Au Revoir

Like my colleagues, I feel we’ve covered certain valid aspects of Public Service Broadcasting but like many of the opinions on here indicate, it’s a vast area to look in to. Add the factor of impartiality in the digital age (which was our main focus) there are more guesses involved than factual evidence of which way we’re headed.

Social media has indeed taken precedence over our lives when it comes to information, which makes it absolutely imperative for the BBC to maintain their strong filtration channels and use them ever more than previously.

With regards to the importance of Twitter and it’s influence over the younger generation, I was divided untill I saw the example used below by my colleague, featuring tweets from Channel 4′s Jon Snow. Having read some of them, the spelling errors and grammatical errors as a result of trying to cram everything in to 140 characters worries me.

Not just because I personally cannot stand cryptic writing and “txtng lng” but common sense tells you that there will be many of the younger members of Jon Snow’s following, whose spelling and grammatical abilities would be subconsciously affected by reading what one of British journalism’s stalwarts writes on his feed.

I don’t doubt his abilities for a second but the point is, whatever the reasons are for the misspellings and confusing grammar, they still went on the feed because there isn’t a filter to correct them. That is where the filtering of the BBC is not just imperative but a necessity as well.

Not just for impartiality but to maintain the high standards and high regard for public service broadcasting in the public’s eyes.

Having criticised Jon Snow to some extent, I feel it’s only fair I open the doors of my tweets to you in case you find any errors in my work. Do drop me a line if you do. It’s only fair and impartial.

Thanks for joining us here on the blog, it’s been a privilege. Been an absolute pleasure working with my colleagues Jessica Dowse, Lucy Bickerton, and James Horrell. Hope to see you soon.

Goodbye, Lebewohl, Adiós, Afscheid, Pożegnanie, Hwyl fawr.

This is it, the blogging is over. Now is the time to reflect on all that we have learnt over the past four months, since starting this blog.

The question was: How can the quality and diversity of news and current affairs output be maintained in the digital age?

We’ve all been researching, reading articles, watching videos, listening to podcasts, conducting interviews, tweeting…in an attempt to come to some sort of conclusion. Its been tricky as, unfortunately, we are not mind readers (life would be so much easier if we were), but we can take a stab at ‘guessing’ how the quality and diversity will be maintained.

Speaking with Tim Hubbard, form BBC Cornwall, he assured us that the BBC have a very rigorous and strong filtration process in place to prevent the material being broadcasted from exaggerating or losing the standard of BBC quality. He does believe that more and more content from the public makes the news richer and more diverse. He goes on to say that perhaps at a less funded news organisation there could be a danger of compromising quality in order to be diverse.

I am someone who is not shy to admit that I am sceptical over the whole Twitter phenomenon. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy tweeting and communicating via Twitter, but to a certain extent I feel as though Twitter and ‘news gathering’ should be kept quite separate. Apart from in breaking news scenarios, when yes I agree it can be very useful.

I fear that ‘real’ journalism will deteriorate and we will all become a nation of bloggers and tweeters and eventually lose the ability to communicate and actually go out and get our own interviews – OK so thats probably taking it too far, but you get my point. The other side of Twitter which worries me greatly is only being able to communicate via 140 character. Yes, it teaches us to write concisely and to the point, but I have seen numerous occasions where many well respected journalists have compromised their quality of grammar and spelling to fit their message into the 140 characters.

Sorry to pick on Jon Snow (@jonsnowC4), but here are three genuine tweets by him:

Exceptionally hard to reas Libya tionight: Gaddafi killing his people..but not in the numbers one woudl expect from vast tank presence..

Shd have read:Gadaffi manifestly not in caracas, even if conceivanbly crackers..seems to accept he’s being beaten

Wakened up in Delhi,here for a three day conference:teeming culture shock never dims:1st time I ever came here I drove here frm UK in a bus!

I don’t even need to pick out the shocking spelling mistakes and shortening of words to fit what he wants to say into one tweet.

OK, so I know this is probably an extreme example and you are probably all reading through this blog post now trying to find mistakes (and I’m sure there are plenty), but my point is that many younger followers of Jon Snow (and thousands of other celebrities who tweet) will think it is OK and the norm to shorten words. Our English vocabulary and diction could all change drastically in the next decade, all because of Twitter. Scary isn’t it.

So, what I am trying to say is that the BBC needs to be very careful to maintain their top standards during this time by using their strong filtration system they have in place. I feel as though we are at a tipping point as far as the digital media goes. We could fall either way and very soon. I only hope that we fall to the side where it is possible to maintain quality as well as keeping a diverse and culturally rich output.

We have touched upon so many different elements of the question throughout this blog and I am not going to analyse all of them here. But I feel as though, us four, as a group have grasped the question and all have a clear understanding as to how public service broadcasting can maintain its quality and diversity throughout the digital age. By keeping this blog and preparing for the presentation we have become aware of different aspects which we, as future journalists, should bear in mind in order to keep our content diverse, yet rich with quality.

BBC news

Twitter

BBC Guidelines

Tim Hubbard interview

So, thats it from me. After all I’ve said about Twitter, I’m going to take this opportunity to promote my personal Twitter feed: @lucybickerton

Bye!

All good things come to an end… (even this blog)

As we near the end of this blogging experience its time to sum everything up, wrap it up in a parcel and put it to bed.

However before we do I want to leave you with a rather funny set of blooper reels. Yes, we have been discussing how quality and diversity of public service broadcasting will be maintained in the digital age. We expect news at our fingertips 24 hours a day, so this said, mistakes are bound to occur – and they do… take a look at these spectacular, laugh out loud BBC bloopers -

The future of PSB in Europe

Unfortunately, I feel as if we have slightly neglected looking at public service broadcasting in other countries around Europe and the world. Some details may have been mentioned in passing, but we have not gone into too much detail about other countries that use PSB.

Here is an article from 2005 that gives an outline of the future of PSB in European countries:

The Future of Public Service Broadcasting in Europe and the Commonwealth

It may be slightly dated in terms of its publication, but nevertheless provides an important overview of what was planned for PSB in Europe over the last 6 years.

The end of the line

So in a couple of days this whole assignment will be over. I thought it would be a good idea to reflect on how it’s gone and what conclusions, if any, I’ve come to.

First of all, I wont lie, it has been tough to keep a blog going and to keep coming up with ideas whilst doing so much other stuff. But we’ve managed it.

I think we addressed the question in a well-balanced, structured way. We outlined what we thought the question meant and all the implications of the words. Then moved on to what the challenges were for each section.

Hopefully our presentation was the point that we reached a conclusion.  We decided that UGC is here to stay and that might cause a challenge to quality, but certainly not diversity. However, we think that if the BBC keeps its filter systems and ‘quality’ firmly at the heart of its programming, then they can maintain quality and diversity in the digital age.

I think if we’d have had more time, we could have gone into PSB in other countries but then I think our coverage of all would have been thin. I think we’ve delved really deep into the debate with the BBC. Our posts have generated discussion and disagreement, and hopefully made people think a little more about the topic.

I’ve enjoyed reading other people’s blogs too. Some posts were particularly interesting and I think press freedom and impartiality were rather difficult topics to write about and explore.

All in all, I think a good job has been done by all. Many of the topics, including ours, were difficult to come to conclusions about….but I think in the process of trying to… we learnt a lot.

Preserving Impartiality

The argument was really about whether impartiality as a virtue could survive the huge influx of technology which has constantly been paving open the way for a double ended conversation.

Doubts have been raised over whether this raises the chances of biased views and opinions and appearing on news websites, which have always worked towards maintaining a balanced view. But surely that itself preserves impartiality in the bigger picture doesn’t it?

It’s about not presenting just one view which is straight down the middle but also housing the various ones existing on either sides of the equilibrium – from extreme ends to the more liberal centre.

Whether it’s television, online, radio, it still ends up representing everyone’s views equally.

Without Bias. Surely if it houses every kind of opinion under the sun. Obviously there are comment filters but they are generally there to prevent abusive and intentionally offensive points of view. People can still have extreme views without malice. Then surely, that is only going to contribute to further preserving impartiality in the digital age.

User generated content: love it, or hate it?

In the world of journalism and the media there seems to be an increasing fear – at least amongst trainee journalists like me and my colleagues – that user generated content (UGC) is going to begin to weigh in more and more on the industry and take away part of the difficult trade that we are trying to perfect.

Personally, I originally only saw the bad side of this – news organisations able to get pictures and stories without the use of a journalist. Now, this seems a slightly far-fetched assumption. Having talked to Tim Hubbard from BBC Radio Cornwall and from looking deeper into the prospect and the future of user-generated content it seems an increasingly promising aspect of the media industry. The BBC , for example, have a very select filtration process in which they use only the best pictures they receive, as well as double or even triple checking stories before they are published.

UGC is unlikely to ever take away a journalist’s job, more likely it will only serve to aid them. This content can provide pictures and stories which might not otherwise have been found. In my eyes UGC is more a source or contact for news that is occasionally used if the pictures are amazing or unavailable otherwise.

Take a look at these videos from BBC employees to see what they think and then make up your mind:

Video shot on a camera phone by Rory Cellan-Jones and an interview with Matthew Eltringham, Head of User Generated Content at the BBC:

Matthew Eltringham, discusses UGC and social media in news:

The presentation: a look back

Well, I finally got around to going over our presentation, admittedly not with a tooth comb – that’s for the rest of you guys who had to watch us doing our thing…

It’s difficult to write something like this without being obviously biased – which obviously I would never be… – but I feel that overall it went as well as it could have done given the time constraints that we imposed on ourselves. In all honesty we left putting together the presentation until a bit late. Jess and Lucy did a fantastic job filming and putting together our opening video which I think I would be right in saying went down well with the audience? It was possibly a tad on the long side, but in the grand scheme of things I think that it really drew everyone’s attention.

Had we made it shorter  we may have been able to have delved deeper into the subject in the presentation, but we felt it was best to just outline the main themes, ideas and conclusions surrounding our question and leave the further details for the blog. I don’t want to go on too much about it as ultimately it’s up to the audience how well it went. What I will say is that I think we could have managed our time slightly better in the build up to the presentation, but I think that everything on the day went as smoothly as it possibly could have.

A short hand out may well have benefitted the overall understanding of the presentation, but then again it may well have detracted from it by people focusing their attention on that as opposed to the actual presentation.

Hopefully the sweets added a bit of flavour (you get it?) to the presentation as well.

agree, disagree? let me know….

Radio 4: too old, too white, too southern?

Radio 4 has been criticised for not appealing sufficiently to young people, northerners and ‘those from ethnic and minority backgrounds.’

The BBC Trust has said that BBC Radio 4 needs to appeal to younger audiences.

In response to this, Victoria Coren recently wrote in The Observer saying, “Hurray! Radio 4 is to get younger, cooler, more regional, more ‘ethnic’ and totally different in way.”

This quote has angered a part of me which believes in not pandering to EVERYONES needs.

In my opinion, why should the BBC create radio stations where everybody is made ‘welcome’. So what if Radio 4 seems a little too middle-aged and middle-class for the average Radio 1 listener. That is precisely why the BBC have more than one station – to have something unique for everyone. This is the way it should stay.

In response to the BBC Trust report, Rod Little in The Sunday Times wrote: “Isn’t it about time Radio 1′s bangin’ DJs Fabio and Grooverider attempted to broaden their listenership and reach out to an older, whiter and more middle-class audience?”

Don’t get me wrong, I am your average Radio 1 listener and that is the exact reason why I feel as though I have the right to comment on the quote by Victoria Coren.

I think her view can be classified as ‘diversity’ gone mad. This is a true example where the BBC will be prepared to lower the quality of their output to please the masses.

The Future of the BBC?

The video we used in our presentation…

Will the demand for quick, accessible news reduce broadcasts to twitter correspondents and ‘soft’ living room presenting?

We spoke to Tim Hubbard…he has faith in the BBC filtering process… believing the digital will only enhance output.