Friday, May 30, 2008
New media swings and roundabouts
News comes from Future Radio that one of the station's four salaried team members has lost his job because of funding pressures. Producer Dan Nyman has been a huge support for my various Overgrown Path projects and will be badly missed. Future Radio is a not-for-profit community station and the rest of the team (including me) are volunteers committed to exploring alternative programming and new media opportunities, and the impressive download figures for projects such as my podcast of the music of Peter Paul Fuchs show it is working. Donations to support the running costs of the station can be made via PayPal.
Elsewhere comes news that the BBC's management has been accused of "poor financial accountability" by the BBC Trust after it emerged that the corporation went almost £36m over budget in its spending on bbc.co.uk in the past financial year. A review of bbc.co.uk published by the trust shows that the actual spend in the 12 months to the end of March 2008 on the corporation's UK web operations was £110m - almost £36m, or 48%, above what had been budgeted. The review by the BBC Trust, the corporation's governance and regulatory body, branded this incident a "serious breach" of bbc.co.uk's service licence. The BBC's income in 2007 was £3.2 billion financed by a non-negotiable license fee paid by all UK TV viewers.
"All that you can do is to make - and publicise - the best and most passionately well-crafted programmes you can think of. Ratings have to be watched, but calmly and with a sense of proportion. You have to believe that if even one person is swayed, or inspired, or changed, or comforted, by a programme, then that programme has been worthwhile" - Libby Purves in Radio: A True Love Story.
The good news is that people are being swayed and inspired.
Dan Nyman can be contacted via me using the email address below. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk