Minds

Under the Daily Mail banner 'Right Minds', former BBC News executive Roger Mosey, with an amusing byline and amusing photo, has a go at analysing the latest corporation moves to ensure/rebuild its reputation for impartiality. 

He's worried about internal formal and informal staff pressure to push agendas out of step with the rest of the UK.  And he shares this insight: "When I was an editor myself, I simply didn’t know enough about the different world view of farmers in Monmouthshire or car workers in Sunderland."

The best BBC editors are aware of their weaknesses, and few are polymaths.  The best BBC editors employ duty editors with the same self-awareness. When news stories pop up at speed, duty editors have to make calls, not just about coverage, but relative importance, and need tools, strategies and support to make those calls. Pre-newsroom computers, newsrooms and production teams were the easily available hive minds.  Balanced teams, with some old hands, made them better hive minds.

(Occasionally, there are outliers - I worked at CEEFAX in the mid-70s. At times I was the only one in the newsroom. My resources were tv, radio, a teleprinter feed of basic Press Association, and a regular delivery of half-hourly written news summaries from the central GNS desk. I wrote the stories, the running order, and the headlines for hours at a time....)

When connected computers came, editors and duty editors were able to scan the emerging running orders of other BBC outputs, and a sort of running order by osmosis emerged, alongside a Birtian control of morning and afternoon meetings. As I understand (and I don't really) the emerging News operating model, content choices are now made largely in Newsgathering, and output teams assemble into running orders, with fewer and fewer resources to achieve variation. 

As an editor and manager, I always encouraged constant learning. It's not good enough to say you've never watched Coronation Street if you're writing summaries for Radio 2; it's not good enough to say you don't understand horse racing, if you're producing a Radio 5Live news programme; if you're on the Africa desk in World Service, you should have heard of Puntland. 

I was fairly confident about my understanding of the Radio 1 audience in 1983, as a Duty Editor on Newsbeat. When our esteemed but much older Editor dashed into the cubicle of one lunchtime show saying Winifred Atwell had died, and one of her discs was en route from the record library, I decided against disrupting the existing running order. I'd have been happier with an Editor with a similar understanding, but at least we had the discussion...