YouView could entice a large cache of older viewers too technologically timid to hook their set up to a games console to view the world of TV a little differently.

So said The Guardian this morning. It seems that, for YouView to be successful, Lord Sugar is relying on customers who are all of the following:

1. Too tech timid to hook up a games console, but tech confident enough to hook up a YouView box using an almost identical method.
2. Too money-conscious to spend cash on a Sky, Virgin, or BT Vision subscription (all of which offer – or will soon offer – most of the new features), but happy to spend £200 on a box whose additional online functionality is broadly comparable to that of a £49 Roku box.
3. Have a broadband connection (or are willing to pay for one), despite tech timidity and money-consciousness.

That doesn’t strike me as a huge market… but perhaps I’m underestimating the power of its big-name backers!

Every now and again, I find myself moaning to Sky News about some report or other they’re running, usually on a medical topic. This might put me in the same box as the green-ink angry brigade of old, but I kind of hope it doesn’t.

Sky News is normally the outlet on the receiving end of my moans because Wendy likes to watch Sunrise in the mornings, so they tend to be the ones to irk me when I’m sleepy-eyed and vulnerable. Usually, they’ve misunderstood the findings of some piece of research, or are giving advice that needs a little more nuance. Generally, I fire off an email to them, and they correct either their script or package pretty quickly, or else get back to me to explain why they won’t. I actually think I have a pretty good relationship with them.

A few years ago when the whole MTAS debacle was kicking off in the medical world, I helped Channel 4 News with some of their reporting, and also found them really helpful, willing to listen to my explanations, and good at accurate reportage.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I don’t think I’ve ever complained about a BBC News report. But then, the BBC News website published this article about the Queen’s faith role. This couldn’t be further from the stuff I’d usually moan about, but the report was based on a COMRES poll, and originally opened with the claim that 80% of the population supported the Queen’s faith role. I didn’t believe this, and so checked out the original data on the COMRES website, which revealed that 80% responded positively to a question about whether the Queen has a faith role. This is, of course, different from giving support – it’s a question of fact, and, as the Queen is the head of the Church of England, it seems pretty undeniable that she has a faith role, whether or not it’s supported.

So I fired off an email. And, within hours, the article was changed to the current version, which reports the actual survey findings more accurately. What I hadn’t anticipated, and hadn’t had from any other outlet, was that the Religion Editor gave me a call. We had a great chat in which he explained how the article had come about, how the mistake had been made, and also a general talk about the complex rules that the BBC has around commissioning surveys. This was fantastic.

So what’s my point? Essentially, any time I personally have moaned to a media outlet about a factual reporting error, I’ve received a positive response. Granted, it would be better that the mistakes weren’t there in the first place, and it’s probably true that not all sections of the media are as responsible as those I’ve been involved with.

But journalists are humans too. They make mistakes, and many of them seem happy to have these corrected. Leveson might give the impression that all journalists are unethical idiots, and Blair might think they’re feral beasts, but some journalists are just doing a bloody hard job as well as they can, with the utmost professionalism.

I know it’s not a popular view at the moment, but maybe we can consider giving journalists a break sometimes? Just a thought.

I’ve just finished watching the complete West Wing again, and I’m experiencing that odd withdrawal / mourning feeling that so many of my friends describe, and that I had most acutely back in 2006 after my first run-through.

It seems incredible that it’s 12 years since I first saw The West Wing, and six since it ended. It’s a really fantastic series, and if there’s anyone left in the country that hasn’t seen it, you really must buy it now.

BBC One should reflect the whole of the UK in its output.

That’s a key part of BBC One’s remit. I get that the ratings are better on the CBBC channel, and I sympathise with that position; but I simply don’t see how BBC One can meet it’s remit without kid’s programmes. BBC Two hasn’t got over the existential crisis it had because of BBC Three and Four, yet they’re inviting the question: “What’s BBC One for?”

It also invites criticism, means that they have to find (and pay for) something to plug the gaps in the schedule, and reduces awareness of kid’s TV amongst the people who actually pay for it. As strategies go, it seems like madness.

I just would have liked to have seen Bartlet say ‘goddammit’ from time to time, which you can’t do. You’ll be able to say ‘motherfucker’ on network television before you’ll be able to take God’s name in vain.

Aaron Sorkin in this Kaplan and Leibovitz Vanity Fair piece about him, his methods, and his move to HBO. It’s a really good read.

On Saturday, a rally was held in London against the Health and Social Care Bill. Tweets have suggested that this peaceful rally was somewhat over-policed, with armed riot police in attendance and protesters being kettled. There’s some coverage on Indymedia, but little coverage by the mainstream media.

There’s a Twitter meme stating that the reason for the lack of mainstream media coverage is because a “D-Notice” has been issued by the Government to prevent reporting. This meme appears to stem from Dr No’s blog.

I should state clearly at this point that I have no inside information about what the defence services have or haven’t done, and no inside information about the media. I’m neither a professional journalist nor a signatory to the Official Secrets Act. However, the idea that a D-Notice was issued to cover up a protest by a couple of hundred people about a Government bill seems utter crap.

D-Notices, which have been called DA-Notices since 1993, are controlled by the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee (DPBAC): they are not under the direct control of government. There are five government representatives on this committee, and 16 members of the media, nominated by bodies like the Press Association, Google, the BBC, and ITV. So for us to believe that a DA-Notice was used to cover up a protest, we must also believe that 16 members of the media – or, I guess, at least six members of the media to carry a majority on the committee – felt that this was appropriate action. Also, since DA-Notices are merely advisory, it must also be the case that not one journalist chose to break rank and shout to all and sundry about the most audacious UK government cover-up of a peaceful protest in history.

DA-Notices are very seldom used. Often, the existence of the DA-Notice itself is reported – these aren’t super injunctions. Back in 2009, the existence of a DA-Notice was extensively reported after Bob Quick accidentally flashed sensitive information to photographers when arriving at Downing Street. The photos were printed in many newspapers and shown extensively on news programmes, with the offending information blurred out and the DA-Notice cited as the reason. There was also discussion around DA-Notices and Wikileaks. So we must also believe that not only have media representatives voted for a DA-Notice to be implemented, but that journalists have also spontaneously agreed not to discuss the very existence of a surely controversial notice.

DA-Notices are so seldom used that in possibly the biggest temporary media blackout of recent years – when Prince Harry served in Afghanistan – a DA-Notice wasn’t issued, but merely a gentleman’s agreement by the press attempted (unsuccessfully) to ensure that the news wasn’t leaked in advance.

There are five standing types of DA-Notice, which relate to: the military; nuclear facilities; secure communications; sensitive installations; and security and intelligence services. I wonder which type of DA-Notice Dr No believes this protest falls under?

A quick Google search reveals that, in addition to Saturday’s relatively small NHS protest, a rally against climate change, an anti-workfare protest, a protest against the Assad regime in Syria, a protest against stop-and-search, and an anti-fur demo all took place in London on Saturday. I’m sure all feel that their protests were under-reported in the mainstream media.

Perhaps the media agreed to the issue of DA-Notices against all of these protests this weekend. Or perhaps it was felt that none of these protests was particularly newsworthy. Perhaps the protests were felt to be a little predictable – a restatement of a known position, rather than anything new. And I’d imagine that there were many complaints about perceived poor policing over the weekend, given the level of complaint against the police on any given day. Each incident in itself is unlikely to be newsworthy.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps there has been a cover-up and a media blackout about this protest. But that’s an extraordinary claim and, like Carl Sagan, it’ll take extraordinary evidence to convince me. Until that’s available, perhaps protestors should stick to the facts.

I really wonder about the value of these graphics. I rarely watch programmes “live”, and suspect the prevalence of behaviour like mine is growing. By the time I play back the programme and see the graphic, I’ve missed the programme.

I’ve noticed that channels are trailling programmes earlier than they used to – look at the BBC’s promotions for The Voice or Sky’s for Mad Men – which I suspect attempts to mitigate this effect of time-shifted viewing. But these onscreen graphics are rarely displayed more than 48hrs in advance.

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to use this opportunity to moan about unnecessary and obtrusive on screen graphics. Job done.

This evening, The Guardian reports:

The title will simply be called the Sun, with an identical masthead to the daily, and insiders have been at pains to make it clear that the newspaper is not a “Sun on Sunday” – but instead simply a Sunday edition of the newspaper that will have some “specialist staff” but without its own editor.

This has come as a surprise to many media commentators, but not so much to me. You’ll note that I wrote the following last July:

Why does it need to be “Sunday Sun” or “Sun on Sunday”? What’s wrong with, erm, “The Sun”? [7th July 2011]

Surely the solution is a truly 7-day Sun – no differentiation in title / price on Sundays? [11th July 2011]

A seven-day operation has always made the most sense, and was the direction of travel for the News of the World before this whole controversy kicked off. Why anyone failed to see this is utterly baffling to me, but I do love being able to say “I told you so!”

This is the second paragraph of this Susanna Rustin article, putatively about “the rise and rise of radio”, from today’s Guardian.

I didn’t look at the photo and clicked on “unfollow” straightaway so I wouldn’t see any more of Dale’s tweets. Holding this woman up to ridicule in front of the 26,000 people who follow him was abusing his position, I thought.

I love the Guardian, but this article is awful from start to finish. It starts with the above assertion which feels like holier-than-thou nonsense: how did the writer know that a woman was being “held up to ridicule” without looking at the photo? How could she be sure this wasn’t a joke? And is she always so reactionary?

And that’s not to mention that the Iain Dale incident has precisely nothing to do with the popularity of radio, which the headline suggests is the thrust of the piece. Indeed, she doesn’t get onto radio until paragraph seven.

She then goes on to give piss-poor reasons for the popularity of radio, beginning with the assertion that “the licence fee is the obvious first answer”, as though radio is exclusively popular in the UK).

Then, further along, she attempts to classify radio as an “old” or “new” medium (as though this dichotomous, rather than a spectrum), and, working for a newspaper that employs Aleks Krotoski, one of the foremost academics on the subject, turns to Wikipedia for the answer.

Is radio old or new media? The Wikipedia “new media” definition doesn’t mention radio at all, perhaps uncertain whether to lump it in with printing presses or mobile apps.

Then, in the final paragraph, there’s the assertion that the Desert Island Discs archive was opened last weekend. Of course, regular readers of the foremost newspaper for media coverage will know that the online archive actually launched last year.

In any other newspaper, this kind of article would be par for the course. But the Guardian isn’t any other newspaper: it’s one that should strive for first-class journalism, not lowest-common-denominator page-filling tosh like this. It’s really quite disappointing.

I predict that the BBC is about to enter one of the most turbulent periods in its history – and I’m not certain whether it will come out the other side in a recognisable form. The next decade may well be the one in which the licence fee becomes unsustainable.

I desperately hope this doesn’t happen. I think the Beeb is the world’s greatest broadcaster, and one of Britain’s most awesome institutions. Yet the signs are there, and I think the Beeb needs to sit up ad notice them.

The BBC’s raison d’être has always been to “inform, educate, and entertain” – and, as successive Directors General have been keen to point out – that order of priorities is crucial. In recent years, the BBC has faced real challenges with the latter two of these, but it’s about to be shaken by an impossible threat to the first.

It’s mission to “entertain” has been threatened in recent years by the approximately decennial shifts between ITV and the BBC in dominance of Saturday night TV: the last decade of Pop Idol, X Factor, I’m a Celebrity and the Talent franchise has been ITV’s. The BBC has also had real difficulty catching up with commercial operators in its engagement of young adults. And the Brand-Ross affair caused stifling restriction to creativity at the hands of “compliance”. But by and large, it seems to be finding its feet, and learning to walk through he entertainment genre again.

The aim to “educate” has been challenged by the ludicrous QueenGate scandal, where non-broadcast footage of the Queen was edited out of sequence. The BBC’s massive over-reaction probably harmed its trustworthy reputation. And the exile of almost all high-brow factual programming to the digital diaspora of BBC Four made for an excellent channel, but also for frequent accusations of dumbing-down elsewhere. And getting Jeremy flipping Vine to “host” Panorama was unforgivable – though I suspect that’s more a personal bugbear than a threat to the corporation’s future existence.

The most significant threat to the BBC has always been any threat to its news output. If it can’t reliably “inform”, then it has no core purpose. And, I think, it’s this aspect of the BBC’s purpose that is about to be shaken to its core.

The Times has declared itself many times (even, laughably, recently) to be “the newspaper of record”, and – to borrow the expression – the BBC’s news bulletins have always been the broadcast bulletins of record. The lead story on the Nine or Ten O’Clock News has always been, by definition, the “big story”. Alistair Campbell obsessed over the Labour Party’s position in the running order because he knew that closeness to the top guaranteed closeness to the top of everyone else’s running order. The BBC’s bulletins have, for many years, been the arbiter of importance in this country’s news cycle. And it is this that is under threat.

I think it was Tim Cook, though it could easily have been someone else, who described the notifications centre in. iOS 5 as compiling “your life’s breaking news”. And that is the crux of the problem. The democratisation of the media, brought about by social media as much as anything else, means we all have a “top story” now.

The BBC is forever being criticised on Twitter for not covering some story or other in huge detail – be it famines (East Africa), protests (block the bridge), or reforms (NHS). People are passionate about their pet topics, and want to see the BBC leading on them. The positive reinforcement from similarly interested people on social media reinforces individuals’ perceptions of the popularity and importance of the cause: “Everyone in my Twitter feed supports x, yet it hasn’t been on BBC News”. Folk also tend to read websites and subscribe to RSS feeds that share their own views and agenda, further reinforcing their own belief of the importance of the story. But, of course, the range of stories believed to be important across all individuals is huge.

The BBC’s traditional hierarchy of the importance of stories no longer applies to the majority of viewers. People begin to believe that the BBC is ignoring their interests, perhaps because it is biased. In fact, the interest is a small minority one, thought to be a larger one only because the individuals is surrounded by factors which positively reinforce that view.

The problem is exacerbated by BBC funding cuts, which mean that the number of stories which get any coverage at all is reduced.

Yet the BBC’s news starts to seem irrelevant, or even biased against every individual’s views. “Why cover Liam Fox / Steve Jobs / Nick Clegg, when he’s just one man? The BBC should be leading on NHS Reform / Block the Bridge / Famine / General Strike / Pensions / Finance because that affects us all, everyone’s interested in it, and it’s a really important story.”

Recently, I’ve been following NHS reform with particular interest, and felt this effect myself. There was little coverage of the Lord’s vote on the NHS reform bill, but my Twitter feed and selected websites had been covering events minute-by-minute. To me, the story seemed earth-shatteringly huge, and I had difficulty understanding why the BBC was effectively ignoring this massively important story. Except, in the grand scheme of things, it was essentially a procedural Lords discussion about a Bill progressing through Parliament. There was a popular campaign to block it which never had the scent of success, and by the end of the day, we knew little that we didn’t know at the start. Yet to me, this story remained huge, and the BBC’s lack of coverage felt disenfranchising.

As more people embrace social media, and as news sources fragment into finer and finer grain communities, the gap between the stories the BBC’s website and flagship bulletins see as important and the stories we as individuals see as important will turn from a crack into a gulf. People will question the purpose of the BBC, and struggle to see its importance. “If the BBC can’t even cover x properly, then what’s the point?”

If trust in the BBC’s news is eroded like this, then it’s unique funding stream becomes increasingly difficult to defend – especially in recessionary times. And in a decade which looks certain to be dominated by the Tories, who is going to stick up for it politically?

For the BBC to survive, it needs to change its news output. A homepage which “learns” about your interests and prioritises its news hierarchy appropriately might be the beginnings of a start.  But how the BBC can possibly reflect the conflicting priorities of millions of people in a meaningful way against a shrinking budget is beyond me – and that’s why I fear for its future.