Closing shop

Ok, so this blog has withered and died. I've lost the habbit.

But Having been Twittering for a while I think I might have found it again. Sometimes 140 characters just isn't enough.

So I'm having another go, with no promise of regularity, no theme, just good old-fashioned vanity blogging.

If you're interested the new blog is here, at http://jameswestsblog.blogspot.com/

If you're not interested, well that's OK too.

Red Harrison - no longer filing in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

Hearing Red file from the other side of the world would always enliven the middle a nightshift in the Bush House Newsroom, but had no idea about the career in journalism he'd had before becoming a stringer for the BBC.

Obituary from The Guardian.

The books we love.

As seen on Blog My Wiki! Thanks Giles.

The instructions are:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 or less and force books upon them.

1. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
5. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
6. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
27. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
30. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare
33. Ulysses - James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
37. The Bible
38. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
46. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
51. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch - George Eliot
56. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
60. Emma - Jane Austen
61. Persuasion - Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement - Ian McEwan
70. Dune - Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
72. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
82. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
83. Dracula - Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal - Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession - A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

So, that's a few more than six read. The only one I gave up on was Lord of the Rings. I was playing D&D at the time, so should have loved it, but to be honest there were too many characters with too many consonants in their names and I lost track of what had happened to who, where. I don't like to leave a book unfinished, and this is my dirty little secret.

My sister was given Swallows and Amazons for Christmas, and read it but wasn't enthusiastic about so it was ages before I opened it up. At first I thought it was an odd story and didn't feel connected to it, but now I've read them all and love the rich storytelling, the depiction of lakeland life and exciting life Arthur Ransome gave to those children. Swallows and Amazons isn't the best in the series though. My favourite is We Didn't Mean to go to Sea, closely followed by Winter Holiday.

Could C4 be the saviour of regional TV news?

Channel 4 say they're thinking about entering the arena of regional news. Along with children's programmes they think this could help them fulfill their public service remit, and maybe help achieve some sort of financial settlement.

At a time when ITV are planning to cut back their regional commitments this has got to be welcomed, even at this early stage when it's little more than daydreaming and certainly not a concrete plan.

C4 seem to be thinking of starting off online and then moving onto their digital channels rather than putting regional news into their mainstream output. This makes a lot of sense to me. The BBC are proposing local online video news services at a cost of £68m, plans which aren't being universally welcomed. itvlocal.com could also become a conduit for local content, but I'm not sure if the regional ITV services will have the resources to provide this after the changes that are coming.

Whatever the outcome it looks as if local and regional news and current affairs are being moved to the digital margins, which is fine for those of us who are connected; but for my Mum who consumes media in a very traditional way this could be more of a problem.

Technorati Tags: C4, public service, Regional news, television

Wired UK - Once more with feeling.

Condé Nast are to launch a UK version of Wired magazine, due to hit the shelves in 2009.

This isn't the first attempt at localising Wired, and I hope they have better luck this time around. I have to say I actually rather like Wired as it is. Although it is focused on its US market there's actually a strong global feel to it which I enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Wired UK, Wired

The Northern Echo - changes update.

Last week I blogged about changes at the Northern Echo, including plans to cut back from five editions to one.

Yesterday the paper confirmed they were actually going to be printing two editions as from July 7, with a North and South version of the paper.

This will serve local readers better than I originally thought, but I don't buy Peter Barron's view that the paper's "local, regional and national content will be consolidated into two better, value for money editions with more pages."

We'll have to wait and see.

There's also confirmation that four editorial positions at the Echo will be lost, although no redundancies are planned. There's no news on production roles, although last week's report suggested a further 14 jobs might be at risk.

Technorati Tags: newspaper, Northern Echo

One Golden Square - Common sense breaks out in commercial radio.

There are a huge amount of talented, bright people working within commercial radio who have been transformed into robotic drones, weathered down and browbeaten into repeating the same old mantras and formulae on music and programming, even though these are so obviously outdated and failing. The division between the BBC and commercial radio is getting to the stage where the former stands almost exclusively for quality and content, and the latter for low-rent background noise.

So says Geoff Lloyd on the One Golden Square blog.

His post is a rallying cry for people working in commercial radio and celebrates the talent that exists there. He also says that commercial radio should respond to the BBC's current success not by carping on about the advantages that the Beeb has, but by trying to beat them at their own game by offering creative, compelling and original content for their listeners.

Sounds like a good idea to me.


[Update] One Golden Square is very good reading for anyone who cares about radio.

Technorati Tags: commercial radio, Geoff Lloyd, virgin radio

Ofcom rant.

The chairman of Ofcom, Lord Currie, will step down next year.

Ofcom doesn't need new leadership, it needs a new mandate from government.

As a regulator of the broadcast industry it has been useless.

Radio stations requesting format changes or relocations get the green light, ITV's plans to cut regional news programmes look likely to be rubber-stamped, and Channel 4 is being allowed to not quite get round to launching its digital radio service, 4radio.

The commercial sector is having a hard time, and the BBC is revelling in it. This is unhealthy. I think the BBC needs strong competition. Ofcom seems to be only focusing on the business side of commercial broadcasting without considering the value a strong, creative commercial sector adds to the market (I'm aware they need to make money - my wife works for a commercial broadcaster and her wages pay our mortgage). The BBC is a marvelous thing, but shouldn't be left as the sole supplier of PSB in the UK.

Technorati Tags: BBC, ITV, ofcom, public service, television