Dan's Update

Your Questions on Iraq's Election

In a week when there'll be a lot of speculation about the state of Iraqi politics and the fairness of the parliamentary election, it would be very useful to hear about the questions buzzing around your brain.

We have been reporting this story for so long our professional detachment may not be enough to avoid the danger that we're too close up.

We'll be reporting on polling data, security and the ambitions of different politicians.

But there may be many questions we won't think of: about daily life, how the voters have been informed, how they might have been intimidated and where they learn their loyalites.

Please tell us where the gaps are and we'll try to fill them in.

Write to us here.

Running to Stay Still

One of the hard jobs on this team, and one I don't have to worry about too much, is organising the running order for the programme.

The editor-of-the day (Amanda today) has to arrange our coverage of stories in a logical order with regard to the importance of the stories and the way different kinds of reports will sound when they run from one to another.

Too many interviews in a row will be indigestible. Too many difficult issues will tire the listener. Too many fluffy items will annoy them. We think.

That's one of the real skills for an editor - imagining the effect of the running order.

Even in a digital age we don't have instant feedback on what the audience is doing. Would it be useful or just too scary if we did?

"523 people have just switched off in Trenton, New Jersey! Quick, get a celebrity on the phone to talk about poverty and stop this interview about North Korean nukes!"

Instead the editor has to use her professional skill and judgement to make a programme order that she guesses will carry a listener along, sometimes challenging, sometimes provoking, sometimes reassuring.

Some days it's obvious how things should work. Those are usually days when there are one or two big stories and they fall into a natural pattern.

But on other days (and this is one of them so far) there are lots of interesting stories but none particularly stands out.

Then it's a creative process to make the running order fit nicely.

And as I'm sure Amanda would tell you, that's only the beginning.

Events, technical problems, guests that go missing and taxis that get stuck in traffic can turn a neatly crafted running order into a jigsaw puzzle with some important pieces missing down the back of the sofa.

Catching Up

There are some exciting new technologies in the blogging world, and I'm trying to adapt them to the kind of blogging I'm doing, linked to a different medium.

I'm hoping that by next Monday one of the newest forms of blogging will be apparent here.

Meanwhile, some excellent points raised in response to my earlier post about the time constraints in radio news, from the Le Monde blogger in France, Hors Sujet.

"We often expect the reporter carrying out the interview to be a neutral relayer of the interviewee's point of view, however, by carefully choosing his questions the reporter has a lot of power to put things in the other's mouth or pushing an agenda.

One of the key weakneses I see in your programme, which I listen to regularly, is the fact that we are often given very little background information on the people interviewed. Only today, a Palestinian official was interviewed. The listeners were told what organization he belongs to, but that doesn't really tell us a lot about him. Does he speak for a large and influential body? Is it some kind of fringe group? An NGO of little importance? Is he representative of the opinions of a larger group of people? An influential intellectual?

I appreciate that you do make an effort to bring us quality information, but the format of a radio programme unfortunately has certain limitations."

Update in Pictures

I'm about to start putting some pictures on this blog.

If you look down to the left, you'll see some inconsequential and test images - don't spend too much time analysing them, I was just checking the link from the camera phone I'm planning to use.

As we travel with the programme, there'll obviously be plenty of material and I hope I can make the best use of it.

But while we're based in Bush House, there could be interesting images, too.

Please let me know who or what you'd like to see in the photo album.

I'll ask their permission and maybe we'll be able to fill in some gaps in your mental map of the way World Update is put together.

Long Form

You might not be surprised to learn that a lot of the things I do getting ready for this programme I don't think about. I just do them automatically.

One of those unconscious habits is doing interviews differently when they're recorded than if they're live.

It's very tempting when I know an interview is being recorded to keep pushing the interviewee to think further and respond more completely.

In the past I have been guilty of making a guest sit in a studio for 25 minutes so I can get just the right quote for a  piece I'm putting together.

I once got into trouble this way with the late Robin Cook, former Foreign Secretary.

In the days he was in opposition, it was reported that he had told a friend off the record something about the Kurdish area in Iraq that fitted exactly the story I was pursuing.

I asked him the same question as politely (and in as different words) as I could for about ten minutes. Eventually, he said simply "I'm not going to say what I know you want me to say, so please stop!"

Live interviews can be exciting, and if you get the questions right can get the information you want to hear within the alloted three minutes.

But it's more satisfying to get there more carefully.

And if you take your time, you can avoid the other trap, which is only asking questions you already know the answer to.

A long interview can reach uncharted territory. Sometimes.

News Stream

I wrote about the decision by the state TV station in France not to show pictures of the rioting - to try to calm the situation.

So in fairness, I should comment on the failure of the authorities in China to say anything for ten days about the chemical plant explosion which forced them to close down the entire water supply for 3.8m people.

You can imagine that journalists in France would be reacting badly to the subservience of the Chinese media. And Chinese journalists would say "we're trying!"

My Mandarin-speaking colleagues tell me that they have seen reporters actually 'doorstepping' officials responsible for the environment - that is, lurking outside offices and asking direct questions when they get a chance as party functionaries come out.

This is brave and novel for China. We'll have to wait and see if there is any adverse reaction after the fuss has died down, as there was in the case of SARS.

Then official reticence was broken down by vigorous reporting in some newspapers. Officials responsible for trying to pretend that nothing was happening were brought to account and in many cases sacked.

But later the newspapers were punished, too.

How long this push-and-pull growth of media freedom can go on without a major confrontation is hard to say.

But history shows, thank goodness, that this genie doesn't go back in the bottle.

Check out the Digital Wave asking for your comments on computers in education.

How Big is Ariel Sharon?

A bit of local tension in the editorial team this week about how to present the story of Ariel Sharon's decision to leave the Likud Party he helped found and start his own in time for elections planned for early next year.

As one who follows the twists and turns of Middle Eastern politics for many years with fascination but few expectations of a sudden, bright dawn, I was excited by the news but not bowled over.

I have friends in the region who have survived decades of disappointment by not expecting too much from politicians.

I have a law degree which I acquired in part through close study of the minute details of the Oslo and so-called interim agreements which allowed Yasser Arafat to return to the West Bank and gave a huge boost to Israeli/Palestinian businesses.

I can tell you more about the administration of mineral rights in Areas A, B and C than anyone could possibly listen to without nodding off.

Against that background, even a change as dramatic as a serving prime minister abandoning his own party might seem like the opening of another chapter, not the closing of an old book.

Some Palestinians have had the same reaction - Mustafa Barghouti, for example, head of the political party the Palestinian National Initiative. He says this is just a way for Ariel Sharon to hold onto power and the idea of a Palestinian state will face the same obstacles.

Others, like Saeb Erekat, call the new party a volcano at the heart of Israeli politics and the most significant change for Palestinians in decades.

Understanding the importance of some kind of final status agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, anyone would hope a volcano is going to produce a new, fertile landscape.

But the image of a bulldozer pushing rubble into sand is what Palestinians are likely to think of in some of their communities.

The debate in our editorial office took on a similar division. I can't tell you much about what was said, but voices were raised.

Good thing we're still so passionate about covering the news, don't you think?

British Winter

"This weather is a joke!" I heard a young woman saying to her friend last night as they left the warmth of a supermarket to make the ten metre walk to their cars.

What she meant was that It is a bit colder than it's been of late.

What's the joke? It's winter and it's cold? That's neither funny ha ha nor funny peculiar.

No, she was using that tone of voice which means "someone should do something about this, it's just not right!"

It's true that the British Met Office is predicting a colder than average winter - roughly the same as ten years ago when average temperatures were a couple of degees celsius lower than over the previous few years.

But we are not talking "Day After Tomorrow" stuff here with London under twenty metres of snow and boats locked in iceflows on the Thames.

And the Met Office scientists say they aren't all that confident about their forecast anyway.

So why the panic?

Of course we Brits love to talk about the weather. I do it too, especially when I meet strangers.

It's safer territory than politics. I don't like talking about football at the moment because my team (Southampton) is plunging down the league. And discussing the weather is more polite than sitting there in silence.

And because the weather changes a lot in Britain, there is always something to talk about.

More than two centuries ago, Dr Samuel Johnson noted that "when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather."

So this obsession must be one of the few remaining politenesses remaining from a time of finer manners.

Yet I still don't completely understand why we discuss the weather as if it is going to do something dreadful and needs to be watched.

The last really serious and deadly floods were in 1953 - more than half-a-century ago which isn't a bad average. The last serious winter snow, deep and lasting enough to bring the country to a standstill, was in 1963.

Of course, we still haven't learned to cope with bad weather - wet leaves on railway lines and a few flakes of snow can disrupt transport for a day or two.

But that's just confirmation of what I'm saying. We are suprised by a bit of bad weather because we think it is out to get us.

No point preparing by having road and rail systems weatherproof. The weather will do something perverse and catch us out anyway.

And if there is a bad winter and things get tougher, then more people will be saying "This is a joke!" and blaming the government, and probably the Americans.

We used to blame the Russians, they were mucking the atmosphere about with their satellites, remember that?

Does the end of the Cold War mean we can't stand the cold? Discuss.

Middle East Buzz

Please read the Digital Wave and comment on age as a digital divide.

Meanwhile, here is today's programme blog.

There is a new enthusiasm in the tone of our office discussions of how to cover the Arab/Israeli conflict .

The difference is the election to the leadership of the Israeli Labour Party of Amir Peretz.

As well as a generational shift in that party his election also marks a change of emphasis towards more 'working class' issues, away from the preoccupation of Ashkanzi (ie mostly European) Jews with geopolitics.

Mr Peretz wants to campaign on social issues, and in particular how much the defence budget is costing poorer families in lost opportunities and welfare.

Voters in the coming election may not allow the main issues to be domestic. Violent incidents by militants could force the debate back onto exclusively security questions

But without taking sides at all, of course, I'd have to admit that not having to report for another year on the well worn arguments between Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon is something of a relief.

Paper Photos

I'm duplicating the Digital Wave blog on this post today, to encourage a bit of cross traffic. If you want to read my occasional take on technology and its implications then try the Digital Wave here.

Despite the rapid spread of digital cameras and mobile phones that take pictures, we still  want to hold a paper print and show it to our friends and families.

You can buy a printer that can produce reasonable photos for a few hundred dollars.

But you can also send your digital images to an online company that will print them out much better and send them in the post the next day, for a few pennies.

This kind of development (pun not intended) is coming to a world wide web near you in all sorts of ways.

Microsoft has reacted by launching Windows Live, a test site that plans to integrate the things we  do on our personal computers with the web.

Microsoft knows that in the future a lot of the software packages they have turned into big profits will be accessible online instead of loaded on our hard drives.

Already there is an online word processor in beta testing that offers a lot of the features of packages that come in a box.

That's software. But the photo story tells us that hardware sales could be affected too.

Why would you want a fax that keeps jamming when you can get a virtual fax machine online?

(I'm not going to link to any of those, because a search engine will show you how many there are.)

Or what about a video recorder? No tape jams or disc failures online.

I'm already planning to replace the TiVo hard disc recorder we've had for a few years with a PC with a big hard drive to record the TV programmes we want to watch (or more accurately the Australian soap operas my daughter watches).

But maybe I should wait until there is an online video recording service that I can programme and download online.

Or wait until every programme is available for download on demand.

If this trend continues, this might not be the time to invest in companies making hardware peripherals.