April 2003 – Page 4

Radio stars

To unlovely Shoreditch via lovely Liverpool Street Station with its disfiguring retail warts (the station concourse and train shed remain beautiful but only if you hold up your hand to block out the sediment of Sock Shops and Soup Shacks up to about first floor level) to meet Matt Hall, head of radio for Somethin’ Else and Tamsin Hughes, top radio producer, to talk about… a radio programme. What else?

Somethin’ Else is a success story of the post-independent-production-quota broadcast landscape. Despite the economic slowdown and the recent dot.com unpleasantness the firm still produces hundreds of hours of TV and radio for the Beeb and other outlets (including British Airways jets). They’re responsible, for example, for one of the BBC’s biggest external commissions, Jazz on 3 and for Channel 4’s Black Like Beckham.

An Athens by the Central Line

So UpMyStreet – apparently a latterday Athens peopled entirely by cool, fun people who worry about things like geo-encoding their web site – has gone bust. Over at NTK the shock was so great they announced a total cessation of sarcasm for a minute to record the company’s simultaneous slashdotting and receivership. Elsewhere, no one can find a bad word to say about UMS.

The thing is, this wasn’t supposed to happen. While I was running another.com, we thought the UMS guys were golden. They were supposed to have survived the bust, they were supposed to have a bullet-proof (at least not chewing-gum and string) service-based business model with recurring revenues. They had groovy, meaningful technology and excellent people who weren’t running-dog dot.com opportunists. What happened, guys?

Word out (but not up)

Word is a worthy and probably doomed attempt to tackle books, cinema, music, art… everything really… for literate middle-brows in one monthly magazine. It’s the first project from the stellar Development Hell team, edited by Mark Ellen and with all sorts of top names popping up throughout: David Quantick, Paul du Noyer, John Naughton. It’s even brainy enough to need a New Yorker-style front cover flap for extra copy lines and tasters.

I wish the mag well but they must get some kind of story archive onto the web sharpish. There’s enough clever, topical, unpretentious writing here to produce a lot of inbound traffic from thousands of media junkie bloggers and, these days, that could make all the difference between a hit and yet another sad fourth issue closure.

Beeb to Charter renewal opponents: ‘give up now’

According to Dan Milmo and Maggie Brown in The Guardian:

“The BBC has begun a three-year battle to secure its future and retain the ?2.5bn licence fee by appointing a team of 50 to work on a new royal charter.”

Most UK businesses and many of the corporation’s most important competitors, especially online, employ fewer than 50 people in total. Forgive the crass analogy, but the Beeb is preparing the media equivalent of ‘shock and awe’ for opponents of the licence fee. Resistance is futile.

Churchillian in more ways than one

Ed Richards, principle advisor on Telecoms and new media to the Prime Minister until he took a job at Ofcom last week, reveals Tony Blair’s decisiveness on Broadband Britain:

“First, I want you to tell me what this broadband thing is. Second, I want you to tell me why it’s in crisis, and third, I want you to sort it out…”

Take-up for broadband is pretty impressive now, even from a very low base. According to NOP, a quarter of UK Internet households will be on broadband by the end of 2003. Blair’s Churchillian approach might actually be working.

Mars please…

Oliver Morton, who wrote the excellent Mapping Mars, says in Wired that we should scrap the shuttle and head straight for Mars. I’m in.

Journos

Vic Keegan Neil McIntosh
To Blacks for lunch with Mike Nutley, editor of New Media Age (forgot to take his picture!). We talked about blogging (what else?). I don’t know how he does it exactly, but he’s been in charge at New Media Age through both boom and bust and managed to keep the magazine healthy and interesting throughout.

Then on to The Guardian to meet with Vic Keegan, Guardian veteran and editor of Guardian Online. Vic’s been at The Guardian since before I was born and used to be the paper’s chief leader writer before he started the Online section. Twenty years ago he started the pioneering Computer Guardian section and was responsible for bringing near-legendary Jack Schofield to the paper. He still writes a leader ‘most days’. Also got to meet Vic’s deputy, Neil McIntosh, briefly. Neil writes Macintosh pieces and is a regular contributor to the Online blog so I always read his stuff.

Fax help!

Somebody sent a fax to my J2 account (why?) and it has a .efx file extension and I can’t open it on my Mac (OS X.2). Does anyone know if there’s a way of converting it to TIFF? (and, yes, I have changed my J2 settings to TIFF for future faxes).