2010 trend-spotting - 3

The unpleasant American acronym "FML" will follow "LOL" into text, Twitter and blogs in the UK.

"Contention" in phone cells will be an increasing issue, as more people use iPhone and Android variants in the UK - look to a major increase in planning applications for masts, and far-sighted football grounds setting up local deals with big sponsors.

Ringo Starr's new album "Y Not", which begs an answer, will be his last.

The proposed paywall for a new Sunday Times site will be late in delivery, as will whatever solution Rupert imposes for The Times. Overall the Times' ABCe figures will drop by more than half by the end of 2010. Murdoch Snr and Jnr will continue to lash out at the BBC - focussing more and more on the Corporation's web output.

Pantone says turquoise is the colour of 2010, and so does my wife. So it will be.

A very happy 2010 to all readers.

2010 trend-spotting - 2

Restaurant consultants Baum & Whiteman in the States suggest that Korean-style Fried Chicken will be the new Roast Pork Belly for happening eateries.

It is, apparently, "invisibly coated, amazingly flavorful and fried twice for ultracrunch". Evidence for this trend ? "Monday night chicken dinners at Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc in Yountville, in Napa Valley, and at Andrew Carmellini’s Locada Verde in New York. People fight for a table at Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York, where you’ll get two chickens (one southern fried, the other a thrice-fried Korean rendition) but even at a hundred buck a pop for your group, tables are
perpetually sold out".

2010 trend-spotting - 1

Ad agency J Walter Thompson says "slow-down" or "anti-energy" drinks are on the way up in 2010 in the States, as opposed to caffeine-laced, jitter-inducing energy drinks like Red Bull.

Brands include Mary Jane's Relaxing Soda, a sugary drink laced with kava, a South Pacific root purported to have sedative properties, Slow Cow and Ex Chill. Reported in the Los Angeles Times.

Flakey

Faced with a festive gap between sleeping, eating, watching telly or football ? Try Cogapps free "Infinite Snowflake Maker". Mine - the work of moments, and clearly marked out by naive instinctive genius, is below. Found via Design Week.

It's business.....

Not, perhaps, Christmas's most searing insight, but do you ever see Tom Hollander (Lord Beckett in Pirates of the Caribbean) and Greg Wood (BBC correspondent) in the same room ?

Moments

Some pre-Christmas moments....

• Customer in Highbury's snootiest cheese shop: "Have you got any Stilton with cranberries ?" . The listening queue is clearly (internally) aghast. The French shop assistant: "Sir, none of our cheese 'as fruit in it. You could try a supermarket".
• At home, kitten number 2 discovers she likes porridge while I'm not looking. The night before, she discovered she likes mince pies.
• On the Victoria Line, c1030am, a six-foot tall scouse pensioner, wearing a flaxen "syrup" and powder-blue blazer, with one large case and a giant pink hat box, enters a surly and silent tube carriage at Euston. "Hiya, everybody, I'm from Liverpool". Silence. "Worra you lot like ?". Silence. "I'm going to St Lucia". Let's hope he can keep the alcohol in balance for the rest of a long day.... I wish the same to all my readers !

Bragging rights

The Guardian, soaring close to 36m unique users around the world in the latest online stats, couldn't resist a little pop at Mr Murcoch's empire, where web progress is slower, or, in the case of The Times, in retreat.

"News International, preparing to move its content behind a paywall, saw less dramatic shifts [this month]. Sun Online, which includes News of the World and page3.com, had 20,200,269 unique users losing 3% month on month in November, but increasing 23% over a year. Its stablemate Times Online, recorded 20,930,751 unique users in November. However, it was the only newspaper losing unique users year on year, with a 3% drop."

Hard Wood

Next year expect sketches from Victoria Wood featuring a new character - a rather high-handed female Controller of a major public service tv channel who makes dodgy festive scheduling decisions. See The Daily Telegraph.

Sketchy Canvas

The BBC Trust's conditional approval of Project Canvas is light on financial detail. This is the final par of the press release.


"The budget for Project Canvas is estimated at £115.6m over four years from launch. Of this there is expected to be cost recovery of £17.5m from anticipated income from listings or the integration of services and licensing of the Canvas brand. This means that the cost to each of the six partners (including the BBC) is estimated at £16.4m over four years from launch".


So not quite the whole story. How much has been spent pre-launch ? Perhaps this explains an additional stricture from the Trust.


"An independent audit must be carried out of relevant BBC research and development spending in order to verify that pre-launch Canvas-related BBC expenditure costs have been or will be shared equally between the partners."

And here's an odd one - the BBC lending others money ?


"Where the BBC has already or proposes to frontload project spending by making initial commercial loans to the other Canvas partners, loans should also be available to the other or any new partners of the same creditworthiness on commercial terms."

Please, no London buses

BBC Olympic head honcho Roger Mosey, on his blog, looks forward to 2010 activities, and points to the need to find a creative director and production company to deliver the London opening and closing ceremonies by at least July.

As we've said before, the British track record on "events" ranges from the Edinburgh Tattoo to Glastonbury, with variable levels of style, wow factor and organisational skill in between. As do the people who deliver these events, from Pipe Majors to farmers.

The short list could be as wide as The Pet Shop Boys, Trevor Nunn, Harvey Goldsmith, Anton Du Beke, Norman Cook, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Arlene Phillips. Which is slightly why I hope we pick a team, and secure some international talent as well....

Alterations

It is a period of festivity and fun, but someone's been larking about with Mark Damazer's entry in Wikipedia.

cf.. "He met his wife, Rosemary Morgan, who is yet to see why she married this balding baboon, whilst at Harvard, and developed a liking for American culture. They now live in south london in the ghetto with their two fantastic children, Katharine and William."

I suspect students at work.

Questions

Some basics are still missing from coverage of the Eurostar cold weather debacle. 6 trains "failed" - but how many trains have they got ? Why are the engines that pull the Eurotunnel services still working - what's different ? Don't Swiss trains go in and out of tunnels in cold weather without damage ? What's so different about this cold weather that caused six failures ? Is this a repairable fault or a design failure ? Will services only run when it gets warmer ?

One problem is that Eurostar has been slow on social media (its Twitter account is, unhelpfully, called Little Break. There, the latest update is a link to a press statement from Friday).

"As we suspected, the acute weather conditions in northern France have caused the disruption. Every year we carry out a ‘winterisation’ programme of the entire fleet which to date has successfully protected our trains. We now know, however, that we need to further enhance the snow screens and snow shields in the power cars of the trains. We have already started making the modifications and to ensure that these new protection measures work effectively we are conducting a further series of test runs tomorrow. Our priority is ensuring that when we resume services we provide our customers with a robust and reliable operation".

OK, let's see film of the modifications in progress on our screens today...

Chart toppers

Working out that web lists are fun, Place has launched the Place 100, "the first comprehensive ranking of private sector power and influence in the property and regeneration worlds of the North West".

Top of the first list is John Whittaker, chairman of Peel Holdings (developers of MediaCity, Salford Quays). A great year for the group's developments, says Place, though adding "more lettings are needed to maintain market confidence"

Interesting that Mr Whittaker's former deputy at Peel, Robert Hough, is now chairman of the North West Development Agency, which recently granted a further £8m to Media City for the creation of a media enterprise centre.

Wall pays

FT.com charges £3.99 per week for a premium subscription. It claims it has 121,200 paying digital subscribers, up 22% year on year... and is proposing more premium offers. From Marketing Week.

If all subscribers were on premium, my maths make that an income of just over £25m p.a. However Marketing Week is not clear how many are on the basic FT access of £2.99 a week (much less for a trial).

I grant you

A grant of a further £8m has allowed MediaCity in Salford Quays to set up a "Media Enterprise Centre" in the south tower of the studio block. (from Place North West). The development is still short of a major commercial tenant, as we end 2009.

Catching up

Where's the BBC's killer iPhone app ? The Guardian's up and running. Trinity Mirror's got one. Scott Mills on Radio 1 (presumably without BBC technical support) is selling his iPhone Flirt Doctor.

On paper

HR Magazine claims an exclusive on the back of the BBC launch of public access to its College of Journalism website.

Apparently talking exclusively to HR magazine, Anne Morrison, Head of the BBC Academy (training, to me and you) said the corporation was in the process of piloting/creating ‘BBC qualifications' (similar to those by Tesco and McDonalds). "We're partnering with Bournemouth University to create a BBC qualification in production management," she said. "Students will be able to get a postgraduate qualification even if they haven't been to university."

Excellent. Excellence.

Heating up

BBC correspondent Richard Black's musings, on a possible pyschological, male flaw driving those those who argue that climate change is either a) not happening or b) not our fault, have created a minor blog firestorm. Nearly 400 comments in 20 hours, and plenty of work for the moderators in keeping the house rules.

The wisdom of age

Yesterday, I went to the annual Christmas drinks organised by former members of the BBC Radio newsroom; sometimes characterised, with affection, as the Newsroom Old Gits do. The venue is, most suitably, an upstairs room in "old man's" pub in WC2, complete with sticky carpet, malodorous urinals and a Lithuanian barman. I had previously thought the pub was chosen because it provided some free nibbles, but later learned that a former Editor of News sends £30 a year to cover that. So the rationale for venue selection remains a puzzle...

There were some 20 attendees, with several over 70 and in good nick. Without attribution, I thought I'd share some of the key pieces of advice I picked up.

"Try not to fall down the stairs at Charing Cross Station"
"It's unwise to ignore a possible diagnosis of diabetes and keep drinking"
"Sell shares in breweries and pubs"

Brass neck

Watching a replay of Sampdoria v Roma on ESPN, I was charmed by the range of neckwear worn by the Italians to protect against the cold/look fashionable. From polo-necks via thermal collars to straightforward scarves.

John Barnes wore a scarf and a hat once playing for Watford in 1981. What will this week's evening kick-offs bring out of the wardrobe ?

There's HD, and then there's HD...

Danielle Nagler, Head of HD at the BBC, dances on a slightly pixellated pin-head in her latest blog about quality.

"As I have said previously our BBC HD service is optimised to deliver to typical viewing set ups - it is not designed to be perfect at very close quarters, or on a 90" projection screen for example. No HD channel as a general rule will offer the same quality as bluray, any more than standard definition television offers the same quality as DVDs. The work that of course has taken place behind the scenes to assess whether - aside from our technical view - the majority of viewers watching in normal situations in their living rooms are happy with the picture quality on the channel has shown that as a group, they are."

It sounds slightly like the climb-downs the BBC had to make with the sound quality of DAB - when "CD quality" became "near CD quality". So is it an HD service or not ?

Height

On the theory that the smaller man wins current public votes (Joe McElderry beats Olly Murs, Ryan Giggs beats Jensen Button) then Chris Hollins....and Gordon Brown ?

Sniffy

I know there's a debate about the amount and level of celebrity/showbiz news coverage at the BBC, but there seemed a certain perversity at work on the BBC News website UK home page this morning. At 0830, Joe McElderry's name was below the fold....

Product placement

BBC technology boss, Erik Huggers, waxes lyrical about Project Canvas in The Independent, with a decision on its future expected from the BBC Trust any day. But the more he goes on about Canvas set-top boxes, apps, and Love Film, the more you think "Why's the BBC involved in this at all ?" More "why don't I just hook up my laptop to the telly ?"....

At your service

From a website called Place North West, found via Skyscraper City. My bold - who's lined up for Salford ? Who are these service providers ?

Bryan Gray, chairman of Peel Media, the subsidiary of Peel Holdings responsible for building and managing the Media City UK development. Gray, a former chairman of the North West Development Agency, said: "The basic approach is to build the occupier base around the BBC. There will be various other large occupiers that provide services to the BBC also moving to Media City. Their suppliers will then come in turn and so on. Our focus right now is on people that want to take a substantial amount of space"

Truly rural

Former colleague Andrew Thorman is on a roll at the BBC - exectuve editor of Countryfile and Farming Today (amongst other things made in Birmingham and Bristol). He'll be delighted to get two credits this week - one for an interview in Farmers' Weekly, and the other for a BBC blog on the same topic.

Blogs at dawn

Excellent swipe at Matt Frei by Damian Thompson, Telegraph blogger. Found via Biased BBC.

Friday music - 11 December 2009

(Nicholas) Ashford and (Valerie) Simpson wrote this for Diana Ross.

Ashford & Simpson - The Boss 1982 (Live)
by Larolke

Relativities

Greg Dyke, Royal Television Society Christmas lecture, on his remuneration at the BBC “When I joined I took the salary I was offered, which happened to be exactly the same as my predecessor and when I left my basic salary was something like half what the current Director General is now receiving".

Greg Dyke joined in January 2000. In his first full year in the job he earned a salary of £341k, rising to £454k with bonus and benefits. The BBC had a declared staff of 24,000. He "resigned" in January 2004. In the previous full year, he earned £464k including bonus and benefits (no bonus was paid for 2003/4 !). The BBC's declared staff was 27,600 in 3/4, apparently dipping to 27,250 in 2004/5 as Mark Thompson arrived (in reality, some 1,700 staff had been transferred to Siemens, but were essentially working full-time for the BBC).

In his first part-year at the BBC, Mark Thompson earned £459k in salary/bonus/benefits. The first full year - 2005/6 - the salary was £609k plus £10k benefits - Mark waived his bonus.

In the most recent accounts - 2008/9, the DG's salary was £664k, bonus waived again, benefits of £6k, "other remuneration" of £164k, making a total of £834k. Total staff declared - 22,874.

Clear as a Bell

Media student Josh Halliday has done a pretty fast turn-round on a talk by Martin Bell at the University of Sunderland. Mr Bell has added Tiger Woods' coverage to his list of grumps about current news output.

Oral fixation

John Plunkett's right. "As cringeworthy radio interviews go, Davis' was up there with the best of them".

This is Evan Davis v Shakira on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. The audio version lasts 3 minutes 31 seconds. The online video is a mere 1 minutes 45 seconds, and is filmed somewhere very "serious". Chatham House ? Shakira's London library ? Evan's club ?

What a good idea !

It's a scooter as well.

Found via Gizmodo

Your cuttings are ready

Serious readers of "big stories" or themes in the news will enjoy a new offer from Google, in partnership with the Washington Post and the New York Times. It gives you online access in a modern way to the sort of cuttings research that fuelled most newspaper articles before the web. The video is a little "cheesy", as the Online Journalism Blog points out, but many other news organisations will be interested in the resource...



There are, so far, only eight Living Stories, with a US bent, and whilst they have clarity in the single partnership with each paper, they lack diversity - and are weak on video.

Factoring the data

It ought to be possible to use online data to predict the winner of this year's X-Factor. The numbers, according to Experian Hitwise Client Intelligence Analyst Richard Seymour, say Stacey. However, the trends, and the people of Newcastle say Joe.

Bacon control

Biased BBC says 5Live presenter and prolific Twitterer Richard Bacon is having his tweets looked at before they enter the ether, by "The BBC". Sounds like shift work.

Choosing a ladder

Sandy Smith is leaving the editor's job at Panorama for The One Show. There's no single route onwards and upwards for the guardian's of "the world's longest running investigative TV show". Some move up inside the News division - Peter Horrocks, Tim Gardam - others head off to wider tv management - Glenwyn Benson, Steve Hewlett. Mike Robinson just left.

Sandy Smith's route seems a little sideways, but he must have found favour with Jay Hunt and Jana Bennett in Vision, so is probably testing the management ladder.

Other sources - Part 4

Second week of the Northumberland Gazette pay wall (£5 a quarter for premium content), and the news page has a new look, with 20 headlines marked as "P" for premium content. The top story is, however, a trail - The Gazette is publishing its annual round-up of Christmas church services next week. Let's hope, in the spirit of filling the pews, that stays free.

Ideally suited

Former BBC sports reporter Paul Newman is now firmly embedded in Salford; his latest appointment is as non-executive director of the local NHS board. Paul's current main earner is as Director of Communications for Peel Media, operators of MediaCity, Salford. Before that, he was Communications Director for Liverpool, European Capital of Culture 2008.

Paul spent 20 years as a broadcaster for BBC News, ITV and Sky News, including three years as sports correspondent for the BBC’s Six O’Clock News.

Basin station

More Crossrail station plans - this time images for the new entrance at Paddington, where this glazed box will sit on the site of the existing Hammersmith & City line platforms, at the north end of the sprawling station. Designed by Weston Williamson, it also seems to afford a possible tube/canal interchange. From Building Design.

Popularity stakes.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has belatedly opened a Twitter account - when I looked, he'd gained 1,600 followers in three hours... Anyone got details of Rupert Murdoch's monicker ?

Emperor's clothes

Andrew Orlowski, writing at The Register, is an entertaining contrarian. Parts of his current analysis of the sparring between Rupert Murdoch and Google will ring true in many organisations..

"The web divisions at media companies - who can speak fluent "clayshirky", quote from Freakonomics and are invariably Twittering at a New Media conference - haven't brought home the goods; media company boards and shareholders now see them more as part of the problem than as the solution."

Expanding planet

In case you thought the BBC Trust's criticism of the Lonely Planet acquisition by BBC Worldwide meant it was over, think again. Brand Republic/Mediaweek reports that BBC Magazines has licensed versions of the Lonely Planet Magazine in France, Argentina, the Philippines, Singapore, India and Brazil.

No fun

Anniversary journalism is always dodgy. Peter Rippon, Editor of Newsnight, has been interviewed by Matthew Bell in the Independent on Sunday, after a year in the post. Both parties make it sound a pretty dull job, with little reference to news stories of the past 12 months, or even the impending question of "Who follows Paxman ?"

Intellectual property

The aspiring multimedia journalists at Property Week may be hot on contract, title, and other aspects of the law, but seem a little weak on copyright. Their latest TV offering is a series of four webisodes called Property Week Come Dine With Me. An earnest homage to the format - or a rip-off ?

Broadcasting House reception

Caption competition

Facing more than one way

Reuters.com boasts a new cleaner look this morning...



However, if you switch to the UK edition, it's pretty much business as usual.

Pushing the limiter

Radio Today pointed me to this BBC comedy clip of Peter Dickson, who provides the strained voice-overs for the X-Factor... No need to watch it all !

More Google tweaks

Now Google are offering publishers separate controls for how Google News and Google Search might index (or not) their content. Press Gazette reports Google chief legal counsel David Drummond thus ...


“The Robots Exclusion Protocol, which is honoured by all good search engines, gives the publisher tremendous control over how content is shown. Don’t index this section of my site, display my headlines but not story snippets, remove this article from the index after a certain date, and so on.


“Today I can announce that we’re giving publishers even more control by launching a separate crawler for Google News. That means that if you choose you can give Google one set of instructions for how we should treat your content in Google News and a different set of instructions for Google Search."

Ordained

The BBC has confirmed that Bishop Ed... sorry, Ed Stourton will be the replacement for Roger Bolton on Radio 4's Sunday programme.

Chopping blogs

The New York Observer takes pleasure in reporting that the New York Times is thinking of culling a good number of the 70 blogs on its site. Gawker follows up with amusing analysis of some of the NYT's duller contributions to the blogosphere.

Will BBC DG Mark Thompson be reviewing the 130-odd BBC blogs in a similar, ruthless value-for-money fashion ?

Other sources - Part 3

I don't want to seem as if I'm hounding the Northumberland Gazette; more helping to iron out problems with their pay-wall pilot.

Afternoon Gazette website lead - "Are you a secret lumberjack ?". The teasers !

The story, which looks like a charity press release rather than premium content, is available free on the News Post Leader site, serving Blyth etc - also a Johnson Press publication.

When do clicks count ?

The five click thing, with Google News offering a deal to news publishers, who may now specify that a user can only read a limited number of news stories a day is weird.

I tried reading the story on the subscription-based Washington Post site. That allowed me free access to the Reuters copy on the subject. The site also offered the first lines of an article on the same subject by Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch.com - that click led straight to the sign-up-for-subscription page. However an ordinary Google search for "Erick Schonfeld Washington Post clicks" took me to the article for free...

Other sources - Part 2

Two lead stories on the Northumberland Gazette website at 0830 this morning... where you now have to subscribe £5 a month for access to "premium content".

1: An Alnwick butcher's shop has won a double whammy of awards in just two weeks. R Turnbull and Sons was named North of England Butcher's Shop of the Year by the Meat Trades Journal.

(Unsurprisingly, that information is also available at Meat Info Online, the website of the Meat Trades Journal).

It follows hot on the heels of a product evaluation hat-trick when father and son Mark and John Turnbull won the top-rated diamond award, the Bri...

(See what they've done there, teasing that premium content by stopping half way through a word ? However a Google Search for "R Turnbull butcher diamond" leads to the Alnwick Journal.live site, where the diamond award was revealed, free, on November 13th)

2: Second lead - link to a photo slideshow - festive fun as Alnwick Christmas lights are switched on.

(At first go, this is harder to find free. The lights were switched on November 20, but the excellent Alnwick Christmas Lights site hasn't yet updated its gallery. The lights are pretty much the same every year, so there's a reasonable set on Flickr. There's also a Facebook page, but it looks like a preview. I'll keep looking and let you know how it goes... )

Where due

Excellent review by Elisabeth Mahoney in the Guardian for World Have Your Say, on the World Service.

Tweaks at 2

Delighted to read that the Terry Wogan Sunday show on Radio 2 will come live, with live music, from the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House. Starts on Valentine's Day.

Meanwhile Controller Bob has shuffled the morning time slots - getting a bit more bang for his bucks by asking Chris Evans to start at 0700 (rather than Tel's negotiated late lie-in start of 0730); Sarah Kennedy will now clock in at 0500. However, it's hardly a "transformation", as claimed by the BBC Press Office.

Chris Evans' sidekicks will be Lynn Bowles on travel, Johnny Saunders on sport - but no word as yet on newsreading duties, which might give substance to rumours about a return for Moira Stewart.

Courting popularity

Press Gazette teases us with a survey of 50 journalists and 1,000 members of the public, seeking their top business/finance journalists. The full results, they say, can only be found by subscribing to the magazine - let's see how long that lasts...

They have disclosed that Robert Peston of the BBC came first by a good distance in the weighted results, followed by Martin Lewis of Moneysavingexpert.com, Martin Wolf of the FT, Jeff Randall of Sky News (and still a bit at the Telegraph) and Gillian Tett, also of the FT. The Times had the most journalists in the top 50, with nine, followed by the Financial Times and the BBC – both on six. The BBC was named by the public as their most trusted source of news about business – taking 30 per cent of the vote. The FT was the favourite source of business news amongst journalists.