Category Archives: Journalism

Getting Old, Journalism

Honour Railway Pioneers: Run The Service

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Generations of hard-working people toiled and risked their lives on the railways when they were being developed. In all conditions and across every kind of territory, they laid rails the length and breadth of Britain, and developed the machines to provide a public service.

Workers have been killed in falls, in collisions, by poisoning, by electric shock, by enemy bombs during wars, by fatigue, and by many other causes. They laboured and sometimes gave their lives to make a public railway for the good of the nation, where all passengers are trusted and treated well according to their payment of the fare, and where all workers are trusted and fairly treated according to their contracts. Today, I believe most people who work on railways still uphold these standards. Equally, the people who develop railway technology, or who have the vision to raise funding for rail development, do this because they want to build a better service for all the public — unless they’re merely opportunist investors.

Today, the Department for Transport, Govia Thameslink and the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers have jointly shown they are unable to run a service. I see this as an insult to these workers’ sacrifices; and to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who pay their taxes, and who pay for their railway tickets. Today is the day to agree to stop the insults, and remember who put the railway there in the first place.

Computing, Encoding, Film-making, Journalism, Radio, Recording

Metadata for Culture and Heritage

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As part of my efforts with the ICOMOS-UK digital committee, I’ve started to collect metadata specifications relevant to heritage and culture.

My aim is to produce a superset with copious documentation and guides to subsets, so that all data is interchangeable. After all, if the Digital Production Partnership can join European and North American delivery standards for television in this way, isn’t anything possible?

Work begins at the link below. Suggestions are most welcome.

Audiovisual Archive Metadata & Preservation

Getting Old, Journalism, Legislation, Radio

Automation—The Radio Authority Spoke Out

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As increasing numbers of British independent radio stations use greater amounts of automation, or voice tracking, I was amused to read what the Radio Authority (Ofcom‘s predecessor) decided about automation only fifteen years ago.

Today’s radio market is, of course, very different. Intensity of competition, especially from non-radio sources of entertainment, is a far greater challenge compared to what it was at the opening of this century.

Who knows how the market might change in the face of the post-dotcom generation? Will leadership in forming taste become too fragmented, and the vacuum need filling? In music radio, could real presenters, experiencing minute-by-minute the music they are playing, be valued once more?

For another perspective, see the foot of this post.

♫ “You’ve yet to have your finest hour.” ♪

Click here to read the entire set of Radio Authority minutes.

Automation

Following on from the discussion at the September meeting, Members decided to set a limit on the amount of automated programming to be generally allowed in daytime on local radio stations. The general limits would be two hours a day on FM stations, and four hours a day on those AM stations which are obliged to broadcast twelve hours or more of locally produced and presented programming. Staff could negotiate different limits, on request, in accordance to specified criteria. The stations would each be written to setting out the limits and giving an opportunity for representations to be made in respect of individual formats.

This decision on automation was not made on the basis that automated programming was necessarily undesirable. On the contrary, Members recognised that automation had a valuable part to play, particularly for overnight programming and for specialist shows.

However, they felt that the “localness” of stations would be jeopardised if programming were allowed to be automated for more than limited periods during the day and also the “liveness” of the medium, a feature of radio highlighted by the Authority in its White Paper submission in July 2000.

They also considered that listeners have a reasonable expectation for presentation to be live, and that too high a level of automation could undermine the trust that exists between the station and its audience. This in turn would affect both the quality of programme output and the reputation of the industry as a whole.

It was a fundamental part of the Authority’s statutory duties not to permit such a situation to occur. Consequently, the Authority decided to impose constraints on the amount of daytime automated programming without prior consent.

Meanwhile, Andrew Gray writes about the same topic HERE.

Journalism, Radio

BBC Local Radio — Light in the Darkness

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The British radio listening figures, the RAJAR survey, are out for the fourth quarter of 2014. They make generally disappointing reading for the management and staff of BBC local radio stations, showing drops in listenership of up to 62%. Many other types of local and regional radio have lost listeners, too. On the other hand, the cultural beacon that is BBC Radio 3 has recovered from two rather bad quarters’ results.

The whole table is here.

But let’s not worry about all BBC local radio. Someone should be knocking on the doors of at least one station, BBC Surrey and Sussex, and asking what they’re doing. Their figures have gone way up this RAJAR, measured year-on-year, which is remarkable given what the rest of the country has seen. Three out of the six quarter-on-quarter measures show a drop, but that is common in quarterly results that show merely seasonal changes.

Something I remember from my earlier career was that a station’s presence among its listeners was paramount and, within that, locally relevant and well-curated speech generated many returns to the station’s programmes.

Until the 1990s, the BBC local station kit for each of the (often smaller) areas contained a radio car, liveried reporters vehicles and plenty of Glensound outside broadcast kit or even a multi-track recording van. And the station’s engineers would often create other portable transmitting apparatus e.g. BBC Radio York’s “Radio Shoes”, _44550154_obkitposed282a back-pack transmitter that could be cycled or walked into the city’s pedestrian centre. These devices, fully branded, allowed properly-trained reporters and broadcasters to be both visible and audible to large numbers of people at public events, shopping centres, transport hubs, etc.

On a typical Monday-to-Saturday breakfast show in the 1980s and 1990s, three stations that I personally know of would think nothing of getting four different locations on the air from the radio car with properly-researched reports or colour pieces, those stations being BBC Radios York, Shropshire, and Hereford & Worcester. Now that regions are generally larger, the smaller staff surely cannot maintain the same quantity and quality of physical presence?

In my opinion, solutions will be much more difficult than my harking back to the olden days. Budgets are massively stretched, and the market fragmented to an extent we never imagined. Yet someone at BBC Surrey and Sussex likes to get the local issues on the air, and follow them seriously, as I have observed. And the figures go up from one year to the next.

Film-making, Getting Old, Journalism, Legislation

A Government Falls

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For some reason this morning, while watching the featureless sky outside this window and waiting for Prime Minister’s Questions to start, I’m reminded of a turning point in British political history.

Thanks to the UK Parliamentary Recording Unit, you can hear the exact moment in 1979 when James Callaghan’s Labour government was challenged, by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative opposition, to a vote of no confidence. As everyone knows, the vote was carried and thus an election was forced leading to a succession of Conservative governments.

The speeches surrounding this motion, by the two party leaders, can be heard in longer form by clicking this link.

Journalism, Legislation

Fit to print?

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Love it or hate it, the Daily Mail has a huge readership both in print and on its website. So aware of its worldwide audience is the Mail that its website, when viewed within the United States of America, produces a whole new tranche of sensationalist, audience-winning and, yes, cleverly-written stories aimed specifically at that country’s population. One need only take a short hop across the border to Canada to type the same address in one’s browser, then to be greeted once more by the familiar UK front page.

Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, spoke passionately on Wednesday morning about the progress of press reporting standards in the UK, and also awakened the spectre of a straitjacketed press should Parliament vote for compulsory press regulation:

News, let me remind you, is often something that someone – the rich, the powerful, the privileged – doesn’t want printed…. Indeed, I would argue that Britain’s commercially viable free press – because it is in hock to nobody – is the only really free media in this country. Over regulate that press and you put democracy itself in peril.

Paul Dacre’s speech is on-line here, at The Guardian’s website.