Rising Dawn

BBC NEWS | Radio 4 news hit by giggling fit

Hundreds of listeners have contacted BBC Radio 4 after newsreader Charlotte Green dissolved into giggles while reading a bulletin on Today.She lost control after playing a clip of the oldest known recording of the human voice.

Charlotte Green has my sympathy - as someone who used to read news bulletins I know the dreadful feeling when a fit of the giggles interrupts your normally sedate reading voice.

The one that I recall most vividly was when I was reading a piece of copy, “North Yorkshire dinner ladies were toasted for winning an employment tribunal case over equal pay”. My imagination played riot with the idea of toasted dinner ladies.

Wall Street | Wall Street’s crisis | Economist.com

“Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone.” Walter Bagehot

I like The Economist. It’s level headed, even handed, has its ear to the ground and its feet on it too. Even when the FTs headlines are screaming and echoing panic from the trading floor, The Economist accepts the current position and points to a way out.

It’s also a newspaper - so within it’s pages are reports from around the world, including Tibet where it is the only foreign news organisation with official approval to be there.

Blasphemy is dead Long live blasphemy | spiked

England’s dusty, archaic and unpopular blasphemy laws look set to be abolished, but Ofcom and others are keeping their censorious spirit alive.

I think Brenden O’Neill has his wires crossed. Companies go to great lengths to protect their brands, challenging what sometimes appear to be only small infringements of the use of their precious “brand properties”. Logos, straplines, positioning statements etc. Just think of the businesses challenged for using the “R Us” gimmick. When these huge conglomerates win their case and force offenders to change the signs on the side of their van or worse rebrand their entire business no one cries “CENSORSHIP” or says that it’s an affront to free speech.
And yet, when Christians protest about the misuse of a phrase or series of words that have been hijacked by the media world you would think the devil himself had stepped up to witness box and won the day. The opposite is of course true. We have ceased the worship of God preferring to honour mammon.
If the phrase “Thy will be done” had not appeared in The Lord’s Prayer the offending splash for GHD Hair Straighteners would have been pointless. If Christ had never been crucified on a cross the symbol in the advert would have been meaningless. The ASA was right to uphold the complaint from the church.
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I’m at my son’s house in London, staying overnight before a workshop day in the capital tomorrow. The is the fourth workshop day I’ve run as part of the Women’s Interfaith Media Literacy project.
I’ll run two short workshops to experience the storytelling part of digital storytelling while other practitioners pass on their skills in print media, broadcasting, and PR. Previous days have been in Bradford, Leicester, Coventry and now London. No matter where I go, I find that people love telling stories, but many don’t know where to start - or finish!
So I will use my Magic Story Bag to see what secrets it reveals and then teach them how to structure those revelations into a story script. Behind all the best journalism is a good story and the best writing is storytelling. What’s your story?

Can news be presented as drama? The editorial team at the BBC must have wrangled over this one. Newsnight is to stage a series of short dramas to raise issues about the decision to go to war against Iraq 5 years ago. This is how the Editor, Peter Barron explained it in his daily email.

Next week on Newsnight we’re making our first foray into drama with a series of films entitled 10 Days to War. This may prove controversial, but we hope it will also open up the debate about the war in Iraq in new and revealing ways. The issue our viewers most often ask us to revisit is - by some distance - the decision to go to war in Iraq.

Over the next two weeks, to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion, we will look back and examine again the circumstances of the run-up to war: the WMD claims, the question of legality, the diplomatic wrangles and so on.

I’m pleased they’ve decided to present the films as a mini drama series that will screen before Newsnight starts. But it still raises difficulties. (more…)