Tag Archives: John Mair

#ge2010: Inside the biggest night in broadcasting

It’s quiet now. You can hear a pin drop. In twelve hours’ time it will be organised chaos. I am at the BBC TV ‘hub’ in Belfast getting ready for the biggest night not just of politicians’ lives but broadcasters’ too. Tonight is general election result night and we’ll be live on BBC One and Two for hours on end bringing predictions, results and analysis to British people and many further afield.

In my bit of the hub, I handle all the material going ‘across the water’ from here to the David Dimbleby programme in Television Centre London. BBC Northern Ireland is at all of the eighteen counts at eight counting centres throughout the province, bringing breaking results, analysis, and interviews with the movers and shakers. I will be constantly offering material to the central hub in London, which they will accept, reject or just plain ignore. At busy periods they could probably fill four TV channels with election results coming in.

This is the BBC at its journalistic and technical best. Hundreds of hacks working on getting the results, processing them and analysing the team in London. Nothing can go wrong on the night. Little is left to chance. Rehearsals have been taking place for the better part of the last week. All systems tested, none found wanting-so far. From my desk I can talk to sixteen different locations/units to see what’s happening.

In front of me will be sitting the BBC Northern Ireland hub producer. They’re going out live too from 10.00pm until the last result here, probably around six hours later. We’ll share their fruits with the rest of the nations when we can. To my left will be the RTE hub producer from Southern Ireland. They’re going big on this election with a Belfast and a London Studio and a big outside broadcast to boot.

This is my eighth British general election with the BBC and it still gets the adrenalin going after 30 years.

After it’s over – tomorrow afternoon by best reckoning – it is time for the post mortem and the analysis of what went right what went wrong. To that end, I’ll be producing an event for the Media Society next Tuesday at the University of Westminster entitled Who Won the TV Election? (more details at www.themediasociety.com or below).

Enjoy tonight’s coverage on TV, and come along next tuesday to praise or blame the great men and women who put on this quinquennial spectacle. Rocket science it may not be, but at times it isn’t far off.

Dhiren Katwa: ‘Current BBC Asian Network model promotes segregation’

2 Replies

Dhiren Katwa, senior news editor at Asian Voice, spoke at the Coventry Conversations series on Thursday about the possibility of the BBC’s Asian Network being scrapped in the face of strategic cuts. He said Vijay Sharma, head of the Asian Network, has been “in hiding” over the current situation.

The Asian Network’s audience fell by 15 per cent to 357,000 in the third quarter of last year, and is expected to struggle for survival after director-general Mark Thompson’s forthcoming strategic review of BBC programming.

Katwa, a member of the Equality Council of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said he thought it would be a shame for the Asian Network to go, but added that he didn’t believe the BBC should be specifically broadcasting to minority groups. He told the audience that “with the Asian Network working within a silo, it’s promoting or contributing to segregation rather than integration”. He said that the solution is to embed minority targeted elements of the BBC more firmly within the corporation.

When asked about the network’s fall in ratings, Katwa said commercial competitors such as Sunrise Radio had contributed to the network’s struggle to reach it’s young target audience, but put its current problems largely down to “a lot of internal issues”.

Caroline Thomson, the BBC’s chief operating officer, told the House of Lords Communications Committee on Wednesday that the idea of one network serving the UK’s entire Asian community wasn’t the right way to represent such a large and diverse audience.

Katwa echoed her assessment in his talk, and suggested that “the BBC Asian Network needs to be embedded within the BBC as a corporation with more faces from black and Asian backgrounds.”

Sharing Katwa’s view, broadcast journalism lecturer and founder of Coventry Conversations John Mair added: “There is no role for something separate or segregated, it should just be part of the mainstream. Not ‘now Radio Four’s Asian hour’, every hour should be Asian hour”.

Katwa said at the talk that his opinions were his own and did not necessarily reflect the views of Asian Voice.

Crisis or no crisis? Speakers divided on whether the journalism glass has anything left in it

4 Replies

The speakers were split between the yeas, nays and dunnos at yesterday’s ‘Is World Journalism in Crisis?’ live-streamed video conference at Coventry University (full audio and video to follow soon), chaired by the head of the BBC College of Journalism, Kevin Marsh.

In the optimists’ corner we had CUNY’s Professor Jeff Jarvis (no surprises there) and a buoyant Professor Richard Keeble: despite witnessing the plight of his local, the Lincolnshire Echo, he was confident new opportunities and techniques were emerging for journalism of the future.

More cautiously, Dr Frederick Mudhai, senior lecturer in journalism at Coventry outlined challenges in world markets and emphasised the increasing ‘tabloidisation’ and celebrity content of African news, citing that a Nigerian newspaper had now introduced page 3.

Dr George Nyabuga, managing editor at the Media Convergence Group and speaking from Nairobi, said that media is in very few hands in Kenya, which can lead to a crisis in trust. There’s a disconnect, he said, between journalists and public, with news organisations producing content that interests the market, not the public. State and commercial pressures increasingly put on media organisations to conform to ways of doing things, he said. Nonetheless, he said, he was encouraged by citizen participation online and the opportunities that afforded.

Likewise, Professor Adrian Monck, former head of journalism at City University, saw potential for journalists to work in new fields, but emphasised that there was a crisis of confidence and jobs in the industry of which new students needed to be aware. Dr Suzanne Franks, director of research at Kent University’s Centre for journalism was err-ing more on the glass half-empty, with little faith in the growth of citizen media (she wouldn’t trust ‘citizen dentistry’ either). But, while cautious about releasing money from the public purse, she could see the potential for some top-slicing of the BBC licence fee.

In-between camps, her colleague Professor Tim Luckhurst deeply regretted ever letting content go free during his time at the Scotsman, criticising the way newspapers had blundered into the online market. But he said, new online agency models were very likely to emerge, and he was ‘also optimistic that others will make more innovative models‚ funded by sales and advertising’.

Meanwhile, renowned BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman, sipping (what looked like) a coffee in a room at BBC TV Centre, was despondent about the level of press-release generated content from ‘the sausage machine’. A saturated news market essentially recycles press releases as an ‘extremely partial version of the truth’ – with too much comment over investigative journalism. His wish for the industry? “I think I would plea for more time, and more originality.” But while he tries to put off people who want to enter (it’s a good test of whether they’ll make it) he still loves the job.

Nick Davies, author and Guardian journalist, was a truer pessimist, stressed the seriousness of the crisis for quality journalism, with theories familiar to readers of Flat Earth News (the various commercial pressures on newsrooms have led to journalists manufacturing a ‘consensus’ version of the news). We need professional journalism (and no, he’s not a citizen journalist of sorts, he told chair Kevin Marsh) ‘Punters’ can’t do it alone, he said, claiming that a lot of citizen journalism content was rubbish. For Davies, it’s all about the truth, and trust-funded journalism (such as the Scott Trust) is our best hope of that.

Lastly, me, an in-betweener. I tackled the UK newspaper industry, deeply in crisis in its current state, I think. But we can be more positive for journalism at large, with truly exciting online projects emerging – not necessarily branding itself as journalism (MySociety, data-mashing projects etc). We can look bravely ahead, whilst accepting that the Sunday Times Insight Team of the future may not be newspaper-based.

Event producer and Coventry University lecturer John Mair didn’t elaborate his view fully, but ended on an upbeat note: They said a world video conference couldn’t be done, he said. “But you’ve had some of the best in journalism beamed into Coventry”.

In an email to participants after the event Mair said that it ‘should not have worked’: “Distinguished speakers from across five continents, an audience of students, academics and real people, three-and-a-half hours of exciting intellectual debate and more, breaking new frontiers with videoconferencing and webcasting and Twitter and more: this has put Coventry and Coventry journalism on the world stage.”

All audio and visual material will be available in due course. Covetnry University’s ‘Is World Journalism in Crisis?’ was supported by Journalism.co.uk and sponsored by Camelot plc.

Comment: The rise of ‘smart’ or ‘not so smart’ internet mobs and their pressure on the media

19 Replies

Jan Moir is the latest ‘victim’ of the virtual mob. Last Friday after her ill-judged article in the Daily Mail cast doubt on the natural death of Boyzone’s singer Stephen Gately in Majorca, using a tone widely-perceived as homophobic, the blogosphere went mad seeking revenge.

Two thousand joined a Facebook group within hours, hundreds wrote to the Press Complaints Commission, inspired and pointed there on Twitter by Stephen Fry and Derren Brown.

The PCC was bounced into contacting Boyzone’s PR company to see if it wanted to complain. The Mail pulled ads on its website. BBC mentioned the Mail article in its news bulletins on Gately’s funeral.

Moir was forced to eat crow the very same day as publication and issued a statement of correction/clarification (you take your pick), claiming complaints against her Daily Mail article were mischievously ‘orchestrated’.

In response, HelpMeInvestigate.com, the crowd-sourced journalism site in beta, has launched an investigation into the nature of the campaign: just how ‘organised’ was the #janmoir / Jan Moir campaign, it asks.

So how democratic are these manifestations of the virtual mob?

The political and social pressure on broadcasters and other media brought about by the internet and ad hoc Facebook groups in particular is double edged.

It can lead to interactivity and enrichment but it can also lead to bullying by keystroke. The zenith of that was the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand row in the autumn of 2008 but nowadays broadcasters, especially the BBC, are facing ‘crowd pressure’ from internet groups set up for or against a cause or a programme; they are an internet ‘flash mob. With the emphasis, maybe, on the ‘mob’.

When Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand rang up the veteran actor Andrew Sachs on October 18 2008 and were disgustingly obscene to him about his grand-daughter, that led to a huge public row on ‘taste,’ mainly stoked by the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday.

Fuel was added to the fire through comments by the Prime Minister. The ‘prosecuting’ virtual group was the editorial staff of the Mail newspapers and its millions of readers in Middle England. In support of the ‘Naughty Two’, more than 85,000 people joined Facebook support groups. Many, perhaps most, had never heard the ‘offensive’ programme. Just two had complained after the first broadcast.

The BBC was forced after a public caning to back down, the director-general yanked back from a family holiday to publicly apologise, Brand and his controller resigned and Ross was suspended from radio and television for three months. The virtual mob smelt blood: it got it.

The battleground for this mass virtual protest had been set out over the transmission of the programme ‘Jerry Springer; the Opera’ in January 2005. Fifty five thousand Christians petitioned the BBC to pull it from the schedules because of its profanity and alleged blasphemy. They engaged in modern guerilla warfare tactics to try to achieve their aim. Senior BBC executives had to change their home phone numbers to avoid that pressure. That campaign did not get a ‘result’. If Facebook had been in full flow then, the 55,000 may well have been 555,000 and the result very different.

This row set out the stall and template for the ‘popular virtual’ activism that culminated in Ross/Brand in 2008 and other cases since. In the good old days, ‘stormovers’ – as the brave founding father of Channel Four Sir Jeremy Isaacs called them – were conducted slowly and in green ink. He survived many such ‘storms’. Today the storms straddle the world in minutes and are just a keystroke or several score of them away from going nuclear.

This is activism by the click. It needs no commitment apart from signing up on a computer. It gives the illusion of democracy and belonging to a movement whereas in reality is it membership of a mob, albeit a virtual one? Is this healthy for democracy and media accountability or not?

Discuss. Online.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He is a former BBC, ITV and Channel Four producer. Additional research by Peter Woodbridge from Coventry University.

Is World Journalism in Crisis? Speaker update: Nick Davies confirmed

Is there life after a journalism course? The Coventry Class of 2009 – Greg Keane

4 Replies

At the end of the academic year John Mair, senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University, asked just what would happen to his undergraduate journalism class of 2009. In the face of the biggest media recession for many a generation where do they go? Is there life after a journalism course? A few months on, we are re-visiting the students.

Greg Keane graduated with a 2.1 in journalism and media from Coventry University last June. He has turned a specialist interest into a small niche in journalism, non-league football.

It’s pointless to send away your CV in pursuit of that first job without any kind of meaningful credential except a degree in journalism.

Despite being warned on countless occasions that work will not simply come to you on the back of a university course, I arrogantly – as I am sure is the case for many of my peers – did not take much heed of the advice.

I applied for trainee jobs advertised on sites such as this one, thinking – almost without doubt – that my 2:1 in journalism and media earned in June this year was easily enough to merit me at least an interview.

Thankfully, reality set in soon enough after early knock-backs. I realised that only with proactivity would I make a name for myself.

An article in which I described my home town football club Luton Town as ‘the most exciting club in England’ generated a large amount of debate across many football forums, as fans struggled to work out whether the title was a question, or in fact a statement.

I had sent the article to the presenter of BBC London’s Non-League Football Show and pitched an idea to her about regularly updating fans on the Hatters’ often turbulent existence throughout the upcoming football league (or non-league as is the case) campaign.

She loved the idea and published the article although I was inaccurately described as ‘a Luton Town fan blogger’ (a description which is wrong on two counts: I was/am neither a blogger of Luton Town, nor a fan! Like many sports writers, I too won’t disclose the identity of the club I support. It isn’t one of the big four by the way).

The piece got significant interest and found its way being discussed on a number of football forums and I even received praise from Luton Town chairman and BBC Midlands Today presenter Nick Owen, via email.

I now regularity contribute features for the BBC London pages on a variety of non-league sides, for example. (Examples of my work here).

After this, I was asked to produce features for the site www.nonleaguefootballlive.com on a freelance basis. This has provided a tremendous platform on which to make a name for myself in a community which may be large, but lacking in many alternative avenues of information and reports from their clubs.

I have since become ‘chief reporter’ for the site and my articles stimulate much debate on the site’s own lively forum as well as clubs’ own message boards.

An article I wrote documenting the plight of Wrexham FC and their supporters seemed also to strike a chord with the Guardian’s David Conn who praised my article – recently he wrote a piece highlighting the trouble Wrexham supporters had trying to protect their ground.

Non League Football Live also has plans to launch a magazine in the coming weeks which they have asked me to play a big part in it.

But I haven’t confined myself to reporting: I have taken up a role as press secretary for the famous Corinthian Casuals in South London/Surrey and that position guarantees that my reports get published in around 14 ‘thisislocallondon’ newspapers and their online sites and one national, the Non-League Paper, which comes out every Sunday across the UK. Casuals are a club steeped with history so there is plenty of scope there to carve out a story.

And radio too: after a couple months of one day a week work experience at Mercia Radio in Coventry, my efforts paid off when they signed a deal to commentate on Coventry City matches.

I now do some paid assistant producing on the Tom Ross ‘Goalzone’ show. I control the studio and the commentator throughout a 3-4 hour show.

It is frantic work but it is enjoyable and certainly gets the adrenaline running. I also provide Mercia with a regular Sky Blues blog – another home for my work.

Unexpectedly, I foresee my future in sports reporting now, especially after finding a niche for myself in non-league football. It may not be glamorous or particularly exciting for many, but I enjoy it and hope that in the not too distant future, there will be a permanent job offer.

Is there life after a journalism course? The Coventry Class of 2009 – Jason Craig

1 Reply

Jason Craig graduated with a first class honours in journalism and media from Coventry University last June. He now works as a writer on the Belfast based Pacenotes – a magazine for the many thousands of rally enthusiasts in Ireland.

As I write this, 10,000 copies of the September issue of Pacenotes Rally Magazine will be returning from the printers in Antrim and winging their way to newsagents, subscribers and leading rally figures across the UK and Ireland.

The days leading up to print deadline, leaving the office just before midnight and rising the following morning at 6am was not uncommon, and after a while you become oblivious to the man-hours needed to compile a 72-page monthly read.

When you are passionate about a subject and you are getting paid to write about it, time really doesn’t become an issue – at least for me, anyway. My last report covered the Ulster International Rally, a mammoth two day operation that required the compiling of driver quotes and pictures on stage and in and around service.

I give up evenings and weekends to be involved in a sport I have followed and admired for so long. To have access to teams and drivers is a privilege, so it is my job to relay this ‘inside information’ to the reader as best possible.

For the same issue, with the help of Phil James (www.pro-rally.co.uk), I have just compiled a one-off, 11 page commemorative feature on the Mini as this year marks its 50th anniversary.

I’ve spoken to many people about this giant-killing rally machine, but none more eloquent than the 1964 Monte Carlo Rally winner, Paddy Hopkirk. This is what makes my new job so varied and exciting.

Recently, in the space of a week, I have been to Dublin to research a feature on Couture Auto Ltd before jetting over to England the following day to pay the motorsport engine builder, Mountune a visit.

This visit to the Essex based company had added meaning as anyone who knows me will be wholly aware of my admiration for the Blue Oval and rallying in general. As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen so many Ford GT supercars in the same place at the same time, including one worth a cool £1 million!

In October I travel to Cork to cover the final round of the TROA Irish Tarmac Championship where this year’s winner will be crowned, and in November – the weekend before my graduation ceremony, in fact – I travel to the final round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge in the hope that Ulsterman, Kris Meeke will prevail as the champion.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have had strong leadership and continued support from my lecturers during my final few days at Coventry University: automotive hack Andrew Noakes and media guru John Mair were of particular help. They deserve a special mention for reasons known only to them, with two copies of the current issue soon to land on their respective desks.

Trinidad’s tabloids scream loudly, but Barbados’ press could do with some balls

2 Replies

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. Previous posts looked at the Caricom Summit held July 2-5 in Georgetown. Trinidad and Barbados were the final stops.

After experiencing Guyanese ‘journalism’ during the Caricom summit, any order is better. In Trinidad, there is much economic prosperity due to oil and natural gas: ‘What recession?’ they ask here. The economy is healthy but the society has some of the fissures of Guyana.

Trinidad politics
Indians were brought here in thousands as indentured labourers to replace the freed black slaves one hundred and seventy years ago. They live in the south of the island, the African Trinidadians in the North. They have much of the wealth, the prime minister and his ruling PNM party are black and have the political power.

There is much violent crime – especially kidnappings and murders – and that is the staple fare of the super tabloids who make up the Trinidad & Tobago newspaper market. The Guardian, the Express and Newsday are much the same. Screaming headlines on the cover but much content inside. They are big in pagination and include lots of classified ads.

Politics gets a big shout and through that the racial dimension. The leader of the opposition (at the moment) Basdeo Panday is Indo-Trinidadian. He was prime minister until 2001 but was driven from office for alleged corruption. Today his UNC is breaking into bits.

His former attorney general Ramesh Marhaj is leading a ginger group/internal opposition within the party together with another MP – Jack Warner, who runs football in this part of the world, is vice-chair of FIFA and has been the subject of critical investigations on British TV about his dodgy behaviour in that job.

Warner’s son sold the travel packages and tickets for Trinidadians to the to the 2006 World Cup. Panday wants Warner to account for $30m (T&T) of election expenses. Warner says it was money he gave the party so no need to account. This makes the British MPs look tame.

Columnists abound on the pages of the T&T press. Different races. All have views. Many far too prolix for the page. Sub-editing is not a craft that seems to have been found in the Southern Caribbean. But the three dailies and the local TV news programmes – sadly also divided on racial lines – make for lively reading and listening. Crime sells. They certainly put the fear of God into the bank manager cousin with whom I was staying.

Keeping awake in Barbados
Not so Barbados. The problem here for a journalist is keeping awake. The best description for the Barbados Nation and Advocate? Stodgy, boring, dull. They make the Bedworth Advertiser look interesting. Boring headlines and even duller stories. It is like reading a parish newsletter for a nation.

The ‘news’ is based on government news conferences and other press conferences by NGOs and the like. On such sexy subjects like polyclinics, insurance and diabetes. Again, writing is prolix and not of great quality.

Barbados is a very polite and ordered society (the murder rate is a fraction of Trinidad’s) and that shows in its press. The hacks need to get themselves some more balls. The TV news is not much better.

There we have it. Prosperity, tabloid culture, Little England and the news values of British suburbia. Funny how they all travel. But Blighty calls.

Alan Rusbridger (@arusbridger) on why Twitter matters

1 Reply

Twitter got a big mention in Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s ‘Journalism Matters’ speech last night. Repeating his ‘future of newspaper’ Twitter recommendations made in Berlin in April (@amonck, @niemanlab, @jeffjarvis and @cshirky) he praised the way it could be used as a personalised filter for information consumption.

He used Guardian technology writer Jemima Kiss as one example of why to use it – she’s probably in labour, and twittering it, ‘as we speak’, he joked. Journalism.co.uk didn’t put its hand up to say ‘err, no – she’s already had all 10lb 6oz of it’ (we learned via Twitter, obviously).

He also mentioned @GuardianTech with its impressive 900,000+ followers, and showed how journalist Paul Lewis (@http://twitter.com/paul__lewis) had used his account to report from the G20 protests.

Before Rusbridger was reborn as @arusbridger he thought it was all a bit, well, ‘silly’, but now he’s well and truly converted. In fact he thinks all Guardian journalists should use it: “I”m trying to get everyone to twitter”. He told this to a room of newspaper journalists in Norway and they asked whether he, as editor-in-chief, would have to moderate all those tweets?…

John Mair’s report on last night’s Media Standards Trust event here, and tweets from @journalism_live, and others captured by the #journmatters tag, below.

Editors Blog | Journalism.co.uk

Online journalism news