Bernie Goldbach in Lancaster | 477 words
I WORK WITH talented creative multimedia students and several of them have suggested a few ideas on rebooting RTE, the Irish national broadcaster. The ideas are worth sharing.
Along with other staff members and several students, I've been interviewed by all the national radio stations. We've put our students and graduates behind the microphones at licensed stations. As a result, we know the amount of research the producers put in to create segments three to 15 minutes long. We respect the work ethic of trained journalists, especially in the knowledge that sometimes their creative work does not make air time. And we think there are some small initiatives that could be tried by RTE to cultivate the same level of respect across a wider population. Here are some of the thoughts about RTE shared by students at the Limerick Institute of Technology.
1. Share RTE Snippets.
These would be small cutting room clippings that show casual viewers a lot of the stuff that never made it on air or onto the TV screen. If the snippets "bubbled out" of a production timeline, you could see how deep research as part of the fact-checking with broadcasts.
2. Lead a crowd-sourced development of a "Research Guidelines Notebook".
This could be very interesting, if leading voices contributed to a product that everybody could use to become more engaged active citizens. The crowd-sourced initiative could be a community-serving programme in its own right as contributors explained how they got their insight to the news and how they saw important parts of a story behind the scenes.
3. Show communities how to get aboard RTE Choice.
When Irish citizens begin connecting Saorview receivers to their kitchen radios and when digital audio becomes a normal feature of commuters in Ireland, RTE Choice could become the mouthpiece for small pockets of special communities. An RTE Choice channel could be a node that connects the digital culture curricula across a half dozen institutes of technology in Ireland. Done right, listeners would hear engaged twentysomethings talking about themes that might percolate into mainstream broadcast segments.
4. Share Freedom of Information Findings.
FOI data are often cryptic and obtuse. When RTE staff spend time and money to get and comb through FOI requests, they're clarifying a focus for a production by working with raw data. Citizen listeners and informed viewers would get a lot out of trawling through spent FOI data. By doing that, it's possible to see how a story originated, was shaped by editorial decision and was framed by producers.
These four ideas are simple takeaways from a third level Honours degree running in LIT. Depending on the cross-talk unfolding on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, we might send them onto the national broadcaster, along with an offer for a summer intern who has the skills to help implement one or more of the concepts.
Updated on 10 April 2012 with "related articles" linking to Winer, Rosen and Mulley. Also added audio element which did not appear in original newsfeed of the blog post.
