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.

Photo: Xerones @ Flickr, cc licenced

Watching the stories about the floods in Yorkshire, it’s been interesting to switch between Sky News and BBC News 24.

BBC News 24 is talking to journalists, rescue workers, firemen, policemen, etc. The questions from the studio are the standard “What’s the latest where you are?”.

Sky News - Anna Botting, who is live on-air - is talking directly to people who are trapped. People stuck upstairs, workmen who are ‘really quite cold now’ in their warehouses, people stuck in their cars. The journalist’s questions are sympathetic, interesting, warm.

Which do you think is the most interesting?

Clue: it’s not what the BBC is doing.

A while back, I posted about journalists, in my view, not doing adequate research into a story before printing it.

I discover today that it’s not really journalists’ fault: the computer network of one national newspaper, at least, has extremely restricted access and can’t even see… this website. “Yes, sorry,” said the journalist I was chatting to, “there’s a really fierce firewall here”.

I’ve no idea what this website does that means that a major newspaper wishes to block access - unless it’s related to blocking Media UK which would be an odd decision too - but I’m pretty amazed at that. Reminds me of my days running Media UK as a limited company, when the internet access was so slow (128k ISDN line, shared between 30 people) that it was often quicker to go down the road to the internet cafe.

Anyway, perhaps I’m being a little harsh on some journalists - not their fault if the tools to do their work can be witheld like that. It does explain a whole heap, though: if they can’t see little blogs like mine, then what else can’t they see?

CC licenced photo of bees on a mobile phone from Carol Esther

I wrote a while back about a particular story about lazy journalism where an obviously fake story simply wasn’t checked before printing or broadcasting.

And now, another - the case of the mobile phone towers that ‘kill bees’. First reported by The Independent on Sunday, the story was copied right round the world.

Shame it’s not true. Indeed, the scientist who’s quoted in the original article says (my bold)…

“Ever since The Independent wrote their article, for which they never called or wrote to us, none of us have been able to do any of our work because all our time has been spent in phone calls and e-mails trying to set things straight. This is a horror story for every researcher to have your study reduced to this. Now we are trying to force things back to normal.”

I’ve spotted stories being copied and embellished before, and (as a non-journalist who’s never worked in journalism) I do find it quite amazing that people lift stories from others without any checking at all.

So, the biggest French political news this year: France has a new president.

A quick flick through at 10.15pm tonight…

Sky News had live coverage of Sarkozy’s speech.
Euronews had live coverage of Sarkozy’s speech.
CNN had live coverage of Sarkozy’s speech.
Al Jazeera had live coverage of Sarkozy’s speech.
BBC Parliament was taking TF1 with live coverage of Sarkozy’s speech (while BBC News 24 simulcasts BBC One’s national news)

…and France 24, the international news service from France, had a pre-recorded sports report, a promo telling us it concentrates on news from France, followed by… a package from New Delhi in India.

And the prize for most non-existent live coverage of the French election goes, surprisingly, to its own news channel.

Well, and Fox News. But then, you’d expect that.

It’s not every day that you end up as a minor tech news story, but that happened this week to me. I thought it would be interesting to do some analysis on it.

First, a bit of background. Before Christmas, we (that is, Virgin Radio, the company I work for) quietly made our radio player work correctly with the Nintendo Wii. The only mention - because I didn’t think it was worthy of a story at the time - was on my blog. We didn’t PR it, nor did we even put it on the website.

Then, thanks to a colleague who bought a PS3, we got the Virgin Radio player working on the Sony PS3. On Friday 30 March, in fact - because, once more, it was blogged here. Again, we didn’t put anything about it on the website; but I did wonder whether we might make a story out of it, so I mailed our PR team over the weekend.

Most of the things we’re proud of (the launch of the Virgin Radio Interact section for example) are technically ambitious, loved by our audience, and totally ignored by the press - I guess because they’re too complicated, too confusing, and not sexy enough. This, however, was different.

A call from John Plunkett from The Guardian resulted in the first coverage of the story. Once that story appeared, on 10 April, I had a few other calls from trade publications and one games website - and our press release went to anyone who asked our PR team.

What’s been interesting is how the story spread. It didn’t take long for BBC News to find the story, headlining it with “console tie-up”, making it appear as if we have spoken to Sony and/or Nintendo. (We haven’t, for the record).

Radio Today used our press release as the basis for their story; as did (I guess) Digital Spy - both of them similarly used the future tense - ‘Virgin Radio is to become the first…’, rather than saying we’d already launched with the service.

But news on the internet appears to run through a chinese whispers system. One news source will copy other news sources in order to add to their news. So, it is interesting following the story around. As an example, I didn’t speak to Radio Today at all (Roy always gets the story right, so I don’t need to); however, I’m quoted as speaking to Radio Today by many websites who use the story, like next-gen.biz, gamesindustry.biz, monstersandcritics.com, ps3news.ca, PC Advisor, tech.blorge.com and absolutegadget.com. Also crediting Radio Today are Portable Planet, whos story then gets used by Nintendojo.

Using a combination of our press release and our website as a source are iTWire and el33tonline, whos story then makes it to igniq.com. Also apparent users of our press release include MCVUK, who then get quoted as a source for PSPSPS and Pocket-Lint.

Clearly looking at Digital Spy’s “will be launching” text were PS3center.net and Hexus who were under the impression this was something we were planning to launch in the future.

AHN quotes the BBC news report; as does Aurum3, totalgaming.co.uk and Afterdawn.com who uses a Virgin brand (not Virgin Radio brand) logo, and claims it will be an update for the console.

Eurogamer quotes the subscription mad.co.uk report (one of the trade press that called me for comment), as do GWN.com.

Interesting how my job changes, too.
I get quoted as ‘Virgin spokesman’ by Palgn.com.au, and just “James Cridland, Virgin” by techshout.com (I’m not, y’know.). In a piece I can’t currently find in the archives, I’m even quoted as being “Virgin’s PR spokesman”.

Seemingly original content (at least, nicely rewritten stuff) from Wii-UK, a nice piece from The Inquirer, Cubed3, Play.tm, TUV Product Service.

So, what do we learn from this?

The main message of this appears, to me, to be summed up here - Paidcontent.org and Future’s tech.co.uk were the only ones to explicitly credit The Guardian’s story, who were first to break it. Being first seemingly doesn’t guarantee a ton of back-links. Perhaps the registration barrier is at fault; if you can find the same story on Radio Today without any registration, instead of on The Guardian with registration, then perhaps that’s an interesting reason to avoid mandatory registration.

As an aside…
Of our total traffic to the radio player since the announcement, 3.3% of that was ‘unknown’ platform (even beating all visits from Mac users). For the same period before the announcement, similar traffic was less than 0.04%. In the PR world, I guess that looks like a hundred-fold increase.

Thanks to you if you wrote and passed on the story; I’ve not included everyone who published it because, well, it’ll get really boring.