In the Guardian Jeff Jarvis says that
Newsrooms are entering a hub-and-spoke future.Touring the BBC with its head of News Peter Horrocks,he tells us
He is making all his top managers rotate in that chair to immerse them in the demands of news in any medium. Next to the multimedia desk is a hub that manages content from BBC News resources - standard stuff - though now its contributors are organised by topic rather than medium
but
in the corner is something I think every newsroom will soon have: a media wire, which in Horrocks' words is a tasting operation that ingests and assesses content from all over to feed to any product and medium. There is a separate user-generated-content hub that does likewise with amateur content. (I'd argue these two will have to merge, as the line between professional and amateur, reporter and witness continues to blur.) This curatorial function, editing the world, is critical in a news ecology that pushes us to do what we do best and link to the rest.
The BBC gets a lot of attention in the paper with its top story asking
Is the BBC hideously White City? claiming
Several in the broadcast industry agree that it has become more London-centric but suggest the issues are difficult to change in the short term. Several, including Andrew Marr, believe the corporation is trying hard to redress the balance
however
One prominent broadcaster suggests the Trust is simply running scared of powerful political pressure groups. The birth of the commission itself underlines the close connection between politics and broadcasting, at least in Scotland
The Independent looks at the Sichuan earthquake and its effects on the Chinese media.
Suddenly, Chinese reporters are asking tough questions about possible government corruption, journalists have been ignoring state-issued orders in order to get to the scene of the disaster, and footage of broken bodies and futile rescue efforts was shown live on TV. This is a startling change in a country often depicted by foreign media and governments as an authoritarian, press-belittling monolith.
Peter Wilby in the Guardian looks at the trend towards newspaper comment and comments himself that
Now the papers are full of them, and it has been estimated that, across the British media, at least 120 writers produce regular, broadly political columns. A political and media landscape without them seems to us inconceivable. Yet such columnists are by no means universal. In several European countries, political commentary comes almost exclusively from academics or other policy experts.
In the Independent meanwhile
Stephen Glover takes a look at the coverage of David Davis in the media and in particular that of the Sun
it is possible that some other people are about to make a mistake that could surpass Mr Davis's. I am thinking of Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Sun, Rebekah Wade, its editor, and Kelvin MacKenzie, a columnist for the paper as well as a former editor, who is thinking of opposing Mr Davis in the by-election at Haltemprice and Howden.
and points out that
In democracies, governments do not own newspapers, though they try to manipulate them, and sometimes succeed. For their part, newspapers and their proprietors do not own governments, though they may also try, and Mr Murdoch has got closer than most to succeeding. It is no idle convention that the executive should keep out of the media, and the media out of the executive, but the essence of our democratic system. In one-party states, by contrast, government and press are one and the same
