Latest entry
- James Stephenson
- 6 Jan 09, 10:31 AM
The BBC is lucky to have two outstanding producers in our Gaza office, Rushdi Abu Alouf and Hamada Abuqammar. They have been well trained, not least by Alan Johnston, and are giving calm, accurate, accounts of what is happening. Hamas has not imposed any restrictions on their reporting and they have been a model of impeccable journalism, in terrible personal circumstances. Most of us go home when the story is over. Gaza is their home.
The great frustration so far, is that we have not been able to send colleagues to help report the story in Gaza. The Israelis have not let any journalists in since the fighting started, despite a ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court that they should do so. We are obviously pressing as hard as we can to get in.
Since we can't get our own crews and correspondents into Gaza, we are dependent on our shots from the border and news agency pictures from inside. The aerial bombardment on Gaza has been easily visible, both on the Israeli and Egyptian border. The continued rocket fire out of Gaza has also been clear to see and film.
So far we have not seen any footage of the fighting on the ground. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the conflict, we are certainly seeing images of its consequences - destroyed buildings and many dead and injured Palestinians and the more limited death and destruction on the Israeli side.
There is a military censor in Israel and we've received text messages reminding us that any material touching on national security is meant to be submitted before broadcast. In practice, we haven't cleared anything before use. At one point, we had a live position next to Israeli artillery near the border with one cannon in clear view. We were not allowed to show a wide shot revealing the extent and location of the battery - and we said so in the live broadcast.
The Israeli military declared a closed military zone around Gaza a couple of days into the conflict and tried to push the broadcasters' satellite trucks back from their vantage points overlooking the Strip. A game of cat and mouse followed and we have been able to keep going with a view over the border. We've also reported live from Sderot, the Israeli town most threatened by the rocket fire from Gaza.
James Stephenson is chief of the Jerusalem bureau
Recent entries
- Derren Lawford
- 5 Jan 09, 01:26 PM
Today sees the official launch of the new Panorama website and I hope you won't mind me saying a few words about it here and seeing whether you think that this is a good use of the web by a TV programme.
So much work goes into a 30 minute Panorama or a one hour special and the website struck me as the perfect platform to showcase the best of our journalism online. Britain's Terror Heartland is a prime example; blog posts from Tom Giles and Jane Corbin provided extra context, while an extended interview with Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik gave those of you interested in the subject an extra perspective. Jane also wrote a feature on the programme and introduced it online in a short video.
I was also very keen for the new Panorama website to be more interactive and responsive to you, the people that use it. You should now find it easier to both get in contact with the programme and e-mail us any story ideas too. Where possible, we'll follow them up and see what can be done.
And even if you are already familiar with the website, there's more to read, watch, comment on and contribute to. If you're coming to the website for the first time, hopefully there's enough interesting material - features, picture galleries, short videos, full length films and blog posts - to make it somewhere you would like to come back to again.
While working on the relaunch, Ofcom published its latest report on the communications industry which made interesting reading, especially as 26% of those aged 15-24 claim to use the internet for "watching TV programmes", up 16% on the year before. 51% used the web for "watching video clips/webcasts", up by the same amount. But the report also noted an increase across all the age ranges for audio-visual content online and that the fastest growing online community is actually the oldest (although they are still in the minority).
Luckily, we were already planning to reflect this changing attitude to media online, which is why the first thing you'll probably have noticed when you look at the front page is a big embedded video player. This will either have key moments from a current Panorama programme or a reporter's take on the film they've made.
Now, just as I took over the Panorama website, there was a story in Broadcast magazine that said that Panorama was going to start doing online "minisodes". Having previously created and produced them for BBC Three's award-winning Current Affairs strand, Born Survivors, this was a reasonable assumption to make. However, I felt that the Panorama website needed a wider variety of video footage.
That's why there's a new section called Panorama Video Extras, a mixture of extra exclusive programme footage, original material made by my multiplatform team, re-versioned snippets from the programme, classic clips - and the odd minisode, too.
And after seeing the impact that the Born Survivors Season can have on other platforms outside the BBC, I was determined that we have a presence in the appropriate places too. So you can now keep up to date with the latest goings on in Panorama via Twitter, check out the archive on Delicious and watch some key moments from our films on YouTube.
We're now fully integrated with the iPlayer and the BBC's online programmes pages too, so hopefully when you come to the website you should now find it a lot simpler to catch up on the latest Panorama programme on iPlayer.
But I also wanted to make it easier to watch Panorama online for longer, a full 12 months after they are broadcast in fact. We've actually been doing this for a while, but judging by the e-mails we receive, not a lot of you are aware of this. That's why we've created a new section on the homepage called "Watch previous programmes in full". It does exactly what it says on the tin.
I mentioned blogs earlier, so who can you expect to hear from on the Panorama team? Well, the likes of our online archivist specialist Eamonn Walsh will be thematically linking programmes from the present to the past, giving classic clips a fresh airing and reflecting on the programmes from our past that you still chat about online.
Then from the main production team, there's Panorama Deputy Editor Tom Giles and reporters Jane Corbin, Raphael Rowe and John Sweeney. And of course I look forward to you all joining in the various debates too (indeed, some of you have already). Whether it's on our own blogs or your own, we'll do our best to make it one big (no doubt heated at times) conversation.
There's more...
One of the main things I felt was lacking from the old website was a permanent and prominent space for the reporters. For all their investigative and award-winning endeavours, there didn't seem to be enough information about them online. So we've created a new section called "The Team" and completely revamped all their pages with new pictures, text and the first in a series of bespoke videos that should give you a better idea of what makes the likes of Paul Kenyon, Vivian White and Raphael Rowe want to be a Panorama reporter today.
But I was acutely aware that despite the achievements of Panorama in 2008 and the technological advancements that allow a website to offer so much more, the programme itself has been around for 55 years.
To better reflect Panorama's enduring legacy, you can now find, among other things, a 50th anniversary film and microsite; a video timeline that charts Panorama through the decades; a picture gallery of famous faces from Panorama's past and a fun quiz to test your knowledge of the programme.
So all in all, lots of changes and hopefully lots more for you to get your teeth into. As ever, if there's anything you rate or hate, e-mail me at panorama@bbc.co.uk with "website" as the subject - or leave a comment below.
Derren Lawford is Panorama's Multiplatform Editor.
- Peter Hanington
- 5 Jan 09, 01:24 PM
In recent years, our annual post explaining and apologising for the Today Programme guest editors has been little more than an excuse to namedrop and to tell a few bad jokes.
This year's will be no different. But we'd like to make one or two observations as well.
Observation 1: One of the most interesting things about being involved with guest editors is watching two different worlds meet - or, in some cases, collide.
This year's editors were Zadie Smith, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, Jarvis Cocker, Sir Win Bishoff and Zaha Hadid. So we're talking about journalism (that's us) rubbing up against literature, the Catholic church, pop music, big banking and high end architecture (that's them).
And in most cases, we rubbed along fine. But of course there were occasional misunderstandings.
Zaha Hadid is a brilliant architect - the artist's architect some call her - and she's a delight to work with. But some of her ideas can be a little hard to get your head around if you haven't had the proper training. Talking architecture with her involved climbing a learning curve as steep as the Seagram building.
At one of our early meetings we sat at a tableful of prototypes for various Hadid projects currently in production.
TODAY PROGRAMME: Ah, that's beautiful. Is that the Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre?
ZAHA: No, that's a coffee pot.
TODAY: Oh. How about that - more kitchenware?
ZAHA No. That's the Vitra Fire Station in Germany.
TODAY: Right. What about this? The Glasgow Transport museum?
ZAHA: No, that's a shoe. Are there any other producers who might want to work on my programme?
And finally.
Zadie Smith is a writer. A clever writer. Writers sit in small silent rooms, alone, and write. We at the Today Programme are journalists. We sit in a big noisy room full of mice and interrupt each other every minute and a half. So when we asked Zadie for question ideas to help Evan (probably the only man we know who wouldn't actually need them) to interview the world's cleverest neuroscientist about rectilinear shapes, grouping, and gull chicks who like abstract art more than their mothers, instead of a few lazy, ill-informed jottings we get several hundred words of sculpted prose which could be published as an expert academic analysis of said clever neuroscientist.
If that weren't intimidating enough, Zadie wasn't just first in line when the brains were handed out. She also pushed to the front of the height, kindness and general comeliness queue. It was too much for some of our producers.
This is a transcript of an early meeting between Zadie and the Today production team:
ZADIE: The interesting thing about Obama's oratory is that he uses all the classic Greek ingredients: pathos, logos and, er...
TODAY PROGRAMME: (excitedly) Porthos... no, Aramis.
ZADIE: I think those are two of the three musketeers. Ethos. That's it. Ethos.
TODAY PROGRAMME: Ethos, yes. Ethos. Can I marry you?
So that's our first observation and I can't really remember what Observation 2 was, apart from possibly that an incredible amount of work goes into these programmes from quite a few people (special mentions for Helen Margolis and Tom Colls - all the others, you know who you are, thank you).
Next year, you ask? We're already planning it: JD Salinger and Robert Mugabe are interested.
by Peter Hanington and Dan Clarke. Peter Hanington is assistant editor, Today programme.
Peter Hanington is assistant editor, Today programme
- Giles Wilson
- 29 Dec 08, 03:50 PM
If you read Boxing Day warnings given in the Daily Mail by media commentator Stephen Glover, you might believe that the blogs written by senior BBC reporters such as Robert Peston, Nick Robinson and Justin Webb were sounding the death knell of journalistic integrity at the BBC. Mr Glover's thesis was that blogs "corrupt the distinction between news and views which is supposed to be sacrosanct at the BBC", and he said that by allowing "the proliferation of blogs", BBC managers were "disregarding the Corporation's duty to be impartial".
There are two things which need to be said in response to these concerns. The first is that Mr Glover is quite right to point out the importance to the BBC of the distinction between news and comment, the value that our audiences attach to it, and the dangers for reporters who "let their hair down" (Mr Glover's phrase) and allow their normal standards to drop, simply because they are writing in a blog. We at the BBC are acutely aware of these points.
But the second thing which needs saying is to reject the implication of his article that for a reporter to write a blog necessarily means them becoming purveyors of opinion and comment. He claims it is "impossible to write a half-readable blog without peppering it with opinions". That's just not true. We look to our expert editors such as Nick and Robert to tell us what has happened, to explain why it is or isn't important, what it means, and even what might be the effect. As to what their personal opinions about the news are, well, that's just not the business we're in.
Mr Glover also says "hard-pressed journalists are not using their time well if they spend hours penning blogs". I'm afraid the millions of people who look at our blogs will, like me, disagree with him. Research published by the BBC Trust in May this year, well before Robert's blog became such a useful companion to the credit crunch and recession, indicated that the BBC's blogs are "already highly appreciated by audiences" - and that even those who do not use them recognise their value.
Giles Wilson is editor of BBC News blogs
- Rod McKenzie
- 18 Dec 08, 03:30 PM
Losing your job is a bitter blow for most of us: for young people that blow can be much more bitter and brutal.
Below the headlines of the latest jobless stats lurks a worrying figure for teenagers and early 20-somethings: one in seven under 25s is now out of a job.
When firms cut jobs young workers are often hardest hit. More than 700 a day are signing up for the dole, the fastest rate since Labour came to power in 1997.
So getting a firm foothold on the bottom rung of the career ladder is a challenge: losing that foothold easy. Temporary and casual contracts are the norm - with big firms and service and retail sectors cutting back, many jobhunters are finding their prospects are bleak.
Our reporter Jim Reed spoke to some of them for pieces broadcast on Radio 1's Newsbeat, 1Xtra News and Breakfast News on BBC1. We set up some advice on the Newsbeat website.
And many listeners contacted us. 1Xtra's - the youngest of any BBC adult service with a median age of 21 - had their say.
K.H.Z said: "I graduated from uni in summer, have all the skills needed 4 a job an i cant get anything cuz of experience. I have a fultime job on minimum wage an i should b earning at least double! Vexes me propa."
Another added: "Im 18 and was made redundant 4 months ago iv applied for at least 50 jobs and around 5 hav got bak to me sayin i need experience i dont want to b on job seekers allowance i feel sick knowin im able to work yet nobody will give me work."
But not everyone from the age group was sympathetic - an 18 year old soldier texted us to say: "Its easy to find a job regardless of the economy, its pure laziness. Why not join the armed forces? Most young people cant be bothered."
So what do you think?
Rod McKenzie is editor of Newsbeat and 1Xtra News
- Tom Giles
- 17 Dec 08, 08:28 AM
It's never easy to make documentaries in Pakistan - especially for journalists who, like those on Panorama, aren't based there.
Given the startling access Jane Corbin and her cameraman/producer Nikki Millard got - not only to the troubled areas around Peshawar, but also to the Pakistan army's battles with militants linked to al-Qaeda and the Taleban in the tribal areas - the new civilian government at least appears serious about showing (some) of what it's up to.
And, despite a war of words over the Americans' use of Predator drones to target militant bases in these areas, Pakistan's efforts have so far been welcomed by many in the US. And that matters. President-elect Obama has made a great deal out of promising to shift the focus of the "War on Terror" to Afghanistan.
Many are sceptical that he can pull off what will be one of the biggest issues of his administration. So both Washington and London will be exerting maximum pressure to ensure that future troop deployments won't be undermined by a porous Afghan-Pakistan border and an ambivalent Pakistani government.
Just how damaging this ambivalence has been in the recent past is eye-poppingly chronicled in this, highly-influential book. None of which makes the job of reporting or filming there any easier.
Jane and Nikki took sizeable, if considered, risks in getting some of their footage. They arrived in Peshawar - already a very tense city - on the day an American aid worker was shot dead and an Iranian diplomat kidnapped.
There are regular threats to Western journalists in Kabul too. So there had to be a clear reason to take such risks. The title, Britain's Terror Heartland, gets to the nub of it. Obtuse - even provocative - perhaps, but the facts and figures bear it out.
Separately, Gordon Brown stressed this on Sunday. British security services are believed to be monitoring some 2,000 individuals - and an estimated 30 active terror plots - the majority connected to Pakistan in some way.
Perhaps as a consequence, we also had to obscure or drop the identity of at least one person in the film for legal reasons. This will be a sensitive, challenging, subject for a long time to come.
Tom Giles is deputy editor of Panorama
- Steve Herrmann
- 16 Dec 08, 03:16 PM
The team of journalists, developers and designers who produce the graphics, maps, tables and multimedia projects for the News website have been researching and compiling data on homicides of teenagers in the UK over the past year, in order to piece together a detailed picture of what has been happening across the country. They have just published a map, searchable table and graphics showing this information, and team leader Bella Hurrell has written about how it was done and the thinking behind it here.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website
- Peter Horrocks
- 5 Dec 08, 04:10 PM
I'd like to explain about a mistaken report which BBC News carried yesterday. Around 1915 GMT yesterday there was a security alert at Delhi airport sparked by reports of gunshots, which the BBC News channel in the UK reported at 2010 GMT.
A BBC News correspondent who was travelling through the airport was involved in the security alert and reported on air that airport staff had told him that six gunmen had been killed. Versions of this initial report were subsequently carried by the BBC World News TV channel and by BBC News online.
Following urgent checks by BBC News teams and denials by the Indian authorities we subsequently and rapidly reported that six gunmen had not been killed. The security alert had apparently been sparked by a false alarm. We made clear in the online story that our earlier report had been wrong and this remained in the story subsequently.
Clearly we shouldn't have given the reports the weight that we did, and I regret that we did so. At the time we believed them to be correct on the basis of the information received by a BBC reporter on the ground but it is clear that we should have continued with further checks before going as far as we did.
Peter Horrocks is head of BBC Newsroom
- Peter Horrocks
- 5 Dec 08, 08:25 AM
There has been comment about recent coverage on the BBC and elsewhere of changing attitudes towards Down's Syndrome. My colleague Rob Ketteridge, editor of the documentaries unit in Audio and Music Factual, explains.
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On Monday 24 November the Radio 4 documentary "Born With Down's" and BBC News reported that more babies are being born with Down's Syndrome than at any time since prenatal screening began in 1989. In 1989 there were 717 Down's Syndrome births. This figure then fell to a low point of 572 in 2001, since when there has been a steady increase to 749 in 2006 - the last year for which figures are available. Since 2001 the proportion has risen ahead of the overall birth rate.
So far so good and accurate. But do the headline statistics support the idea that more parents are choosing to continue with pregnancies after Down's Syndrome has been diagnosed or when it is a high risk? And if so, is there any evidence that a reason for this could be that social attitudes towards Down's Syndrome are changing?
Since the documentary was broadcast these questions have become a matter of fierce debate, with some of the medical experts and statisticians as well as some journalists challenging these hypotheses. One issue they have raised is that there has been an increase in the number of older mothers with a higher risk factor for Down's Syndrome during this period. They argue that the rising trend is therefore predictable and without prenatal screening it would be significantly higher. They also state that from 1989 to 2006 the proportion of women choosing to terminate a pregnancy following prenatal diagnosis of Down's Syndrome has remained constant at around 92%.
To shed more light on this, we need to look at the data in more detail. Bear with me because things are about to get more complex.
The figures are published annually by the National Down Syndrome Cytogenetic Register run by Joan Morris who is Professor of Medical Statistics at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine in London. Follow this link [pdf] and look at Table 7 on Page 8 of the latest report for 2006. The table shows that in 1989 there were 1033 diagnoses of Down's Syndrome in total, of which only 30% approximately (318) were prenatal. There were 717 live births and 290 terminations that year. In 2006 there were 1877 diagnoses, of which approximately 60% or 1132 were prenatal, leading to 749 live births and 767 terminations.
So: in 1989 there were 318 prenatal diagnoses and 290 terminations; in 2006 there were 1132 prenatal diagnoses and 767 terminations. On the face of it, the proportion for those choosing to terminate after a prenatal diagnosis in 2006 doesn't look anything like the 92% figure.
But - and it is an important but - the 2006 figures also reveal that in that year there were 293 cases of "Unknown Outcome" - a figure that has also been rising over the years. If a high proportion of these were in fact terminations then the 92% figure starts to look accurate.
Last week I contacted Professor Morris to ask about this. She said: "To obtain the true proportion of women who decide to terminate their pregnancy we had to analyse a subset of the data from cytogenetic laboratories for whom we had excellent follow-up (in other words areas of the country in which we had extremely few unknown outcomes). In these laboratories we found that 92% of prenatal diagnoses were terminated." A footnote to the published tables also states that: "A large proportion of the missing outcomes are from one single large private cytogenetic laboratory in London, which analyses samples from women throughout the South East of England."
So: there is little evidence here, according to Professor Morris, for a shift in social attitudes leading more parents to continue with a pregnancy after Down's Syndrome has been diagnosed prenatally. Some have argued that the consistency of the 92% figure over this period isn't in itself very surprising: the diagnostic tests (such as amniocentesis) carry a small risk of miscarriage and the argument is that most parents who go ahead with them are likely to be decided on termination already if a positive diagnosis is received.
However none of this tells us much about the still large number of cases where a conclusive prenatal diagnosis isn't made. In some cases parents might have refused diagnostic testing because of the miscarriage risk or because they had decided to continue with the pregnancy whatever the outcome might be.
What do we know about the views of parents in this last category? There has so far been little evidence. Surprised by the rising numbers, the Down's Syndrome Association conducted a survey of some of its members to coincide with the programme. In many cases religious reasons were given for continuing with a pregnancy when Down's Syndrome had been diagnosed or was a high risk. But, as we reported, a significant number also cited changing social attitudes towards people born with Down's Syndrome.
Such evidence is interesting but inconclusive. What is more certain is that the original documentary and other reports could have included more information about the complexity of the data underneath the headline figures - as necessary qualification and context - and more fully represented the debate about how to interpret it.
Better understanding - not just of the data and other evidence, but also of Down's Syndrome itself and social attitudes towards it for which we are all responsible - seems to be clearly needed. Primarily, though, the documentary focussed movingly, and from more than one point of view, on parents who have Down's Syndrome babies and it engaged with their experiences.
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I would just add that one of the claims made by Ben Goldacre in his Bad Science blog and Guardian column is that when Professor Morris issued her clarifications after the story was initially covered in newspapers and online, "everybody ignored them, nobody has clarified". That's not true - our website's health pages were updated as soon as we had spoken to her.
Peter Horrocks is head of BBC Newsroom
- Steve Herrmann
- 4 Dec 08, 10:25 AM
There's been discussion of the role played by Twitter in the reporting of the Mumbai attacks and of the way that we made use of it on the BBC News website.
During the crisis, we monitored this microblogging service, along with the material being filed by our own reporters and a wide range of other sources, and referenced or linked to all of these on a "live updates" page as the events unfolded.
Our aim with these pages (we did something similar during the US election) is to provide news, analysis, description and comment in short snippets as soon as it becomes available. It is a running account, where we are making quick judgments on and selecting what look like the most relevant and informative bits of information as they come in, rather than providing the more considered version of events we are able to give in our main news stories of the day.
These accounts move more quickly and include a wider array of perspectives and sources, not all verified by us, but all attributed, so that in effect we leave some of the weighing up of each bit of information and context to you.
During the Mumbai attacks, we gave prominence in our running account to the latest information from our correspondents on the ground, but we also included breaking lines from news agencies, Indian media reports, official statements, blog posts, Twitter messages ("tweets") and e-mails sent in to us, taking care to source each of these things.
Some of the many e-mails we received and the follow-up contacts contributed directly to our reporting, with first-hand accounts of the events including that of Andreas Liveras, who was, sadly, later killed in the violence.
As for the Twitter messages we were monitoring, most did not add a great amount of detail to what we knew of events, but among other things they did give a strong sense of what people connected in some way with the story were thinking and seeing. "Appalled at the foolishness of the curious onlookers who are disrupting the NSG operations," wrote one. "Our soldiers are brave but I feel we could have done better," said another. There was assessment, reaction and comment there and in blogs. One blogger's stream of photos on photosharing site Flickr was widely linked to, including by us.
All this helped to build up a rapidly evolving picture of a confusing situation.
But there are risks with running accounts that we haven't been able to check, and my colleague Rory Cellan-Jones has written about one piece of unsubstantiated information circulating on Twitter which we reported, suggesting that the Indian government had asked for an end to Twitter updates from Mumbai.
Should we have checked this before reporting it? Made it clearer that we hadn't? We certainly would have done if we'd wanted to include it in our news stories (we didn't) or to carry it without attribution. In one sense, the very fact that this report was circulating online was one small detail of the story that day. But should we have tried to check it and then reported back later, if only to say that we hadn't found any confirmation? I think in this case we should have, and we've learned a lesson. The truth is, we're still finding out how best to process and relay such information in a fast-moving account like this.
Is it confusing to have reports from our own correspondents, along with official statements, pictures, video, accounts from other media, bloggers, emails and Twitter, all together on the same page? It's true that normally we separate them out - news stories in one place, correspondents' reports in another, Have Your Say comments and links to blogs somewhere else.
But on a major unfolding story there is a case also for simply monitoring, selecting and passing on the information we are getting as quickly as we can, on the basis that many people will want to know what we know and what we are still finding out, as soon as we can tell them.
So as the story progresses, as one element of the coverage, we will select, link and label the emerging information. Further assessment, equipped with this information, is left to you. At the same time, we will continue to work on writing fuller news stories containing the most definitive and authoritative version of events we have, as established by our own correspondents and newsgathering teams who are there.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website
- Alistair Burnett
- 4 Dec 08, 09:32 AM
"I was very surprised we didn't do the Baby P story."
That was the comment of one of our team when we were reviewing the previous night's programme during our editorial meeting the day after the publication of the report into how Haringey Council in London failed to protect Baby P who was on the child protection register. The boy's mother has pleaded guilty and her boyfriend and a lodger have been convicted of charges relating to his death.
The report was published on Monday and that night the news bulletin which opens our programme of course had a report on the story, but we did not cover it further in the programme, which we led with the story of the announcement by President-elect Obama of his national security team that afternoon.
Our colleague's surprise triggered a discussion amongst us - which is an ongoing one on the programme - about how we cover big British stories.
A little background is needed here to explain why this is an issue for The World Tonight.
The programme focuses mainly on global news - we think it is the main place on daily national BBC news where international stories are reported and analysed. However, we also have a remit to cover major British news and breaking news, which we do. You can read about what we try to do on the programme here.
The challenge - or if you prefer the difficulty - for us is that we aim not to repeat stories or angles on stories which have already been covered on our sister programmes on Radio 4 - Today, The World At One, PM and the half-hour 6 O'clock news bulletin.
The problem we often face with big stories - like the Baby P story - is that there has been a lot of coverage on these programmes and new angles are not always obvious. Hence the debate on how we do them.
The ideal solution is that we think of an interesting angle or an interesting interviewee with a view on the story that has not occurred to our colleagues. When we are at our best, this is what we do. But it's not always that easy.
So another solution - which we adopted on the day of the Baby P story - is not to do any more than have a short report in our news bulletin. The criticism of this approach is that it sends the message that we don't think the story is important.
When we do this, we argue that by the end of the day, our listeners may have heard enough in-depth coverage of the story in question, and they will be happy to have the brief summary of the story in our bulletin and then hear about the other things going on in the world in the rest of the programme.
I'd be interested to know what you think.
Update [Friday 5 December 1100]: Due to legal risks, this thread is now closed to comments.
Alistair Burnett is editor of the World Tonight
- Jeremy Hillman
- 26 Nov 08, 01:08 PM
In my job I expect to spend most of the time obsessing about the financial crisis and looming recession, its implications for all of us and how we are covering it. Yet I was still surprised when it became the centrepiece of my seven-year-old son's school assembly which I went to before work this morning.
The theme of the assembly was choice and personal responsibility and the kids all did brilliantly with readings about a wise man and foolish man and a song to finish. Then the headmaster talked to the whole school about the origins of the global financial crisis. Not surprisingly there were no mentions of mortgage backed securities and collateralised debt obligations!
Instead, he talked to the children about personal responsibility, not spending more than you have, and about thinking about the consequences for the future of your decisions now. This Christmas, he told the children, you should decide what you can afford and stick to that - it was obviously a message too for all of us parents sitting at the back.
As we spend a lot of our broadcasting time discussing bank behaviour, corporate greed, and failures of regulation it did make me wonder if there is a simpler message we should be conveying more strongly in our coverage.
I suspect my son though will still want that remote control helicopter and damn the consequences.
Jeremy Hillman is editor of the business and economics unit
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