Why it was right to screen the horrifying images from Woolwich

THE horrific video images captured from Woolwich last week of a blood-stained madman apparently justifying his actions in killing an innocent soldier demonstrated all too clearly the power of the citizen journalist.

Those pictures, initially broadcast by ITV, was taken by a passer-by. Other footage, both video and stills, have since been splashed across all forms of media; newspapers, television, radio has taken sound bites, along with the web and social media.

One man has now been charged with murder, while another lies in hospital awaiting to be questioned. In the meantime, the Metropolitan Police is appealing for the public to come forward with any material they may have taken on their mobile phones or cameras which might help with the murder investigation.

How technology has moved on. The days when digital cameras costing £3,000 a pop and belonged to a privileged few, have long gone.

Now the film quality of mobile phones is so good that it is of broadcast quality.

At the newspaper, Johnston Press has equipped all its journalists with HTC phones, capable of filming video and which, with a wi-fi Hotspot, can work with your laptop or MoJo (mobile journalist as it is affectionately known). This is the shape of the 2015 journalist.

There was much debate whether it was right to broadcast those graphic images. Why should the media give extremists the platform to express their views? Isn't this going to encourage others to follow suit with equally dramatic outrages?

London Mayor Boris Johnson believes it was wrong to do so, and said he did not consider it a valid argument that if mainstream media did not air the images it would lead to a free-for-all on the internet where they would be broadcast anyway.

Boris is wrong. Those pictures should have been broadcast, albeit with the constraints imposed. The public have a mind of their own and it was heartening to see the measured, tolerant response most people displayed.

The extremists only inflicted more harm on the credibility of their cause. How could you not have broadcast those scenes? It would be like ignoring what happened at the Twin Towers over a decade ago.

What happened in Woolwich brought out the best in people, notably the brave woman who stood up to one of the alleged attackers. She remained unbowed like the majority of the British public. This was not about faith or religion, but it was crazed butchery on the streets of London.

 

I had to listen to the recording twice, and even then I didn't quite understand what golf chief, George O'Grady had said wrong following the row over the perceived racist comments towards Tiger Woods by Spanish golfer, Sergio Garcia.

O'Grady used the word "coloured" in an interview defending Garcia. O'Grady described many of Garcia's friends as being "coloured athletes". This followed Garcia making a "fried chicken" comment about Woods at a dinner earlier last week.

I'm sorry, but I don't get this. I am absolutely anti-racist. We all stand equal irrespective of sex, colour or creed. And thank heavens we have moved on from the dark ages of the Race Riots in the USA 50 years ago and removed some of the barriers which existed in this country when I grew up.

But hold on a second. I honestly don't understand how using the word "coloured" is regarded as racially insensitive. Just think. Are we trying to suffocate our language, dancing to some vested minority's tune?

Any right-thinking person would understand the point O'Grady was making that he did not believe the Spaniard was racist since he has many friends who are not caucasian.

What is wrong with that? However we like it, people are of different ethnic origins, so what's wrong with pointing this out. Are we so ashamed of our own race?

Madness, complete and utter madness.

 

Just as a footnote, I met Michael Fish last week, the BBC weatherman. He's now 69 and will long be remembered for the unfortunate forecast the night before the 1987 storms.

We met at the foot of the South Downs to promote a healthy-living campaign in Eastbourne, which is Michael's hometown.

For the photo call he was wearing a special jumper with weather symbols made by Monsoon which was the only one produced.  I think in his dotage he'd warm to the idea that this jumper became a must-have fashion accessory.

A nice guy and a real gentleman who spent 42 years working for the Met Office, many of those on our TV screens - and notable for one memorable hurricane broadcast.

The missing exam parcel and the loss of Neal Butterworth

MAYBE it's the modern world, perhaps it is the increasing pressure we are all facing, but sometimes I sense we're a lot less smarter than we used to be.
Initiative seems to have become a thing of the past, as we've given up thinking to become a tick-box society.
Here's an example. I set, mark and moderate exam papers for journalists. It's a small step outside my normal job working in a newsroom, yet rewarding and challenging.
The latest bunch of sports journalism papers have been marked and were recently sent to me for moderation. Unfortunately, even though I moved home from Hampshire to East Sussex a year ago, the exam marker was given my old address and so sent the exam papers to Portsmouth by registered post.
That's okay, because surely when the package turned up at my old address the current tenants would ensure that the papers were returned to sender. But no!! They signed for the package even though they later told me they'd lost my forwarding address. Why, oh why?
So last weekend, I drove round to my former home, left a note since no-one was around and received a phone call 24 hours later to say that the package were passed on to the landlord. They had no explanation for why they signed for the registered package in the first place.
A call to the landlord discovers that like a game of pass the parcel they passed the package onto a third person who has now gone on holiday to Turkey for two weeks!
Total muppetry in motion.
The end result is that the exam papers are currently lying on a table at this person's home while he is sunning himself abroad - so the students won't be able to discover their exams results for another two weeks.
A total catalogue of errors which makes you despair.

Journalism lost a good man this week.
Neal Butterworth was a former editor of the Bournemouth Echo who died of bowel cancer aged just 55. He was editor in Bournemouth between 1998 and 2011, and had just begun a new life with his wife Julie in Spain when he was diagnosed with cancer last summer.
I never worked directly with Neal, but we would speak and meet up on quite a few occasions when I was deputy editor with the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton. Whenever I popped into the Echo on Richmond Hill, he would always spare the time for a chat to catch up on the latest gossip.
He was the first to congratulate me when I took on my first editorship in Swindon and Neal was always very generous with his advice. Editing a newspaper can be a lonely place, but always go with your instincts, he told me.
We had exchanged quite a few messages since he left Bournemouth when, ever the optimist, he admitted that despite the challenge of cancer, he was going to battle the cancer head on.
Neal was a fantastic editor who held the respect of the newsroom and the community at large. He produced wonderful newspapers, had a vibrancy and energy about him, and as a person he always had time for you. Neal was a really decent man.
http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/10415067.Former_Echo_editor_Neal_Butterworth_dies_of_cancer_aged_55/?ref=nt

What would Mike Neasom have made of the 2015 journalist?

THE News Centre in Portsmouth would not win any architectural awards for beauty. It's a concrete edifice right next to the bus station in Hilsea on the northern edge of Portsea island and which has been home for 43 years for the city's newspaper, The News.
Next month, the paper is due to move to a new home in Northarbour, plush new offices at another out-of-town site near IBM.
The move was inevitable. When I visited the offices yesterday for a meeting, it was like a ghost building with staff rattling around half-fillled newsrooms, and walking past darkened rooms now shut up for good.
When I last worked at The News as sports editor some 13 years ago, the place was humming, teaming with people. But as technology has moved on, economies of scale found and the recession has bitten the newspaper industry harder than most on the butt, so staff numbers have drastically dwindled.
The no-nonsense compositors have gone, the print room is run by just a handful of people, and the number of journalists has declined too. You could have heard a pin drop when I walked through the newsroom yesterday afternoon.
Some of the editorial guys I used to work with back in the 90s are still there; Mark Acheson, Simon Toft, Chris Owen, Malcolm Wells, and good old Eric, the chatty inputter with his famed cardigans and chamois leather!
They were great days of a razor-sharp six editions a day evening paper under the much-respected editor, Geoff Elliott; early, Fareham, Gosport, Waterlooville, Havant and a city final. For the sports guys, we also had the small matter of the Sports Mail to produce every Saturday afternoon and for one year we even tried to publish a Midweek Mail.
In the mid-90s, The News was one of the first regional newspapers to push forward a website closely allied to the newspaper - it was controversial at the time with plenty of teething problems, but the sheer professionalism of the journalists embraced the new media.
What a team we had then. journalists who were right at the top of their game. Even the trainees had to be on the button from the off. There could be no passengers in the newsroom, and there was no expectation among the new recruits of writing a front page splash in their first week - they would have to bide their time to suffer the slings and arrows from the hard as nails news editors.
Our sports team alone was a formidable bunch headed by the Pompey legend Mike Neasom, a total workaholic who didn't suffer fools gladly but was the best sportswriter I have ever worked with.
When I joined the sports desk as a sports writer back in 1991 we had Colin Channon as sports editor, Calvin Shulman deputy editor, alongside the top desk of seniors consisting of Mike Neasom, rugby/golf writer Alister Marshall and horse racing expert, Mike Allen. Simon Parker and Danny Griffiths completed one of the strongest sports teams I have known.
What set all these guys apart is that they could write, not just the big stories in mainstream sports, but across a plethora of pastimes. They all knew their sports, had unrivalled contacts books, they could interview to get the most out of their subject, they would work a story right to the end, and their prose was a joy to read - and easy to sub (well, except "fat boy waffles on about Bognor" Danny, maybe!).
It's a mark of how much esteem Mike was held within the sports world, that when he died in 2004 at the age of 69, tributes poured in far and wide from across the sporting world. He was held with enormous respect by the likes of Jim Smith, Alan Ball, Lawrie McMenemy and Robin Smith.
We live in a far different newsroom in 2013. The demands and pressures are much greater now as journalists are expected to be multi-disciplined across an ever-changing media.
At Johnston Press, now the owners of The News, the talk is of the 2015 journalist capable of writing for paper, on-line, to shoot and edit video, while using Twitter and Facebook effectively during a breaking story as well as having a sustainable presence on both platforms - which includes blogging!
It's a great time to be a journalist, far different from the halcyon days of Neasom, but exciting nonetheless.
I'm unsure how Mike would have fared with Twitter and Facebook, or even the increasing demands of in-paper and the website - no doubt a few expletives would have been uttered - and as for video, don't even go there!

The knob-end of a slice of bread, a tin of baked beans, a small sack of sugar and a teabag!

THE knob-end of a slice of bread, a tin of baked beans, a small sack of sugar and a teabag - what's that all about?

It was a gift from a 50th birthday celebration at the weekend when my oldest and greyest of friends gathered at a swish golf club just outside of Watford to mark our collective half centuries.

The present was a pleasant reminder of our childhoods.

We had all gone to school together at a posh grammar school in Northwood Hills, Middlesex - the last of the 11 Plus brigade and, in fact, the grammar school became a comprehensive midway through our secondary school years when, heaven forbid, we mixed with girls for our 'O' level classes! So, the six of us; Kevin, Nigel, Eric, Paul, Andy and myself became close friends.

Free-time was sometimes spent at my parents' home in South Ruislip. We'd play football and cricket, or spend the days out riding our bikes. I had one of those old-style reel-to-reel tape recorders, a collection of microphones, and we would occasionally set up a studio in the lounge; recording music, singing badly and editing the tapes - one year we actually won the British Amateur Tape Recording Contest with one of our ropey Parkfield Crescent productions.

Heady and happy times during an age of total innocence - no internet, no mobile phones, no satellite TV, no spectre of drink or drugs, we made our own entertainment and enjoyed those teenage years without the weight of the world on our shoulders!

And during those mad-cap days, lunch was always beans on toast with a fine brew to boot - hence the amusing 50th birthday gift. My mother used to have one of those old-style cookers with a grill at the top. You needed to use a match to light the grill which would spew out a tongue of flame which would sometimes threaten to singe our cat. Still, it made perfect toast every time and before the age of the microwave, the beans were perfect!

When we left school aged 18 to go our separate ways I went to journalism college in Harlow, Paul went to university in Bath, Kevin started work in the computer department with Taylor Woodrow in Greenford and Andy and Eric started at the motor spares business in Kensal Rise run by Andy's brother, Nick. I was unsure whether those friendships would be life-lasting, but they have.

There is no great moral to this tale, this is not absorbing story with a tear-jerk ending. In fact, it is its unremarkableness (is that really a word?) which makes this yarn worth telling.

We don't meet up as a group of six very often, but we have walked across life's stepping stones together - weddings, the birth of our children, christenings, landmark birthdays, been on holidays, sharing the joys as well as being there for the lows - with an unbroken thread of friendship. When we do meet I regret that we don't gather more frequently, but maybe that is the secret of its longevity.

Saturday night at The Grove, with sleek Ferraris lined along the driveway and plush surroundings of an exclusive golf club once graced by Tiger Woods, was wonderful. We were there with our wives who pander to our eccentric whims, understand the childish behaviour and who have become good friends themselves. The time passed all too quickly in between the most amazing culinary fare. We laughed, we reminisced, we caught up with each other's news.

Maybe we were a little greyer, carrying a few more wrinkles, but the passage of time hasn't dimmed this special bond, the truest of friendships which I know will remain for a long time until the fat lady starts singing.

Stuart Hall: from national treasure to opportunistic predator

ONE of the perks of a career in journalism is that you get to meet your heroes, especially those who you have admired and respected, maybe even looked up to as role models.
The dilemma is that sometimes these meetings prove to be a crushing disappointment.
What you might see of a personality on television may be all veneer and sheen.
Up front and personal, that toothpaste smile quickly disappears amid a myriad of time-sensitive publicists and a coterie of parasitical hangers-on.
Early in my journalism career, I interviewed the legendary singer, Max Bygraves, the crooner who was the granny's favourite. Perhaps I caught him on a bad day, but he was foul and bad-tempered looking at his watch throughout the interview which was swiftly ended.
I once had a pretty open spat in front of other media with the then Southampton manager, Gordon Strachan, who was livid about something I had written about his players.
On TV, the wee Scot might seem calm and softly-spoken, but he was always a feisty character to interview - never throw a dumb question his way or he'd chew you to pieces - and at this moment he demanded I followed him to the player's changing room to tell him who was the source for my story. I told Strachan to get lost, and ironically from that moment on we actually got on during future interviews.
Perhaps he respected that I'd stood up to him.
Matthew Pinsent was someone I'd always admired as a rower and when before the 1992 Olympic Games I interviewed him at the family home in Portsmouth, he was a delight. We had tea in the family garden and chatted at length about the Barcelona Games. He was charming and personable.
Gold that year with Steve Redgrave suddenly raised his profile and when we arranged an interview before the Atlanta Games in 1996, suddenly I was working through public relations agents. I had to go to Henley for the interview and I had 15 minutes. It was dull and the charm had gone.
Ironically, I caught up with Steve Redgrave afterwards for a chat as we looked out from the balcony of the Leander Club and he was brilliant and so interesting to chat to.
I've not exactly chosen an A-list of personalities as examples, suffice to say that over the years I've interviewed personalities from the world of sport, entertainment and politics who have changed my perception of them overnight. Meeting Harriet Harman at Downing Street a few years ago was an absolute pleasure, Gordon Brown was brief and business-like.
Which leads me somewhat carefully to Stuart Hall. Our paths have crossed a few times at football grounds. In the press room we've spoken, compared notes, no great earnest conversations. I don't know him at all.
But as a journalist and broadcaster, he was a man widely respected and in a different league.
I admired Stuart Hall from a far. Like the children of my generation, we grew up with "It's A Knockout", "A Question of Sport" and his sports reports on the BBC. In later years, I have loved listening to his brilliant football reports on Radio 5Live, and only a few years ago was wrapped to hear the tributes at an 80th birthday celebration in honour of the great man.
I once read this quote about Stuart Hall, which is a fair assessment of the man as a broadcaster:
"Stuart Hall can bring a game alive in a one minute summary, making you feel like you were actually there and experiencing it with him. His voice has a nuance, prosody and natural rhythm that you just don't find amongst the modern ego-sodden bombastic football broadcaster."

How the mighty have fallen. It is hard to imagine how his victims must feel right now. Justice after all this time will be seen to be done. The gravity of the offences is unimaginable.
When I listened to that 80th birthday tribute, there were the likes of Francis Lee, Colin Bell and Mike Summerbee paying tribute to a man who has fallen from a national treasure to an opportunistic predator in a matter of years. It is so, so sad.