Substance and soundbites

The BBC's Politics Show today brought together the Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, and his Tory and Lib Dem shadows for a debate on this week's main political story - the row over the funding of personal care.   Presenter Jon Sopel understandably opened the interview by teasing out the sudden divergence of opinion on the subject, after an initial attempt at forging a cross-party consensus appeared to have been shattered by the Tory's "RIP Off" poster last week.   And so the political posturing began, with Conservative Andrew Lansley straight out of his starting blocks.

Andy Burnham's response to a direct question from Jon Sopel about the row was to meander off on a description of the issue itself, rather than focus on the political bust-up - normally an annoying diversionary tactic, but, on this occasion, one which seemed genuine enough.   Sopel was having none of it.   He assured the Health Secretary that the discussion would come round to the substance of the issue soon enough, but not before he had commented on the political fallout from the week's events.   The tenor of the discussion was set and, inevitably, the substance never really made it to the table.

It wasn't the fault of Jon Sopel.   It wasn't the fault of his Producer.   It was my (and possibly your) fault for routinely indulging ourselves in the latest political spat.   However much we might insist, po-faced, that we care only about the issues, our heads are easily turned by a bit of political theatre on the small screen.   

It is for that reason that package-based political programming is so worthwhile.   Ironically, The Politics Show is the only regular example of the genre on television, but it was obviously concluded that this particular topic demanded a three-way thrashing-out and nothing more.   In-depth, well-crafted packages deftly inform and engage - and we can always have our more combative cravings satisfied in a post-package 'debate'.   It is a formula which largely works well on The Politics Show and, traditionally, on many of ITV's regional political programmes - Granada's erstwhile Sunday Supplement being a prime example. 

As the broadcasters make their bold plans for the forthcoming General Election - leadership debates, swingometres and the rest - it's to be hoped they remember to provide an outlet for both the substance and the shouting matches.

Regional news - a confused picture

The GMG decision to sell the Manchester Evening news stable to Trinity Mirror is clearly an important development in the ever-changing landscape of the UK's provincial press.   However, from a broadcast news perspective,  it is the absence from the deal of Manchester television station Channel M which is particularly interesting.

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, the Tory idea for securing plurality in regional television news is the creation of dozens of city-based services across the country akin to Channel M.   Trinity's decision not to buy the station may have been purely a strategic one.   However, if the station is not soon snapped up from a GMG which seems willing to sell, a question mark would surely hang over the viability of the services which are a key tranche of Tory broadcasting policy.   And maybe then Jeremy Hunt's vehement opposition to those ITV regional news pilots might seem a little out of step.

Here's to the hierarchy of news

Where does news come from?   You might think that, six months into a Broadcast Journalism Masters, I'd be able to answer that poser in a heartbeat.  Not a bit of it.

I had naively imagined before embarking on the course that we were all going to be let in on some kind of industry secret about how journalists get a good story - or any story.   It transpires that the secret to finding a story as a trainee journalist is that rare combination of luck and judgement.   Luck that you happen across something of vague interest in the first place and judgement that you are able to discern just how vague the interest is permitted to be before it no longer constitutes a story.

Until, that is, you find yourself in the fortunate position of working for a news organisation with real status.   Then, it seems, stories have a habit of coming to you.   How else to explain the fact that the country's national and local press, not to mention broadcast media, are full of stories which elude the mortal trainee?   Because some of us just aren't very good?   Well, probably - but I think there is a more fundamental reason. 

News finds its way to the organisations with the greatest ability to disseminate it.   If you had information on anything from a church fayre to a big political scandal, where are you going to take it?   Some obscure blogger (asks the obscure blogger)?    No - the chances are you would go straight to one of the 'traditional' media outlets that are increasingly portrayed as some kind of stain on the modern media landscape.

That's not to say established media outlets have it easy when it comes to generating stories.   Much of their material will be down to old fashioned legwork and contacts.   Yet here again, they excel, because of the access their status affords them.   Real journalists from real news organisations succeed where trainees operating in an artificial environment never could.

All of which reinforces my innate scepticism about the fashionable concept that 'we're all journalists now'.   Even as a trainee, I don't consider myself a bona fide journalist - no authority has been conferred on my words.   The lack of status and access means that I could never aspire to emulate anything a traditional media outlet could produce.   

Some commentators seem to be confusing citizen journalism (the ability to state your opinion in a blog or get lucky with some mobile phone footage) with the craft of newsgathering and production.   The internet and those who populate it have undoubtedly opened up a new journalistic frontier.   The speed, breadth and depth of available information assists journalists enormously - but it should never replace them.   Elites are deeply unpopular in an age when the internet is seen as a great leveller.   Yet without a journalistic elite to gather, filter and judge the raw material, the competing, partial, biased voices of the internet could mislead us into thinking we know a lot about everything, when, in fact, we know very little about anything at all.  

The hierarchy of news remains intact - for now.   If the dark day ever comes when the presses stop rolling and the television news goes blank, then we had better hope the organisations behind them survive in some other form.   If they don't, then it won't just be trainees like me who will be missing out on stories - we all will.     

Regional news re-think?

A change of government in the Spring would doubtless have many consequences.   One of the less publicised (and, to many minds, less important) of these would be its effect on the future of regional news provision on ITV.   The Tories are now openly admitting they would scrap the fledgling concept of independently-financed news consortia (IFNCs).

This is hardly surprising, given their lukewarm response to last year's Digital Britain report, in which the proposal was first mooted.   What is surprising is their proposed solution - the creation of more than eighty "local media companies", which will be able to take advantage of plans for a burgeoning number of local television licences.   These LMCs will apparently generate sufficient advertising revenue across print, broadcast and on-line and will require no government subsidy, either directly or through the licence fee - the very reason the Tories run for the hills whenever IFNCs are mentioned.

This seems a curious standpoint for two reasons.   First, given the collapsing revenue and readership levels of the traditional local print media, why would LMCs with their websites (a concept with which most local newspapers are familiar) and their substandard television channels be any more successful?   Second, what would their presence mean for said crumbling local media, apart from a more rapid decline?

Meanwhile, even ITV is trying to distance itself from IFNCs, in spite of the fact that they were created as a solution to what the company claimed was an acute financial drain on ever-dwindling resources.   Contention over on-air branding and generation of advertising revenue around regional news lots (thereby reducing its potential ad minutage around peaktime audience grabbers) are the two most significant issues.   Yet surely these are mere sticking points in comparison to the implacable objection of a future government.

Encouragingly, there has been no shortage of bidders for the pilot schemes due to operate in Scotland, Wales and the Tyne Tees/Border areas.   Those of us keen to see the survival of a plural system of regional television news will be hoping some pretty watertight contracts are signed before May.    

All Talk

It used to be one of the great mysteries of U.K. radio - why can't local talk stations be commercially viable?   The demise of Edinburgh's Talk 107 a year ago and the ever-shifting format of City Talk 105.9 in Liverpool have provided a rather obvious answer to that poser - such services are simply too costly to sustain in view of the number of listeners they attract.

Outside of the capital, there doesn't appear to be a successful business model for an all speech local radio format.   After just over a year on air, City Talk applied for and was granted permission to introduce a 50/50 speech/music split outside of peaktime.   Yet within six months of implementing that change, they were back at the door of the regulator and now even bigger changes are afoot.   The station attracts around 50,000 listeners per week, but its share is a meagre 1% - to justify the cost of its operation, a talk station would probably have to equal or even out-perform the heritage ILR station in the area.   Sadly, it always seemed a big ask.

Whatever the reasons for the difficulties experienced by recent attempts at all-talk formats, the inherent lack of local commercial speech dates back nearly twenty years - in fact to the demise of another station bearing the name City Talk.   When the FM and AM frequencies of the early independent local radio stations began to broadcast separate programmes in the late 1980s, most operators rolled out an oldies service on medium wave.   Radio City, however, bravely went for the more daring option of a speech station - City Talk 1548AM.   Although it broadcast for only twelve hours each weekday, it was a class act and will almost certainly have required levels of investment which would make today's commercial groups balk.   Even with far less competition and so a much higher audience share, the station still didn't pay its way and the early 1990s recession is generally thought to have brought about its demise in 1991.   A valiant effort, nonetheless.

There is a key link between this era of local radio evolution and the fate of local talk stations today.   Radio City Gold, the station which rose out of the ashes of the original City Talk, retained a high level of speech content - full-length news programmes, discussion features within daytime programmes and the usual phone-ins.   Meanwhile, even licencees which hadn't gone down the talk route, still had speech quotas (mostly in terms of extended news bulletins) to adhere to - and these were largely fulfilled on their AM stations.   For a short time in the early 1990s, the U.K. had found its model for commercial speech.   It wasn't all-talk, because maybe that format was never going to be viable on a local level - but it was meaningful and largely popular speech-based local radio.

Unfortunately, the recently-formed Radio Authority soon paved the way for the erosion of this embryonic model before it had time to develop.   Mergers and format changes soon saw speech requirements jettisoned in favour of the quasi-national networks which we know and, according to listening figures, don't really love today.   The regulator rolled over at almost every request.   Meanwhile, unrealistic speech quotas were being forced onto applicants for the new small-scale licences of the late 1990s, which had neither the resources nor the editorial area to justify them.

The opportunity to make speech an integral part of strong local AM stations was missed.     Had it been taken, these stations might today have been a worthwhile competitor to BBC local radio.   They might even have been driving the migration of an important sector of the audience to digital radio - and we almost certainly wouldn't have witnessed two brave, but ultimately aborted attempts at all-talk local radio.         

Head-to-head hype?

The Presidential-style debates which have threatened to cross the Atlantic for so long will finally put in an appearance in the U.K. during next year's General Election campaign.   It was confirmed today that the three main party leaders will all take part in a trio of a ninety-minute shows to be broadcast by the BBC, ITV and Sky.

The general consensus amongst politicians and commentators seems to be that this heralds a victory for democracy.   To some extent, that will undoubtedly be true - but I'm not altogether convinced that such occasions represent the zenith of democratic debate.  

Surely there is an inherent danger that the theatre of the occasion will take over and very little will be revealed in the way of detailed policy.   The inadequacies of the only comparable event - Prime Minister's Questions - will be magnified.   It will be all soundbites and pseudo anger.   Factor into the equation the heightened level of interest in the occasion when compared with the average PMQs and you are soon confronted with another problem.   The leaders will be so hamstrung by the fear of having their words and every nuance of their performance analysed to the nth degree that they will be more reluctant than usual to deal in the currency of candour.

The issue of fairness to nationalist parties was quickly raised and the suggestion is that there might be other debates scheduled in the nations involving the leaders of the parties in the devolved assemblies.   However, that doesn't address a related issue - namely, the fact that three-way debates like this inevitably skew the political debate in favour of the three main parties.   That seems a shame in an election when minority parties might be expected to put in a strong showing - but it was ever thus.

For me, the pre-election coverage in 2005 had the potential to be far more illuminating than anything proposed for next year.   The one-on-one leadership interviews conducted by Paxman for Newsnight and Jonathan Dimbleby for ITV boasted the kind of forensic interrogation of our political leaders that we only really get during an election campaign.   For some reason, this style of political programme seems to have fallen out of favour over the past five years.

The BBC ditched "On The Record" in the early 2000s for a more package-based affair in "The Politics Show."   Meanwhile, ITV turned Jonathan Dimbleby's one hour, one minister discussion into a sofa-based melting pot which did neither the presenter nor the audience any favours.   When Dimbleby left soon after, ITV attempted a return to the highbrow with Andrew Rawnsley fronting "The Sunday Edition", but this was scheduled into oblivion before the channel decided to jettison its national political programming altogether.   An unwise move for many reasons, not least because they don't now have a seasoned political heavyweight to front their version of leaders debate - luckily for them,  Alistair Stewart is more than up to the job.   Channel Four, inexplicably, has not scheduled a regular political programme for more than a decade.

As for next year's debates, I might be pleasantly surprised by the way in which they engage with and mobilise a mass audience.   Yet even if they succeed on that level, will the viewing public be any better informed by the time credits begin to roll?

Chequing out

This week, another once reassuringly familiar aspect of our daily lives has been deemed too outdated to be allowed to encroach too far into the twenty-first century.   The cheque is next up to be written into history.

At the behest of a usually faceless committee going under the moniker the Payments Council, this three centuries' old method of payment will become a relic as of 2018.   I use the term "usually faceless," because, on the day of the announcement, a representative from the organisation hawked himself around various media outlets to tell us all how little we use cheques these days.   Granted, their use has more than halved from a peak in 1990, but something about this method of payment still prompts us to write four million of them a day.

The Payments Council admits there are certain situations in which only a cheque will do - and says an alternative will have to be developed in the next few years.   If, like me, you're asking why we need a safe, easy alternative to the cheque when we have, er, the cheque, then the answer is simple - cost.   It costs our cash-strapped banks £1 to process cheques (in a delightfully quaint process which involves all cheques being gathered and inspected in London),  but only a quarter of that to administer a chip and pin payment.

Self-evidently, debit and, more worryingly, credit cards are a more convenient method of payment in many instances than the cheque.   The days of having to register your intention to use one of these new-fangled plastic cards before you did your weekly shop at the supermarket (and I'm sure I haven't imagined that) are long gone.   So I'm not suggesting we retain expensive clearing apparatus when only a couple of octogenarians in Western Super Mare are still writing them - but why can't the consumer decide if and when they want to abandon the cheque altogether?   Apparently, in these situations, bodies like the Payments Council bear a responsibility to "manage decline."   Is that manage, or hasten?   

Granadaland goes digital

It feels like it's been talked about for years.   Ah, right - it has.

The much-vaunted digital switchover came to Granadaland this morning and sixty years of broadcasting tradition were wiped out at the flick of a switch (probably).   Sadly, but predictably, neither the public-funded BBC nor the once federal ITV saw fit to mark the occasion with any kind of "farewell to analogue" special.   Granted, that sounds horrendously dull, but done well, it could have been an interesting and fitting look back at television's halcyon days.

For those days are now surely gone.   There's always the danger of a rose-tinted view of television from days of yore, but the plethora of choice heralded by digital is in no way proportional to quality.   Remember when television was just about modern enough to be good, but still remained a comforting, genuinely exciting presence in the corner of the living room?   It was probably around the mid-1980s, when we had four whole channels to choose from and the medium was a cohesive, homogenising force - while still being quaint enough not to broadcast for much of the day.   Now, it just feels like everything's been done before - only better.

As for the demise of Ceefax/Teletext, it's an insult that these once innovative (and still undeniably useful and used) services have been replaced by digital text, a set up so woefully inadequate as not to be worthy of the name.   The rectilinear graphics of our youth could have survived into the digital age - but nobody cared enough to save them.

Today, more than usual, I feel like an analogue man in digital times.

Redrawing the map for ITV regional news

At last - an announcement about the future of ITV in the regions which isn't just about allowing further drift towards the impending digital glacier looming larger than ever on the broadcasting horizon.

For so long we've been used to OFCOM and the Department for Culture Media and Sport acquiescing to ITV's (from a commercial outlook, understandable) demands to reduce its presence in the regions.   First, the non-news regional quota was slashed and then virtually abolished.   Next, network production outside bases in London and Manchester sharply declined and once iconic production centres like Central and Yorkshire were reduced to little more than a collection of offices.   Finally, and most damagingly, various regions and sub-regions were merged to create geographically meaningless newsgathering areas - viewers suddenly found that their 'regional' news could now encompass places as far as two hundred miles away.

As a fan of ITV regional news and a firm believer in plurality, I feared for the future - I feared whether there was a future.   The announcement late last week by Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw that trials of so-called Independently-Financed News Consortia (IFNCs) would begin next year (in the Scotland, Wales, Tyne Tees and Border areas) was a welcome one.   It is probably not the panacea I would like to be, but it's a step in the right direction.

There are certainly some issues which need addressing, the most obvious being the question of where the "independent finance" comes from.   The perceived wisdom is that it will originate from that part of the licence fee reserved in recent years for funding the digital switchover.   That is top-slicing in all but name.   Personally, I am surprisingly indifferent about it, but it is far from a done deal.

Another issue is the composition of the consortia themselves.   Several local newspaper groups view INFCs as a much-needed way of diversifying, but concerns have been expressed about the ability of print media to operate a broadcast-led operation.   For me, local newspapers undoubtedly have a contribution to make in this evolving model, although I would probably be more comfortable with an established broadcast news provider like ITN taking the lead.

Then there's the Tories.   The other side of a general election, a future Conservative government would seem to favour taking the IFNC approach beyond what I believe to be its logical conclusion.   Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has suggested creating a network of local TV stations, adopting some aspects of the successful American model.    In the States, there is competition between local broadcasters serving the same populations.   Hunt concedes that there isn't the scale for this in the U.K., but believes monopolies of privately-funded local commercial broadcasters could be created.

As far as I'm concerned, the U.S. model, albeit modified, simply doesn't transfer to the U.K..   Local television news, let alone local television per se, would be too parochial and poorly funded to attract an audience.   It could only mimic what local radio and the struggling provincial press already does so well - but which would be too naff to contemplate on screen.   It would replicate the problem in local radio about ten years ago, whereby heritage stations with large populations were allowed to jettison many of their news commitments, whilst ultra-local stations had unrealistic quotas imposed on them even though they served unsustainably small audiences.   Television is much more deft at reflecting, perhaps even forging, a strong regional identity in otherwise disparate areas.

That's not to say the slightly anachronistic map of the ITV regions shouldn't be redrawn.   There are clear anomalies, such as the presence of the Scottish Borders in an English ITV franchise.   Other tweaks to questionable border demarcations could also be made and, at the very least, the level of regionality enjoyed by viewers pre-2009 should be reinstated.   This is eminently possible, since the annual budget for ITV regional news stood at £100 million before this year's mergers and that is now the level of funding being suggested for the IFNCs.   Noises from the DCMS suggest that they share my sentiment and it is one aspect of the proposals which should be non-negotiable.   If broadcast regional news needs one thing to survive it is an injection of relevance.

There is still plenty to be finalised, both about the trials themselves and any concrete inception of IFNCs in the near future.   For once, though, I'm excited - and it's a long time since I've been able to say that about the future of regional news on ITV.

What's all this about, then?

Now, why would you be reading this?   No offence meant - it was a genuine question.   Apart from people who know me and might make the effort to visit a blog like this once in a while (probably to spare my feelings more than anything), why would anybody else be interested?

If I were in the public consciousness, that would be different.   If I were a politician, journalist or broadcaster (rather than an aspiring one), there would undoubtedly be a whole swathe of people tracking my every blogged utterance - but I'm not.    And that's why I have a slight problem with the 'blogosphere'.   It all seems just a little bit conceited.   Cue the digital obsessives who'll be wailing how, to use the well-worn phrase of the year, I "just don't get it."

So having spectacularly failed to answer the first question, here comes another.   Given all that, why am I adding my voice to the ever increasing background hum of comment, opinions and unnecessary bile?   Well, hopefully, I'll manage to avoid the bile element of the proceedings for a start.   The overriding reason, though, is pure self-interest.  

Trainee broadcast journalists up and down the country are having the multi-platform message drummed into them - some of us take a little more drumming than others.     Maybe it's because, on the one hand, I'm being taught how to make finely honed and crafted radio and television packages and, on the other, being told that any old hastily arranged pictures or tatty bit of audio will do so long as it can be thrown into a mash-up (eh?) and flashed around the world in a nanosecond.   It kind of makes you fear for the future of your chosen medium and causes you to resent the brave, new, converged, multi-platform world a little more than you probably should. 

Anyway, having flirted with Twitter (and felt dirty and cheap for the pleasure), I think my contribution to the digital world can best be made here - as a little analogue outpost, gently nudging readers in the direction of those 'traditional' media which our digital cousins talk about with such rancour and vitriol.    Now that probably isn't the spirit in which I've been advised to engage with digital, but at least I've got a blog - what more do you want?