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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 - ...

30 March 2013

Bigger Than Leveson?

I have long been an advocate for a rethink of the rules governing commercial radio news.

A year ago I suggested that it was time to relax regulation in order to free listeners from an insipid, unchallenging approach to news in the independent radio sector. Now it seems the idea is being taken up, however obliquely, by the most unlikely champions for change.

I'm talking about the House of Lords.

12 March 2013

Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word

I've made a few cockups in my time, on and off air.

I cringe when I think of the brain freeze that led me, whilst covering a high-profile funeral, to get the name of the deceased wrong in a live voicer. On another occasion I booked an interview with a well-known writer and completely forgot about it, leaving reception to make abject apologies.

On both these occasions, and many others, I've apologised when I've screwed up and tried to make amends to those affected. Which is why I get cross when others won't do likewise.

07 March 2013

I'll Be Damned

Another arts posting from me in my new role as a Leeds cultural reporter. I say new .. rediscovered is probably a better way of putting it. Bear with me on this.

There was a time when I haunted the original Leeds Playhouse as Features Editor of Pennine Radio. I reviewed every show for a commercial radio audience of .. several. This was the same period, incidentally, during which Marc Almond of Soft Cell was pulling pints of lager behind the bar. Marc was for me, with my sheltered upbringing, the first bloke I'd ever seen wearing lipstick.

Since then I've been an occasional attender as a paying punter to shows at the purpose-built West Yorkshire Playhouse. But last night was my first in two decades to attend in the role of reviewer.

03 March 2013

Change for the Better. Eventually.

Change happens, whether we like it or not.

The commercial radio industry has changed beyond recognition from the 'ILR' of the 80s. 
Television has changed even more; if I'd told my grandma that one day we'd have a choice of several hundred channels on a TV as big as our dining table she'd have called me a "daft 'aporth".

Behind the scenes some of the biggest changes have taken place in the broadcast newsroom, and this was reflected in Leeds Trinity's 5th annual Journalism Week.

For the first time we had to put into practice the ideal of multimedia newsgathering using -tada- the Apple iPhone 5. And there's a tale to that.