Jemblog

Murdoch saves the licence fee

Sky is probably the best protection the BBC and public-service broadcasting have in this country. It’s the vision of Sky waiting just over the horizon that will keep politicians from radically tampering with the licence fee.

AA Gill writing on the 15th anniversary of Sky in The Sunday Times.

Alexei on Dexys

"I'd always believed that if I can just get to number 1 in the charts, if I can get on Top of the Pops, if I can be somebody, nobody will be able to say I'm no good. I'll feel all right, I'll feel better. But I didn't. It was really miserable, I just thought Is this it? It seemed crap."

A great Kevin Rowland interview from Dexy's radio biog doc inexplicably presented by Alexei Sayle.

Listen Again to the whole thing - Radio 2. (until Feb 21st).

It would be mad.

From later this year, on BBC TWO you'll see an hour long weekly programme, with the working title The Culture Show. It'll be on for the majority of the year, covering everything from the Elgin marbles to Hollywood's summer crisis of creativity.....We'll both benefit from the new arts journalism unit being set up to make a new raft of programmes, The Culture Show amongst them: .... Back in the Sixties, BBC TWO was born out of editorial ambition married to technological creativity: in today's world it would be mad to just think of television on its own without new media. So we will have links into a big new online site that BBCi is creating alongside the new unit. It's a huge investment from the BBC.

Jane Root, Controller of BBC TWO speaking to the RTS on the 40th anniversary of BBC TWO.

ETech: Fund Raising in the USA

I'm at ETech 2004 and spent all of yesterday at a bunch of sessions supposedly dedicated to Digital Democracy.
It was incredibly depressing and insular.

The *success* of the Dean campaign which its (now sacked) Campaign Manager; Joe Trippi described in a remarkably generous (to Dean) keynote as a 'dot com miracle' was it appears; exactly that. In that it raised a lot of money which it then burnt its way through in couple of months with not much to show for it. Actually I'm being harsh and others have already made this point with more eloquence but raising conciousness not dollars was hardly mentioned in 8 hours of panels and ppts.

More thoughtful sessions from the guys behind meetup.com and moveon.org were fine but still failed to talk about politics much beyond the 2004 campaign and issues with Bush.

The best session of the day was a session for veteran political/technology journalists including the excellent Dan Gilmour (who has already seen through a poor keynote that I walked out on to write this). My only regret was that The Guardian's Jack Schofield (sitting in front of me sucking on his unlit pipe) kept his counsel.

Yep a frustrating day probably compounded by the lack of mentions of anything UK. No references to ican, faxyourmp or Tony Blair. Not once.

You can't buy political TV ads in the UK. You'd think someone would have mentioned it.

update: The Guardian: Presidential Race goes Offline - Jim McClellan - Feb 12th.