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.

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.

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 in the Digital Age

There are mixed opinions on Radio in the digital age despite the technological prowess making it more accessible to people at different points in the day.

You can listen to radio on the web now. That alone enhances the potential listenership, reaching those who haven’t got access to a radio set at the time, or the wider audiences across the globe who wouldn’t be able to get the frequency on the radio.

RAJAR released figures in 2009 about radio listenership expanding steadily and so did BBC Radio. Alexis Forsyth from Cardiff University has compared the positives and negatives of radio going on the technology platform.

Keeping quality in mind, a personal experience may help illustrate a point. As assistant producer of Cardiff City Phone In (CCPI), we were constantly contacted by listeners before, during, and after the show – giving us their feedback on different aspects of the show we produced.

While this may not be different from the time when technology hadn’t made as much headway, the difference here is it didn’t stop at direct phone calls. There was an online communal forum set up to discuss each CCPI show as it was broadcast.

When I personally had to step in once to present the show on a last-minute notice, we feared a negative backlash from the listeners. While none came over the phone, we had to watch out for the comments on the forum as well.

That’s added a realm of consumer control. There’s more scope now to criticise a bad broadcast or praise a good one. It isn’t just restricted to letters to the editor anymore.

The Digital Age

The concept seems simple enough in literal terms. Digital Age, used synonymously with the term ‘Information Age’ is the phenomenon of everyday lives; whether private or professional, being governed in some form or another by technology.

By technology, you would instantly think computers and the internet. it has been defined as ‘the practical application of science to commerce or industry’. Digital Age, would have to be the vastly expanded culture of using the exact science of the worldwide web in our everyday lives.

The fact that majority of our information today is derived from the Internet, facilitated with its ever-growing array of features and application uses, has perhaps made us very dependent on technology.

This has its positive as well as negative effects on our lives and society in general. Just the fact that this piece alone has been facilitated by the use of internet search engines, as it’s being written, goes to show how much we depend on technology to do what used to be done manually – physically going through books and other information sources to find the required information.

Even the use of the web-links above to link to other pieces of information, almost completely illustrates the point of this topic. I don’t have to staple a copy of what has been said, with this piece, to provide my points with some ground to stand on. I can simply provide your mouse cursors with an address to travel to in the blink of an eye and see for yourselves.

Before the uses of technology became prevalent, the travelling in this context would take a lot longer than a blink. But with technology, time required to perform a logistical task has been cut short by a long way. That is essentially what the Digital Age has done for us.

It has made information easier to access, with a lot less effort required on both ends of the stick.

Explore this Virtual Workspace.

Note the way all the different bits of related information are grouped and laid out, as it would in an office. Every work is credited to someone, and every piece of information is available to authorised personnel to access and facilitate their own work.

This would be possible manually as well of course, but think about the time factor required to do it that way. This isn’t to say technology is good or bad at the present moment, that’s what we’re out to discover eventually within the context of this project. This is merely an illustration.

Also, think about how else it would be possible for us to conduct this project, available for all to see, as and when it progresses.

Twitter

So we are now up and running with a twitter account…

Add us if you fancy joining the debate: @digi_challenge

More posts to come…

What we’re trying to do…

So as you may or may not have gathered… we four are trainee journalists.

Please don’t stop reading now.

As part of our MA we have to run this blog exploring a question which intends to get us thinking about the direction of the media, the ethics of journalism and the quality of output.

The Question: Regarding public service broadcasting, how can the quality and diversity of news and current affairs output be maintained in the digital age?

Our first posts will seek to define the meanings given in the question.

I will explore what quality is.

Lucy what diversity of output means.

James will define public service broadcasting.

Abs will tell us what the digital age actually entails.

Feel free to comment and let us know what you think…if we’re on the right track or you think we’ve got it totally wrong…we’re here to learn!

The Christening

So it begins. There’s 4 of us.

Abhijan Barua

James Horrell

Jessica Dowse

Lucy Bickerton

We’re going to have to research, analyse, and delve deep in to the subject of Public Service Broadcasting.

How it’s changing rapidly at break neck speed, and how it’s coping with the diversity of news available today via the umpteen different kinds of channels.

All of that, and much. Coming right up!