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?