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Helen Boaden

What's the future for News?


I gave a speech at 's Future of News conference on Wednesday. You can read what I said there below. Let me know what you think...

Continue reading "What's the future for News?"

Helen Boaden is director, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ News

Adrian Van-Klaveren

New thinking


You may have seen earlier in the week, calling for more ambition and innovation from the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Trust’s research shows that people want fresh ideas – few would be happy to accept only the familiar year after year. What we in ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ News have to work out is exactly how that desire applies to the services and programmes we produce. The questions are certainly rather different to thinking about the next Saturday night entertainment format or another drama as fresh as Life on Mars.

Innovation in News can mean many things. Over the last five years we have begun to offer a much broader range of services available wherever and whenever people want them. So whether , on a big screen in a city centre or , we can offer different ways of distributing news. There is the potential to be able to do a lot more in terms of personalisation, by subject or by location. And we can make much more of current affairs content by not simply thinking in terms of particular programmes and commissioned timeslots. The aggregation of our content in different forms will be a crucial part of the future.

There is also technical innovation, enabling us to be live faster and more cheaply in more places. In our recent coverage of the floods in Yorkshire, we have for instance pioneered the use of a VSat dish to send many of the pictures and live coverage. Instead of using a large satellite truck and relatively expensive broadcast satellite space, this simply mounts on top of a normal vehicle and uses a fast broadband connection over satellite to send pictures and sound back to Television Centre. These aren’t innovations our viewers should even notice in themselves – but they should mean the reporting we can offer is even more immediate and authentic.

And finally (as one now-departed news format used to say), there is the question of formats. In many ways this is the most difficult. We know that audiences value innovation but reject gimmickry. It is not enough to do something in a different way simply because we can. But when we launch something new and get it right, the impact is huge. Radio Five Live has been a long-term success through consciously achieving a sound different from Radio 4. Television presentation has been transformed – if you get a chance, just look at a programme from 15 or 20 years ago and see how formal it feels. Our uses of studios, live location reporting and interactivity have all gone through a revolution. There is the potential to do something similar again over the next few years as long as we use the tools in a way which benefits the journalism and doesn’t get in the way.

We see innovation as key to keeping existing audiences and reaching new ones. New services and new approaches will be vital and that’s why we’re keen to hear thoughts about what we should be doing. But even more vital will be the editorial ambition which drives what we do every day. The thinking about how to select, treat and develop a story is in the end what most determines our success. The lessons all broadcasters have learned is that people will try an innovation once simply because it is new. However, they will only keep coming back to it if it is both simple to use and the content meets their needs.

Adrian Van-Klaveren is deputy director, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ News

Rod McKenzie

Taking sides


We know that younger audiences are turning away from TV news - that's not new. But makes some bold suggestions about how we might halt this trend, as well as analysing the reasons behind it.

One of those is doing away with impartiality rules "for all but key public service broadcasters". The idea here, is that will make for more opinion-led, partial bulletins everywhere on the scale from to the to the and leftwards.

Radio One logoSo impartiality puts young audiences off?

I think that's tosh.

Oops, there goes my impartiality.

Younger audiences are much more media savvy than that, and they "get" this stuff. They know where there are no rules, where it's a free for all on the web, where anything goes. They like that. But they also sometimes want a fix of impartial and balanced - and we should help them to know where to go for that fix. But it needs to be interesting not dull.

Our problem at the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ in news is while that many audiences respect what we do, some younger and ethnic minority audiences are put off - not by impartiality - but by our inability to make it matter to them. We don't do enough to explain why these apparently dull stories are interesting and relevant: we don't do enough to make them accessible. Our agenda is sometimes too narrow to feel anything other than a conversation between some middle-aged people from which others are excluded by lack of background knowledge or the tone of the discussion.

And that, of course, is the classic dilemma for the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½. Paris Hilton's name only has to cross a newsreader's lips for an outcry of "dumbing down" - editorials in the papers and raised eyebrows from politicians and the chattering classes. As a result, we have been known to get a bit cautious editorially in the face of this onslaught.

I think what young audiences want is robust, interesting, passionate debate about stories and issues that affect them and their lives. The voices we hear should be more outspoken, less impartial and from wider, and yes, more extreme, viewpoints. But the glue that holds this together should be the context and impartiality of our journalism - true to it's founding ideals. We should give everyone a say - at the moment we don't always do this. When we do, we'll be stronger, and younger audiences will respect us for it.

Rod McKenzie is editor of Newsbeat and 1Xtra News

Host

ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ in the news, Friday

  • Host
  • 6 Jul 07, 09:08 AM

The Guardian: Columnist Mark Lawson predicts that TV news will soon be determined by viewers being able to pick and mix the news they watch, replacing the traditional running order. ()

Daily Telegraph: Reports that ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ correspondent Alan Johnston travelled to the West Bank to thank Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for his part in helping to free him. ()

The Times: Article on new Culture Secretary James Purnell and the decisions he faces regarding broadcasting, in particular the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½. ()

The Guardian: Interviews with John Simpson and Rageh Omaar celebrating the release of Alan Johnston. ()

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