The Evolving Newsroom

A week or so ago Frank Torley, the executive producer of Country Calendar, came to Hamilton to speak at Wintec's Media Bites function.

Here's what he had to say on why the programme's so successful and how the team go about telling stories:

"I don't know... I'd like to believe that the New Zealand public recognises quality.

"The beginning of that process is research. If anybody says 'Why is Country Calendar successful?' -- research, research, research. Keep doing it, find the story. What is the story, what are the people like, what else can we do?

"Having diagnosed, if you like, this is a good story, then we are the spoilt brats I suppose in so far as they do give us the budget to enable us to put the time and effort into making the programme.

"From the time of 'here's a story idea' to 'let's go and shoot it', may take a period of two or three weeks while we really look at it and make sure it all works.

"We then don't leave it to chance, we do have it mapped out. We write up those research notes so the producer can get a decent handle on the story and not just airy fairy 'oh, yeah, I reckon it'll work'. It's got to work, and it's got to be seen to work.

"And then comes a treatment so that you've got an outline. Planning, if you like. PPPPP as our production manager calls it. Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

"And then we are given the opportunity to spend the time and ...we get the wonderful co-operation of getting top cameramen and sound recordists."

I'll try to pull out more from his talk a little later. It was really good.

Country Calendar must be one of the few New Zealand media institutions that truly count as 'iconic'. The weekly programme, which casts light on NZ farming, hasn't looked back since its launch in 1966 and the current theme tune must be one of the most readily identifiable sounds for any Kiwi.

This clip gives a glimpse of what the programme used to look, and sound, like.



It's gone on to become one of the longest-running TV programmes anywhere in the world and still ranks in the top 10 for viewing figures each week, according to the TVNZ website, with those viewers being both urban and rural and numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

That's no mean feat. Someone somewhere must be doing something right.

So I'm looking forward to meeting Frank Torley, the show's executive producer. He's been involved with Country Calendar in one way or another almost since the beginning and he's our guest speaker at Wintec's Media Bites lunch in Hamilton next week.

Media Bites is a series of lunch/lectures hosted by the Editor in Residence (that's me) with the idea of bringing together journalism students with tutors, journalists working in the Waikato and people in business with an interest in the media.

Past speakers have included Dominion Post editor Tim Pankhurst, TV3 news chief Mark Jennings, John Campbell, former Al-Jazeera bureau chief Trish Carter and Morning Report's Sean Plunket. Earlier this year we heard from Sam Farrow.

I'm hoping to bail Frank up and ask him for a few top tips on storytelling and staying on top. What would you ask Frank if you had the chance?

Here's me sharing my Facebook page (among other things) at the eFest education conference in Auckland earlier today. The picture comes courtesy of Thom Cochrane, academic advisor at Unitec, who was in the audience, snapped the pic on his Nokia n95, posted it to his blog and referred to it in his presentation which followed.

Thom and colleagues have armed Unitec design students with n95s and encouraged them to use the phones to blog, vlog, articulate and collaborate as they study. You can see an outline of the programme on a wiki Thom used during his presentation and get a feel for his teaching/learning style at his blog. It's worth a visit.

My presentation constituted a whirlwind tour of the bigger changes we've seen in the news media since 1975, a year when we woke up to Merv Smith on 1ZB, put an ad in the paper on Saturday if we wanted to sell something, and came home at night to Dougal Stevenson's dispassionate delivery of the 6pm TV news.

These are my slides. I didn't manage to attach the notes to them, though, so who knows whether they'll make any sense.

Stephen Harlow, my co-conspirator in introducing a group of Wintec communication students to web2.0 tools and concepts, then took over to talk about how we're encouraging our students to blog, link, use keywords, experiment with audio, video and images, try out tools such as del.icio.us and RSS readers, and get used to talking to each other online.

There are many challenges in starting a course like this. Among them are knowing what to introduce first, having the patience to let new bloggers find their voice, being persistent in encouraging more considered writing, and waiting for the penny to drop about the value of things like RSS feeds, social bookmarks and good use of keywords (hard concepts to understand if you generally only look at five websites and don't go looking for anything in particular).

But we're well on the way, learning as we go, and enjoying watching the likes of Media Witty (aka Rhys's blog) and Sarah Byles' Motorsport blog develop.

Watch this space.

This has been a good week with much spirited conversation about journalism, daily news and how the web is changing how, where and when we get our news.

It's Spark Week at Wintec in Hamilton - a festival of international and local speakers, workshops, films and exhibitions open to students, staff and the community at large.

Well worth a look at the Spark website to check out the programme if you're in town. There's still a lot to come including Pecha Kucha 7.30pm tonight in the Hub - Wintec's new high-tech function centre, meeting space, library and cafe rolled into one.

My contribution to proceedings started on Tuesday with a Media Bites lunch - a regular Wintec event open to students and the local media and business community. Media Bites, hosted by Wintec's Editor in Residence (that's me), brings in industry speakers to share ideas and experience and spark conversation about what's happening in the industry, and what should be happening.

In previous years we've heard from Dominion Post editor Tim Pankhurst, TV3 news chief Mark Jennings, John Campbell, former Al-Jazeera bureau chief Trish Carter and Morning Report's Sean Plunket.

Earlier this year Waikato Times editor Bryce Johns spoke about the way his paper handled coverage of the Tamahere coolstore fire, a major story for the region.

This time Sam Farrow joined us to talk about his time at New Scotland Yard developing new media systems to improve communication with the UK media. Sam, whose background spans PR, news and IT, managed the development of an online news programme at the Yard. He's now back in NZ and until recently was New Media Manager at NZPA.

Early on Sam told us that when he joined the Yard its only means of talking to reporters was by phone. That meant fielding 300 phone calls on an average day. It was closer to 1,000 on a day like September 11, 2001.

That's a logistical headache by anyone's definition. So they started setting up email networks, sending out press releases with print-ready quotes and later broadcast-ready audio.

Interesting stuff, made more so by the fact that Sam cheerfully let us in on some of the mistakes made along the way. I think Sam's going to set his slides up online soon and when he does I'll post the link. If you're interested in coming along to Media Bites or presenting some time, drop me a line at juliestarr@wintec.ac.nz.

Yesterday Sam followed up with a workshop based on a real-life scenario. Police received a taped phone message of a distressed young woman saying she'd been abducted and was in trouble. The message cut out before she could say where she was.

What followed was a slow drip feed of information, and those of us in the workshop were asked each step along the way whether we should start talking to the media and how much we should say if we did, given that a young woman's life hung in the balance.

I'll be honest, I found it really difficult to decide - I wanted to be open with the media but I didn't want a mob of reporters showing up outside the barn where the girl was thought to be held for fear the abductor would react badly to the added pressure. A very interesting exercise if you ever get the chance to do the workshop, or something like it.

Before I go, a quick nod to the Sparkettes, two Wintec students working on Spark week who are blogging about their 12 days of Spark.

I've been in the process of moving house - to a place with no internet access - while spending a busy week producing the Fieldays Exhibitor, an annual publication created by Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec) students and distributed to exhibitors at the Fieldays agricultural show out at Mystery Creek, near Hamilton.

Between the 12-hour days, long commutes in the dark and paucity of connectivity at my new part-time home, I've barely been online for the past 10 days. I've also barely picked up a newspaper, haven't been able to find National Radio (a preferred source of news) on the dial and haven't watched television (haven't got round to buying a connector for the aerial).

I feel like I've been living under a rock. Can't say I like being that disconnected from the world. So it's nice to be back online while I'm on the road for a few days.

I've managed to get a little bit of connectivity going at my new place, via a Vodafone vodem - a dongle which you plug into a USB port on any desktop or laptop anywhere and get whatever connectivity's available - 3G in the cities, 2G in the hinterlands. It comes with an outrageously overpriced and unneccessarily complicated data plan, of course - that's telcos for you (masters of grasping obfuscation) - but it scores pretty highly for convenience if you're someone who spends a lot of time on the road and works out of different offices.

It only musters 2G at my place in the hinterlands so it's slow - fine if you only do one thing at a time. That's not my style, but it is what it is, at least for now. On the upside, there's a fabulous beach just down the road and lots of trees and birds. It's all about priorities, after all.

Anyway, back to the Exhibitor. It's a terrific publication that runs daily for four days during the Fieldays each year. Wintec journalism students take over a mobile newsroom and spend four days scaring up stories from the 1,000 exhibitors and more than 130,000 visitors to the event, the biggest of its kind in this part of the world.

Meanwhile, I had a team of five very capable design students – all third-year students of the Bachelor of Media Arts - on the production desk putting together between 8 and 16 colour pages a day, with copy and images often flowing in 15-60 minutes before deadline – very much like any other daily newspaper in the world.

It was great fun laying out pages again and working with such a young, motivated team who, despite having no newspaper layout experience, took direction incredibly well, soaked up information like sponges and produced a pretty tidy looking product.

It was a nice reminder of what I loved about being a chief sub-editor (on the Business section of the UK’s Daily Telegraph) - intense work, layout puzzles to solve, juggling a thousand thoughts and things-which-must-be-done-before-deadline - and what I didn’t love (long hours, tired brain). It’s hard work making newspapers, but singularly enjoyable.

So where’s the website for the Exhibitor? Still on the draftboard I’m afraid. For reasons outside our control we were in danger of doing two things badly rather than one thing well. So we opted to do one thing well. Next year will be a different story.

In fact, next semester Wintec is launching a digital journalism paper which aims to arm students with tools for multimedia storytelling, researching stories online, working collaboratively and distributing information and stories online. I'm really looking forward to seeing it take shape and I hope to write more about it in a couple of weeks.