- Steve Herrmann
- 9 Nov 07, 02:32 PM
This week we launched the tenth in our set of correspondent’s blogs, with Justin Webb's America. It seems a good time to take stock.
Over the past couple of years they have quietly changed the way in which the best of the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½'s journalism gets out to our audiences.
When Nick Robinson started his blog – which was the first of these - someone in the newsroom likened it to a kind of hotline straight to Nick's brain – because by reading it you got to find out – often way ahead of his appearance on any broadcast outlet – what angles of a story he was contemplating, and what his take on events was going to be. You still can.
There have been some fine moments on Nick's blog, most memorably the time when he blogged as he was "eyeballed" by President Bush at a White House press conference, or when he explained (in what some readers told us was too much detail) how he'd had to get from being naked in bed to interviewing the home secretary in the space of just seven minutes. Thus helping prove that blogs are even more informal than TV "two-ways" (interviews between presenter and reporter).
And what Nick has done for our Westminster coverage, Brian Taylor, Betsan Powys and Mark Devenport have done for our political coverage of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland respectively.
The other correspondents’ blogs, as they have rolled out, have each had their distinctive character – as you'd expect. Robert Peston has made a habit of setting the day's business news agenda early in the day (in a businesslike way) on his blog – he did it right through the story of the Northern Rock crisis, which he broke. Evan Davis demonstrates, in his, how to make intimidating economic phenomena friendly and accessible – like here where he talks about immigration and the labour market in terms of a question about a bus driver’s job.
And Mark Mardell, who is very attentive to comments on his blog, went to the trouble of consulting website readers about whether he should start it in the first place. Mark's Euroblog is one of the most engaging ways I know of keeping up with European affairs – it also contains an intrepid experiment in long-term reporting – tracking
every step in the lifecycle of a certain piece of EU legislation.
Responding to comments consistently across the blogs continues to be one of the biggest challenges for all concerned. There are often hundreds, and the relevant editors are almost always having to focus on the next development, and the next deadline. After all that's what we – and perhaps you – expect from them.
So that's my assessment of where we've got to. How do you think they're going? What should we do differently? Or what should we do next?
Steve Herrmann is editor of the
- Kevin Marsh
- 9 Nov 07, 10:59 AM
There was something of the about it.
"The Future of Impartiality - is the Public Ethos Doomed?" is pretty weighty stuff on at least two fronts... existential, even, as far as the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ is concerned.
But like Tristram Shandy, last night's joint ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ College of Journalism and event at the LSE never quite got to say what it was that it was talking about. Though it was no worse a debate for that.
In spite of Feedback's Roger Bolton pressing the panellists, none cared to define 'impartiality' - though that didn't prevent them discarding 'it' (, author of 'Scrap the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½'), redefining 'it' in terms of 'the right of reply' in an unlimited, webbed world () or drawing a distinction between the intellectual case for 'it' - a difficult but not impossible one to make - and the instinct that it was right that 'it' is every ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ journalist's aspiration (Evan Davis).
Richard D North's case - that the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ and other terrestrial broadcasters are constrained by an unnecessary obligation to be impartial - rested on his view that the market alone can deliver news and information (not just comment) from a limitless 'variety' of viewpoints. One, monolithic, impartial view was unnecessary. The British press, he asserted, was 'a beautiful thing', taken in the round - and had never needed an obligation to be impartial to make it so. Plus, the requirement to be impartial, he argued, had two important effects on ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ journalism; it encouraged the belief that its reporting was somehow 'more true' and an attitude amongst ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ journalists of 'perennial dissidence'. That it was enough to be 'equally unpleasant to everyone'.
Emily Bell's case rested on the web's ability to deliver limitless accountability, right of reply and fact checking. That overcame the need to try to define a particular standpoint or a particular way of embracing diverse standpoints. Emily even posed the idea of an editorless news organisation and deskless newsrooms - the audience deciding the order in which it uses information, the standpoint of that information, the depth and breadth of its use and, crucially, the extent to which it wants to play a role in creating and improving it.
Evan Davis's case was that impartiality was 'probably a public good' - though he acknowledged the intellectual difficulties that surround both its definition and its practice. His instincts, though, challenged his intellect; for all the difficulties in arriving at a definition and accepting that it's possible there's no market demand for it, the aspiration to be impartial, he thought, did mean that what the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ did was 'a little bit different from what the Daily Mail does' - or any other newspaper for that matter. And, he said, he always tended to go with his instincts.
In the audience, two ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ (former) luminaries tried to help. spiced things up a bit by defining impartiality as 'truth, fairness and being unbiased'. Therefore, to be against impartiality meant being for untruth, unfairness and bias. While observed that the level of trust in broadcasters - regulated and with a requirement to be impartial - was relatively high whereas the level of trust in newspapers - unregulated and with no requirement to be impartial - was low, 'at the bottom'.
So if impartiality was closely identified with the idea of the public ethos in broadcasting, did that ethos have a future? All agreed it probably did - but in different ways.
Richard D North foresaw its future embodiment as a kind of 'National Trust' of the air - relatively wealthy, educated middle class people clubbing together to preserve the kind of broadcasting they preferred, without state or taxpayers' interference.
Evan Davis likened this to the model in the US - a worthy organisation with limited appeal and influence: he believed there probably was a future for the public service ethos within any future media market ... though in an entirely free market, without subsidy of some kind, he believed the product of that ethos would be smaller and lesser than it is at present.
Emily Bell had a very different, intriguing idea. A future ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½, she said, could be a kind of 'non-commercial search engine' interpreting its public mission in terms of ensuring equality of access to the world's information.
Kevin Marsh is editor of the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ College of Journalism
- Peter Barron
- 9 Nov 07, 09:05 AM
This week we did something we'd never done before. We brought together Newsnight and Radio Five Live for a live simulcast in the , presented by and Richard Bacon.
Taking phone-ins and reading out viewers' e-mails is something we have often said we won't do on Newsnight, but in the case of immigration where public opinion is such an integral part of the story it seemed appropriate that viewers and listeners should be able to question the politicians.
The response was huge - Richard received 3,000 texts during the programme and between them nearly 2,000 Five Live listeners and Newsnight viewers sent e-mails.
A few thought we make unlikely bedfellows, but I hope there were many more who didn't previously count themselves as Newsnight viewers or Five Live listeners who were pleasantly surprised. It's not something we plan to do regularly, but let us know if you think there are subjects we should occasionally tackle in this way.
Peter Barron is editor of Newsnight
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