BBC Radio 4 will broadcast a new weekly programme on the media industry from October.
Presented by former TV executive Steve Hewlett, The Media Show will also be available as a podcast and will run for a year.
It will focus on changes affecting all aspects of the industry: print, online, television, radio and telecommunications, a release from the BBC said.
The Guardian is searching for a new independent producer for its Football Weekly podcast.
According to an announcement via the Radio Academy, the application process for producing Football Weekly and Football Weekly Extra for the 2008/9 season is now open.
“After two really successful seasons working with production companies that shared the Guardian.co.uk vision and helped establish the programmes as the UK’s leading football podcast brand, we’re looking to build on the great work already done. We want to increase the reach and profile of the shows, and continue to be the net’s number one destination for football podcasts,” said Matt Wells, the Guardian’s head of audio, in the statement.
In January Wells told an industry gathering that the podcast was downloaded 80-100,000 times a week.
Tags: Football Weekly, Matt Wells, Radio Academy, The Guardian, the Guardian.co.uk, United Kingdom
The Financial Times and the BBC have reason to celebrate after they both won Webby Awards - considered by many as the Oscars of online publishing.
With nominations in over 70 categories FT.com’s Alphaville blog and the BBC News site were amongst a crowded field of winners as they picked up gongs earlier this week.
The Webbys are selected by a group made up of web, business and celebrity figures selected by the awarding body, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, with the people’s voice awards voted on by web-using members of the public.
Alphaville won the best business blog category, also picking up the people’s voice award in that category.
BBC News was the people’s voice winner in the news category (it also won the main award in the radio category) with the main prize going to NYTimes.com - one of a total of six awards for the publication.
Two of those successes came in the online newspaper section where NYTimes.com won both the main award and the people’s voice award, in the process beating of competition from Guardian.co.uk, Independent.co.uk, the Wall Street Journal Online and Variety.com.
Tags: Alphaville, BBC, FT.com, Guardian.co.uk, Independent.co.uk, International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, online newspaper section, Online publishing, The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, web-using membersJobs in radio are not under threat from the increasing trend towards networked content, Peter Davies, director of radio & multimedia for Ofcom, told an industry conference today.
Davies said the introduction of networked programming between stations, where shared content is broadcast by different stations within the group, would not result in less employment or training opportunities.
“The opportunities are still there they are just in different places,” said Davies, echoing Paul Myners comments about the newspaper industry to last week’s House of Lords Communications committee.
Davies added that Ofcom did not have a regulatory role regarding training and employment within the industry but that this was a concern of the body.
Tags: House of Lords Communications Committee, Paul Myners, Peter DaviesThe Guardian will soon introduce ad spots to its podcasts in the next few weeks, the title’s head of audio told an industry conference today.
Matt Wells, who announced the plans in January, said a range of bluechip advertisers were interested in the spots, though he did not elaborate on which podcasts would be the first to feature the advertising.
The argument for introducing podcast ads had been significantly boosted by the success of the Guardian’s advertising within its video content, Wells added.
Tags: Matt Wells, The GuardianThe future of Channel 4’s digital radio prospect was on the table at today’s Radio Reborn conference, prompting some cagey answers from Natalie Schwarz, chair of the 4 Digital group over their ongoing discussions with Ofcom.
In the clip below Matt Wells, head of audio at the Guardian, challenges Schwarz’s comments:
Speaking from the audience, Ofcom’s director of radio and multimedia Peter Davies did concede that Channel 4 had not asked for an extension to the launch date of Channel 4 Digital.
Tags: Matt Wells, Natalie Schwarz, Peter Davies, The GuardianThe publication of journalist Nick Davies’s book, Flat Earth News, in which he makes the accusation that a significant proportion of the news served by UK institutions is simply regurgitated PR or wire copy by time pressured hacks with too much work on their plates, has caused a wave of strong reaction through press watching circles.
Davies claims that journalists are failing at the essential job of telling the truth by ever greater commercial drives in the industry:
“Where once we were active gatherers of news, we have become passive processors of second-hand material generated by the booming PR industry and a handful of wire agencies, most of which flows into our stories without being properly checked. The relentless impact of commercialisation has seen our journalism reduced to mere churnalism,” he wrote in the Press Gazette.
Taking a donation from the Rowntree Foundation, Davies asked the journalism department at Cardiff University to research home news coverage (download report here: quality_independence_british_journalism.pdf ) in the UK’s leading national newspapers over a two week period, he claims that the research found that only 12 per cent of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. For eight per cent of the stories, researchers couldn’t be sure. Yet for the remaining 80 per cent they found were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry.
Media commentator for The Independent, Stephen Glover, claimed the book presents ‘a damning picture of a dysfunctional national press which is spoon fed by government and PR agencies’. Glover added ‘Many journalists will recognise his portrait of editorial resources being stretched ever thinner’.
But he sees the more damning element of the book to be its attack on the relationship between the Observer newspaper and the Blair Government:
“It is amazing stuff. Mr Davies suggests the editor and the political editor of a great liberal newspaper were suborned by Number 10, and so manipulated that The Observer became a government mouthpiece. Not even The Times’s endorsement of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy in the 1930s involved the degree of editorial submission to governmental power that Mr Davies alleges in Flat Earth News.”
Although broadly in agreement with Davies, Peter Wilby wrote in the Guardian that his methodology and conclusions of increased workloads hadn’t quite made allowances for some of the positives changes in the newsroom:
“Davies overstates his case. For example, the internet, email and mobile phones have all made information and contacts more easily accessible. It isn’t, therefore, unreasonable to expect journalists to fill more space. Time spent “cultivating contacts” was, in any case, often time spent on overlong, overliquid lunches. But experience also tells me his argument is fundamentally sound”
There was a little more scepticism about the research from Adrian Monck, he wrote that study ‘links full-time employees to pagination’:
“But what about: freelance employees? Bought-in copy? The amount of agency material used? Changes in technology? The reduction in the number of editions?
“Could any of these things have a bearing on the analysis? And shouldn’t journalists be more productive? What about these innovations: Electronic databases, computers, mobile telephones, the Internet?”
He also takes issue with Davies line about PR being used to fill news pages, suggesting that it’s not a new argument.
Simon Bucks, Sky News associate editor, also draws out the point that new technology can negate some of the issues brought up.
“There’s a wider point in this debate. Web 2.0 allows the public to play a much bigger role in journalism. If we get a fact wrong or miss out something important, it won’t take long before someone lets us know. Big mistakes generate an avalanche of comment.
“So there’s no reason for any news organisation to keep reporting a flat earth story, if it isn’t accurate.”
More predictably, the editor of the Independent on Sunday, John Mullin, and the managing editor of the News of the World, Stuart Kuttner, argued the defence against Davies on Radio 4’s Today programme, choosing the more well-worn line of British journalism being the best in the world.
Roy Greenslade wrote that it was ‘heartening’ that Davies work was being taken seriously. Dismissing the Mullin/Kuttner rejection line as ‘not being good enough’, he added that the Davies work was ‘an indictment of journalistic practices that deserves wider debate’.
Kevin Marsh, editor of the BBC College of Journalism, sounds a warning on this last point:
Tags: Adrian Monck, BBC College of Journalism, Blair Government, Cardiff University, John Mullin, Kevin Marsh, mobile phones, news of the world, Nick Davies, passive processors, Peter Wilby, public relations industry, Rowntree Foundation, Roy Greenslade, Simon Bucks, Sky News, Stephen Glover, Stuart Kuttner, The Guardian, The Times, United Kingdom“The trouble is, though, the British newspaper journalist has no history of taking criticism well… or working out what it is that needs to be done to turn a dysfunctional, distrusted press into something that performs a useful public purpose.”
