Unlocking China

Polis' Charlie Beckett is currently out in Shanghai and writes an interesting post on whether the new media business is changing the politics of China?

The media industry here appears to be booming but scratch under the surface and you realise that even the political authorities fear that there are too many obstacles to innovation. This is both a source of concern and hope

.he writes and continues

the journalism school students and staff talk about how they are being paid for by the state to create journalists who will go out to serve the state. They describe it as accepting 10% censorship in return for doing the rest of their jobs.

Can this work with new media? Well, the answer I am getting is that it doesn’t and that the state itself recognises that.

Who should control international news?

Is there too much international news to consume?

Well,Charlie Beckett reports from the BBC festival of international news,where he says

it took veteran BBC hack Frank Gardner to suggest that perhaps there is a limit to the number of people who want to devour detailed reports and analysis from far flung corners of the globe.

The truth he adds

is that we have more international news than ever before. Thanks to new media we can also make it and access it by ourselves.

But surrounded by old media executives he felt that there was a reluctance to accept that foriegn news could be entrusted to the new media arguing that

the evidence from Iran at the moment is that freedom of expression is, indeed, a fragile bloom. But the greatest protection for global connectivity and trans-national communication is to enpower the people to participate.

We are all online journalists now

I was asked to talk about ‘online journalism’, but in a sense, I think there is now no other kind of journalism. By that I mean that anyone practicising journalism anywhere in the world is, in some sense, now conditioned by digital technologies and the Internet. We are all infected, as it were, by conditions or concepts such as citizen journalism, satellite transmission, search, infotainment and hypertextuality

.

This is the opening of Charlie Beckett's speech to the 50th anniversary conference of the Korean Society for Journalism and Communication Studies

Beckett,the Director of Polis who continues to say that

We are a moment of profound change for the news media that raises transformational questions about the ethics, politics and economics of journalism. And journalism itself is a key to answering broader societal and global questions.

I interviewed Charlie a few months ago for a UCLAN project.He is tremendously enthusiastic about journalism and although recognising that the profession faces immense problems he is optimistic of its future.

In this speech he reflects on how the new media can bring hope to areas of the world that were denied access to mainstream information.

Kibere,the world’s biggest slum,on the outskirts of Nairobi where people

have now found a voice through SMS. Through cheap mobile phone texting, its 500,000 people can begin a conversation with the volunteer journalists of a new community radio station Pamoja FM.

The online revolution has created many negatives in journalism,this is happily one of the positives

Gaza situation a mess according to a BBC news person

With Sky news now also deciding not to carry the DEC appeal for the citizens of Gaza,Charlie Beckett,director at POLIS reminds us that the BBC does have a precedent for this which appears to have been forgotten

Back in August 2006 it turned down a DEC appeal for Lebanon for the same reason - impartiality. It was specifically concerned that the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah might break down.

So as Charlie points out.

Did the DEC not remember the Lebanon precedent?Did BBC News warn that their impartiality was going to be questioned? Were they consulted? If the Appeal would bring criticism, was it really thought that it would be so strong and so credible that it should sway BBC policy? Would it not have appeared more confident and consistent to allow the appeal, take some flak and move on? In practice has this not made the BBC look much worse?

As he concludes

The BBC is now suffering from self-inflicted collatoral damage. One very senior BBC News person described the BBC Gaza Appeal decision to me as ‘a mess’.

TV industry must button down the hatches according to Media consultants

Over at his Director's blog Charlie Beckett gives a handt=y synopsis on the current state and the challenges faces the TV industry gleened from a briefing by Oliver and Oldbaum

As Charlie reports

In his forecast for the next five years O&O’s Mark Oliver’s pointed out the obvious fact that ‘this is not a good time for a recession’ and that the TV industry is facing a ‘perfect storm’.

The particular challenges that it faces are

1.Macro Advertising shift
2.The recession
3.Fragmentation and distintermediation
4.Rising competitive intensity

But there is good news for other forms of media

Newspapers are going to be less effected by the downturn according to their new survey of consumer intentions. Both local and national papers are more resilient than many other forms of media and entertainment.