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What a Journalist Isn't

I'm sick and tired of the abuse journalists are getting at the moment. They don't deserve it, at least real journalists don't - ...

27 February 2012

Radio Needs Apprentices

Work experience trainees are in the news for all the wrong reasons this week as various high profile retailers stand accused of using 'slave labour' to stack shelves and clean floors; the accuracy or otherwise of the various claims and counter-claims don't concern us here, but maybe it's time to take a long, hard look at the place of work experience - or maybe more formal apprenticeships - in radio.

Workies are ingrained deep of the ecology of the industry, and always have been; at least, ever since the development of local stations offered more and less forbidding front doors to knock on than the one in Portland Place guarded by Ariel. I'd never have wormed my way into wireless without doing my share, and when any job is perceived as glamorous and exciting there will always be someone wanting to give it a go, usually for free.

Many - perhaps most - work experience candidates are useless. We've all seen the gormless teenager sit and watch a phone ring when all hell's breaking loose in the newsroom, or endured the self-obsessed career changer who witters incessantly about the one subject they find fascinating; themselves. Yet others are pure gold. The day they set foot in a radio station they know it's where they belong.

21 February 2012

A Word From Our Sponsor

Just to say that next week is Journalism Week at Leeds Trinity University College (not that we don't live and breathe journalism for the other 51 weeks as well).


Now I'm a cynical old hack, but even I'm impressed by the lineup this year, which includes BBC correspondent Mark Easton, ITN's foreign editor Tim Singleton, Bauer Radio's head of news for Yorkshire (and former Leeds Trinity postgrad) Louise Easton, the head of all things BBC in Salford Peter Salmon, 5 Live's deputy controller Jonathan Wall, Look North's award-winning VJ Nicola Rees and ITV Yorkshire's political correspondent Ben Erlam.

Ben's another former Leeds Trinity postgrad trainee; as part of the regular 'month on air' which is at the heart of the course he was duty news editor for BCB Radio on the day of the London bombings in 2005, a fact I never let him forget.

Oh and there's some bloke called Jon Snow opening it all next Monday morning.

Anyway the boss had me designing an event website for the week which has now gone live; so you might want to take a look, there's a timetable and full details of all the speakers.

From Monday we'll be liveblogging on there as if our lives depended on it in the odd few moments when we're not tweeting as @JournoWeekLIVE or otherwise engaging with the full range of social media tools at the 21st century journalist's disposal. We might even have time to listen to what the speakers have to say and ask a few questions as well.

Of course with the Myers report into BBC local radio due out next week I'm hoping for some instant reaction from the wireless folk attending, and will post anything interesting here in due course.

16 February 2012

IR: Why We Need a New Map

I reckon it's time to give the commercial radio groups in the UK what they want.

But let's do it properly.

No-one designing commercial radio in a logical fashion would create what we have now. We're stuck with the results of four decades of tinkering.

From the first beginnings, the 19 heritage stations with strong local names and identities simulcasting on AM and FM, often stuck in regional 'second cities' to avoid duplicating the BBC map too closely, through the subsequent phases of local network development, the setting up of full national and patchy-quasi-national stations on FM and AM, the establishment of supposedly 'niche' regional stations to the filling in of the gaps with TSAs which seldom match any real communities on the ground ... it's a mess.