Tag: Tower Hamlets

Where’s the audience for local TV?

Thank God I got round to finding out about local politics in Tower Hamlets. It’s  Dallas meets the Borgias with Oyster cards round here.

New readers wanting to catch up with a story of political double-crossing, conspiracy theories about religious fundamentalism,  suspicions of electoral fraud and  backroom deals in smokefree rooms can start here.  Those with a taste for a more analytical take on it all can pick it up here.

With such rich source material a local TV station broadcasting news about the area should be a hit – there’s a  news programme /soap opera combo just begging to be produced already.   But, even in Tower Hamlets, I fail to see  local TV of the type Jeremy Hunt was proposing on the Today programme this morning taking off.

As he explains it, the market has failed to give us a truly plural local media so he proposes to stimulate the market by relaxing ownership restrictions and allowing media companies to start hyper-local TV services to fill the gap.

He gave some examples of where local interest might be strong enough to make programming worthwhile.  It won’t fill a schedule, but, yes, football fans in Bolton may well want coverage of their team’s performance against Man Utd  (as long as ESPN/Sky/MUTV are prepared to share the rights – and Wanderers fans don’t already have access to the BBC, the internet or a newspaper).  People in Middlesborough may  want to see their Mayoral debates televised – a bit more of a stretch this one, but I can see the public interest argument for giving them the chance;  but it’s hardly going to be stripped through a week’s programming at 7pm – and if there isn’t a regular local channel for people to go to, how will they find it when it’s on?

It  may be a massive failure of imagination on my part, but I can’t see where the audience demand is for these services, or what the business model for a local TV service might be.  The  obvious conclusion is that creative use of the internet is the best way to achieve the  kind of services that Jeremy Hunt has in mind – a conclusion he seems to be reaching himself, if this speech is anything to go by.  Odd that he didn’t try to share this with us on Today.

This is the Morden World

To R’s school a couple of nights ago for parents’ evening (how weird it is to be doing as a grown-up the things you remember your parents doing when you were the child).

Apparently she is topp at Hist and Geog, German, Maths, Tech, Science and RE (where she is trying to convert  the other kids in her class to atheism).  She can almost play Fairy Bells on the piano and may not be able to recite The Brook, but has put together an anthology of her own peotry (all right, all right,  I’ll stop with the St Custard’s stuff now)

There are, of course drawbacks.  As her (otherwise fantastic) English teacher pointed out in her report:  “Her spelling is her Achilles heal” (the title is one of hers, but with teachers like that…); but she knows she needs to work at it, she’s getting better, and she is  filled with enthusiasm for EVERYTHING the school has to teach her. She’ll do just fine.

Obviously I can’t speak for all schools in Tower Hamlets, but the ones I know about are pretty impressive.  Don’t let Michael Gove spook you.  Education isn’t in crisis because children can’t recite the dates of the Kings and Queens of England.  They’re  learning different things these days, that’s all.  And they learn them in different ways because the world is changing.  I hate the New Labour managerial-speak of enrichment activities and learning outcomes just as much as any other literate person,  but I do understand that different doesn’t necessarily mean worse.

If you build it, will they come?

Interesting to see on Emma Mulqueeny’s blog a post about Directgov’s attempts to set up a news site about school closures during the great freeze.  I salute the fact they even tried to do it (so fast, and without a Submission to Ministers first, too!)  The technical problems they had are laid out in the comments to Emma’s original post, but at least it’s there and it works after a fashion, and it will get better.

Problem is,  even though I’ve worked with Directgov in the past – in fact am linked to a project with them right now – it never crossed my mind to go there for news on Monday.  (I went straight to Tower Hamlets’ website and found not very much of use – although it did tell me the library was closed.)  Is it just a matter of time before Directgov seeps into people’s consciousness as the place to go for information – or are we always likely to think locally first about issues which affect us on a local basis?

When I was at DfES some years ago, there were ideas floating around to get schools to set up mass text message services for parents to let them know about school closures.  Anyone know if this is happening?  That kind of very local solution to problems like this instinctively feels better to me than trying to do it on a national network.