As we’re all fully aware the deadline for our blogs falls on us tomorrow. I thought I’d open one final post for our group to discuss what we’ve achieved, learned and could have done differently.
Firstly, I think we’ve all successfully achieved what Charlotte set us out to do- communicate through this blogging system. Especially through our giant work load and the IJs and BJs not so synchronized time tables blogging has proved to be a good form of accessible communication. However much of a chore it may have seemed.
Secondly, our topic, which I definitely remember rolling my eyes at when we were first put into groups, provoked a long interesting debate after the presentation and evidently in many comments on here also. On a topic which i didn’t really consider before I have definitely become more aware of the politics of public service broadcasting and the troubles that lay ahead with it.
We focused on quality and diversity. The BBC says it aims to provide a full range of diverse viewpoints and diversity may also apply to ensuring that programmes are produced from a variety of sources. However during the coverage of Gaza-Israel conflict they were notably cautious.
It was intriguing to see how our blog also pressed into the realms of the other blogs. Today, media is so dependent on multi-media and their audience. All broadcasters have an internet site, watch again play systems and numerous digital channels. It’s interesting how they all feed off each other.
I think we made a good attempt in making our presentation interactive. Unfortunately some people didn’t understand our introduction. I’ll take this opportunity to clarify why we did it. We had the different mediums of technology broadcasters use to receive media on the powerpoint behind and acted out a disaster scene. It was namely citizen journalists witnessing a chaotic scenario and using the means of twitter, photography and video to record it. All of the footage, twitter comments and photos were used in news agencies like BBC, Al jazeera, Fox Sky News and more. We didn’t make any introduction to ourselves or the presentation until we came out of the freeze frame of the scene and asked the audience “is this quality?” Making people think what level of quality is acceptable.
We could have introduced it first and explained to the audience what diversity and quality meant to PSBs, but we thought it might have been a nicer introduction having a role play. The point was that when news is breaking and agencies aren’t at the scene- do news agencies/broadcasters rely on any source of information or do they just accept verified and quality information. But will they then miss out?
This was obviously not the only element on quality but we thought it was a high impact way of introducing it. Too much jargon, especially with PSB talk, would have nodded people off.
And finally…what lies ahead for the poor old topic of PSBs in the digital world. Well, by looking at Gareth’s post below it has definitely sparked much interest among our peers and causes much controversy within the industry. David Cameron’s recent comment about a “freeze” to the license fee and highlighting that it needs to “lead by example at a time when the whole country is tightening its belt” has also certainly opened a national debate.
We eagerly await whatever happens to the future of PSB and hope that you all enjoyed reading through our research, posts and presentation.
Thanks for your co-operation
Stay classy fellow bloggers
