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News Bulletin

We had our first day of bulletins today

Listen here for the 3 O’Clock news and sport with me, Clem Silverman!

Living Library

High Wycombe library held a ‘living library’ event aimed at breaking prejudices, and I was the token Jew.

The concept was a very good one. People were invited from all walks of life to be ‘books’. Tea, coffee and sandwiches were supplied for the books, who waited to be borrowed by members of the public.

I quickly found that I was in high demand. There are six mosques and many churches in Wycombe, but there is a negligible Jewish community. People were very keen to talk to the Jewish person, but I would have thought that because Jews are so well integrated into society there couldn’t be too much ignorance out there.

Two people asked me if we sacrificed goats.

My first borrowers were two Christians. They had never (knowingly) met a Jewish person, and were very surprised to learn of my very liberal interpretation of biblical texts. They, as literal believers in the bible, couldn’t understand the dialogical relationship most Jews have with their faith. “God bless you” they said to me.

A Muslim councilor borrowed me next. He underlined the severe prejudice some Muslims have towards Jews. I got the impression that many people in the Muslim community find it hard to separate Israel and Judaism – thinking that Jews naturally support an antagonistic view towards Islam and fully supported Israel’s actions.

I spoke to a young Muslim lady who, like me, can separate religion and politics. She looked for similarities in the faiths – dietary, prophets, dress-code, cultural and family life. It was very encouraging.

More needs to be done by the Jewish community to make sure people have a chance to meet us. Because we are so small in number and so fully integrated into British society many people don’t understand what it means to be Jewish to most Jews. The most visible are the Chasidic ultra-orthadox, but that distorts the way that people view the Jewish faith.

Programmes like Dispatches have to be balanced after focussing on Islamic extremism, but by portraying the Jews as a small minority with a powerful lobby only stokes prejudice and exacerbates  problems.

The Living Library was a great concept and a really good way of meeting lots of different people. I felt it was important that people got the chance to speak to someone that might appear alien, and therefore breaking down barriers in the process. But these people are those that are willing to go out and discover for themselves – what about the majority who are happy to have their prejudices and will do nothing to try to change them?

No Expenses Spared

Robert Winnett and Gordon Rayner with Richard Wright

Robert Winnett, deputy political editor, and Gordon Rayner chief reporter at the Daily Telegraph came to the University of Westminster to talk about the expenses scandal and their new book.

Students put their questions to the writers of the book No Expenses Spared, click below for a poor quality short clip.

Nathan Rowden asks a question

Making news for peanuts

All news outlets are run by monkeys doing it for peanuts.

Nick Pollard

This week I visited a Media Society event to talk and discuss about the future of the news business. There was free wine. Hosted by Nick Pollard, ex-Sky and now BFBS (British Forces Broadcasting Service) chief.

But rather than the bosses at Sky, ITN, Al-Jazeera, BFBS and BBC reassuring all of us that we’ll have a job and a successful industry to inherit, they all seemed to be genuinely scared of falling advertising revenue, falling viewership and dissatisfaction from the public.

Like rabbits in the headlights, none of them have the inclination to hop out of the way. Instead they blather on about muti-platforms. Steven Cole of Al-Jazeera said that he would like to see broadcast news “get back to journalistic basics” to save it. Journalism is being diluted, according to him, and too many politicians are being let off the hook.

Mr Cole also said that TV news is too often a “parasite” on newspapers, whose journalists still make full investigatory stories, but they work to a different threshhold of truth.

All news is loss making.

Jonathan Levy from Sky News believes that 1 in 4 people still access TV news, and though the internet, IPTV and on demand are taking over, television will be forced to become more niche, but most importantly, it must be live.

Does the £180m budget the BBC spends on on-line news distort the market? The answer is, according to nearly everyone in commercial news, yes. They can compete nationally using powerful brands at Sky, ITN, but the Beeb trumps all when it comes to local news online coverage.

Jonathan Monroe, news editor at ITV, said that there is a difference between “information and journalism”. Anyone can be a ‘prosumer’ – a producer consumer – of pictures, video and information, but it’s up to real journalists to ask the how, what, where, why, when and how much questions. That is why 8 million people in this country watch some kind of 10pm TV news.

There is hope that so-called multi-platform journalism will one day start making money, but until then, the rainbow looks far off in the distance and its pot of gold is well hidden.

High Speed Two needs to hurry up

We desperately need a high speed rail link to link our major cities and reduce overcrowding on regular lines. But after years of talk, who is going to put money where their mouth is and start building?

The Conservative policy on transport says that they will “build a high-speed rail line connecting London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds with the Continent through the Channel Tunnel” if they win the next election. Labour have also promised something similar.

There are two main plans for the line. One by Greengauge 21 and another by Network Rail, amongst others. Both widely accept that an initial line from London to Birmingham and then onto the north-west and scotland, using high-speed stations at Heathrow and either a central London terminus or using the existing international station at Stratford for transfer.

Whilst most of Europe are expanding the network of high-speed rail, we’re stuck with a piddly 67miles of track that link none of our own major cities. Granted, being in Paris in 2hrs 15 is just brilliant, but we should be able to hop on a train in Manchester, and 4 hours later be in Amsterdam, without having to change once. Although border controls may have to be loosened if that were ever to happen.

Politicians talk, and rail enthusiasts just dream, but no-one is laying any track yet. We need to be part of this highspeed system. In France the domestic airline business has died on its arse thanks to the wonderful TGVs, as has the number of flights linking Madrid and Barcalona when the rail link opened there. It would facilitate business and growth in the regions if they were linked from city centre to city centre with London and the continent, without paying ransom money to slow, overcrowded train operating companies who fleece travellers.

Sort it out Britain!

Europe Dreaming

For argument’s sake: would it be so bad if there was a United States of Europe?

The Lisbon Treaty was ratified this week, and David Cameron has announced that he won’t, because he can’t, call a referendum if he gets into power in May. Far from being “the end” for Britain as The Daily Express called it, the treaty basically contains some minor changes to the way in which  this group of small countries talk to each other about issues that affect us all. See the BBC Q&A if you don’t believe me.

On LBC James Whale asked if being Euro-sceptic essentially meant that you were xenophobic. i.e. if you’re scared of foreigners having more powers, doesn’t that make you xenophobic? Frightened. BOO!

But if we went down the path that the Express, amongst others, are apocalyptically envisioning, what would we actually end up with? Think on a micro-scale first of all. The various Kingdoms of England were once independent states, with their own currency and rulers. Then there was the unification of Great Britain, when a common currency exists in Northern Ireland, Scotland England and Wales. We had empire, exerting our political, cultural across the globe. But people in Liverpool still describe themselves as Scouse and those in Scotland even have their own parliament and strong national identity.

Being part of a bigger union doesn’t mean the end for culture or independence. Look at how the USA operates. States like California would be one of the richest nations (before the credit munch) in the world were it to be independent, but if it was independent, it would certainly not be as prosperous. (he says completely speculatively)

I personally am undecided. I don’t think that a United States of Europe would actually affect a great deal the way my life will turn out. The single currency hardly brought catastrophe beyond a few teething problems but is now a very strong currency. But then I’m a product of the fluidity of borders, half my family is French and  part Algerian, the other half of my background is from eastern Europe, so I would say that…wouldn’t I?

Students in Need

News addiction on the rise after an exhausting monitoring exercise fails to provide a big enough fix.

Students are turning to desperate measures to get their news today after a news monitoring exercise failed to give them the ‘hit’ that they required. One could only beg “need some news…” in broken English through the medium of Facebook.

“bulletin” – the slang word describing how much they want pumped into their vein riddled eyes

One of the side effects of overdosing on news, other than becoming resistant to higher and higher concentrations of “bulletin”, is to blog onto the keyboard. Some have been so completely smacked up that they will often listen to Radio 4 until the shipping forecast bids them goodnight, and sob dejectedly into their pillows over the national anthem, before blogging all over their keyboard.

So please, help a poor journalist student. Donate a news story today. Pledge just one story or press release a month and feed a journalist.

Dahl continues to trump

Revolting Rhymes at the Roald Dahl Museum

‘As soon as wolf began to feel…’ after the Fringe and events at Waterstones, I was back in storytelling mode.

The intoxicating world of Road Dahl continues to be as popular as ever. The master story-teller has been adapted into a new film, Fantastic Mr Fox, but it’s still the beautiful linguistic tickling of the rhymes in Dirty Beasts and Revolting Rhymes that engage children in raptures.

Working closely with children, I have found anecdotally that they respond better to language involves rhythm and rhyme as well as complex words, rather than straight forward prose. At an 8th birthday party today they were loving it.

The US National Science Foundation say that ‘children discern patterns in the language and experiment with speech gradually’. Using rhyme coupled with silly actions, children make more connections within to language and sounds, ‘The physical and mental aspects of speech are closely intertwined. In an environment full of sounds, the brain manages to discern and make sense of speech.’

Fun!

In a way, the role of Dahl has been to defamiliarise language for those that are not familiar with it yet, therefore making it more exciting. Even for adults, the structure and richness of Dahl’s writing can be refreshing to read after the daily grind of having language used as mere tool of communicating ideas.

The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre capitlises on this intoxicating effect and dedicates an entire gallery, or Story Centre, to playing with words. Look at the way Dahl plays with words in the BFG – a draft of which I’ve had a look at in the archive – and it’s easy to see how children are able to be free with words, making it more enjoyable to learn. ‘Spitzwangler, Pifflemuffer, Bungledoode’ amongst 30 others made the original list.

So get out there and discover Dahl, or alternatively, hire me!

P.R. vs. Journo’s, why can’t they all just get along?

Journalism is dead, apparently.

Simon Goldsworthy, former Whitehall spinner, outlined the tensions between the PR industry – which has spread into virtually every organisation in the known universe – and professional journalism.

If you believe what you hear from people such as Nick Davies journalism is in terminal decline, being kept alive only by the license fee’s refusal to yet turn the life support off to the BBC.

Largely anonymous, PR is in danger of completely controlling what we see and read about in the news; save for those few precious natural disasters. Mr Goldsworthy said that around “80% of news is PR”. Everything from NGO green campaigns to dirty Trafigura coverups. Even wars and governments have huge PR departments, funneling their facts (or propaganda?) to eager journalists.  If you take into account that newspapers have their own agendas to pedal, and commercial broadcasters have ratings to chase, where does that leave responsible idealists like Rob Powell?

As news consumerism is more and more segmented into tiny little chunks, deconstructed into fast headlines, people like Rupert Murdoch have called for the end to free news.

Balance of power.

The PR industry holds all the cards. With all organisations using their public relations as firewalls, only the most investigative of investigative journalists can get close to some semblance of the truth. Therefore, it’s up to the spinners to leak out the bad news when it suits them, which journalists gobble up gratefully because they can’t get through the fortifications without having arselicked someone on the inside.

But, journalists have the last word. 92% of press releases are never used, according to Simon Goldsworthy. For every each person in PR on one side of an argument there are just as many on the other. Take the oil companies vs the green campaigners for example. It’s up to them (us) to mediate, to consider both sides, and sieve  through the mounds of spin in order to find a grain of truth to put to the general public. Analyse, draw conclusions, investigate, deconstruct.

So in that, journalism has got a lifeline, and it needs PR to survive, just as PR needs the media to present itself.

This article from The Independent discusses similar issues.

(p.s – there is the elephant in the corner: the internet. Unregulated and uncontrollable, the balance of power has shifted away from the big PR firms or the monolithic media outlets like the BBC and is returning to the people. People can access a vast number of sources, they can skips ads and choose to turn off or on, on-demand. What is the future for both professions, I ask you?)