- Craig Oliver
- 21 Feb 07, 12:09 PM
What makes a good news camera operator?
For me there are four key areas...
1) A good eye. Some have it - some donβt. Itβs the ability to spot the telling shot and frame it either beautifully or in a compelling way.
2) Journalistic instinct - filming something to create an arresting narrative.
3) Technical ability - sounds obvious, but frequently they find themselves in some of the most inhospitable conditions on earth. If you can't make the machinery work in those conditions, youβre finished.
4) Bravery - when youβre capturing something important, you are often in dangerous circumstances.
One camera operator has all the above and more in spades. He is called Darren Conway (DC to anyone who really knows him) and last night he won the Royal Television Society award for Camera Operator of the Year.
His portfolio included extraordinary images that have been described as "burning themselves onto the viewer's retina." From coming under fire in the Lebanon to living with Pastoralists in the Turkana he captured the defining images of last year. He is an extraordinary camera operator and one of the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ's greatest assets.
Craig Oliver is editor of ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ News at Six and ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ News at Ten
- Steve Herrmann
- 21 Feb 07, 11:47 AM
For those who take an interest in these things, the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ News website just passed another statistical milestone - for the first time we served over one billion (1000m) pageviews in a month. (Yes, weβve been keeping count of them all). For those who don't take an interest - time for you to move on to the next blog entry ...
But, for the interested: To give you an idea of how this compares with past months and years, it took us about two years before we served the first one billion pageviews. Our first 100m month was in June 2000 and our first 500m month was in March 2004. It'll be ten years this autumn since the site launched - who'd have predicted these kinds of figures for online news back in 1997?
Steve Herrmann is editor of the
- Rod McKenzie
- 21 Feb 07, 10:36 AM
As a snapshot of a nation's insecurity over the way we look, our Radio 1 'body image' survey has got people talking. Half of all the young women who took part in our online questionnaire for Newsbeat and our sister station 1Xtra would consider plastic surgery. A third of size 12s think they are overweight - and nearly half the respondents had skipped meals to slim.
This wasn't just a small scale snapshot either: with 25,000 responses this is the largest, albeit self-selecting, survey of body image among the UK's young adults. As you would expect from Radio 1, the vast majority of respondents were aged under 35. Body image, and problems that stem from it - including eating disorders and depression - are very much a running theme to our journalism on Radio 1.
There are some who are very surprised by all this. One woman outside our target audience age range confided in me her despair: so much for living in a post feminist world - today's women seem so much more self critical than our generation. Who's to blame? Is it the media? An obsession with the size zero super skinny models? Shops that seldom seem to stock larger sizes and push large volumes of size eights and 10s at the front of their displays? Or is a sign of youthful insecurity?
You'll have your own views and the men have theirs too: one listener got in touch to ask "am I the only guy in this twisted country that thinks size 14 is sexy?". Plenty of others told us how much they loved their girlfriends for their "sexy curves", but some of them admitted that despite that the women thought of themselves as fat and ugly. So male praise isn't working then. (I'm still not popular for attempting to reassure my friend that her size 12 was two sizes below the nation's average size. Big mistake for raising it. Ouch.)
And although far fewer men are unhappy about their appearance - the quest for the perfect body isn't confined to the female sex: one in five men in their early twenties had tried bulking up in the gym with protein supplements, and 80% of blokes thought the ideal body image was one of a very muscular physique. Incidentally, reassuringly for the skinny blokes, more than a quarter of women who took part in the survey thought that was the male body beautiful.
Rod McKenzie is editor of Newsbeat and 1Xtra News
The Herald: βThe ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ came in for a cyclone of criticism yesterday after a weatherman described the Western Isles as βnowheresvilleβ.β ()
The Guardian: βΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ staff campaigning against the proposals for adverts on ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ.com have made a final call for the director general, Mark Thompson, to abandon the scheme.β ()
Daily Mail: Reports that ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ security correspondent Frank Gardner, who has been wheelchair-bound since being shot by al-Qaeda in 2004, presented a report standing up. ()
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