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.

Permalink||(4) Comments

It’s a bit of a cheap shot – to ask any of the world leaders at the climate change summit whether they think the 15 car motorcades they drive around in, blocking the streets of Manhattan, send the right message at a summit on global warming.

But of course someone asked it anyway. read more

Permalink||(3) Comments

So Terry Wogan considers newscasters as “self-important” and the job a “piece of cake“.

He’s quite right.. or nearly right. It’s a piece of cake so long as you can absent yourself from any involvement in generating the material that you are reading. The moment you combine newsreading with actual journalism, going after stories, trying to find out stuff, and the rest, it becomes much harder. read more

Permalink||(23) Comments

Soon after arriving on holiday in the States, I was standing in a friend’s kitchen in which the telly happened to be on. Suddenly an expensive-looking ad came on sporting a British cancer specialist, Karol Sikora. His message was simple: Britain’s NHS is a failure that the United States should not attempt to emulate.

read more

Permalink||(10) Comments

Our team have been blogging all last week from Afghanistan on the elections, but they’re not the only ones commenting.

Soldiers who know the front line only too well have been posting their comments on our blogs, including Lt Col Brown on Nick Paton Walsh’s reports from his embed at Camp Keating.

Read, digest and feel free to join the debate.

Permalink||(2) Comments

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.

Permalink||(19) Comments

I have had the delightful experience of visiting the piston-less, wire-less, valve-less, transistor-less headquarters of Google UK.

Yes, I’ve been right inside www.google.co.uk. And it is a quite extraordinary experience, verging on cultish. But very benign.

read more

Permalink||(5) Comments

A selection of newspaper front pages from G20 countries on the day after the London summit. Barack Obama is a prominent theme. read more

Permalink||(0) Comments