in every school or university in the land have to put up with this?

I've found it particularly viscious this year - sort of three colds one after another in quick succession.

There is a Common Cold Centre here in Cardiff that pays students a fiver a time (or thereabouts) to catch a cold.

I think they should focus on the wretched academics and pay them a lot more to reesearch what they have to put up with every October.

Saving the planet

We're now three or four weeks into Cardiff City Council's "wheelie bins for all" recycling scheme.

I must say my initial thoughts about all this were wrong. The wheelie bins aren't such an impostion after all. But then we do have the space to house them. I'm still not sure how well this will work in parts of Cardiff where there are minimal or no front gardens.

What is interesting is the change this has inflicted on the Atkins household. There are now three bins in the kitchen. A big one (new, smart, £79 from Habitat) for 'recyclables' by the kitchen door, a small one for 'landfill' under the sink (allways there, just never used) and a bucket in the broom cupboard for 'compostibles' (or is that 'ables'?), ie cardboard .

This week - this morning - was a 'recyclable' collection day. Outside the property (seven households have a common front onto the street) was a vast pile of green bags full of recyclables and two nearly empty wheelie bins for landfill.

It's been thus ever since the scheme started. Next week the green wheelie bin crammed full of garden waste will take its place along side the nearly empty black landfill bin.

Is this problem solved? Or are we rather odd people?

A new academic year

Yep. The new academic year starts today.

For me that means thirty new postgrad broadcast journalism diploma students. I've begun to meet them about the place - in Tesco's for example - though in practice they meet me.

At interview you see people in suits (or the female equivalent) so are hardly prepared for meeting them in standard student attire.

Putting names to faces on a new course is always difficult. Colleagues tell me I do it pretty quickly.

As it happens I know I tend to rely heavily on the hairline to recognise people (this is not a lifestyle choice - it appears to be fairly deeply built-in) so a beany or a new haircut will confuse me more than a suit.

Thus - students with similar hair styles - if I fail to get your names right - forgive me. There is something more fundamental going on here.

Facts are sacred and expensive

Just run across Richard Sambrook's private - as opposed to his BBC sponsored - blog, "Sacred Facts".

Oh dear - how very BBC - even in private.

I admire the sentiment over the howls of derision from a milllion media studies lecturers. It is, of course, a reference to CPScott's famous aphorism about facts being sacred and comment free.

Sambrook last came down to Cardiff to speak to students a couple of years ago (pre-Hutton when he was still THE big cheese at BBC News). He painted a worrying picture of the BBC as this vast journalistic organisation - globally in a league of it's own - unchallengably vast. But never answered the question, why? Who asked the licence payer if they wanted to pay for a global journalistic behemoth? Did anyone ask the treasury for that matter?

These were the unasked questions that floated over the whole session. So these are very expnsive (£2 billion+) "Sacred Facts".

Nonetheless I can point to a number of recent former Cardiff students who are surviving in uncomfortable parts of the world thanks to financial arrangements with the BBC behemoth. And, of course, the BBC accounts to fully 50% of all British broadcast journalism.

This is a hand I'd better stop biting. Long may it live!

GB, UK , does it matter?

Just noticed that, when you select your 'country' on this blog site, selecting UK actually generates GB.

Now there's a difference between "Great Britain" and the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". Does the apparently internationally agreed GBR three letter abbreviation for Britain mean GB or UK? I don't know. Does it matter? I don't know. It only seems to affect people from Northern Ireland.

So does this kind of thing irritate people from Northern Ireland? Again I don't know. All being well the Northern Irish are less pedantic than I am.

Putting the 'p' into 'hamster'

Good news that TV presenter Richard Hammond seems to be out of danger and on the road to recovery following his 300 mph crash.

Apparently he was known by his fellow Top Gear presenters (because he's not the largest of people) as 'the hamster'.

Looking at the BBC website, I was struck by how many of those posting get-well messages to Richard had spelled hamster with a p - hampster.

I'd guess over 50%.

So where does the p in hamster come from? I think from here.

Another one for the OED.

Up to....

Some supplier of broadband has been taken to task recently by the Advertisimg Standards Authority for claiming 'upto 8 megabits a second' speeds. The ASA said that, while occasionally 8 mbs might be achieved, a lower speed was more typical and accordingly the ad should be changed.

"Up to..." is one of those advertising terms that one has got so used to it hardly registers when it masks an actual untruth. I suppose along with its cousin "From..." it's the mainstay of all cut-price 'come-ons'.

So what is one supposed to make of the slogan painted onto the side of many of Cardiff's new 'bendybuses'.

"Upto every five minutes".

The ASA could have a field day with that one.

Popular Culture (1) - Kitchens

I'm in the final stages of speccing (is that how you spell it?) a new kitchen.

The idea is to make my flat more saleable. In other words my new kitchen has to be in tune with the latest in kitchen 'popular culture', and, since I probably don't want to sell for three or four years, I've got to second guess taste three or four years ahead.

Wow! All the magazines (and there are lots of them) don't really seem to consider this aspect of the awfull new kitchen business.

I'm terribly conscious how quickly some things date. How slowly others do. What to do?

I'm relying on my judgement of what looks and feels good to me now - today - over second guessing tomorrow's taste. And the result is alarmingly conservative - in the sense that it's almost indistinguishable from what I have now. Except it isn't filthy and falling to pieces.

Oh dear! A kitchen is a big chunk of money. Unlike a car it isn't resellable. But, as they say, it could add '£££ to the value of your home.'

Why doesn't the academic study of popular culture cover kitchens?

Popular culture (2) - Radio 4, Corrie and Arctic Monkeys

Heard the BBC's Sean Curran neatly trap Sir Ming Campbell on my way home this evening. It happened on Radio 4's PM show as Mr Curran invited Sir Ming to demonstrate his familiarity with popular culture.

A pretty easy question as these things go - did he watch Coronation Street?.

"Oh yes - regularly", replied Sir Ming.

"Who's your favourite character then?" asked the guileless Curran.

Sir Ming faffed about and came up with Bet Lynch. Now, apparently, she left the show three years ago. Mr Curran pressed Sir Ming along "that's ancient history" lines. Sir Ming, I suspect sensing disaster, waffled out a "wouldn't like to rate one above another" type answer. And that's where it ended - though who wielded the merciful editorial scissors here I don't know.

A number of points emerge from this.

If I'd had the wit to ask Sir Ming that question, I wouldn't have had the knowledge to challenge his Bet Lynch answer. My last regular watching of Corrie was in Ena Sharples days.

So - clearly - this is an example of why journalists should be abreast of popular culture (before correction that came out as 'culturd' - an interesting new word).

Like Sir Ming, I listen to Radio 4 and don't have Arctic Monkeys on my iPod (but I do have an iPod) . My soaps are 'The Archers' and 'West Wing'. I suspect neither rate as touch-stones of popular culture with our tabloid press.

So again, like Sir Ming, a guess I'm a 'toff'. Now that's a word I thought was these days confined to the arcane vocabulary of the red-top tabs. But no. It featured in the BBC PM piece from the Liberal Conference. Shame on you Sean Curran - surely there's a BBC editorial guideline prohibiting such usage.

Are "The Archers", "Just a Minute", "The Now Show", "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" and all the rest of them, including "PM" and "Today" just the preserve of 'toffs'?

I think not. But they do represent an under-researched area of popular culture. Maybe Channel 4 Radio will lavish money on acedemia to unpick this area.

Boiling frogs

It's a week now since I had a corneal implant in my right eye at Cardiff's University Hospital. There cannot be many medical procedures that produce such instant results. Cataracts develop slowly - so slowly you barely realise what you're losing. It's a road where the milestones are few but all the more important when they crop up.

• The day you stop buying newspapers because you've come to terms with the fact that they're a waste of money - you can't read them.
• The day you stop sitting in your 'favourite chair' to watch TV but sit on the floor nearer to the set.
• The day you stop driving.
• The day you realise you don't read in bed any more - actually you don't read at all.
• The day you decide not to go somewhere or do something and you realise you're using poor sight as an excuse.
  

Then comes the day someone does something about it. Now I can close my right eye and look through my untreated left eye and really see what this particular 'boiled frog' put up with. It's a world of yellow fog.

Which is why the greatest revelation after an implant is the rediscovery of BLUE. OK being able to read again is pretty crucial too, but losing most of blue from your colour palette really does affect your relationship with the world around you. Blue is symbolic of sharp focus, of freshness, of life itself - "the blue planet" etc.. Yellow is symbolic of old parchment; a fuzzy yellow is even worse.

So "thank you" to Roger Morgan and the team at Cardiff's University Hospital. I'll be back for the left eye as soon as possible.

To kinform - have we a new verb?

On Friday an RAF NImrod crashed in Afghanistan with the loss of 14 lives.

The plane was based at RAF Kinloss in Scotland and this morning (Sunday) I heard the base commander (I think) speaking at a press conference use the neologism "kinforming" as in "names will be released once kinforming is complete".

Was this a slip of the tongue or the launch of a new verb? Am I alone is suspecting that this is a piece of service jargon that's now crept into the public domain.

How widely is it used? Do, for example, the police detail officers to kinforming duties?

I'll keep an ear out for further hearings of kinform. Meanwhile OED - you heard it here first.

What time is it?

I've been trying to set the time zone of this blog to where I am (Wales) rather than California. I would have thought 24 time zones would pretty much cover it. But there are 24 or more for each hour of the day. Why?

Think I've got the right one.

Thanks, John

Tried endless things for the title of this blog - all been taken. 'Tight and bright' was a favourite saying of a former journalism teachng colleague in Cardiff - John Foscolo.

Thanks, John. Those who know you will appreciate a certain irony here.

So after a year of bullying students into starting a blog, I have one myself.

I wonder what will happen.