If you’ve ever wondered what I do, this is it.

Monday
Saw a presentation of a great piece of research, done for the BBC and others by The Leading Question. Interesting figures include (I’ve checked, I can blog these):
77% of music fans discover new music on the radio. The average music library on an iPod or computer is 1,247. 51% of that is from their own CDs. 27% from ‘free downloads’. Among filesharers, Limewire still MUCH more popular (67%) than torrents (14%). 44% of iPod owners live within the M25. Plenty more interesting stats to come, I suspect.
Meeting count: 3

Tuesday
Included a meeting around putting radio into the iPlayer. People started shouting at each other. Nobody minded. Passion, it’s good.
Also included, variously, a pitch from a company about a new product; a meeting about potential improvements to a BBC system; a meeting with Ian from BBC Backstage, which was very good; and a pitch from a US company which wasn’t.
Meeting count: 7

Wednesday
Catching up with some of my direct reports. Useful meetings, must do them more often (and pass on good feedback rather better). Travelled to Heathrow, got on a plane to Dublin. Really good conference about the future of newspapers, where I was chided for not wearing a tie. Professor Roy Greenslade is officially the most interesting man in the known universe, if you want to know about newspapers. Lots of editors of newspapers on the panel with me. Slightly startled the panel by saying I’d read 243 news items by 146 different journalists - or, rather, bloggers - that day, and hadn’t read a newspaper. Those stats were stunningly made up, but potentially very possible given my Google Reader habit. (I had in fact read two, because they were free.) Enjoyed the conference very much. Particularly enjoyed the Guinness drinking and excellent company afterwards. Quite seriously considering hopping on a plane back to Dublin tomorrow for more of aforesaid company. Can’t. But quite tempted.
Meeting count: 4

Thursday
Staying at a posh hotel in Dublin (courtesy of the conference organisers), which was irritatingly attentive and anxious to please. Just fuck off, leave me alone, stop ringing me every two minutes asking if everything’s okay. Thanks. Woke up after a, ahem, small amount of sleep, to get to Dublin airport for 7am. Thank heavens I flew on BMI (courtesy of the conference organisers), which was cheap and meant I had club lounge access (courtesy of other conference organisers and my silver card). Much coffee drunk. Back in the UK, one meeting around new streaming infrastructure; the monthly departmental get-together (three great presentations by my team, one blog read out by me, that was it really); then moderately not very good conference in the evening around widgets, during which I had to pipe up from the audience of course. My take? Widgets aren’t the exciting bit. APIs are. APIs? Mmm. Widgets? Meh. Retold a story about Virgin Radio’s magical “adding the person’s ID number at the end of their linking code” to reward people for linking from external sites. Bumped into some nice people from Sky afterwards.
Meeting count: 3

Friday
Inexplicable internal BBC accounting wrangling portfolio discussion meeting, then radio-into-iPlayer meeting in the afternoon. Seeing lots of really nice UI for it. Lots of little niggles to help sort. Looking really good though. Quite exciting.
Meeting count: 4

All in all, a meeting-light week (Tuesday was more normal). Very tired now, mind. Looking forward to bed.

Photo: Jesús Gorriti. Used under licence.

So, I went to Cork for a journalism conference last Thursday.

You might reasonably wonder what I know about journalism. Not much, in truth: my background is in music radio.

But my first week in commercial radio was spent in the newsroom.

As is now a source of fascination for some people, incredibly my first job on my first day was holding the mobile phone for one of our reporters, Maria Duarte. You might wonder whether it was very lazy of her not to carry her own mobile phone: but this was back in 1989, when mobile phones were the size of a small flight bag and incredibly heavy - it was like carrying a car battery around. I had to carry it for her as she went to report on a house fire in Bradford - light damage, but smelly. Nobody died, but the station still sent out a reporter to file a piece from the incident, and then to interview a fireman on a Uher tape machine. This piece of audio was driven back to the station, edited on tape using something quite like sticky-tape and some chinagraph pens, transferred to an eight-track cartridge, and played out on the next hour’s news bulletin.

I suppose you’d marvel at the staffing levels of the newsroom if you compared it to a typical newsroom now. During the day, there was a news editor, at least four other journalists, a sports editor, a sports reporter, and a slightly nervous thin looking kid who occasionally helped to carry mobile phones. That’s a news team of around eight in total; in fact, I think it might have been even larger.

That team was creating news for, essentially, one radio station: Classic Gold. News bulletins were five minutes an hour; ten minutes at 1pm. Pennine FM took the first three minutes of every bulletin, with a clunky-sounding timecheck to allow them to opt-out. And that was it: no web, no text message alerts, no production for different stations. Occasionally, the team got a story accepted by IRN, and it was sent around the country. News cues were written on typewriters, on little pieces of A5 thin paper. Audio was on cartridge. If you were really unfortunate, you dropped them on the way in to the studio.

And you try and tell people that these days.

One of the things I wished I’d said at the conference was to tell the students to make sure that they can do more than just write. If they can’t take photos, edit videos, record decent audio, and write, then they’ll be useless in the emerging journalistic world.

Hopefully, when I speak in a panel on Wednesday night in Dublin (on the same subject - what are the odds of that?!), I’ll remember to say it.

Photo: Steve Rhodes. Used under licence.