The two US journalists arrested while working for Current TV, will face trial in North Korea on June 4, according to North Korea’s state-run KCNA news agency, the BBC reports.
“How much are you paid for coming onto television… harassing Members of Parliament…? (…) How much are you being paid out of the licence fee? (…) Freedom of information: what is it?” Lord Foulkes asked the BBC’s Carrie Gracie during a heated discussion on the BBC News Channel.
“My salary is £92,000,” she quickly answered. Video below:
Another dose of Fry this morning, in an earlier post we reproduced yesterday’s comments to the BBC about journalists and expenses.
Courtesy of Malcolm Coles, here is the full transcript [below video] of Stephen Fry’s presentation at Digital Britain on April 17. Fry’s appearance caused a little stir that day, not least for the way he was introduced onto the stage by the BBC’s Nick Higham:
“Stephen is, one of the organisers told me beforehand, the representative at this conference of the ordinary person, frankly: if that’s what someone thinks the ordinary person is like, then someone needs to take them aside and fill them in…”
Some of Fry’s comments relate to technology more broadly, but some interesting points on media, and keeping the web ‘organic’:
“You talk about the BBC doing a digital switchover, as if that’s the same thing as the world-wide web.”
“We’re moving from a world, in which no-one knew or saw the point of, online world, into something [where] everybody has reserved to themselves some special insight into how it’s to affect us.”
Via @LouiseBolotin: The transcript of comments made by Stephen Fry in an interview on the BBC News site:
“Although, of course, anybody can talk about snouts in troughs, and go on about it, for journalists to do so is almost beyond belief, beyond belief.
I know lots of journalists; I know more journalists than I know politicians.
And I’ve never met a more venal and disgusting crowd of people when it comes to expenses and allowances.
[Interviewer: “Not all of us surely?”]
Not all, but then not all human beings are either. I’ve cheated expenses. I’ve fiddled things. You have. ‘Course you have.
Let’s not confuse what politicians get really wrong. Things like wars, things where people die, with the rather tedious bourgeois obsession with whether or not they’ve charged for their wisteria.
It’s not that important. It really isn’t. It isn’t what we’re fighting for. It isn’t what voting is about.
And the idea that ‘oh we’ve all lost faith in politics, because’… it’s nonsense. It’s a journalistic made-up frenzy.”
Louise Bolotin, a freelance journalist, has written a response on her blog – she says Fry has got it badly wrong. Here’s an extract:
“I have news for Stephen. The expenses culture for journalists ended a long time ago – at least 10 years ago – when the accountants moved in and put an end to it. The scandal at the Houses of Parliament, however, has been going on a long time – only MPs can vote on their expense allowances and they just keep voting to continue.”
Journalism.co.uk attended the journalism and enterprise unconference, JEEcamp, last Friday.
Reports on the day will follow, including:
Kyle Macrae, founder of Scoopt, on why entrepreunership is the only option for journalists now
James Hatts from London-SE1.co.uk on community and hyperlocal news publishing
There’s already been some great videos, pictures and posts from the event – see Michael Haddon’s round-up, Martin Belam’s posts and John Welsh’s blog to name but a few – but some additional (rough) audio from Sue Greenwood’s presentation on self-publishing platform Sweeble and two panel discussions are below.
Sue Greenwood:
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/sweeble.mp3]
Panel 1 featuring: (to come)
Journalism.co.uk’s own John Thompson (@johncthompson)
Jon Bounds, Birmingham: It’s Not Shit (@bounder)
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/jeepanel.mp3]Sue Heseltine from Birmingham City University
Chaired by Joanna Geary, web development journalist, business, Times Online (@timesjoanna)
Panel 2 featuring:
Dave Harte, economic development manager, Digital Birmingham
Jo Wadsworth, web editor, Brighton Argus (@jowadsworth)
Robin Hamman, Headshift (@cybersoc)
Andy Dickinson, journalism lecturer at UCLAN, (@digidickinson)
Robin Morley, assistant editor new media, BBC English Regions
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/secondpanel.mp3]Source: https://www.zovovo.com/ – A Turkish information blog.
Interesting to spot this, late Friday afternoon. Is it because the Telegraph had the exclusive, so people went there to read about it, or because BBC users just weren’t all that interested in the subject?
MPs’ expenses was top of the list for the Telegraph’s ‘most viewed’…
But rather lower (7th), for the BBC’s most read (below), even though it was running as the site’s main story…
The BBC has relaunched its sport and news mobile sites – but how does their new look benefit the user.
One significant addition – stories on the mobile site will now update 60 seconds after a journalist has published.
Some good advice here on accessible mobile site design too.
Prompted by Jay Rosen’s recent critique of the ‘He Said She Said’ news formula, Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News, offers his own take on balanced reporting on his blog.
Sambrook ‘agrees with the thrust’ of Rosen’s argument, ‘but was left uncomfortable’ for several reasons, outlined in his post.
Most interesting, is Sambrook’s reference to a critique against the formulaic approach of British TV news, made 34 years ago by John Birt, later director-general of the BBC, and Peter Jay, a Times columnist and later economics editor of the BBC. They called it ‘bias against understanding’. Birt’s argument shaped his later strategy:
“In the late 80s, instead of interviewing those caught up in the news, specialist correspondents would be interviewed to explain the significance of an event or a report. It was highly successful, building the reputation of BBC News as a quality, intelligent, authoritative service. It’s a model which persists to this day.”
Nadim Hasbani, writing at the Huffington Post, looks at the ‘the widespread failure of western-owned Arabic TV channels to establish themselves as credible news sources with Middle Eastern audiences living under dictatorship regimes,’ in light of Obama’s decision to speak to the Arab world on Al Arabiya, a Dubai-based news channel. Hasbani writes:
“Arabs are watching news and entertainment programmes from Arabic satellite channels like Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, MBC, and LBC. But they are not watching the news stations western governments are funding to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year: BBC Arabic, the American Al Hurra, France 24 Arabic, and Deutsche Welle Arabia.”
On Friday I was lucky enough to sneak inside the University of Central Lancashire’s (UCLAN) Sandbox – a space dedicated to ‘digital media R&D’.
I was there as part of the final day of Infuze – a joint training scheme from UCLAN and the BBC to retrain freelancers in multimedia journalism.
It was the first time the six-week course had been run (Journalism.co.uk reported on its launch back in January) and while course leader Paul Egglestone said there were some improvements to be made, he was pleased how far all participants had come in a short time.
Presentations from Ilicco Elia, head of mobile for Reuters, and videojournalist David Dunkley Gyimah gave all of us some food for thought, but mainly it was a great opportunity to chat with a group of freelancers facing the challenges of cross-platform journalism head on and hear about their experiences.
Only fair then to give them (and some of their newly founded websites ) a shout out (in no particular order):
Nazia Mogra – freelance broadcast journalist, now looking at the possibilities of newspaper video too.
Sean Smith – former print freelancer who turned his hand to broadcast journalism during the course. Smith said he’d learned that the ‘new skill is adopting a mindset of not being intimidated by tech that’s meant to be intuitive’.
Rumeana Jahangir – who is looking to develop a specialism on grassroots, community news and investigative work.
Emma Blackburn – freelancer broadcast journalist turned videojournalist during her course placement at Times Online.
Erisa Lluca – who having now set up her own website is determined to keep it going beyond Infuze.
Christina McDermott – or @misscay as shes known to her followers on Twitter, who discussed how she’s using social media as a freelancer (more from Christina on this later).