-
Radio Festival 2011 Report: Part One – TechCon
This is the first part of three part summary of this year’s Radio Festival. Part two can be found here, and part three can be found here. Each year the radio industry gets to meet in Salford at the Lowry in Salford Quays – just metres away from Media City where Five Live is currently…
-
Google Reader
I’ve been shut away at the Radio Festival for the last few days (more about that soon), and since I was largely using a tablet computer there, I hadn’t yet properly used the new “improved” Google Reader until today. I’m late to the party, although it seems that basically nobody who actually uses Google Reader,…
-
RAJAR – Q3 2011
New RAJAR brings with it some big digital changes this quarter. This chart shows that digital listening has pushed through to 28.2% which is up a decent amount from the previous 26.9%. We usually get the big digital jumps in Q1 each year, when people start turning on their DAB radios after Christmas, but is…
-
US Sport on BBC Radio
A few days ago, the BBC press office put out a press release detailing some of their US sport coverage. In particular, coverage of Major League Baseball’s World Series, and NFL coverage ahead of the International Series game at Wembley as well as other regular season games. The sport is broadcast on Five Live Sports…
-
National Newspapers on Friday
I’ve had a couple of days to think about this, but here’s the response I wrote to a piece Andrew Collins published on his blog in reaction to media coverage of the death of Gadaffi. I refused to buy a newspaper on Friday, because I found the editorial judgement of many of our newspapers –…
-
The Booker Prize 2011
Yesterday, Julian Barnes won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending. In the past, I’ve read some, but by no means all, Booker Prize winners. And of course I’ve read a fair number of the nominees. But this year, I made a concerted effort to read every novel on…
-
Light
Autumn is finally here…
-
Holiday Video
While I was on holiday recently, I made a short film… It’s a Super 8 film shot on the island of Syros. The camera is a Canon 318M, and the music is from the film Le Mépris and is composed by Georges Delerue. The camera’s filter was misbehaving so I’ve colour corrected a bit. The…
-
DQF – Some Initial Thoughts
And so it came to pass. The BBC’s “Delivering Quality First” aka “What We’re Cutting To Save 20%” has been published. It’s worth Since I work in radio, I’ll start there, but I’ll offer my thoughts on other services too. Radio To a greater or lesser extent, radio escapes the brunt of the savings. Radio…
-
Foreign Language TV Dramas
I think that it’s safe to say that if there’s one thing that BBC Four has given to UK audiences (and there certainly isn’t only one thing), it’s introducing British audiences to much more non-English language TV dramas. Historically, we’ve been an export-only country, with imports not finding a home here unless they come from…
-
London Soundscapes
Currently in London there are two audio exhibits – of sorts – taking place in London. And they’re only about a five minute walk apart. At the Wellcome Collection on the Euston Road, passers-by are currently being exposed to White Sounds: An urban seascape. Bill Fontana is bringing the sounds of Chesil Beach in Dorset…
-
New Amazon Kindles and Pricing
So Amazon, as widely expected, has announced details of its new range of Kindles. There are four of them: Kindle at $79 Kindle Touch (WiFi) at $99 Kindle Touch (WiFi + 3G) at $149 Kindle Fire (their colour tablet) at $199 Woohoo. Let me order one immediately. Ah. But they’re mostly only available in the…
Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
-
Yellowface/All The Lovers In The Night
Yellowface by R F Kuang I first came across R F Kuang with last year’s very enjoyable Babel, an alternate history of the British Empire told in a world where magic exists and is controlled by an elite group of individuals. Yellowface is very different, but no less enjoyable. It’s a book about books, and…
Hadrian’s Wall
Check out some of my other photography
