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In my job I expect to spend most of the time obsessing about the financial crisis and looming recession, its implications for all of us and how we are covering it. Yet I was still surprised when it became the centrepiece of my seven-year-old son's school assembly which I went to before work this morning.

The theme of the assembly was choice and personal responsibility and the kids all did brilliantly with readings about a wise man and foolish man and a song to finish. Then the headmaster talked to the whole school about the origins of the global financial crisis. Not surprisingly there were no mentions of mortgage backed securities and collateralised debt obligations!

Instead, he talked to the children about personal responsibility, not spending more than you have, and about thinking about the consequences for the future of your decisions now. This Christmas, he told the children, you should decide what you can afford and stick to that - it was obviously a message too for all of us parents sitting at the back.

As we spend a lot of our broadcasting time discussing bank behaviour, corporate greed, and failures of regulation it did make me wonder if there is a simpler message we should be conveying more strongly in our coverage.

I suspect my son though will still want that remote control helicopter and damn the consequences.

How do you get your news at different times of the day? When do you want headlines on the radio and when do you sit down and watch a TV bulletin or log on to see what's happening? And, of particular interest to us right now, how do you keep up to date if you're out and about or commuting?

We've been carrying out some audience research to ask people these questions, and we've been specifically asking whether and when they use their mobiles to get news (or sport, or weather or travel). And if they don't, whether they ever would.

As part of the research, volunteers were asked to fill in news diaries, drawing a chart to show when and where they normally get their news.

The results showed:
• Most people were getting their news and information in a whole variety of different ways and from different places in the course of a day or a week
• The researchers described each person as having a "news ecosystem", where an individual might read several papers, hear news on the radio, look at various websites and/or TV channels for news
• The habits of the modern news consumer were described as "increasingly eclectic and multiplatform"
• As for mobiles, people were typically using them for headlines, major stories and areas of specific interest

As mobile devices get smarter and connectivity better it seems reasonable to expect that people will increasingly be using them to do some of the things they already do on a desktop PC - look at a map, check a train time, buy something online, look at headlines or football results.

Take-up of news on mobiles is indeed increasing. For the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's mobile services overall, there are currently about 3.2m UK users a month, and this has grown by 25% over the past year.* But that number is still very small compared with those accessing the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ website overall (22m unique users per week**). My colleague Paul Brannan wrote about some of the possible reasons for this earlier in the year - cost (data and handsets) being one of them.

But on the basis that more people might take to getting their news via mobile if they try it, we're running a campaign over the next few weeks to publicise how to get the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website on a mobile phone, and simply to tell people it's there.

Here's what we'll be showing on the . What do you think? Do you have a "news ecosystem"? Will your mobile overtake your PC one day as the way you get online news and information - or maybe it already has?

* This is claimed reach on the M:Metrics monthly survey; it was growing faster up until Sept 07, but is now 26% year on year (Sept 07-Sept 08).
** Unique users are not the same as "people" so the figures are not directly comparable but this is now our currency for reach.

Well done to those of you who attempted our Newswatch grammar test. Between you, you managed to spot all the deliberate mistakes we put in - though no doubt there will continue to be disputes over some of the grammatical rules involved. If you got all of them, you did better than Breakfast presenters Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams, who scored 19 between them; Defence correspondent Caroline Wyatt (18); Newsnight's political editor Michael Crick (14); and the former Education correspondent Sue Littlemore (12). Here are the errors:

"said she is leaving" should be "said she was leaving"
"her family are growing up" should be "her family is growing up"
"momentarily" - "in a moment"
"there's no surprises" - "there are no surprises"
"between you and I" - "between you and me"
"Number Ten were trying" - "Number Ten was trying"
"mitigate against" - "militate against"
"in affect" - "in effect"
"partner with" - "partner"
"inferred" - "implied"
"effectively" - "in effect"
"none of his other ministers are" - "none of his other ministers is"
"try and move" - "try to move"
"one less opponent" - "one fewer opponent"
"fulsome" - "enthusiastic"
"ministers sung" - "ministers sang"
"Number Ten refutes" - "Number Ten denies"
"bored of" - "bored with"
"enormity of the subject" - "significance of the subject"
"disinterested" - "uninterested"

Listeners to the Six O'Clock News on Radio 4 may, in recent weeks, have been surprised to hear correspondents broadcast live into the programme. We had on the Fed Rate cut and of the programme on the day the controller of Radio 2 resigned.

On the Radio 4 Six O' Clock News (or simply "the 1800" as it's known within the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ) historically, we've tried to avoid live inserts from correspondents. This is mainly because we try to create an atmosphere of calm, considered authority and we like to give the impression, at least, that everything has been prepared well in advance. It's also because taking a correspondent live shreds the nerves of both correspondent and editor.

However sometimes important news breaks so late that we have no other option. When it works well, as I believe it did with the two examples above, it can provide a wonderful sense of immediacy. That said, I'd like to reassure regular listeners to the 1800 that this is in no way a precursor to correspondents being interviewed by presenters, or, God forbid, Harriet Cass reading out texts.

Following my recent post about this website's preparations, I'm pleased to be able to report that the various new features we tried for the event all seem to have worked well.

There was clearly huge interest in the events. Usage of the site as results came through and the day after hit record levels - something which other websites have also reported.

We had 9.2 million unique users and 73 million page views from midnight on 5 November (UK time) through to the end of that day (Wednesday). Normally we'd expect around 6 million unique users in a day so that's an increase of about 65%. Those numbers broke down into about half UK and half international, of which half again (26% of the total) were from the US.

The new features deployed on the site included a different front page layout, new video and picture gallery formats and, most crucially, a multiplatform results service from a centralised ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ desk in Washington which drove results on all our services, from TV to web and mobiles.

The most popular element, unsurprisingly, was the . The was also one of the most popular amongst those of you who stayed up to watch. And one in five (about 1.9 million) of those who came to the coverage accessed video or audio content, with the among the most watched items.

Those of you who saw five ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ presenters and correspondents bravely attempting the grammar test we set them on last weekend's Newswatch might like to see how you fare yourselves. Remember, the journalists scored between 12 and 19 out of a possible 20.

The test is in the form of a fictitious 'two-way' or conversation between a presenter and a correspondent, so it's designed to be heard, not read. It contains what we think are 20 deliberate mistakes, though there are, of course, disputes over the rules involved in some of the words or phrases. Here it is - good luck!

Presenter:The Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, said she is leaving her job - the second ministerial resignation in just over a week. Ms Kelly says it's a hard decision but her family are growing up and she wants to spend more time with her children. We'll be joined by her momentarily but first, our political correspondent, Nick Robinson, is here. Nick, is there more to this than meets the eye?

Correspondent: Ruth Kelly asked to leave the cabinet several months ago - so in a way, there's no surprises here. But what is odd is the way the news has been broken: in the early morning, before her conference speech. Between you and I, it looks like No 10 were trying to mitigate against a dramatic departure - in affect, putting out a spoiler.

Presenter: It had been rumoured that Ruth Kelly might be the leader of a mass resignation or at least, partner with one other minister - is that no longer a possibility?

Correspondent: You're right - one minister in particular, inferred to me that he would be off but has since changed his mind. While he'd be loath to admit it, the current financial crisis has effectively done the PM a favour. None of his other ministers are planning to try and move against his or her leader at such a crucial time and so no, I don't think he'll have to face up to a revolt. Meanwhile, he has one less opponent in the cabinet, so Mr Brown's position may even be stronger as a result of this, particularly if his speech receives fulsome praise.

Presenter: Is the subject of the leadership likely to receive less attention, then?

Correspondent: Well, I wouldn't go that far. Ministers sung from the same hymn sheet in public but behind the scenes at conference, it was a different story. There certainly are people who say Mr Brown's not the right man to lead Labour into the next general election - an assertion that No 10 refutes, of course. The public might be bored of speculation but the question of Gordon Brown's leadership is not likely to go away, given the enormity of the subject, no matter how many people are disinterested in it.

There are few places in the world where the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is not welcome. While, officially, we're still banned in Zimbabwe, a number of brave colleagues have spent the past year working there undercover to report that country's political and economic turmoil. In the spring, we were prevented from reporting in both Tibet and Burma, with ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ reporters hunted down by the authorities. Today, there is a new place that is off-limits - Gaza.

At the best of times, reporting from that narrow strip of land is challenging - and these are not the best of times. Since my colleague in March 2007 (he was released after 114 days) his replacement, Aleem Maqbool, has been based in Ramallah. But for the past 18 months be has made regular trips to Gaza. Not this week. For the past six days, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and other media organisations have been turned back by the Israeli authorities at the Erez crossing. We're in good company. The heads of a number of EU diplomatic missions have also been refused entry. No explanation has been given, despite repeated requests.

The security situation in the area is serious. Since 4 November, the Israeli authorities say more than 60 Kassam rockets and 20 mortar bombs have been fired from Gaza at Israel. Earlier this week, four members of the Palestinian militant group, Hamas, were killed in clashes with Israeli troops - the Israelis say the Palestinians were seen trying to plant explosives. But in order to tell the story for our audiences in the UK and around the world, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ needs access to Gaza.

In the past, the Israeli government has accused the media of being manipulated by Hamas - on one occasion, claiming that images of children holding candles were actually taken in broad daylight, in a room darkened by drawn curtains.

The best way we can report the facts - whether in Gaza, or elsewhere - is first hand, using our own ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ reporters. In order to do so, the Israeli government needs to facilitate access to Gaza. I hope they will soon do so.

At Newsround, we're often asked how we tackle difficult and upsetting stories such as the deaths of the two young boys in Manchester and Baby P in London. A good question for any news outlet and particularly pertinent to us as our content is aimed at 6 - 12 year olds. There isn't an easy answer to it nor a one-size-fits-all approach. We start each day with a team meeting where we discuss the news agenda and try to work out what stories have the most relevance to our audience. As a result, there will often be stories that feature prominently on other news outlets that we simply don't cover.

This doesn't mean that we shy away from reporting on difficult and at times distressing stories. For example, we are currently . When Shannon went missing, the story provoked a huge response from our audience - they had a lot of questions and concerns about it and we felt we had a responsibility to put it into context and give them as much information as possible in a non-sensationalised way. Now that a trial has started, we thought it appropriate to follow the story through.

Another deciding factor for us when dealing with difficult stories, can be the amount of coverage it gets elsewhere. If our audience has heard about a distressing incident through other means they'll often contact us with questions about it. When that happens we will often try to break it down, contextualise it and provide as much reassurance as possible. Often this is about the language we use and the pictures we broadcast but it can also involve us liaising with child psychologists behind the scenes to get their advice and to ensure we are on the right track. Clearly we never want to scare our audience so a great deal of thought goes into everything we do.

We are in regular contact with children via e-mail and through school visits and this helps us gauge their reaction to stories, their concerns and their level of understanding. We also aim to provide additional information, advice and guidance online and we know that many schools use our content to explain tough news issues.

It can still be controversial though. Some parents prefer to shield their children from certain issues and don't want them featured on children's TV. Whilst others rely on a programme like ours to help explain world events. We work hard to straddle that divide. At the end of the day, we want to give children information about the world they live in and provide them with the means to discuss current issues and hear the views of their peers. Listening to our audience on a daily basis is undoubtedly the most valuable tool we have when working out what to cover and how to cover it.

Each week on , complaints come and go from members of the public about what some see as mistaken news priorities, bias, inaccuracy, or trivialisation. But what remains constant, and what seems to elicit the ire of viewers more than anything else, is one topic: sloppy grammar. Everyone seems to have their personal bugbear, be it the use of "less" instead of "fewer", the split infinitive, or the use of a plural noun with a singular verb. And many feel that standards have slipped in recent years.

We thought we'd put this to the test, and invited a number of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ journalists to demonstrate their grammatical expertise - or otherwise - on camera. Perhaps surprisingly, five presenters or correspondents were brave enough to take up the challenge: spotting 20 deliberate grammatical errors which we'd inserted in a mock conversation between a presenter and a correspondent.

Wedged into an old school desk under hot lights, they all felt the pressure. Breakfast presenters Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams took part as a team of two, but disagreed over whether to turn a "less" into a "fewer". Newsnight's Michael Crick admitted he received frequent e-mails from viewers correcting his grammar. Defence correspondent Caroline Wyatt was concerned about disgracing her old school English teacher. And Sue Littlemore complained that expectations were high for someone who's been reporting on Education for the past 10 years, saying that you wouldn't expect a Health correspondent to be able to perform surgery.

The results weren't quite as clear as we'd expected. One journalist spotted a mistake we didn't think we'd made. Another sent us evidence from the Oxford University Press that the noun "family" could take a plural verb instead of a singular. There was debate over phrases which were grammatically correct, but simply sounded wrong when you spoke them out loud. And anyway, if we're all used to hearing phrases like "to boldly go", is it just pedantic to object?

Our guinea-pigs spotted between 12 and 19 of the 20 mistakes - and on this week's programme you can see who scored what. So as not to spoil the surprise, after the programme's shown I'll put the questions themselves up here so you can see how you would do.

Newswatch is on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News Channel at 2045 on Friday 14 November, and 0745 on Saturday 15 November on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ One.

This week I gave the keynote speech at the . You can read what I said below. I would be interested to know what you think.

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When I started my career in broadcasting - at Radio Tees - a commercial local radio station in Middlesbrough - we'd never heard of digital. Nor of the internet. Channel 4 was about to kick off but there was no Sky News; no ITV 2 and certainly no ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News Channel - formerly known as News 24.

Today, as you will know, on average every person in the UK spends approaching half their waking hours using communication tools like PCs, laptops, mobiles, TVs, radios, iPods and other digital devices.

Last week, 5.5 million people tuned into our US election programme with David Dimbleby. Interestingly, we don't know the precise figure for 1979's programme but we can be pretty certain it was many, many more.

What we are seeing in television is audience fragmentation - the natural impact of greater audience choice in a multi channel age. When people have a lot to choose from, they go off in all sorts of directions. It means that really huge audiences for television news on all channels are a thing of the past.

You can see this quite clearly in the figures. In 2006 - in homes with digital television, news viewing fell by a third. And the numbers watching current affairs fell by half.

Interestingly, soaps don't suffer the same decline.

And all this in the context that analogue television switch off begins this year and ends in 2012. In just four years, we're fully digital.

Today, and increasingly in the future, audiences want the news at the time they want it; on the platform most convenient to them and tailored to the subjects or agenda they find most appealing.

So the biggest challenge for us is about our relationship to the people who matter most - our audiences.

It's about capturing and keeping their hearts and minds. And for audiences who want to join in, that means including them in the process of making the news.

Our journalism is now fully embracing the experiences of our audiences, sharing their stories, using their knowledge and hosting their opinions; we're acting as a conduit between different parts of our audience; and we're being more open and transparent than we have ever been.

Read the rest of this entry

I gave a presentation this week to a group of journalism students at City University, London about The Future of News. You can read a summary of what I said below. In case you're wondering why I'm talking about commercial funding, as I've explained before outside the UK the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's English TV and internet services are commercial and supported by advertising as of course are most other news services.

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In Sidney Lumet's 1976 Oscar winning movie Peter Finch, playing deranged news anchor Howard Beale, rails at his audience about the banks going bust, environmental crises, crime on the streets, politicians and the media. "You've got to get mad!" he tells them. It seemed an appropriate way to start a talk to a group of students about The Future of News.

Because 32 years later we are still dealing with many of the same issues (economic crises, political apathy, a crisis of trust in the media) and anyone setting out now for a career in journalism needs to motivate themselves to overcome a vast array of forbidding problems. I didn't tell them anything new - the themes are now familiar.

Technological change is transforming how news is produced and consumed. Audiences are fragmenting and undermining the economics of commercial news operations and the more open, interactive and inclusive nature of the internet is challenging the culture and conventions of traditional news organisations. The media pages and blogs are full of counsels of despair about the future of serious journalism. But I prefer to side with Tom Curley, the President of the Associated Press news agency who :

"The adjustment we're being asked to make is to a world of increased access, new competition and different business models. It's not about easing onto the obit page."

We are only at the beginning of the transformation of the industry - in much the same way as the music industry is also being changed totally by digital technology. As for the future, in , it's full of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. It seems to me the known knowns will be a continued need for information about an ever more interconnected world; an appetite for storytelling in a way that engages interest, a need for analysis and explanation and an opportunity to debate and discuss.

But these things will increasingly be delivered through an internet that is more tailored and personalised thanks to data-driven services, video-rich and live (in the way we can on some issues for example) and more open networks of people and information rather than closed systems offering limited and pre-determined choices.

But there's a paradox here. Just as the number of global channels and news sites online explodes, what it hides underneath is a contraction of international newsgathering. Costs are being cut, , staff laid off.

[pdf link] said that only the agencies, Reuters, AP and AFP plus the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ now maintain extensive international newsgathering resources. , like The Drudge Report, for all its interest and benefits, is no substitute for original reporting. New models are emerging - like and - but it's early days.

There's just that troubling issue of how commercial organisations get an audience and advertisers to pay for it. Newspapers and broadcasters have lived for decades by selling audiences to advertisers. Now the number of eyeballs per page or per programme is falling - but we have much greater detail and granularity about where they are going and what they are doing online. Media organisations have to find a way to extract the value from that.

The risk otherwise is that long standing newspapers or stations will disappear.

Those students just setting out on their journalistic careers will need to be multi-skilled, commercially savvy, creative and confident. They need encouragement - their generation has to reinvent the business of journalism.

Are you familiar with the song by Sting, "An Englishman in New York?" This is the refrain: "Oh, I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien, I'm an Englishman in New York." Well, I'm an American in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, and sometimes I do feel a bit like an alien. But yesterday, election day, I felt proud of both parts of that description...American citizen and ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ journalist.

I've always been proud to be an American, but never more than last night as I watched the returns come in and the candidates come out. Both John McCain and Barack Obama demonstrated enormous grace and honor, one in defeat and the other in victory, and it's hard not to cling to the hope that their supporters will live up to their calls for unity and common purpose.

There is enormous pride, too, in witnessing the long and still unfinished journey of racial progress in America. One of my earliest and most vivid memories is of my mother pointing out two water fountains side by side at the Dairy Queen in my Florida hometown, one with a sign over it marked "Whites" and the other "Colored." I was about five-years-old. She said something like "You see that, son? That's wrong, and it's going to change one day soon." So it did, and so it has. It's not over...not by a long shot. But still...

It was also a source of great pride to be part of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ last evening, and to watch so many people work so hard to get the story of a momentous day right and to tell it well. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ played a big part in bringing the sights and sounds and statistics of an historic day in America to people all around the world, and that's just a cool thing to have a chance to participate in.

Thanks for your comments so far. Pongabit - On covering the voting process and Orvillethird - on talking to poll workers, those are good points and if this does become a central part of the story our reporters in the various states will be covering it on the ground and we'll also be monitoring the messages we get from those of you who are there and looking at other sites and blogs.

To those who think we are doing too much (comments 3, 8, 13, 14) I'd say that whilst it's a major story by anyone's standards, we are continuing to report the rest of the world, including and the , and for the , last time there was one, we did have considerably more coverage. Besides, isn't one of the advantages of online news that those of you who want to skip the US election detail and get to other stories can readily do so.

The other thing to mention is that the new features we have developed to help us cover this story better will now be there for us to deploy on any of our other coverage in future. An example is one specific new feature (which I didn't mention yesterday) which we used for the first time last night - a site-wide alert which communicates a breaking news headline to readers on story pages anywhere on the site.

As messrs McCain and Obama have criss-crossed the US in a final round of campaigning ahead of the election, I hope you won't mind me explaining here some of the changes we've got planned on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website which will, we hope, allow us to report the event even better, using some new features.

Central to our coverage will be a fast and comprehensive results service, a live video stream of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ TV election special programming for UK and international audiences and the full range of reporting from ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ correspondents across the US and around the world.

To display all this effectively on the website we'll be making use of new designs that should allow us to show the main story in a wider, two-column format on the front page with a selection of bigger images to accompany it, along with more room for other related election news headlines.

For an idea of how the new page format is shaping up look at the US elections page, where we have already made some of the changes.

There is also a new carousel format allowing a bigger selection of on demand video to be displayed.

From Tuesday evening UK time we'll have an area on the main pages displaying the full results service including a dynamically updating map, scoreboard and ticker. These will be fed by a multiplatform results data system which will also be driving the results for our other platforms including mobiles, and ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ TV and radio on election night. It will be co-ordinated from a central results desk in our Washington bureau.

Another recently developed feature will be a "live page" - a format that allows us to provide the live video stream of the election programme on a page which also automatically refreshes to bring in the latest text updates as they come in, including key developments, quotes and comment from ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ correspondents, our users and the rest of the web. This was first used for Olympics coverage over the summer on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Sport site and we've now adapted it editorially to give us a fast-moving, multimedia format for reporting the election as the story unfolds.

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ US election blogs, meanwhile, will continue to play an important part in our coverage, featuring on-the-ground reporting by Gavin Hewitt and Matt Price from the campaign camps and Justin Webb's overview, insight and analysis.

So those are some of the main things we're planning. I hope it all works - and that you like it!