More convergence at the BBC. Yesterday, its TV and radio departments shut up shop. And were then born again. Following Director-General Mark Thompson’s restructuring plans, the Beeb is regrouping into Vision, Audio & Music, Journalism and Future Media & Technology.
- BBC Vision launches with a promise to audiences

The BBC needs to be ready for “360 degree multi-platform content creation”, according to Thompson.
- BBC reorganises for an on-demand Creative Future

Or as one BBC radio, sorry, Audio and Music presenter put it:

You can’t say radio any more in case people are listening on a mobile phone or a toenail, or a haddock, or something.

via Ben Hoyle, London Times

Yes, Google’s newly launched News Archive Search is a great boon to those lacking subscriptions to super expensive public record/newspaper/academic databases – all the news going back decades that’s unclassified and fit to print – such as LexisNexis and JSTOR.

For a few dollars a shot, bloggers can now sample what journalists have become totally hooked on.

Click over to one place and search. Cut and paste from a clutch of database cuttings. Leaving no citations to indicate that your great thoughts aren’t your great thoughts alone, damn, you sound authoritative.

Due respect to old skool Google, but you won’t want to go back. It’s like coca leaves v. crack cocaine.

And you won’t talk about it. In the last month, no journalist at any British quality newspaper, not the Guardian nor the Times nor the Telegraph, has mentioned, casually, in passing, that he or she uses LexisNexis. No mention in any US newspaper either. But everyone’s doing it. Quick and easy access to vast databases of information must be one of the most significant changes to journalistic practice in recent years.

Video marketeers beware. As Paris Hilton and Tony Blair both get down with the new brand-driven YouTube – yay! the Official Paris Hilton YouTube Channel as well as Tony’s Transformational Government & Leadership Challenge, angry, bored, plain delinquent consumers citizens are sharpening their keyboards:

For a long time Governments have been looking around for way to get their ‘messages’ out to the public without the bothersome annoyance of journalists asking difficult questions. They may see YouTube as the fix for this.What they may not have taken account of is the video replies or text comments that people can leave in response.
- Simon Perry, Digital-Lifestyles

Millions of websites will aggregate what we do, syndicate it, link it, comment on it, sneer at it, mash it, trash it, monetise it, praise it and attempt to discredit it – in some cases all at once. But no-one will actually go to the risk and the expense of setting up a global network of people whose only aim in their professional lives is to find things out, establish if they’re true, and write about them quickly, accurately and comprehensibly. The blogosphere, which is frequently parasitical on the mainstream media it so remorselessly critiques, can’t ever hope to replicate that.

- Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian

From the department of kicking the US mainstream media while it’s already down: it’s not unusual for US TV stations to run corporate product pitches as straight news items, according to a new report by a media watchdog.

Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy found 77 TV stations guilty of airing video news releases (VNRs) created by PR companies for corporate clients.
- Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed

What happens is that the news anchor stops talking about murder and mayhem on Main Street and cuts to a colleague who talks about a great new product by Acme Corp. The viewer has no reason to think that what’s on show is an advert.

The report finds that while videos were routinely altered to look as though they originated in-house, most stations failed to disclose their promotional nature.

Television newscasts—the most popular news source in the United States—frequently air VNRs without disclosure to viewers, without conducting their own reporting, and even without fact checking the claims made in the VNRs.

- Diane Farsetta and Daniel Price, Center for Media and Democracy

More corporate copyright capers. The pure legal anarchy enjoyed at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on the opening day of Apple vs. Apple, in which the Beatles’ record label is demanding damages from the computer giant for the alleged scrumping of its apple logo, as QC Geoffrey “Loudmouth” Vos, resplendent in what excited journalists took to be an Adidas hoodie, chopped from the classic disco of Chic’s Le Freak to the big street hot riddims of Coldplay’s Speed of Sound while waving Hunter S Thompson’s pump-action wordage in the air -

the music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side. – Hunter S Thompson, Daily Variety (Sub Req)

- gave way to the tired realisation yesterday that iPods were now ordinary, that this was just another squabble between big corporations over copyright lucre. Mr Justice “Notda” Mann cut short an explanation from the lawyers of how Apple’s iLife suite works – “I’ve got it and I use it” – and thereby opportunities for any further zeitgeist-defining and/or legal sitcom moments.