- Sue Nix
- 1 Mar 07, 04:15 PM
ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ viewers - and listeners - led the way yesterday and helped shape our coverage as never before.
It all started with an unusually high number of calls mid-morning to ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Cambridgeshire from people saying they were having big problems with their cars, which prompted our Cambridge TV producer to call some other local radio stations. They were getting similar calls. She tipped off News 24, and our reporter Nicola Pearson began to make her own inquiries. It was clear that the story was growing.
Around 2.30pm, we put out the first flash on the story and presenter Jon Sopel asked viewers to text us on 61124 if they'd had car trouble.
The next few minutes were extraordinary. Within seconds the first few messages were starting to come in and then as we began to read some out, there was an absolute torrent of texts - all reporting the same symptoms: spluttering engines; cars losing power; breaking down, etc.
It seemed as though the problem was affecting a much wider area than we'd thought. By now, our producers were ringing garages and experts - they confirmed that not only was there a serious problem, but that garages were running out of the parts needed to deal with it.
The texts were coming in faster than we'd ever seen before - we rang back some of our texters and put them on the air, which prompted yet more texts and e-mails. We started to throw out other news, and by 3.30 it was clear we had a major story which would lead the bulletins.
We asked the supermarkets for their response, phoned yet more experts to try and find out what the problem was, and how our viewers could fix it, and we put up a map showing the areas over Britain that viewers were texting us from.
For the first time, the top story on News 24 was genuinely βYour News" - so thanks!
PS. In the last 24 hours we've already received more than 4,000 e-mails on this.
Sue Nix is afternoon editor of ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ News
- Craig Oliver
- 1 Mar 07, 12:38 PM
Last night the Ten O'Clock News broadcast a report revealing that the Ministry of Defence has not completed urgent safety work on its fleet of Hercules aircraft - many of which are now flying in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A few viewers complained that by detailing the fault we were handing crucial information to the enemy. Here's one complaint:
I do not think that the programme should have included a report about how key safety measures have not been introduced on some military aircraft. This is just giving information away to the enemy. This sort of thing should remain secret.
It is true that Paul Wood's report did give very detailed information - however, in no way did this endanger the lives of our troops. An official report into the death of 10 British servicemen in Iraq made clear what the problem was - this was widely reported in many media outlets (including the Ten O'Clock News) at the time.
The point of last night's report was to show that despite the fact that changes to Hercules were considered urgent, the process of making the fleet safe has been incredibly slow - not least because the planes can't be withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan because they are so vital to operations. Many of the senior military figures we spoke to in the preparation of the report believe it is the failure to make the planes safe, and not the reporting of the issue, that is endangering British troops.
Craig Oliver is editor of ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ News at Six and ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ News at Ten
- Steve Herrmann
- 1 Mar 07, 09:52 AM
Should ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ correspondents writing for the News website write in blogs, or in conventional diaries/columns? Not the most burning issue in the world maybe but we've been pondering it nonetheless...
Mark Mardell, the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔβs Europe Editor, whether we should migrate it into a blog template, like the one youβre looking at now. We're wondering about the pros and cons (it's the kind of thing editors do).
At the moment some of our correspondents (for example , , and ) write regular columns or diaries, others write in blogs (Nick Robinson, Evan Davis, Robert Peston). Which is better? Does it matter?
Blogs allow easier updating and comments, permalinking to individual posts, an RSS feed so you can keep track of the new entries and don't have to come to the site to find it... The conventional story template tends to collect together lots of thoughts into one long-ish piece that gets published in one go, which is easier to schedule regularly and therefore promote systematically across the website. Maybe itβs also easier to write - a once-a-week or once-a-fortnight task rather than an ongoing preoccupation.
What do you think?
Steve Herrmann is editor of the
Daily Mail: Columnist Steven Glover accuses the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ of hypocrisy regarding its environmental record as it is revealed that the corporationβs employees flew 125 million air miles in one year. ()
Daily Telegraph: Letter criticising ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ bulletin newsreaders for using the phrase βtop storiesβ. ()
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