Young people have never really been interested in the news so why are people so concerned about younger viewers for the news now?

Transcription

1 Melanie Essex Executive Editor, BBC News Action and School News Day 17 April 2007 I am responsible for developing and running a range of projects, which are not just about young people although a lot of them are aimed at young people, about connecting with our audiences and reaching out to audiences that might not otherwise connect with news. So we do School Question Time Challenge, for year olds, we do School Report, which we piloted this year for the first time, which is for key stage 3, so we have a key state 3 and key stage 4 focus. We do a project with Blast, we do Blast news reporters which is very small but it s an interesting way of getting some young people who might not otherwise have thought about BBC News working with us. We provide six placements over the summer and mentor these people and then they get something on air last year we had stuff on News 24 and News Online and radio as well. Then on the adult side of things I work with projects like Action Network and also we ran a big citizenship conference about participation and what the BBC s role was in linking up with organisations in supporting public participation. As part of my remit I m also within Creative Futures, an exercise the BBC went through a few years ago looking 10 years forward. There s a work stream in creative futures about connecting better with the young (for those purposes that s year olds) and that includes things like taking journalism into schools and potentially twinning a journalist with every school in the country, which is 4,500 schools, and also building on the established brand of Newsbeat [Radio 1 news service]. The other thing I ve been involved in recently is Andy Parfit s been doing some work looking at year olds and there will probably be a very small news offering as part of that. What for is that likely to take? At the moment it s still very much in developmental stage but I think it ll be predominantly online with, I think, a Saturday sort of year old zone somewhere and within that zone there may well be weekly or monthly newsy reports, and then online two or three pieces of AV (audio/visual) a week probably. That s where the thinking is but lots of the ideas for Creative Futures were prelicence fee settlement and of course we re reviewing everything at the moment. So I couldn t give you definitive answers on anything at the moment but I can tell you what aspirations are, or what they were. Young people have never really been interested in the news so why are people so concerned about younger viewers for the news now? I ve been in the BBC for nearly 19 years and for as long as I can remember there s been a concern that under 25 year olds weren t watching news. First of all it was under 25 year-olds and then it became we were worried that not so many under 35 year-olds weren t watching news and increasingly it s getting a worry about under 45 year olds. So I think that is relevant because before it was 1

2 easy to say, well, OK, under 25 year olds they don t watch much news but they ll come to us, and it was easy to be more blasé about it. But now it s a more genuine worry that if they re not coming to us, if they re graduating from university, getting a bit older, settling down and beginning to think about the world around them and if they re still not coming to us then then we need to think about it in a different way. Does it matter which media young people get their news from as long as they re getting it from somewhere? I m not hung up on TV news particularly as long as they are getting it from somewhere. I think a lot of them do still watch it on telly and a lot of young people, certainly in the age range I work with, it s quite interesting going into completely regular schools, not nice middle class schools but absolutely regular schools, a lot of kids do watch Newsround, they still watch Newsround, even though they re trying to age it down. Where else do they get their news? Urban kids read Metro if they have to travel, certainly in the schools I ve worked with in London they read Metro. A lot get it on line. Not many of them get their news from the radio. But what I m never sure about is that, because when I talk to a group of young school children they know I m from the BBC, quite a lot say they watch the news on telly but they might well say that. As far as the BBC is concerned I don t care where they get it as long as they re getting it from the BBC. So is there still a role for a core terrestrial TV news given the proliferation of new news outlets? One of the things that is important is that as there are going to be many more sources for them to get their news from and it s important that they understand what it is they re getting. Adults, to an extent, are media literate about the newspapers, they know that newspapers have agendas, to an extent, they understand that there are agendas and they might like one paper more than another because it tells them things more in the way they like to be told. Up until now there s been a bit of telly news, the BBC and now Sky. I might think there are differences between the BBC and Sky but for a lot of the audience they re not enough to make a difference. But actually with this huge proliferation of news, both online and on telly, I think there s more and more channels and if we end up with a Fox News here then I think it s really important that people understand what the options are. If they want to go off and listen to opinionated news that s their prerogative but I think it s important that they understand the difference between opinionated news and news that attempts to be more impartial. 2

3 One reason why young people say they re put off by the news is the way they are invariably portrayed in news stories as a problem of one sort or another. We were going into schools and in terms of the reports they did it s such a big theme. Part of that is I think about being a teenager, you know, the feeling that they re not given any respect and people assume they re going to shoplift and they re not allowed into shops there was a lot of that. As I say I think some of that is by definition about being a teenager and one of the comments we got on School Report was how lovely it was to see such a positive representation young people on air. Are the people who decide the news agenda aware of this representation? I don t think [the news] tries to dwell on the bad but what happens is that teenagers aren t necessarily a group we would go to to get their perspective on other things. I think there are people within TV news who are thinking about this and are thinking about portraying that representation a lot more. So if we were doing a story on global warming it wouldn t necessarily occur to us to go to a bunch of 16 year olds and say what do you think? Actually it might now because we re trying harder but a couple of years ago we d of done politicians and we d have done it from that perspective. Actually, if you were just to ask young people, you are the future, what do you think? that s not a negative portrayal of young people at all. I think it s about mindsets and I think quite a bit of work s being done, certainly in the TV newsroom and in News 24, to try and broaden the range of voices and faces on telly. Now actually people have been trying to do that for as long as I ve been in news but there is a focus at the moment in getting younger voices and faces on in more neutral stories rather than just the hoodie/ knife/crime/truanting/teenage pregnancy/anorexia stories. So I don t think it s deliberate, I don t think the news sets out [to be negative], it s just that those are the obvious stories that young people get seen in but I think people are starting to think more about how you can not do it in obvious ways. How clear are young people about what the news is, what it s agenda is, where it comes from? We do put on the Schools Report website one of our lessons is on What is news? and we try to get them to think about that themselves. It s things that are happening in the world around you on a local, national and global scale and things that are newsworthy. It is information but it is also things that are relevant to your life. It s information but it s also relevant, it s what do I need to know? Which is still information, it s what do I need to know to live my life as well as this is something which has happened which you may find interesting and is different. It s quite a sophisticated message for people to pick up on. A lot of the reports that were done we spent a lot of time saying think about your audience, which is clearly what Newsround does to perfection, but one of the key messages that goes through the School Report is think about your audience. So the way you 3

4 cover stories for the one O clock news is going to be different to how you cover it for the 10 o clock news. If your audience, as school reporters, is going to be your school community think about what are the stories that are going to be most interesting to them, or think about how you report them in a way that makes it relevant to them. By all means have a round up of things that are happening all around the country and all around the world but put your effort into things that you think would be most important to your audience. One of the key turn offs for young people is the amount of politics and politicians we see on the news. People say they re not interested in politics but actually if you look at the subjects they covering it s politics, politics, politics. They don t [like politicians] but that s been true for 15 years now there have been studies saying that. But what was interesting was that when we had our party leaders [on Schools News Day] everybody jumped at the opportunity of interviewing them. I talked to the Hansard Society yesterday about is there a way of making form explicit to the students that actually it is politics that they re doing? Should we, could we, say, well, ok, you ve come up with all those subjects, all those issues, and every single one of those counts as politics. Is the problem the way politics is covered, then? But it is part of the debate that s going on constantly within news about how we cover politics. How do you cover education? Do you cover it as a Westminster story, as, you know, the government has announced this policy or the opposition is going to announce this policy and from there refract it out to and this is how it s going to affect your lives? Or do you do it the other way around, saying children all around the country are finding out today what school they re going to. We ve swung backwards and forwards over the years in news. Where s the balance now and is it in the right place? I think at the moment we re back on the Westminster side of things but from conversations I ve had with people we might be moving [away]. For example, Mike Baker, who was our Education correspondent for years and years, has just gone and I think that might signal that we might do more education stories in a different way. The Budget this year is very interesting. The Budget is a really good way of tracking this and I spent seven years of working down at Westminster so it s something I know. The Budget used to be a Westminster story, political correspondents covered the Budget. Then we went through a phase where actually no political correspondents covered the Budget, the transport correspondent did the transport bit, the social affairs editor did what it means for people and the economics editor did what it means in terms of economic policy and if you were lucky the political correspondent got to say whether it was good 4

5 or bad for the government. This year, every single political correspondent was tied up covering the Budget. The second or third packages might have been other correspondents as well but the prism was through Westminster. It shifts, it just goes backwards and forwards. Depending on what? Audience research, who happens to be head of the department it s cyclical, it just goes round and round. How influential is the whole BBC Westminster machinery in pushing stories and ways of covering stories? It really does depend on, you know, programme editors change and new programme editors come in and have ideas about ways of doing things. Some want to change some things some want to change others. There was a time when the One O clock news was full of outside broadcasts. You don t see that so much anymore but the One O clock news was the outside broadcast programme. A new editor came in decided that they wanted to go back to more studio-based stuff so it changed. So some of it is personalities and styles and fashions. Whenever Newsbeat is covering a political story it makes a point of not initerviewing politicians unless absolutely necessary so there are other ways of doing it. Yes, on radio Five is somewhere in the middle. If you look at the spectrum, on Radio 4 you would expect to hear a politician, on Five Live you would expect to hear a head teacher or a mum maybe as well as, not instead of, the politician and then on Radio 1 you wouldn t expect to hear the politician but you d definitely expect to hear the young person and maybe the head teacher and mum as well, depending on the story. Do you think Newsbeat is a format that could be adapted for TV to attract younger viewers? The thing about Newsbeat is people listen to it because it s there, they don t switch on to listen to it, which I think Rod [McKenzie, Newsbeat editor] would be the first to say. Actually I think for the 12-16s if you look at television, kids like Five News, they like 60 Seconds [on BBC3], which I find a bit baffling. What do they like about it? They like that it s there and it s quick and it tells them what they need to know and then they can get on with their programme. Newsbeat has its two long bulletins but the on the half hour ones are short and people like that. They feel that they ve done news, they can feel good about themselves because they ve 5

6 listened to the news. They re not missing anything out, they need to know it but they don t need to spend too long thinking about it. How Newsbeat does its long bulletins I think could be a model for how you do it on telly but I think it would be much harder to do it. Where would you put it on? Newsround works where Newsround works. Seven pm doesn t seem like a bad time to do it but you can t put it up against Channel 4 News. You could put it on before Eastenders. If you were brave you might put it on before Eastenders in the way that Newsround comes on before Neighbours, which works for them really well. But how long? Are you talking about a two minute bulletin, are you talking about a 15 minute bulletin? That s the other thing which is the way that TV schedules are structured. You could maybe do a ten-minute bulletin on BBC2 somewhere but I m not sure how many people would make it an appointment to view. Where would you put it? BBC3 is meant to be for year olds. We know it isn t but that s what it s meant to be for. And they ve got 60 Seconds. BBC3 used to have a 15 minute news programme with Liquid News. Why didn t that work? Not enough people watched it and the channel image changed as well. It was actually very celeby which actually people quite liked. We often here now that people, even young people, are tired of the celebrity obsession in the media yet the sales and ratings for celeb media continues to rise. You know that you shouldn t like it so you say you don t like too much of it. I think they want to be able to have the celeb news without feeling guilty about it. If you have a little bit of it that s ok. 10 O clock news audiences don t want celebrity news but that s a different audience. It s very clear that if an output editor puts a David Beckham story at number three it absolutely consistently comes out as the least enjoyed item of the programme and the one that should have been dropped. The one o clock and six o clock news are different but 10 But young people say they don t want too much celebrity. We didn t have a lot of celebrity news in Schools News Day, if you look at the stories that people covered again it s slightly self-selecting because I think people do these things because they think, oh, well I m doing this for the BBC so I ve got to do it like the BBC. It would be interesting to see if Sky, for example, ran a similar project whether you would get the same kind of agenda or whether you d get an agenda that felt more like Sky. My guess is that it would be more like Sky. They re quite young, they re quite impressionable and they re quite spongy. But we wanted them to come up with their own stories and their own agendas and they did. And in that sense their agendas were much more serious than we thought they would be. There was a great story in a school in Glasgow about asylum seekers. There was an asylum seeker in the school who didn t want to be identified, so it wasn t a publicity stunt, but there was a petition that had been started in the school and they did a story about the petition going around the 6

7 school to keep the asylum seeker in the country, and in the end it was picked up by a reporter in Scotland who interviewed an MSP about it. So that was a good story. There was a really good story in Kent about a campaign for half price bus fares for school kids that got picked up by local radio. There was a lovely piece in Stoke where they did a lovely radio piece about city centres and how they were becoming empty shells because of the developers, and he went and interviewed a councillor. It was a really serious minded nicely made piece. So in that sense we did get their agendas because they were asked what do you care about, what do you think is important? What about stories of young people and knives and guns and gangs, etc? Some of the urban places did that. Hackney did something on it. Manchester did something about that. They did local stories about that if it was an issue locally. And likewise the veil and all those issues around the veil, some of the schools took those issues on and did pieces about them. Did people say they didn t like the way such stories were usually reported? I don t know. They didn t say they didn t like it, they just said it was something they wanted to report from their perspective. But it is, that is where you see negative images of young people. One of the things we want to look at as a follow up to the School News Report is whether we could do a weekly or monthly slot produced by school reporters. You can look at it in two ways. We can go back to the school reporters and say there s been a stabbing round the corner from your school and what s your take on it, so we hear from the people who are likely to be involved. That s one way of doing it, or you can just say we keep it going, maybe with online or with News 24, we keep it going on a monthly, weekly, nightly basis. There s already a show on News 24 called Your Stories which is about user generated, suggested stories. One school did a piece about whether school children should start having pensions and they interviewed the Lib Dem pension man. Actually it was a very positive piece. It was we keep hearing about pensions, we ve come up with an idea, this is how it would work. They put a very nice report together. I m not saying you d want that all the time but there were lots of schools around the country that had really nice ideas for reports. Some of them we ll cove school diners, playing fields, staying on school until your 19 and some of them will just be genuinely interesting stories. So I think if we can find a way of keeping the momentum going through the year that s a step towards how you think about h having those kind of stories on. And within the six o clock news and within the one o clock news, it is easier to do so on a quieter news day a more featury piece. I don t think it needs to be a good-news story, it needs to be a good news story. 7

8 Do people working in the news think much about new ways of presenting the news or are they mainly just delivering to order? I think people are trying all the time. It s really hard when you re in the news room and you re part of the news machine and you re churning it out and we didn t get the licence fee settlement we wanted so news is going to be subject to more cuts. People by and large work very hard and sometimes if you re head down it can look a bit like Stepford Wives in the newsroom, particularly now where there are computers, everything s online, you re on the end of a phone. People get out a lot less, you meet people a lot less, you talk to interesting people a lot less. So it s hard to do it. I think there is a will, I think there is a genuine desire to be able to vary, it s about having a varied menu. What makes any newspaper or magazine interesting or TV news report is actually having light and shade and things that you didn t know. I always think with current affairs, and the same should apply to news, I used to say you want to have the wow factor. You want to come to the end of a programme and think, wow, I didn t know that, wow that was interesting or wow, I m shocked. It doesn t have to be a big kapow wow that makes all the headlines in the papers but you should come away from a current affairs news programme saying I didn t know that and I m really pleased I just spent half an hour watching that. And we should apply the same principal to the end of a news bulletin. You should come to the end of a news bulletin and think I m pleased that I heard that because I learnt this, I understand this better now, I m appalled by this you can have a negative reaction as well, but you should be able to react at the end of a bulletin. What sort of future is there for the main TV news bulletin in a multimedia world? The thing is it is a mixed bag. So we do have online, we increasingly will have mobile services, there is radio and there s different radio. If you look at the news there s news on Radio 1, which suits one type of audience, there s news on Radio 2, which probably is closer to the Six O clock [TV] news, you ve got Radio 4, which is a bit more heavyweight the six o clock news on Radio 4 is a pretty substantial bulletin and then you ve got radio Five, which is a very different model. So on radio you ve got that pick and mix and you ve got TV as another And a lot of people do sit down to watch the teatime bulletin. The news hour between six and seven is still the most watched news and there are still people who still want to sit down at 10 pm and watch the news. I think it s generational, we ll see it shifting. 20 years from now I don t know where we ll be but now I think there is still enough of an audience that wants it. If you do the research, for all the surfers and clickers and movers there are still the news traditionalists who feel that they get their news from watching a half an hour bulletin at a fixed time every night. But is it generally a case of managing a decline? Maybe the core audiences for the core bulletins but I think where you might end up 20 years down the line is you just won t have those. You may well retain them 8

9 on News 24 for some time but 20 years down the line everyone will be so much more used to the idea of on demand news that they ll watch it at 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10. Now what that does to Channel 4 News I don t know but Channel 4 News has an audience of between 1.5 and 2 million, it s a niche audience anyway. We might decide at the BBC that we ll have a niche programme as well. We might keep the 10 O clock news, which at the moment gets 5 or so million viewers, sometimes more sometimes less. At what point do we stop? It may be that some time down the line there is the Channel 4 news and there is the 10 O clock news on BBC and Channel 4 news is still getting its 2 million and the 10 O clock news is getting 3 or 4 million and you decide that s one part of the portfolio. It may be that we may not end up with the appointment to view at 1, 6 and 10pm but actually if the range of people that we re reaching grows, because we re reaching them through different means, then we re still doing our job. Some people say it s not that difficult to have a news agenda that is more appealing to younger viewers but if you do that you just put off older viewers. I think we neglect our core audience, our heartland audience at our peril. But I think you could have more stories on the news which younger people would find more compelling which older people wouldn t necessarily want to turn off. I don t think you could do School Report more than once a year. I think once a year is a novelty having news by young people, for young people as a chunk of your news is fine. More than that in the context of, say, the six o clock news, of a traditional news audience, you d struggle a bit. News 24 is easier. News 24 can play around with its format as much as it likes and the people watching News 24 are expecting something different on it as well. Given its unique form of funding, how is the BBC different from other news providers? In terms of how it differs from ITN it s probably not that much. I don t think you would find core values at BBC and ITN are much different. BBC is much more committed to regional news than ITN. For a lot of people their idea of news is their local news and I think the BBC s network of nations and regions and its commitment to regional programming is pretty important. Putting that aside I think there is less difference between the BBC and ITN than there is between the BBC and Sky and I think in years to come you find that as new news comes on the market you may find that there s more in common between the BBC and Sky than there is with the new providers. Take something like Al Jazeera English, which a lot of young people watch in those communities. It has a very very different approach to news to both the BBC and Sky and it makes the BBC and Sky look more similar than different. What are the key differences for the BBC? 9

10 I would say at the BBC we care about impartiality, we want to be quick but we ll check our facts first. There are all of those difference but when you put that against Al Jazera English which is much more partial, it s taking a perspective. Is that a problem for younger viewers? No, it s not a problem at all and in fact they re more comfortable with it because for a lot of people they don t like what their world view is I don t just mean that in a narrow sense but if you are hearing one message at home and hearing it at school and hearing it in your mosque and then you re turning on your TV and you re getting a completely different message, that s pretty unsettling, pretty undermining. So for them they want it. I would hope that what the BBC can do is to try and explain that there are views and there are shades of grey and that, although it s not necessarily comfortable, to hear other opinions is really worth doing. We had a really interesting experience at Schools Question Time. The way it works is that schools can download an education pack, which they can use for teaching Citizenship, they can submit a proposal for how they would stage their own Question Time and we pick 12 finalists around the country. One of the finalists was a sixth form college in East London who put in a very strong application, really interesting story ideas. We ask them who they d have on their panel, what subjects they d cover and to explain why. They put in a good form. I went along and judged it. They had on their panel the Labour GLA member John Biggs, who s not new new Labour but not old old Labour, somewhere in the middle; they had a guy from Telpo[?], which is the East London communities organisation, and he was slightly more radical; they had a guy from the Compass think-tank, he was very knee jerk old Labour, you knew what he was going to say before he answered; and then they had on these two right wing journalist commentators, they were both pretty new right wing. The audience was made up of students from the college. These two [right wing] guys did not hold back at all and you could almost feel the physical shock some of these students in the audience were feeling about people saying things that they thought were unsayable. I thought some of them were pretty unsayable as well. One of the questions was about wearing the hijab and whether it was cause or a consequence of Muslim alienation a perfectly valid question and one you d expect to ask. This guy, he did not mean to be offensive, he was so offensive but he did not mean to be, he said, I have a real problem with it, it gives me the creeps, I don t find it attractive. He didn t mean I don t find it sexually attractive, he meant I don t like it. I understood what he was saying but he was a 50-yearold white Englishman and they recoiled when he said that. It was a really interesting exercise in watching young people who clearly don t get their views challenged or hear a different view. Some of them found it very hard and some of them engaged with it. Now I d like to think as public service broadcasters that our job is to open their worlds and open their minds, and if it helps them reinforce their opinion then so much the better but at least they d know that there are other opinions out there. 10

11 Given the proliferation of news sources now is it a problem that people can filter their sources so they only get to here news based on their own prefixed agenda? I think there could be a real issue that we could have whole pockets of communities growing up who only see one side of things, and then you have the opposite of small rural communities who ve never seen anyone who isn t white before. So a public service broadcaster which aims to be impartial and aims to show the shades of grey and the range of opinions can help people who are otherwise blocked into their communities. Whether they chose to access that public service broadcaster is the issue. How we get them to access us and engage with us is the issue because it s going to be much easier to access Al Jazeera English, much more comfortable, or the Fox News equivalents when they come (although I don t know if they will come). Most people in TV news seem to think that the Fox News style couldn t work here. Why not? Well it s not obvious where it will work. Cable doesn t have quite the same role here as it does in America and therefore where is the home for it? Where is the home for that mass opinionated news channel? It s mass, that s the thing about Fox News in America, it s increasingly mass. In cinema there s been a number of films covering political issues and current affairs, like Super Size Me and the Michael Moore films, that have been very popular with younger audiences. Could television news and current affairs learn from that? It is opinionated broadcasting, it s personality led broadcasting, and I think in news news, pure news, as in a bulletin with x number of stories in it, I think it can t, I think it shouldn t [be opinionated]. You can call it something else if you want, you could put together a weekly bulletin either where you have a different guest editor every week Channel 4 used to do it, it was called Opinion. You could do it. I think you could do it with a different guest editor every week and you have people who are extreme and you get them to do the news of the week through their perspective, what they think is important in the way they think is interesting. Or you chop it up into segments or you could do the same story told four different ways. You could take the story of the week, so last week you d pick the story of soldiers selling their stories, and you d get people with completely different opinions to make bulletins about it. You could do it that way but it would need to be signposted. It might make for some quite edgy watching. It would come more out of current affairs I suspect. Peter Horrocks recently complained that the BBC news was seen as being too closely linked to authority. Is that inevitable given the way it s funded? 11

12 We are public property in the same way that Marks and Spencer s or Sainsbury s is public property. That s one thing, in the audience s mind we are theirs and what we do yes we are authority figures. What s great when we do this work with school kids a lot of the time is that what they say is you re really normal, I thought you d be really stuck up but you re really normal. That s why I think there s a lot of effort going on in the BBC at the moment to connect better with audiences because actually if you make the connection they don t mind the fact that the licence fee pays for you and they might think you re a bit old fashioned. It will be interesting to see when you have a generation of CBBC kids. We had quite a long chunk when there were kids programmes on BBC and ITV and then there was Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and then they had no experienced of the BBC, particularly if their parents weren t watching either. So I think there s a bit of that. And in terms of local radio, BBC local radio is often not what young people would be choosing to listen to, it doesn t particularly target them. So if your only experience of the BBC is that channel that your parents don t watch, the channel that isn t on very much, and you might not think Radio 1 is the BBC because Radio 1 spends a lot of time not saying it s part of the BBC, it keeps its brand identity separate, and then you come a cross local radio which is full of Alan Partridges doing phone ins, you might think it s a bit boring. It will be interesting to see CBBC and C Beebies are now between five and ten years old so ten years down the line But is the way the BBC is funded a particular problem? I don t know how the BBC changes that. I don t think anyone who actually watches BBC news would think for a second that we were government puppets. I would argue that we ve gone too far the other way in our political coverage. If you look at any of our political coverage, if you look at our coverage of any of the establishment I would argue that we it s to do with brand image and I think possibly that s a question for the marketers. But if you look at the content it might not be as much whistles and bells as some but if you look at the content, if you just looked at the transcript of a BBC news report and a Sky report on a political story, for example, if you looked at them blind I bet you couldn t necessarily tell the difference. How important is pure presentation? It s always assumed that younger viewers want a younger look, younger presenters, etc, but is that true? There s research going on about that all the time. You stand up, you sit down, you have one presenter, you have two, you have blue, you have red, you have white. People seem to think that Sky is slightly less staid, slightly less boring but I m not sure if you were coming from outer space and you turned them both on you d come to that conclusion, I think part of the reason people say it is that they expect Sky to be less staid. I think the Sky news graphics are better than the News 24 graphics in spite of the revamp. But they don t want to be patronised. They like George Alagiah, they all like George Alagiah, if you ask them for a 12

13 presenter, and he s not particularly young. He s got a nice smile. I don t think there s a particular formula, it s just that some have got the chemistry and some haven t. They clearly don t want to be patronised. They re not that big on bright colours and whizzing lights and things like that. In fact I was talking to a 14 year old yesterday who was complaining about First News, the newspaper that Piers Morgan started, and he said that actually some of the content in this is quite good but God, they change font every other story and there s too many colours and it s just trying too hard. I think they pick up on that trying too hard and I think it s interesting that Newsround is aging down because one of the things about Newsround is a lot of people watched it but they kept quiet about it because it wasn t cool because all the branding is actually very young. The content is great but the branding is young. Maybe the issue for the rest of the news is that the branding is great but the content is too old. And there would be a huge outcry if you fiddled around with it a bit but people would get on with it. We risk losing our heartland audience at our peril but I don t think we would lose lots of over 60s if we went for a slightly brighter look and who knows we might attract a few young people as well. But the presentation while it is slightly hello, I m here to tell you what s important but I think it s softened quite a lot over the years, over the 10 or 15 years. Think back to Michael Buerk, late 80s or early 90s, it was much more staid then. I was talking to a group of year olds and we said, you know, what about no ties? And they said, no, they should wear ties, they should look smart. These were kids in some schools in Hammersmith and Fulham. They kind of see the role of the newsreader as being like that, that s what it is. A lot of teenagers will say oh it s boring anyway. Maybe we should do more with pictures, maybe we should write to pictures more. If you haven t got really good pictures for a story should you tell the story? So every story you watch is visually exciting and therefore you watch the news because you know you re going to be gripped. I m a bit uncomfortable with that. But years ago at Westminster there was a discussion, we used to try very very hard in political news to get interesting pictures, to take it away from Westminster, this was George Gardiner was going to be deselected from his seat because he was a Euro sceptic, so we went to his constituency and for some reason there was a barbeque going on, the constituency summer party, so we did the whole piece there, we didn t bother to do any of it from Westminster. We then did some focus group work and without fail every single person said I didn t understand what that story was about, I thought it was about MPs so why did we see sausages on the barbeque? So we tried very hard to find good pictures for stories and then we thought well maybe you don t, maybe you just do two-ways. Now I know a lot of people don t like twoways. I m quite comfortable with two-ways because rather than have silly GV s and walking shots of MPs for me I d rather just listen to Nick Robinson tell me what he s found out that day. I don t want his opinions on things but I want to know what he s found out that day, but I don t think that would necessarily work for audiences. But maybe you do try harder with the pictures. 13

14 What is the role of user generated content in the future? It s often assumed that younger people are keen on that sort of thing. I think you re going to have to end up with two things. You re going to have to end up with some programmes come out about user generated content but again it s signposted because the danger with user generated content is that it s all about the person who generated it and nothing about the audience. So if you re going to start using this material it s got to be in a way that adds something for the audience. It may be that people are making interesting reports, which I think as they get better at it they will do although at the moment it s not necessarily so. It can clearly add value to something like Bunfield or incidents where users get there and take the pictures, that adds value to an audience So I think you ve got those two things going, it s how you use user generated content, it s one in it s own right as here s an opportunity to hear some stories that other people think are interesting and want you to share which aren t completely self obsessed and have some merit, and here is user generated content which adds to our general coverage and adds something that we couldn t have brought to you by ourselves. So I thin those are two things that are going on but I think again it ll be as people get more used to doing it. I ve got a colleague who s 14 year old son says he and his colleagues spend the whole time making films with their mobile phones, that s what they do, things that are going on. They interview each other ad stuff. Now I ve got a 12-year-old daughter and she would no more do that than fly to the moon. They just don t do that. So we re making these huge assumptions that there are lots of people out there who are going to be making user generated content but I think we re a little way off it happening actually. I think it s really important that we can say to people though, and that s what School Report is all about, that there are opportunities and we re interested in what you ve got to say and if you want to make a report we are interested in what you ve got to say and here s a showcase for it. But I think you ve got to signpost it clearly and set the boundaries quite clearly. Part of your job is getting news producers interested in younger audiences. Is that difficult? At the moment I m completely preaching to the converted. People say they don t really understand about younger audiences, that they want to reach out more to younger audiences. That statistic that it used to be the under 25s who didn t watch news, then the under 35s, then the under 45s, has really scared people and there s a genuine appetite to do better. So for Question Time we said that any school that had an application in before the end of November could have a visit from a BBC journalist to help them with their proposal and give them a talk about what we re all about, well we had a150 schools entered and I had no problem finding 150 volunteers to go and do it. In fact for School Report most schools that took part had a mentor and in the end we had more mentors volunteering than we had schools taking part. At the moment the will is there. These things come in cycles. 14

15 How much interest did you have in television news when you were growing up? Not that much interest in news when I was growing up. We did watch the news at 6 o clock. I suppose I was interested in politics and current affairs in an abstract sense. I remember being desperately frustrated that one election was a month before my 18 th birthday and I couldn t vote. I got more politically active in the sense I was a member of a party and I was engaged through university, but actually I wanted to make arts programmes, I wanted to make children s programmes or dramas and I fell into news because that s where I happened to be able to get a job. I thought, well never mind it ll be a stepping-stone and after a year I went off to Watchdog as a trainee researcher and I desperately missed news. I was about I went to Newsnight after that and never went back. I ve spent four or five year working in Learning but I never stopped being a news person. But I wouldn t say I was particularly news nerdy growing up. Probably above average but not obsessively. I didn t do any journalism at University which made my life very difficult trying to get a job afterwards. Now I just struggle to get my children to watch news. They watch Newsround. At one point I did instigate in return for watching Friends that my eldest daughter had to watch Channel 4 News every night, the first 15 minutes, but that seems to have gone by the wayside. But they are getting more engaged in it. END 15