Tag Archives: Coventry University

It’s no use having a platform if you have no customers. Full stop.

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John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He was born in Guyana and regularly returns there to help build local media, print and TV. His last posts looked at the Caricom Summit held July 2-5 in Georgetown.

As one door closes in the media, another opens. The trick is to spot whether the train leaving the station will crash or make it to the new destination. British newspapers and others are standing watching the various emerging platforms wondering which ones to accept and which to reject.

Some are dithering and may die. Imagine you are the editor of the Coventry Evening Telegraph facing steadily declining sales. Do you boost them on a  new web platform, do you throw your resources, mainly journalists, at that platform? Do you try to revive the traditional paper? Or do you give up the ghost?

For the last two and a half weeks, I have witnessed, here in Georgetown, the death of one platform and the rise of others. The Plaza Cinema in Camp Street is, or was, right opposite my hotel. It was a Georgetown institution when I was a boy.  A huge art deco cinema which played the big films. I saw ‘Ben Hur’ there over 50 ago as a young boy.

There were five or six big cinemas in the town which provided entertainment for the masses especially at weekends. Films came from Britain or the USA a few weeks after their release there. Each town and village on the coastal plain had a small cinema too. The films they showed varied according to the ethnic group of the area.

Indo-Guyanese village cinemas showed Hindi films with English subtitles – early Bollywood; the African Caribbean diet was Hollywood. Cinema was part of the very fabric of life. The cinemas supported a daily full page advertisement in the local papers.

Then along came television. Most of it illegal – stealing from satellites and from video shops. Copyright was for the birds. They showed anything and everything. When I pointed out to one transgressor that the film he was showing on his TV station clearly said on screen ‘For Home use only’, his retort was instant: ‘I show it in my home, they watch it in theirs. What’s wrong with that?’ Iron logic. TV stole the cinema audience. People preferred the comfort and safety of their living rooms to the trip into town where cinemas were old and often smelt of bodily functions.

The illegal DVD trade took up any slack (last week within twelve hours of it happening live in LA, I could buy a DVD of the Michael Jackson Memorial Service in Georgetown market). The cinema platform firmly died first in the villages, then in the town. There were fewer and fewer ads in the paper.

Three weeks ago, part of the art deco facade of the Plaza fell down. It had been closed for two or three years now. That was followed by an army of scavengers who, day and night, over two weeks literally stripped the place of anything worthwhile.

Timber went first, taken away in scores ofdray carts (horse drawn carts) to pastures new to make new or improved houses in which to watch films on TV or DVD. It was like watching ants taking food from one place to another.

Now all that is left of the once great Plaza is a breeze block back wall and some steel pillars. The human scavengers have like locusts left just the shell. If ever I wanted a real-time demonstration of the death of one media platform and the rise of another, this was it.

In the not-so slow death of the Plaza Cinema in Georgetown lie big lessons for those trying to ride the tiger called the internet.

It’s no use having a platform if you have no customers. Full stop.

This is Georgetown but it could be Westminster: journalists hunt in packs wherever they are

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John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He was born in Guyana and regularly returns there to help build local media, print and TV. His last post looked at how summits bring out the lazy side of journalists.

The herd mentality is alive and well and living in the sun. I’ve just seen it at the Caricom (Caribbean Community) Summit (July 2-5) of 14 Presidents and Prime Ministers with the Caribbean media. A pack without teeth. The government of Guyana established a very slow accreditation system and a media centre in the conference venue. But the media centre was a broiler room. Up to 20 hacks, computers (usually working), tea, coffee and confusion.

The highlight of the day was often lunch, with the President’s press secretary presiding over just who got fish and who got meat. Big decisions. He and others in the communications team at the Summit did precious little briefing, precious little spinning in advance, or even ex post facto. That was left to the principals and usually in impromptu corridor press conferences where they were waylaid by journalists. The worst sort of herd mentality. One hooked the prey while the others piled in, often not knowing what questions to ask, but not wanting to miss out on the action. A journalism flash mob with plenty of heat and not much light. The leaders love this. They can bluff on a wide variety of subjects for several minutes to feed morsels to the hungry hacks.

Away from the pack, the masters of journalism. None bigger than Rickey Singh. Sitting typing in the corner of the media centre. Thousands of words over three days for his outlets in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados (where he lives) and his native Guyana. He is a one-man Caribbean press corps and the institutional memory for the travelling correspondents covering the Summit. Any historical or other questions they ask Rickey out loud. He knows all the answers. He has lived them.

Rickey has been to virtually all the Summits since the founding of Caricom. After 40+ plus years as a journalist, often against the odds and the subject of official displeasure, there are no new names and faces for Rickey in the Caribbean. Just watch him in action, prowling the corridors of power at a big event like this. No media scrums for him. As he walks around casually, his name is all. The powerful stop him and talk to him. Now, that’s contacts and working them. Rickey pumps out news, features, opinion, the works from his corner position in the Summit newsroom. The ultimate freelance, the ultimate journalistic craftsman.

For many Guyanese journalists, a little knowledge is enough. The big issues they leave to politicians and their prolix communiqués. The hacks take what they are offered, too often with little or no deep questioning. Barbados Prime Minister David Thompson was given a very easy ride in a press conference he called after facing criticism for an exercise in ‘ethnic cleansing’. It’s not a pretty sight to see how easily young journalists can be kept happy.

There we have it; experience against naivety, age against youth, solo against the pack. This is Georgetown but it could be Glasgow or the Westminster lobby. Herds don’t need cold weather to exist.

Reporting from ‘the EU in the sunshine’ where hacks are hunting in packs

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John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He was born in Guyana and regularly returns there to help build local media, print and TV.

Summits bring out the worst in hacks. Lazy journalism by design. You arrive, get spoon-fed information, report it and then leave. You get fed and watered too. No need for digging, no need for investigation.

The Caricom (Caribbean Community – think EU in the sunshine) Summit, which opened last week here in Georgetown, Guyana, is no exception. Fifteen regional leaders and distinguished others from all round the world propelled at speed by police outriders all over the Capital City to a brand new Conference Centre. They ‘meet’ for three days to discuss the pressing issues of crime, security, economy and more in the region. But, like all summits it is a sham. The team have long been at work preparing the final communiqué. One person told me minutes after the end of the Opening Ceremony last night that the final communiqué was done and dusted – just crossing the ‘T’s’ and dotting the ‘I’s’ left to do. Where is the journalism in reporting that charade?

But the 60 or so journos from all over the Caribbean who are here go through the motions. The Guyana Government has set up a press centre in an anteroom of the summit to feed regular morsels to the hungry hacks. They run on the spot, faithfully file and come back for more. The herd instinct in action.

There is one real story at this talkfest. The Prime Minister of Barbados, David Thompson, is it. He is a pariah in the Community as it heads towards integration. He wants to clear his Little England island of illegal Guyanese immigrants. His police round them up early morning, interrogate then and so far 53 have been dispatched South in two months. Caricom is supposed to be about the free movement of labour. Thompson held a bizarre press conference on arrival in Georgetown. Local journos failed to ask the right questions. But the ‘Bajan bans Guyanese’ story will run and run.

The local media hunt firmly in packs – whatever their race or the politics of their paper/TV station. At the ceremonial opening last night, the usual suspects were present. All corralled in the lobby or in one small room. All using the feed from the State broadcaster as their only source. Some of them will not file for a day or so. ‘Soon come’ journalism is common here. But how many of the Guyana Press Corps will have the courage to announce the opening as a non-story? Nothing really happened. Fifteen men in suits sat on a stage and listened to six of their number drone on for two hours. Sound bites aplenty there were not.

More to follow on the conference, which ran July 2-5. Over the weekend, the Premiers and the Pack headed off to the Chinese built Conference Centre to go through the elegant quadrille that’s called ‘reporting’ major summits. Me – I got hold of a copy of the final communiqué and sat beside a hotel pool reading it and reporting it. If you are going to be lazy, do it right.

Guyana: Four daily papers and 20+ television stations but a poor standard of journalism

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Regular Journalism.co.uk contributor John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University and the inventor of the Coventry Conversations, now on iTunes U. He was born in Guyana and returns there regularly to observe and advise the local media. His nom de plume in Guyana is Bill Cotton/Reform.

I am at one of the frontiers of modern journalism: Guyana in South America, but of the Caribbean. Most things go here. Four daily papers and 20+ local television stations feeding the news appetite of the 750,000 population. Journalists rank just above dog catchers as a trade in Guyana. At least the latter get some training.

Over here there is a university course in ‘Public Communication’ but little else to fine-tune wannabe hacks. The best and brightest go north drawn by the bright lights of the USA and Canada, like many others in their country. Newspapers are still sold on the streets by vendors on commission. The four on sale range from the supermarket tabloid Kaieteur News to the urbane Guyana Times. Kaieteur is the baby of local shoe shop entrepreneur Glenn Lall. Brash, vulgar, full of crime stories with some challenging columnists (including me behind a nom de plume).

It hits the popular mark as nearly does The Stabroek News, a paper instrumental in bringing democracy back to Guyana in 1992 after a period of dictatorship. Its guiding light, the Caribbean media giant David Decaires, died last year. The paper has lost some direction since. It is worth looking at though – for the letters column alone. A national Conversation tree but one which is prolix. Working out which letters are genuine makes for a fascinating read. Both major political parties (the PP and the PNC) and racial groups (Indo and African Guyanese) employ specialist correspondents to support their positions under a variety of noms de plumes (I am not alone in my anonymity. It is a Guyanese tradition).

Third in the press race is the Government-controlled Daily Chronicle. Cynics dub it The Chronic or The Daily Jagdeo in honour of the now second term President Bharrat Jagdeo. If a government minister speaks, they report it. If the President does, it hits the front page. The masses have not gone for it in thousands, nor for the new kid on the block for the last year, The Guyana Times. Intelligent, erudite, semi-broadsheet and the brainchild of a pharmaceutical baron Bobby Ramroop. It is well-written if stodgy, but at a level way beyond the literary level of the mass of the population. The Guyanese middle classes are now not here but in Toronto, New York and Miami. They read their papers on the internet.

The big action is on screen-in TV journalism. That is madness. Tout court. 20+ stations all stealing product from international satellites and re-transmitting it. The Guyanese journalism content ranges from the vulgar-local poujadist and station owner CN Sharma, the soi-disant ‘voice of the people’ with oppositional news shows like ‘Capitol News’ and ‘Prime News’, to the ‘Chronic’ of the airwaves NCN and its ‘Sixo’Clock News’ – which I invented a decade ago. The latter is news on the station owned by the Minister of Agriculture (and President manque) Robert Persaud and makes few pretences to impartiality.

Few of the TV journalists have any training. Few stay in the job for long. Few ever work out what the medium means. They think relaying a press conference with a few links is a ‘story’. More than one over several days if they can spin it out as they get paid per piece. Wallpaper is too kind a word to describe their use of pictures to tell tales.

So there you have it. Poor journalism by under-trained hacks. But all will change later this week when the heads of the Caribbean Governments come to town for their Annual Caricom Csummit. They bring with them the cream of the Caribbean Press Corps. That should be an intriguing piece of media anthropology in action. I will be there.

Whatever the platform, whatever the technology, it’s the stories, stupid!

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Students rise to a challenge if you trust them and give them one. This week they’ve learnt that stories matter. As previously reported on this blog, my students – aided by my colleague Andrew Noakes and me – have been providing live reports on cutoday.wordpress.com from the Play the Game Conference in Coventry. To say this has been a rip-roaring success is an understatement.

The product and its appeal has shocked even hardened hacks like me and my fellow lecturer Andrew. The students have seen and scaled an online Olympus.

Let the figures speak for themselves: over 5000 hits  in four days before the conference has ended; hits received from all over the world and overnight they go up 500; 100+ posts for the week – the daily record so far is 30, from a staff that never exceeded ten. All contributed by students, bar two lecturers giving help and advice.

We’ve provided print, audio and video and a link to a live-stream of some of the events. These lessons in live journalism have taken place in the blogosphere and are very transferable.

But, Content is King. Keep putting up real and interesting stories in all media. The audience will find them and find them very quickly. One video on drug testing had 50 hits in the first five minutes.

It’s the video and audio which sells, especially if original and exclusive. Keep refreshing the stories with new one and new angles. People will come back to find the new. Vary the texture of stories with length and embeds. Remember that you are writing for a net generation with the concentration span of a gnat.

Tease and trail the speakers, profile them, preview them and then report them. Remember what happens in the conference hall (sometimes the live audience was, er, all of 15) is just the front-end; your audience is out there on the blogosphere worldwide. Via the internet, you can reach and refresh parts that many thought could never be reached – and do so in seconds and in some style.

But the central lesson is the obvious one. Produce good readable and accessible journalism. Assemble motivated hacks manqué, get them working quickly and accurately, finding angles and writing the stories up well. But make sure they are subbed and checked – one student was surprised to learn that the Lord Mayor of Coventry had changed since last year… But the mantra should always be – as Jim White of the Daily Telegraph once put it to my students – ‘good copy delivered on time…’

Whatever the platform, whatever the technology, it’s the stories, stupid. No stories, no content, no audience. It’s a lesson we have all learned quickly.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He ran cutoday.wordpress.com at the 2009 Play the Game Conference. Most of the hard work was done by his colleague Andrew Noakes and a small group of students of journalism at Coventry University.

Coventry students reporting live from annual ‘Play the Game’ conference

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We teach them about real-life situations and real-life deadlines but how often do journalism students experience the adrenalin or buttock-tightening of knowing they are live-on-air on the internet? Not enough.

Nothing concentrates a man or woman’s mind so completely as the thought he or she will be cyber-hung in 10 minutes – to misquote Dr Johnson.

Coventry is hosting the annual ‘Play the Game’ Conference in the Cathedral and the University itself. Serious scholars and journalists from all over the world are here to discuss the big issues of sport-doping, cheating, match fixing and the whole underbelly of the modern business of sport. This is the sixth time they have scratched the sores that others might prefer to leave well alone.

Two hundred odd delegates in the very beautiful surroundings of Sir Basil Spence’s masterpiece, but why leave high quality thoughts for such a select audience?

We are not. Coventry journalism students (and one solitary LCC one) are reporting live or near live at Cutoday.wordpress.com. They attend all sessions, report them in print audio and (crossed fingers) video, right there in cyberspace. Want to hear or read David Goldblatt on the big round ball, or Declan Hill on match fixing? Then go to the site.

They’re learning to write against time: news, features, backgrounders, gossip, and so much more. Learning by doing. You can see fear in their faces when told to let the piece go to the subs and out to the world. One student took four hours of persuasion. His work is up on the site now – eventually. You can spot it as it is very carefully crafted and re-crafted and subbed.

Come out of closet, journalism educators! Trust your students. Try teaching journalism using the real world with the cordite of failure and the sweet smell of success. It’s what happens in real newsrooms. Daily.

I can just about remember…

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. His colleague Andrew Noakes, who teaches automotive journalism, ‘is doing most of the hard work’.

Why Jeremy Paxman is the new Charles Wheeler

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Tonight he steps up to get the first ever Charles Wheeler Award at Westminster University from his boss Mark Thompson, the BBC director-general. Paxo is now the worthy wearer of Wheeler’s Crown. Well deserved.

Charles loved words and using them. So does Paxman. Witness this week, Paxman calling Esther Rantzen a ‘retired television nabob’. Ouch.

It’s what good journalists do; we use words. Charles transformed any film which he reported. I’ve seen very so-so stories become very good watches when reported by Wheeler. Paxman, lest we forget now that he is in a warm studio, was the best film reporter of his generation. Look at some of the films from the Central American frontline 30 years ago. The man learned early.

Charles liked to cause mischief. All good hacks do. He was once heavily censured by the BBC bosses for being rude to royalty on tour. Did he care? Not a jot! Think Paxman and Blair: ‘Do you and President Bush pray together?’ and my all-time favourite to Shaun Woodward, the new MP for St Helens in deepest Lancashire: ‘Mr Woodward did your butler vote Labour?’ (Woodward is very rich and was parachuted to St Helens. He did have a butler).

Charles was less the master of the studio than Paxo has become. Charles always looked a mite uncomfortable, Paxo not. A caged animal waiting for its prey. It’s no wonder Gordon Brown refuses to be interviewed by him. Paxo takes Newsnight up a gear when he presents it.

Both are, to use that wonderful English word, ‘curmudgeonly’. So what? There are too many smiling faces on TV and too many autocuties. Curmudgeons find things out – even if they do not make huge numbers of friends. But then good hacks are loners.

For all of their similarities (and differences) who can begrudge Paxo the title of King of the TV Journalism jungle? Not me.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He produced last month’s Media Society Annual Award Dinner for Jeremy Paxman.

Note: updated with subbing corrections 21.05.09

Paul Gambaccini: BBC Radio 1 fails to recognise its ‘incredible responsibility’ by keeping Moyles in a job

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Former BBC Radio 1 broadcaster, Paul Gambaccini, has once again emphasised the ethical implications of public broadcasting to an audience at Coventry University.

‘Broadcasters have an incredible responsibility,’ said Gambaccini, who currently presents on BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 4 and Classic FM. Back on the ‘Sack Chris Moyles’ beat, he said he was deeply offended by the current BBC 1 breakfast host’s comments about, and parody of, the singer Will Young.

“Had I been the head of Radio 1 I would have sacked him for that, because I know everything that we do will be remembered by, and have an influence on, some people,” he said.

Gambaccini first called for Moyles’ sacking in February, in his Oxford University lecture series, in his role as this year’s News International professor of broadcast media.

It was the second time he repeated the message this week. Speaking at the Media Guardian Radio Reborn conference on Monday, he said that Moyles was ‘a bully who causes human suffering’.

Gambaccini told that audience that young boys were beaten up in the playground for their sexuality. Moyles’ parody encouraged that, he claimed.

He claimed that the BBC had failed to recognise its ‘incredible responsibility’. “Radio 1 hasn’t been aware of that [responsibility] or willing to act on it. Personally, I would have dropped Chris Moyles. For someone like Chris to throw the word gay around with abandonment, does, I’m afraid, show a sense of irresponsibility.”

Moyles’ job has attracted attention of late: the Sun recently devoted a front page story to his alleged imminent ‘sacking’ from the pole position on Radio 1. Moyles responded with a rant on his show denying the story.

Radio 1 deputy head, Ben Cooper, also questioned the veracity of the Sun story this week, in a somewhat lukewarm endorsement of Moyles and his show.

John Mair is senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University and organiser of the Coventry Conversations, a series of events featuring high-profile media figures.

The Defence Advisory – its role on privacy and the British media

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This week the Defence Advisory’s (DA) notice secretary, Andrew Vallance, delivered the final lecture of Coventry University’s Coventry Conversations series on how the controversial subject of secrecy is handled to maintain our country’s national security.

The DA is an institution set up to advise media figures on whether new and sensitive information is suitable for publication or whether this would have an adverse impact on national security.

Vallance was keen to highlight that the organisation tries to create a compromise between allowing and pushing for intriguing information to be published and urging the media not to be too specific about subjects that could make British associates easier to target.

The DA ‘provides advice to avoid the inadvertent publication or broadcasting of information that would damage UK national security’, but also ‘facilitates maximum freedom of the media to report in public interest’, he said.

The DA Notice System has five standing notices advising the media against publishing information on Britain’s military operations, weapons, communications, addresses and services.

But in the UK, where secrecy is taken very seriously and is a ‘birth right’ to every Briton, according to Vallance, the effectiveness of the DA is limited by the rapid spread of information on the internet and because its services are only for domestic-based media.

The internet and a fiercely competitive media industry are the Advisory’s main challenges, Vallance said. These two factors combined create a platform for instant communication from media organisations who want the most popular story or angle, which could leave inside information susceptible to dangerous and unexpected predators; to mass audiences who create pressure by craving daily news and revealing details.

The only alternatives to the current system would be to create government legislation preventing media institutions from printing certain types of information, which could effectively transfer the DA’s five standing notices to parliament, posited Vallance.

The other and more damning alternative, according to Vallance, would be to have a ‘media free for all without a security safety net’.

If all currently secret information was released, which would undoubtedly cut costs for data storage and legal proceedings, would anybody actually take any significance from comparing how many weapons country a, b or c has?

In the modern climate, the likelihood is that vulnerable countries would be targeted from figures released in the press, and so although the DA’s system has no authoritative enforcement, it is a hindrance to any media moguls who may contemplate prioritising the financial lure of popularity over national security.

Money Saving Expert’s Martin Lewis on ethical concerns with financial reporting

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Speaking to students at Coventry University last Friday, via video link from BBC TV Centre, UK financial journalist and consumer champion, Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert.com, raised questions about the ethics of economic reporting, and called for specialist journalists to declare their bias prior to publication.

“I am an ‘agenda journalist’, my job is to support opportunism,” Lewis said. “I know that I am biased. My worry is that a lot of journalism is biased without necessarily claiming that it is biased,” he said.

Had it been Lewis himself who had got Robert Peston’s Northern Rock crisis scoop for the BBC in 2007, it would have raised ethical questions for him, he said. He would find ‘breaking a bank down difficult to live with,’ he said.

“It is an incredibly difficult question, because if you answer publicly that you are worried about one bank, you can cause the problems that you were talking about,” Lewis said.

The creator of MoneySavingExpert.com dismissed claims that financial journalists, particularly Peston, were becoming too powerful in the volatile economic climate, and said that stories had impact, but not overriding power in decisions made.

“Government has to follow the way the media is going to cover these stories, but ultimately, the people who are making the decisions are the lawyers, the people sitting in the Bank of England, at the FSA [Financial Services Authority] and in the cabinet,” he said.

Defending the future of financial journalism, Lewis claimed that there would always be a place for economic reporting, but that the significance of the reporting would depend on the methods used by the journalists involved.

“What we want is journalists who are questioning, but who also have to be respectful of the wider picture, and the impact that their journalism has on people,” he said.

The ‘money saving expert’ also insisted that journalists need an ‘ability to see both sides’ in order to avoid the potential pitfalls presented by a subject with such a large effect on so many people.