http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:20:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Calls for libel law reform are misguided. Journalism is intended to be harmful and journalists who don’t like risk should go elsewhere. Sometimes a practising journalist wonders whether his or her current project is investigative. There's a good practical answer: if you're scared, it might be. If you're not scared, not. As in other ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2010/03/03/libel-fear-should-be-the-spur/ James Murdoch’s Edinburgh MacTaggart Lecture attack on Ofcom and the BBC was so blatantly self-interested and tendentious that it was easily dismissed by all right-thinking people. Now that it has been firmly adopted and amplified by politicians, who might all too soon have the power to mount an attack on these institutions to his and ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2009/12/02/regulation-goodnight-nurse/ If one week is still a lifetime in politics then, for sure, the past 20 years has been a cosmic eternity for journalism. It was difficult enough to launch British Journalism Review in the 1980s. Eventually we succeeded after two years of gestation and a generous financial grant from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2009/09/01/all-our-yesterdays/ At the end of March, I wrote my final column under the Pendennis byline in The Observer and was not replaced. An extraordinary list of names, from Anthony Sampson to Barbara Cartland, had worn the Pendennis hat before me. At more or less the same time, The Independent’s Pandora writer, ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2009/06/01/hot-gossip-goes-cold/ “Some of my best friends work for the BBC, but…” That ancient cliché of prejudice seems a fitting epigraph for a few thoughts on a favourite journalistic habit: sniping at the Corporation for flagrant waste of the licence fee. Note that I say (with unwonted modesty) “a few thoughts”. I am not qualified to ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2008/12/01/bbc-gets-its-numbers-right/ Standards of press behaviour have plunged and the PCC sees much of this as ‘inevitable’. Now’s the time for those at the sharp end to revolt When Arnold Wesker, the playwright, persuaded Sunday Times editor Harold Evans to allow him to spend a month on the paper in the early 1970s, to watch the ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2008/09/01/what-happened-to-playing-fair/ If the soup was too salty, the steak tough and the fruit overripe, that’s one restaurant you won’t be revisiting. You might be too timid or too busy to complain, but the nasty taste will linger, and you will find somewhere else to eat, somewhere you can trust. That’s more or less the ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2008/05/26/food-for-thought/ As might have been expected, reactions to the condemnations of media practices contained in Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, which provides a plank for an article on investigative journalism by David Leigh in this issue, have tended to be focused on the moral and methodological failings of national newspapers and broadcasters. Another aspect might, ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2008/03/01/trivia-pursuit/ On a spring day, two distinguished drama critics and broadcasters, James Agate of The Sunday Times and his protégé Alan “Jock” Dent of the Manchester Guardian, were out in the West End. Agate wrote in his diary: “Of a six-footfour figure whom we saw striding along Regent Street this afternoon, Jock ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2007/12/03/lord-help-us/ Andy Bull I have an analogy I like to use when working with a group of raw recruits to a journalism course. It's that they should think of learning how to write a news story rather as they would approach following a recipe in a cookbook. Just as with a recipe by Jamie or ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2007/08/31/training-a-matter-of-degrees/