In the final seconds of BBC One’s Weekend News bulletin yesterday, Reeta Chakrabarti squeezed in an extra story in just 25 words:

Just before we go, President Biden has just tweeted that he intends to address the nation later this week, saying that it has been a great privilege to serve. We’ll bring you more at ten.

We know now, of course, that in the judgement of mere seconds, the team had perhaps overlooked the more significant message of Biden’s message: his decision to withdraw from his re-election campaign.

It’s not hard to see why: Biden’s statement refers only to standing down, without complete clarity on what from. It’s a letter that’s hard to parse on a scan-read, with the eyes of a nation watching.

Wendy and I switched over to the news channels, and after minutes of slightly desperate filling, the airwaves were thick with discussion of the political consequences of the decision, with hot takes and commentary on who might replace him and what it may mean for an election that’s still months away.

Nobody seemed keen to take a step back. It’s not hard to imagine the sense of profound grief Biden must feel at this moment. This is surely a moment that marks a painful shift in the way Biden sees himself: judged irreversibly incapable by dint of age of doing something he’s done before.

As Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic last night:

Coming to terms with mortality is never easy. We rage against the dying of the light. Many elderly people face the painful moment of letting go, of losing independence and human agency, when they are told by family they have to give up the keys to the car; Biden was told by his party to give up the keys to the presidency.

It must cut deep; I hope he’s okay.

It’s funny, really, how little attention the news pays to the universal aspects of stories like this. How the immediate reaction focuses on predicting what might happen next, rather than on sitting with what’s just happened. How it refuses to dwell on the humanity, those moments of insufficiency most of us have faced and will continue to face in life.

The news runs away from the lessons of others’ experience, the things we might take and apply in our own lives. And that seems like a shame.

When The Times started publishing its ‘compact’ edition in 2003, initially alongside the broadsheet format, there was a lot of debate about the potential impact on its journalism. One concern its journalists wrote about publicly was that in a compact size, it becomes more tempting to ‘hang’ stories around photographs, which can pervert the way that stories are covered.

Two decades on, this feels a bit quaint: large numbers of journalists for most media outlets work in multiple formats, writing stories, taking photographs, and filming videos, for example. But it feels undeniable that this has changed the weight that is given to different aspects of stories.

For example, over the last few days, we’ve been subjected to a huge amount of news coverage about a widespread computer fault. A huge proportion of the coverage—the lede in most cases—has been the impact on air travel. Yet, there is no reasonable interpretation of this story in which air travel is the most significant angle. The effect on GP services, for example, will have affected far more people and almost certainly caused more harm—and the underlying technical issue, and the way it has affected so many system across many countries, is a much more interesting analytical story.

I posit that the reason for the heavy weighting towards air travel is the multimodal way in which journalists now operate. It’s very difficult to create images of the problems with GP systems, and even more so to illustrate IT problems, yet airports provide an immediately available endless supply of emotive imagery of huge queues. That imagery can be easily supported by information on flight cancellations that’s freely available on websites journalists can access from their desks.

The lede becomes what’s easy rather than what’s important. Images become more important than analysis. We’re all less well-informed as a result.

In The Times Luxury newsletter this week, Kate Reardon wrote:

A lifetime ago, when I was editor of Tatler, I got into terrific trouble. I gave the Speech Day address at a girls’ boarding school in the Cotswolds (I did a lot of that sort of thing at the time — being editor of Tatler gives you the status of, if not a minor royal, then at least a non-royal duchess) and I said something that caused a bit of a stir.

It was along the lines of this: manners can be much more important than academic results (outside an ever-decreasing list of licensed professions). It’s a ticklish business, but bear with. Good manners will make people like you. If they like you, they will help you and, more importantly, they will want to work with you. I’m not talking about some weird etiquette like using the correct spoon for soup or eating asparagus with your left hand. I’m talking about being polite, respectful and making people feel valued.

A few years ago, I would have inwardly nodded while reading those paragraphs and moved on with my day. Yet in 2024, in the forty-eight hours or so since I read them, a debate has been raging between different parts of my brain.

My first reaction is strongly negative: Reardon’s is a privileged take which gives preference to people who adhere to a narrow set of cultural norms. It’s difficult to see someone with a strong regional accent and an underprivileged background being judged as polite by Reardon’s yardstick, let alone people from entirely different cultures. It reminds me of being at a House of Lords event and finding it deeply weird and confusing to be asked where I went to school, until it clicked, days later.

My second reaction is the opposite: there are many different ways to make people feel valued, and to act with politeness, respect, and consideration. Anyone can be nice—there’s really no class or cultural issue to be found.

My third reaction is disgust: this is a posh woman proudly declaring that she tells young girls that their agreeability is more important than their education. That is… problematic to say the least.

My fourth reaction is anxiety: it’s true that being nice is a useful quality in life regardless of gender. Is my disgust an inappropriate and revealingly prejudiced response to the writer’s identity rather than the content of her ideas?

I no longer know what to think.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Seventeen years ago, I highlighted a BBC News article in which Dave Gilbert reflected on thirteen years of online news.

So much of what has come to pass since is unwittingly signalled in that article.

The shrewdest comments came from the newspaper advertising executives who wondered where the revenue would come from. It’s a question some are still asking.

In 2024, this question is posed more frequently than in 2007. Waves of news organisations have collapsed, having transitioned to a business model that siphoned their income to Google and Facebook.

We clocked very early on that it was about a global audience, audience response and encouraging feedback – Web 2.0 in fact.

The idea of ‘audience response’ feels so quaint in 2024, when many news articles are built around embedded Twitter quotes. Often, it feels like the commentary has become the news, in a way that I certainly never foresaw.

People buy newspapers for a host of reasons but reporters never know how many read their own stories. From our real-time statistics, I know exactly what the audience is reading, and the feedback is almost instantaneous.

I don’t think any of us quite understood the extent to which those statistics would come to drive the news agenda, ‘public interest’ playing second fiddle to ‘things that interest the public,’ even at the BBC. ‘Beyoncé’s country album: the verdict’ would not have been one of BBC News’s top stories in 2007, though it was yesterday.

The pace of cultural change is difficult to believe.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I read Jacob Stern’s article in The Atlantic about the political controversy in the USA related to specific car manufacturers selling certain models without AM radios.

It made me wonder whether my car has an AM radio. I know it did when I bought it, a little over 14 years ago. I remember occasionally listening to Richard Bacon’s afternoon show on BBC Radio 5 Live in the car. But I’ve replaced the radio twice since then.

For the last three years, I’ve been using a ‘radio’ which uses Apple’s CarPlay system to stream content from my phone. Since then, I’ve never listened to broadcasts via FM or AM. I knew the system had a ‘tuner’ function, but I wasn’t sure whether it included AM frequencies.

Surprisingly, the ‘radio’ unit I bought is still ‘current’. I found it on sale on a national retailer’s website. Despite the technology now being several years old, the retail price has inflated by more than 11% since I bought it.

The retailer’s website didn’t list whether the ‘radio’ had an AM tuner. I can only assume this must be irrelevant to many people’s purchasing decisions these days.

I consulted the manufacturer’s website, but it wasn’t listed on the main product page there, either. I dug into a separate ‘full specifications and features’ page—lo and behold, there it was!

My car radio does, indeed, have a hitherto unused AM tuner.

Some US commentators appear to believe this to be essential to my freedom. I still don’t think I’m going to use it. Given that my car model isn’t sold in the US, perhaps no one will mind.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I often hear people complaining about notifications from the BBC News app and whether they really represent ‘breaking news’. I don’t use the BBC News app, just the website, and most of the notifications on my phone are turned off, so I don’t spend much time thinking about this. But perhaps I should.

On Tuesday, the FT’s Stephen Bush wrote about the impact of these push notifications on people’s awareness of policies and how this may become more salient in the forthcoming general election. I was surprised to learn that the decisions on which stories get push notifications are ‘made by comparatively low-ranking journalists, certainly compared with the six and the 10 o’clock news.’

But then, I’ve frequently been surprised by the BBC’s willingness to downplay or delegate its most crucial role. The editorial decisions taken by BBC News about what matters in the world—what it puts at the top of its news bulletins, what gets the big slot on the website homepage, what it sends notifications about—are among the most significant decisions anyone in the organisation makes. Yet, too often, the decision is ceded to others: parroting the front pages of openly biased newspapers or perverting the news agenda to promote its own programmes are two common sins. It’s rare to log on to the BBC News website on a Sunday morning and for the ‘top story’ not to be that their political discussion programme is on the air: that’s not news.

This is also reflected in much of the marketing BBC News undertakes: the focus is regularly on ‘news that matters to you‘. But it ought to be the exact opposite of that: the BBC ought to be the source of the news that matters to all of us. The organisation should cherish and embrace its unique position in directing the national conversation. It should talk to us about it.

In the third episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, anchor Will McAvoy gives an on-air speech which includes these words:

From this moment on, we’ll be deciding what goes on our air and how it’s presented to you based on the simple truth that nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate.

We’ll endeavour to put information in a broader context because we know that very little news is born at the moment it comes across our wire.

We’ll be the champion of facts and the mortal enemy of innuendo, speculation, hyperbole and nonsense. We’re not waiters in a restaurant serving the stories you asked for, just the way you like them prepared. Nor are we computers dispensing only the facts because news is only useful in the context of humanity.

You may ask: who are we to make these decisions?

We are Mackenzie McHale and myself. Ms McHale is our Executive Producer. She marshalls the resources of over 100 reporters, producers, analysts, and technicians, and her credentials are readily available. I’m Newsnight’s managing editor and make the final decision on everything seen and heard on this programme.

Who are we to make these decisions? We’re the media elite.

I’d love to see that kind of confidence and pluck from BBC News.

Some weeks, I think more about local journalism. This has been one of those weeks, as I’ve been thinking quite hard with my comms colleagues at work about whether and how to include public health messages in statements relating to a minor local news story. It’s sometimes a trickier call than you’d think.

When I saw James O’Malley’s most recent Substack post was about saving local news, the topic was already on my mind. He suggests that local news might be sustainably delivered through ‘paywalled newsletters’, initially supported by the BBC’s Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) funds, which currently pay for local newspaper journalists.

In an instant, this would mean that many more pockets of the country once again have quality reporting in a quality publication, covering the nuts and bolts of their local democracy. And with a LDRS subsidy, it would mitigate the chicken-and-egg problem that newsletters have, of needing to sign up enough people to be viable while still paying the wages of the writers.

Over time, some newsletters might even become profitable or sustainable – like the Mill. Others may need to be subsidised for slightly longer.

But ultimately, it would stimulate an ecosystem of viable local newsletters, with the reach and distribution to serve communities with real, meaningful news – with all of the civic positive-externalities that implies: Better democracy, better accountability, and better media.

As I read this, I immediately thought this was both a brilliant and terrible idea, and I haven’t entirely managed to reconcile my thoughts on it since.

The downside is, of course, the paywall. I’m not sure that content whose accessibility is limited to a few paid subscribers really does deliver better democracy or accountability. At the very least, it’s harder to counter misinformation and disinformation that is not out in the open in the first place. I’m also not confident that it’s ethically sound to use LRDS public money to fund journalism that’s only—or at least preferentially—available to those willing to pay a subscription fee.

And yet, if a product like that existed locally, I wouldn’t hesitate to sign up, so I’m not that ethically opposed to it. Heck, I even subscribe to the apps of some local newspapers so that I can view the less ridiculous content without a deluge of advertising. And surely a sustainable future for local journalism, even if it is a little less open, is better than no local journalism at all?

It’s a quandary.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

In Monocle this month, Michael Booth profiles Det Sidste Ord (The Last Word), a Danish television programme where famous people give an interview that is. filmed in great secrecy, edited and broadcast only after their death. Slightly weirdly, the questions are asked in the past tense and the third person (‘Who was Simon Howard?’ or ‘What was the most important thing Simon learned during his lifetime?’)

The interview is typically shown within a few weeks of the participant’s death, and there is an intention to re-edit and re-broadcast them around twenty years after death.

It sounded fascinating, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a radio format. The description didn’t sound televisual to me.

I’ve been trying to work out why that was my reaction. I think it is because it sounds like the format involves deep and intimate conversation, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that done well on television. Radio somehow conveys authenticity; TV struggles to break through a sheen of artificiality.

I read Rob Burley’s book about TV political interviews earlier this year and disagreed with his view that long-form television interviews are the most revealing. They often become performative and false in a way that rarely happens on radio. They are simply different beasts.

It’s an unfair comparison, but you can learn more about a person’s character from one appearance on Desert Island Discs than from ten guest slots on Graham Norton or Laura Kuenssberg’s TV shows.

With those preconceptions, I can see why my initial reaction was that Det Sidste Ord would make great radio rather than television. But perhaps the real lesson is that those who make British TV have much to learn from the Danes, or that I am watching the wrong programmes.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

A local politician popped up on our regional news bulletin yesterday evening. This was the sum total of his contribution:

What we’ve seen today is a series of meaningless soundbites that will provide very little reassurance to families that are struggling right now. To turn our economy round, we need tough but necessary decisions.

These two sentences could have been ejaculated by any representative of virtually any UK political party discussing virtually any issue. There is poetry in their vacuity. It is content-free speech lamenting content-free speech. There’s no hint of an idea, a political message, or even a substantive criticism.

Rather than the politician spending time on constructing such empty verbiage, the reporter and crew attending to film it, and the viewers having to listen to it, perhaps in future we could just replace it with one of those classic slient film caption cards: “ … “

Over recent months, I’ve become more certain in my position that the BBC shouldn’t be creating and sharing material on closed social networks. I’m defining ‘closed’ as anything that isn’t available to the public without a login. For example, BBC journalists shouldn’t—as part of their job—be posting threads on ‘X’.

Universal access is a core part of what the BBC stands for. Indeed, they’ve always aimed (with variable success) to give equal access to their television services regardless of the platform rather than giving preferential treatment to, say, Sky subscribers. I shouldn’t have to give my data to a third party to receive BBC content.

I used to think the same of government bodies, but then I changed my mind: it’s the responsibility of the government to reach people where they are, no matter how unpalatable that location.

A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Broderick gave me a whole new suggestion to ponder when he suggested that all politicians should be banned from private social networks. It is coming up to a month since he wrote that, and it’s been swimming around my mind ever since.

On one hand: clearly, there’s a risk of politicians being duplicitous by posting different things on different closed social media networks.

But on the other: ‘twas ever thus. I’m sure politicians have always said things in closed fora that they might not say elsewhere. The bit they write for a church newsletter is probably quite different in tone and content to the speech they give at the local social club. That’s clearly not wrong nor necessarily bad. If they end up saying contradictory things to different audiences, then they risk exposure.

It’s fair to say that the internet is not a church newsletter: for one thing, social media content has the potential to travel further faster than anything handed out in hard copy. But that’s actually protective of the underlying principle: the further content spreads, the greater the probability of inconsistencies coming to light.

So, despite my misgivings about social media, I don’t think I’m with Broderick on this one.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.