Friday, December 14, 2018

OBJ

Owen Bennett-Jones has been in and around BBC News for 25 years, and offers some plain speaking about current live issues in a piece for the London Review of Books.

Here's an extract - about podcasting, but the whole thing is well worth your time.

"I recently made a series of ten podcasts on the murder of Benazir Bhutto called The Assassination. It took more than a year to get it commissioned, during which time many promises were made and broken, and my emails were routinely left unanswered. By the time the series was finally commissioned, my producer and I had just ten weeks before the first episode was broadcast. When the series briefly reached No. 1 in the UK podcast charts, there was frenzied activity, as all the managers who had even the slightest association with the project, including some who had been very unhelpful, tried to claim credit. I was copied into messages from a dozen managers all congratulating each other. "

1 comment:

  1. "It also means that for BBC journalists, the real competition is with each other. Typically, a ten o’clock news correspondent covering, say, a US party convention, will declare it beneath his or her dignity to file a report for anything other than the national TV news bulletins or the Today programme."

    With attitudes like that 'Newsround' would never have got off the ground in the early 1970s - with certain correspondents finding time to file reports tailored to children's viewing.

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