John Bracken

In case you haven’t heard, after 10 years and 6 weeks at Number 10 Tony Blair is readying for the movers. The BBC, of course, is going full guns, including a review Blair’s career, thoughts about how Gordo might lighten up, and an analysis of what a Brown foreign policy might look like. The highlight, however, has been the audio reports from 10 year-old “trainee reporter” Ben.

Ben was born the same time Blair became Prime Minister and he’ll be bringing his ten years of experience to help make sense of Mr Blair’s premiership. We sent him to find out what a decade of life under Tony Blair has meant for people.

I’m not always a fan of children reporters, but Ben has asked good and sensitive questions of his head teacher and of a doctor at the hospital where he was born. (He also reminds me of that frequent Johnny Depp co-star, Freddie Highmore.)

Coincidence or not, this film’s debut coincided with Blair’s election in May 1997:

Whilst being driven home late Saturday night I made one of my frequent visits to the Dave Winer-created NYTimesRiver and was saddened to encounter this message on my blackberry:

Over the years I’ve tried out lots of ideas, some work, others work a little, and some — not at all…Recently I’ve decided to start turning off the ones that sort-of work, the goal being to reduce the monetary and karmic cost of maintaining an online presence. This is one of the sites I’ve decided to retire…In order to get somewhere, you have to try lots of ideas, and most of them aren’t huge successes. But, imho, it’s good to try — it’s also good to know when it didn’t work.

Shows what I know. The Rivers (Digg, the BBC [apparently disabled] and especially the Times) have been my favorite mobile destinations, and I was heartened this week to learn that Gabe Rivera has added rivers for his addictive meme and other sites. In linking to Rivera’s post, Winer did drop this note about the lack of traffic on NYT River and BBC River:

They’re still running strong, although there aren’t many people fishing on their banks.

How will I spend my weekend mornings now? Oh well, at least Winer’s committed to continuing blogging for a few more months– and (hopefully) my wife’s new Treo means I can take advantage of the old Slingbox a bit more often.

I’ve found myself listening, with notable exceptions, exclusively to English and Candadian podcasts recently. Earlier, I mentioned the Guardian’s acerbic World Cup podcast. Now that the tournament is over, I’ve returned to the Guardian’s Media Talk, which this week included:

Dawn Airey, managing director of Sky Networks and outgoing chair of the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival (as we, as title sponsors, must call it) comes into the podcast studio to talk us through the programme for this year’s event…,

as well as a discussion of Chris Anderson’s long-awaited Long Tail book and a brief interview with BBC director general Mark Thompson, who will be rolling out some big announcement later this month. Media Talk is Brit-centric, but with with and an appreciation for this brave new media world. Plus, the accents are a crack-up.

Relatedly, as Dennis Haarsager notes, the BBC’s new Annual Report, has a section on new media that looks especially interesting:

The future of broadcasting looks increasingly to lie in ‘on-demand’ – the provision of programmes and other material when, where and how audiences want them, often with an inbuilt interactive element…[M]anagement have carried out a large-scale trial of the BBC’s experimental BBC iPlayer, which allows users to access BBC television programmes for up to a week after transmission…Early findings already made public show that individuals watched on average two programmes a week – about an hour of content, equivalent to 6% of a typical household’s weekly viewing…

The Beeb’s Radio Two has made some great docs available on-demand, including a two parter on the history of Trojan Records (though it seems to have disappeared from the site). The Documentary Archive is a bit overwhelming, too.North of the border, CBC Radio 3’s New Music Canada podcast is chockful of goodies. The Puck Fest show was a fun one– with tales of co-ed bands playing hockey.
So why are non-U.S. programs so good? Is it the novelty, or is their an approach being taken by our English-speaking cousins that hasn’t clicked here yet? Is it the same reason that British novelists are so good?

The BBC is bringing the wisdom of the crowds to the World Cup. Player Rater allows users to evaluate World Cup performances; here are thoughts on who played well, and not, in the Sweden-England match. During their running account of the game, the Beeb includes its readers' player ratings. Its not kitschy, it doesn't feel like TRL or anything– user's voices are simply integrated with the professional content. 

One of my favourity BBC programs is its "World Have Your Say," the international call-in program. Here is its blog (which links to its World Cup Have Your Say blog). From Fiona Crack's preview of Wednesday's show:

The line up starts with the release of the Indonesian muslim cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, who was found guilty in connection with the Bali bombings in 2002. Some Australians are angry at his early release, while some in Indonesia have come out to greet the man and express their happiness at his release.

Then we'll be hearing your tales of world cup blues. Whether it's riots in Croatia, switching off the big screen in Liverpool, or power cuts in Uganda: not everyone has had an easy time watching the world cup.

On Tuesday women police in Iran broke up women protesting for equal rights. Many were shocked at the violent pictures of women beating their 'sisters'. But is the phenomenon of women fighting women against change, more widespread than we thought? What do you think?

And finally we'll be hearing from kids in Soweto and Wigan today. They took part in a video and internet link up and learnt about each other's schools and daily routines. We'll be hearing from children from both schools that took part and getting them to carry on their conversation by radio and phone.

And Mark Sandell summarizes the World Cup bit:

Today's show worked. The blend was right, the fans were brilliant and i think we got close to capturing the mood of the World Cup.
We had two South Korea fans (Jun and Brent) talking to two Togolese fans in Lome (Eric and Guy) and they replayed yesterday's game with the help of Mikhail (a Poland fan) and Mirka (a German fan).

Following on last week’s IMA conference on public media’s future, the International Herald Tribune points to public media’s innovation:

Strangely enough, though, it is the public broadcasters, like the British Broadcasting Corp., Radio France Internationale, Deutsche Welle or National Public Radio in the United States, that are flourishing by embracing new technology and strategies, while commercial radio operators are losing out to iPods, MP3 players and digital and satellite alternatives.

In Britain, the BBC has increased its market share to 55.1 percent, according to surveys, taking its lead over commercial radio to its widest point in three years. The same trends are taking hold in the Netherlands and in Germany.

For [Jonathan] Marks, the radio gadfly, podcasts are a form of a conversation that engage listeners. “The best type of radio,” he said, “is one that shares emotions.”

Dennis Haarsager points to the IMA’s blogged conference (its the next best thing to being there) where he discusses a presentation by Nic Newman of BBC News Interactive on what audiences want:

[1] greater choices of platforms and providers, [2] greater power to shape personal consumption around own lifestyle/behavior, [3] greater opportunity for involvement, and [4] greater ability to compare/contrast providers — less loyalty.

In an earlier post, Mark Fuerst sings my song, pointing to the difficulty of applying lessons of the Beeb across the pond:

The problem with BBC presentations, and we’ll have several throughout the week, is how do you apply their lessons and their models to our scale and our decentralized structure? Even if you just talk about content, it’s hard to imagine how we apply BBC lessons and the BBC approach.