Over at BBC Radio 4’s iPM website there’s an interesting experiment going on – and some good examples of my 21st century newsroom ideas in practice.
- Firstly, their ‘Rough Notes’ blog is a good example of the ‘draft’ stage of my News Diamond, with members of the team talking about what they’re working on (and comments facility for people to suggest stories – some very good ideas there, BTW). Also, posts labelled ‘In Production‘ allow you to see the work so far, while you can comment on the current running orders.
- Secondly, they have a Flickr page where users can upload images. Distributed Journalism, perhaps? Well, more like simple community.
- Thirdly, and perhaps best of all, they’ve made their del.ico.us account public, so readers can see what they’re reading. That’ll be the ‘What’ of my Five Ws and a H, then.
The blurb, BTW, is: “We’ll source what we do through the best blogs, passionate ‘ear catching’ online debate as well as comments and recommendations of others. So what ends up on air will be shaped by listeners and bloggers.”
Online Journalism Blog 
Hi Paul, I’m the Editor of iPM. I can say in all honestly that up until an hour ago your ideas for the 21st century were unknown to me and the team. I wish I had seen them a little earlier! We are trying ( in part ) to put into practice some of your thinking about how we make programmes in the future. We do think it’s right to open up our processes and production techniques. At heart we want people to help us shape, comment and suggest what stories we are worknig on ro shd work on. And I can’t see why we shdn’t be transparent about the decsions we take in the course of a week. Driving the programme through the blog let’s us do so much more than we can through a convential set up. We’ll post up unedited versions of interviews, invite further discussion, perhaps park an idea for a while etc. As a producer, it feels different and the notion of the long tail is something I’m getting used to – albeit slowly. Of course, it helps that the R4 audience is typically engaged, intelligent and informed – so it might not easily transfer to all audeinces. We’ve a run on Radio 4 that takes us through to around Christmas and all comments/feedback good and bad is more than welcome.
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