Media earthquake
Via Australian blogger Tim Blair (who I have been following pretty closely in my RSS reader since he initiated a bracing stoush with my other group blog crew a couple of weeks back) comes this brilliant video of some guys in Lincolnshire waiting (and waiting), in real time, for the BBC to report that there had been an earthquake, literally right underneath them.
It’s hilarious, and shows up a range of things. You can trumpet your 24 hour news service, but having it just makes it more embarrassing when, as in this instance, you’re so comprehensively beaten to a story (Sky News had it on wall-to-wall while the Beeb were still… confirming that the earth had shaken?). And it also shows that we’re well beyond the early TV studies maxims about active audiences - this is the audience itself broadcasting its active, critical relationship with television. It’s funny, but also really interesting as a stimulus to thinking about the changing relationship between the audience and media organisations.
In a last note, the mordant commentary of these guys gave me nostalgic pangs for the everyday humour of British people.
Update Sunday: By clicking through the links, I found that this is the work of none other than Dave Lee, who Roy Greenslade has praised as the UK’s leading student journalist blogger. Nice resonance with my comments on an earlier post about teaching student journalists about these technologies.
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