Public service broadcasting symposium to discuss digital future

Places are still available for a one-day symposium on the Future of Public Service Broadcasting, on Thursday 10 June 2010. The event is the result of the Public Service Broadcasting Forum project, which has debated public service broadcasting issues to coincide with the public consultation period for the BBC’s Strategy Review.

The symposium is organised by openDemocracy, hosted by City University London’s Department of Journalism, and chaired by Steve Hewlett, presenter of BBC Radio 4′s The Media Show.

The aim of the day:

The symposium embraces the current consultation on the BBC’s Strategy Review in asking a broader question: what is the future for pluralism in the supply of public service content in the UK?

The schedule includes: The role of the licence-funded BBC and the significance of the Strategy Review with Caroline Thomson (chief operating officer, BBC), Professor Steven Barnett, Mark Oliver (Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates), Professor Richard Collins; How to identify, supply and fund the PSB needs the BBC cannot fulfil with Jonathan Thompson (Director of strategy, Ofcom), Geraint Talfan Davies (former controller of BBC Wales), Blair Jenkins (former head of news, BBC Scotland), Helen Shaw (Athena Media); and The public service media content that merits support in the digital future, and how it can be funded with Tim Gardam (Ofcom board member), Tony Curzon Price (openDemocracy), Claire Enders (Enders Analysis), and Jeremy Dear (NUJ).

Tickets can booked at http://psbf.eventbrite.com for £25 (including coffee/lunch)/£15 for students. Any enquiries should be sent to the PSBF’s moderator, Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal via daniel.macarthur-seal [at] opendemocracy.net.

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Video: Angry hack vs angry flack – a touching story

This one has been doing the rounds: a head-to-head between Dan Noyes, the chief investigative reporter for US news channel ABC7 News, and Marc Slavin, director of communications at a local hospital. Neither are willing to give any ground as Noyes holds on to his story and Slavin holds on to Noyes shoulder…

More background on the story behind the confrontation on sfweekly.com.

Video posted on YouTube at this link…

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TechCrunch: Pulse launch – are RSS news apps must-haves for the iPad?

TechCrunch reports on the launch of Pulse – the RSS-based news aggregator application created for the iPad by two US university graduate students Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta.

On sale for $3.99 [£2.76], the app is aimed to please both hardcore RSS reader users and people who are willing to pay top dollars for single publication apps. Pulse’s home screen renders stories from multiple sources on a dynamic mosaic interface. Swipe up and down to see headlines from various sources, and right and left to browse stories from a particular source.

Full story at this link…

The app gets a favourable review from TechCrunch and adds another point to Patrick Smith’s post last week arguing that RSS feeds beat any branded iPhone or iPad news app:

Of course, the everyday Man On The Clapham Omnibus doesn’t care or want to know about RSS, much less mobile apps that create a mobile version of their OPML file. But Journalism.co.uk readers are media professionals – and I’d wager that most of you are capable of using free or cheap software to create a mobile news experience that no branded premium app can match.

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Communicate.ae: Digital experiments at the Guardian – successes and failures

From earlier last month this Q&A with Mark Finney, head of client sales at Guardian News & Media, in which Finney explains some of the digital ‘experiments’ that have worked for the group and some that haven’t:

Guardian 24 allowed you to download stories scraped from our sites automatically over a number of different areas, and print them as a PDF. It was our way of trying to enter the London free newspaper market but get our readers to pay for the paper and the ink and not have to pay for distribution. It was an interesting thing to do, but it didn’t really work. Not many people did it.

Finney says the Guardian’s iPhone app experiment is paying off: “£250,000 is not going to change the face of newspapers, but it’s 100,000 people who have chosen to pay for an optimised version of my content.”

And on paywalls and registration models for Guardian.co.uk:

[Y]ou could pay for an ad-free version. It was a long time ago that we binned it. It was about £25 to £30 per year. We got something in the order of 2,000 or 3,000 people who did it. Only 2,000 or 3,000 people a year were prepared to pay £25 or £30 for an ad-free version of the Guardian, proving how little resistance to advertising there is.

Full post at this link…

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Online Journalism Blog: Paul Bradshaw on journalism and enterprise, blogging and JEEcamp

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Interesting insight into what makes a good event – and why he decided to end JEEcamp after three years.

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#followjourn: @dannybradbury/freelance IT journalist

#followjourn: Danny Bradbury

Who? Freelance IT journalist

Where? Bradbury is based in Canada, and writes a blog, Word Herder. He is currently editor of two security newsletters: Computer Fraud and Security and Network Security. He is also US bureau chief and US editor of InfoSecurity magazine. He has a LinkedIn page here.

Contact? @dannybradbury

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – data opportunities for journalists

Data: Guardian Datablog editor Simon Rogers gives a fantastic overview in this post of why proper interrogation of data is an opportunity for journalists and how open data can help local media. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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