Author: |Posted: 11:05 am on 24/09/09
Category: Snowblog
Block yer ears. Shut yer eyes. Krishnan and I and our able friend Mara Carlyle, are in preparation for tonight’s Newsroom’s Got Talent competition (no danger of any of us winning – we’re just ensuring that we can actually appear at all at Vinopolis in the Borough Market).
It’s a contest between the BBC, Sky, al-Jazeera, ITV, Channel 4 and Uncle Tom Cobbley, in which every one of us is going to make an idiot of ourselves – wait till you see my wig! All in the cause of Leonard Cheshire Homes and Helen House Hospice.
There will be video of the performance on our website, come Friday. Beyond what you see, we’ll be performing with our band, Fourplay.
Author: |Posted: 6:14 pm on 02/09/09
Category: Snowblog
Do you think they’ll catch on?
Author: |Posted: 6:59 pm on 28/07/09
Category: Snowblog
I was intrigued to hear BBC Radio News this morning using its own airwaves to “report” its decision to supply video content to a number of newspapers for free.
Not a corporate announcement, of course, but a news story of sufficient importance to warrant its place midway through the main bulletin during the peak period of listening on Radio Four’s Today programme.
This is a service which is currently undertaken on a commercial basis by ITN (which makes Channel 4 News). Good old BBC, you may very well say, for making a similar service freely available to the newspaper groups which have been increasingly vociferous critics of its online expansionism.
In the same spirit of fair and impartial reporting that was in evidence in the BBC’s reporting of this news this morning, it’s worth posing a number of questions the BBC may wish to address.
1. Is it a good use of licence-fee-payers money to supply a service for free that newspapers are happy to pay for?
2. Why should the licence-fee-payer then, by implication, subsidise a commercial news outlet?
3. Why should licence-fee money be used to undercut and thereby undermine the viability of a commercial rival?
4. Does this activity increase or reduce the diversity of digital/video news provision in the UK?
5. Given all the above, what exactly is the BBC for, and whose decision was it that the information above should be presented as a BBC Radio news item?
Answers on a post card please.
PS I have the obvious interest to declare: I work in the private sector in direct competition to the BBC making programmes for ITN, which some might feel disqualifies me from reporting on this issue, but I’m not sure that that neutralises my capacity to ask the above questions.
Author: |Posted: 10:48 am on 13/07/09
Category: Snowblog
Author: |Posted: 5:12 pm on 01/07/09
Category: Snowblog
Rare sighting today – me and my mentor in the Channel 4 News studio. In the 20 years I’ve been doing this programme Peter Snow has never stepped this way.
It was nepotism that got me into this business and it looks like nepotism will get me out again. He could take over tonight.
Author: |Posted: 12:49 pm on 29/06/09
Category: World News Blog
Was he as famous as the Duke of Wellington?
There has been some debate about how much time a show like Channel 4 News should devote to a story like the death of Michael Jackson.
Both in the newsroom and, I imagine, among our viewers too. Is it really “our” kind of story? Is it really a lead story – night after night? Can it possibly be right that we currently have a bigger team in LA than we had in Tehran for the election? (But do remember you don’t need to get visas from a repressive government to enter Hollywood.) read more
Author: |Posted: 10:46 am on 23/06/09
Category: Snowblog
I was minding my own business on Sunday morning, doing the washing-up from the night before.
As is my want, I had Radio 4 on – tuned to Broadcasting House.
As usual they had a panel of celeb newspaper reviewers on. Somehow Paddy O’Connell, for it was he, fell to asking the panel: “what’s the best thing on the television?”
Quick as a flash, one of the panellists, the eternally rewarding Tom Conti, chimed, “Channel 4 News”.
It was followed by what seemed to me a slightly awkward silence, though not in my household!
Author: |Posted: 3:28 pm on 10/06/09
Category: Snowblog
Look, let’s start with a confession. Beyond being a lifelong supporter of Bright & Hove Albion (I can no longer name a single member of the team), I know very little about football.
So imagine my joy when, upon entering the office this morning, I discovered that that raft of great players who were in the England squad but did not play in the World Cup final in 1966, were going to get Fifa medals for having been in the squad.
Author: |Posted: 6:07 pm on 10/05/09
Category: World News Blog
It’s not often that the most powerful man in the country rings you.
I’d spoken amicably to defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa 45 minutes earlier about getting some better access to Sri Lanka’s 25-year war. But this time he was calling me, and seemed to have remembered something.
“Who is this? You rang me earlier? Is this Channel 4? You have been accusing my soldiers of raping civilians? Your visa is cancelled, you will be deported. You can report what you like about this country, but from your own country, not from here.”
Author: |Posted: 8:54 am on 08/05/09
Category: Snowblog
I discovered this week our 13th pregnancy in a year. Yes, from a staff of little over 100, 13 of the women workers on Channel 4 News are either expecting or have just delivered babies.
Six of the men workers have fathered or are expecting their partners to deliver babies… 19 out of 100 in one office.
Is it a record? Is it the recession? Is it peer pressure, or just something in the water?
