discussion

Breaking news? Or simply broken?

I’m a radio addict. Well maybe not addict. I don’t have the discipline for a true addiction. The reason I bring this up, is that I am currently working on a project for a multi-media news organization. To prepare myself, I am reading up on trends in content delivery and journalism. I am also doing a lot of listening. In addition to talking to people about their news gathering habits, I am listening to the radio.

I am going to post some of the findings I find interesting here. Kevin Cowan who works on future platforms for the BBC World Service discussed what they found when they looked at mobile content usage in Russia, the UAe, South Africa and Argentina.

Essentially people use their mobiles for breaking news and sports. Here are some key excerpts:

Lots of competition on the mobile platform (“BBC is a small player…”)

First stop is Google, then maybe on to other sources, BBC, CNN.

“The good thing with Google is that they are an aggregator so they take content from us. People are still getting news from us.”

The BBC has to fight to get heard. (Wow. I thought I had to fight.)

“In the old days it did just used to be BBC and Voice of America and Deutsche Welle… there are numerous ways that people can obtain information.” (He’s talking about the World Service)

The BBC is moving from being a broadcaster to being a content provider. (Hmm… that’s an interesting distinction. I had already conflated the two.)

Mobile phones have a lot of impact since more people have access to mobiles than to the internet. You can dial a number to listen to BBC and get fm quality sound. (That is really great when you’re talking about regions that routinely block outside sources of information.)

Thanks to Richard Sambrook who helped me track down the program online after I heard it while washing dishes.

Reposting my response to Tori’s message, since for some reason my reply doesn’t show up….

As I was saying, reading the earlier post, the phrase ‘being moved by a language not understood’ somehow immediately made me think of one of my all time favorite films, Orson Welle’s interpretation of Kafka’s novel, The Trial - in my opinion a great masterpiece which puts in pictures the unexplainable and some of the absurdities of reality …

For some reason this is not liking my youtube embed link? :

Harrison’s father kindly reminded me that many of the ideas we were discussing concerning the show Rehab at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau (posts that refer to the show “Ben Laloua / Didier Pascal” and “Leave Britney Alone”) were examined by Marshall McLuhan who was a media theorist, better known as “The High Priest of Pop.” If you have never read anything by McLuhan, well, you probably should. So many artists, filmmakers, theorists, and others interested in media refer to his work implicitly and explicitly. Here are a few links:

Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message (Did you recognize “The Medium is the Message?” how about “The Global Village? which he popularized.)

Lots of McLuhan links