And now for the news....

Rory Cellan-Jones is someone who knows what makes good T.V. journalism. His lecture provided a fascinating insight into how television news used to be and makes us even more aware of how far we’ve come with technology and how it really impacts on good journalism.

In the 80’s, there were few moving pictures to help tell a story – they heavily relied on stills to inform the report. . The video Rory showed us wasn’t that dissimilar to the portrayal of T.V. News in the film ‘Anchorman’. Thankfully this didn’t last long and we soon had moving images being used to aid the narrative of T.V. news reports.

Fast forward to 2008 though – and we now have very different tools to make the news. User generated content has been as massive factor in news broadcasters' output. Why wait for a cameraman from broadcasting house to travel twenty miles to a news story, when you could use Joe Bloggs’ pictures – who was actually at the scene? Initially anyway, this is a huge development in broadcasting – if Joe Bloggs was there first, use his material and then broadcast the quality pictures later.

Tools like Twitter enable us to break news stories quickly and for masses of people to have them pop up on their desktops instantly. In fact, during Rory’s lecture, the news broke that Roy Keane had left Sunderland. Now, without a T.V. or radio being switched on in the room, we wouldn’t have known that information. This is how people want the news to be broken to them; as it happens.

I’m not sure it would’ve really mattered if we had found this information out till after the ninety minute session though – perhaps we’re becoming a little too reliant on technology to feed us with a constant stream of information and sometimes it’s nice just to ‘switch off’. Maybe so – but at least these tools give the choice to the consumer, if they don’t want to use them, they don’t have to.

It’s been said several times during our online journalism workshops, that we don’t know in which ways news is moving – but these tools can only help rather than hinder newly trained journalists and it's something we should definitely embrace.

My Brand's Bigger Than Yours

An interesting question has come out of the recent economic crisis or ‘credit crunch’ as was the buzz phrase of the moment: How big a brand is a journalist? Throughout the economic turmoil that’s unfolded over previous months, Robert Peston has become a household name – reporting several times a night on the BBC News, and on Radio 4 and Radio 5Live, his face and voice were rarely off the screen. But – interestingly, he was breaking a lot of the stories he was receiving through his blog, rather than on T.V./Radio. With these mediums, he has to wait for designated slots before he puts the information into the public domain – but with a blog, he can do it instantly.

But how big a brand did Robert Peston actually become?

For many, it reached a point

where he was the story and he has too much power

– many people tuned in to see if Peston would pop up rather than what the latest economic or financial news would be. Is Peston bigger than the BBC though? My guess is not. He’s able to break the stories and find the interviewees that he does because he’s part of such as massive Broadcasting Corporation. If the BBC did not have the platforms for him to break such stories – i.e. a rolling news channel, several national radio stations, and hugely popular network news programmes then ‘Peston: the brand’ certainly wouldn’t have grown to the extent it had.

There’s no doubt that people do rely on high profile journalists to tell them what’s going on in the world. We expect Nick Robinson to tell us what’s happening in the political world, we depend on Julian Manyon to bring us a well put-together, sensitive report from a war zone. They’re faces, names, and voices that people trust. It’s not just high profile journalists though – every word that is written or broadcast, the public rely on to be free from bias and personal views – this is naturally more true for broadcast rather then print media. This is why responsible journalism is so crucial – particularly the ‘power’ it brings with it. However, there is a very fine tipping point between reporting the story and being the story.