Amazing to re-visit Berlin twenty years after unification in October 1990. Then we were a group of young journalists from all around the world sharing one year together on the Journalist in Europe programme (now sadly gone). We were based in Paris for one glorious year and our first group venture together was to Berlin to experience the political and social story just twelve months after the wall came down and to coincide with the unification ceremony at the Reichstag. Now we returned as just two of that group, Pia Diaz from Chile and myself, to see what twenty years had achieved. Then some people talked about the possibility that Berlin would once again become the major city in Europe, would re-gain its status at the political capital of Germany and could potentially be one of the most dynamic cities in the world. It seems difficult to imagine as we, like others, chipped away at the huge chunks of wall that still divided the city and walked through empty, no-man’s land between east and west Berlin. Today the city is a mix of the most creative elements of new architecture in Potsdam Plaza and the re-invention of the old glory of Berlin in Museum Island. The once empty wastelands beyond the Brandenburg Gate have become tourist attractions with more museums on offer (including one very strange one for the old DDR) than any city visit can accommodate. But more significantly the dynamic energy of the city is real with thousands of young people from across the world coming to it to live and experience Europe in a way that Paris used to appeal. Berlin seems more cosmopolitan, more open, more relaxed than either London or Paris. In old east Berlin the once Jewish quarter has been re-built but with respect to its tragic past and while Berliners will still say the old lines of division exist, in that east Berliners stay east and west stay west, now it seems more a concept of habit than anything else.
The canal and river Spree bridges tour is three hours long but a view of Berlin from the water is vital as you get a sense of the weaving past and present; the divisions and aspirations of the city. And the new Norman Foster designed Reichstag tower captures beautiful the old and new. A transparent democracy is what they say it symbolises; this parliament with a glass tower roof that people can wall through and see power in action.

It seems we’re so busy rushing into life we sometimes forget the things we knew for sure as a small child. Like our complete confidence in capturing the heat of a summer flower with a pencil and crayons. Just up the hills from Kilorglin in Co Kerry, in the idyllic setting of Carragh Lake and mountains, Pauline Bewick, one of Ireland’s most loved artists, lives amid a cluster of flowers and artist studios. Her life’s work is exhibited in the Seven Ages collection currently in Kilorglin Civic Offices and Library. Her drawings from childhood mark her seven decades and show her rich, instinctive talent flourish through the years and works like a visual autobiography. She is one of the most alive and youthful people about and now in her 75 years she still works daily and has a new exhibition due shortly which will showcase some of her recent work from China. In this week with the Irish Times marking the contribution of women in Ireland lets celebrate women like Pauline who have followed their dream, their art, their passion and made a profound difference in their world and ensured that women’s voices, stories and lives are now part of the fabric of our culture and social life. Anyone in Kilorglin or Waterford can visit Seven Ages and trace Pauline’s incredible life story. And watch out for the new collection which promises a whole new phase in the Bewick visual narrative and style to inspire and provoke.

It has been an incredible few days. A volcano closes our skies and forces us to sit back and consider some of the assumptions we base our busy, scheduled lives upon and then in true human nature within 24 hours of airplanes being back in the skies we seem to have forgotten it all and erased that moment of pause from our minds. In the rush to get back to normal (which everyone wants, particularly the airlines) perhaps there are a couple of things we can take with us from that force of nature. In many ways the events of ash week underscores one of the fundamental truths of our human lives - the need to be flexible, adapt and change, in order to survive. We go through live denying our fragility in the hope that if we deny it we may be safe. Yet embracing our fragility and the inherent fluidity of everything around us is at the basis of resilience. Our world is not permanent, our lives are mere moments in the arc of nature and we are not always in control. News reporters (like RTÉ special correspondent) describing passengers as experiencing ‘a long ordeal of hell’ after just three days waiting for a flight out of New York airport seem not just to lack any sense of perspective but equally any sense of man’s relationship to the world. The ‘trauma’ of western passengers waiting for flights in cities like Rome, Barcelona and New York, filled our TV and radio programmes while the stories of developing world farmers who had to destroy their crops, unable to get them into European markets, was less interesting.
Hell is relative. We had flights to Krakow booked for some months on Friday just as the airlines were getting back to normal. Once the flight was confirmed we decided to go. The visit was a chance to re-connect with friends who had been history students in UCD many years ago and make a visit to one of the most dramatic places of human history, the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. Krakow was itself in deep national mourning after the funeral of the President and his wife, killed in the plane crash on route to honour another national tragedy the massacre of over 10,000 Polish soldiers by the Soivets during WW2. At Auschwitz nothing you know from history can really prepare you for the sense of horror at the reality and scale, the minute detail, of the Nazi’s genocide. All the techniques of master project management, business efficiency and cost effectiveness turned to the use of human beings as tortured slaves in a vast war machine. Yet that extremity is part of mankind and we distance ourselves from understanding it at the peril of repeating it. Leaving the camp I bought and began re-reading Primo Levi’s account of life there ‘If this is a man’. The Italian chemist was one of just three Italians to survive the camp and his insight into his year there, and how both inmates and captors adapted to the camp, is enlightening.
But why do I connect the two events? Because sometimes planes, and the ease and rapidity of our modern world can make us feel very distant from our past. A hundred years can seem a long time to everyone except a volcano. Yet Auschwitz is a mere generation away. For most of us its our parents or grandparents time. We know the failure to know history is to living through it again and Levi reminds us that the impulse that drove Auschwitz is the same one which on a small more personal scale drives all hatred of ‘the other’ and in Ireland has recently lead to the death of two Polish workers and a young Irish-Nigerian man. Xenophobia, racism, homophobia - all those ways we categorise people who are ‘not us’ is the beginning of our nature which created in its extremity Auschwitz and all the other camps of destruction both then and now across the world.
The planes are flying again, the airlines are rushing us all to forget the strange week when we were still, and yet maybe we should cherish the moment, the pause and let it remind us of where we come from, who we are and just where we are all rushing to in such a hurry.
The volcano exposed how little we know about our world. It challenged us to discover more, to be open to learning and to learn from our past. After all if we had we would have expected the eruptions and been prepared. We now know, for sure, it will happen again, in our lifetimes and in those of the next generation to come. In a sense Auschwitz challenges us as well. It challenges us to see ourselves in it and to learn from it and the misery it presents. If we don’t, if we see it only as the product of one people, one time, we risk inflicting it again, suffering it again, as either the torturers or the victims. We can be both, we can be either. The question is what have we learnt? What do we carry into our future?

Just back from the EBU’s Multimedia Meets Radio in Hilversum which was fascinating on lots of front - including the Sound and Vision building where it was located. Its the national audio visual digital broadcasting archive where decades of Dutch radio and television output is digitised, stored and used. A wonderful public interpretative centre, especially engaging for children, is part of the multicoloured cube building and its frankly something which we in Ireland can only look at in envy.

We were there facilitating the podcasting workshop and showcasing our www.joycesdublin.ie project as well as chairing a discussion with the Apple podcasting team who (because of somewhat restrictive guidelines in Apple) only wanted to be know as ‘Pete’ and ‘James’. Both lovely American guys with proud Irish roots although Pete did get a reaction and causes a lot of tweets when he answered one question about iTunes, podcasting and the future by simply saying ‘we can’t talk about the future. period.’. While Apple were not talking too much about the future many others were including Mark Friend of BBC Interactive who showed us the soon to be released (coming by the end of this year) BBC Radio Player which will allow users to play all forms of radio both public and commercial with added digital extras. One of the most popular presentations was that of Mark Rock of www.audioboo.com which is a simple to use audio-blogging tool which ironically grew from the failed Channel 4 Digital Radio initiative. We loved audioboo and can’t wait to use it in our work and to share it with those who find creating RSS feeds just a little bit too techy. The BBC is using audioboo in promotions and blogs and its rapidly growing across the world. One of the hilarious asides of this seminar was the use of twitter on screen during the two days of workshops. Its quite disconcerting to present to 150 people and see most of them have their heads down furiously tweeting on their iphones or laptops and then seeing a parallel conversation emerge on the twitter screen about your presentation! Many of the conversations, points and twitpics are online under the twitter hash-tag #mmr10 if you want to re-visit the sessions and find out what people were saying and sharing. Or visit the EBU site www.multimediameetsradio.ebu.ch which has trapped all information relating to the event including participants.

So what is the future of radio? Visual, mobile, on-demand, multi-platform and multi-media but retaining its personal, emotion heart which works so well with social networking and social media. One of the key learning curves on the final day was the use of applications via iphones, mobile hand-sets and social media to facilitate radio’s future. Radio’s future is ubiquitous, flowing into every part of the digital landscape and remaining close to users by increasingly opening up interactivity to content-creation. The loser in the digital landscape is DAB which hardly got a mention during the seminar and workshops and indeed the BBC has just announced the closure of two of its DAB Radio family, BBC Radio 6 and Asian Network. The good news from the BBC’s message was that the money stays in digital but will be focussed, supporting the extended digital life of the main radio family rather than growing the empire of stations available from the BBC. The problem, according to Mark Friend, is that digital has moved too slow and the demands of both a terrestrial and online expansion are hurting the industry. The answer, he says, is not to stop or make a choice but to move faster and focus the offerings.

We were in London on Friday for the BBC Radio 4 producers briefing. Its a big annual event intended to brief internal and independent producers on the commissioning needs and briefs for BBC Radio 4. Its always interesting and gives an insight into how the station and indeed BBC Radio is thinking. The audience figures for BBC Radio 4 have been growing in recent survey from RAJAR (the radio listening data resource) and the station has about 10 million listeners. Audiences for speech radio in UK, Ireland and US has clearly grown in the past year and a half with some attributing it the financial crash and gobal recession. Bad news, whether its 9/11, Iraq invasion or Lehman Brothers, makes us want to know more and understand more.
Its interesting the briefing happened on the same day the Times of London front page was running with the BBC internal review which threatens to close two BBC digital stations, BBC Radio 6 and the Asian Network as well as cut web staff by 25% and close online and digital projects like JAM aimed at young people. Strange you may think since the buzz everywhere else is how broadcasters get half as good at digital as the BBC. But the decisions seem less about the performances of these projects, or even about the future needs of broadcasting and audiences, but more about matching the BBC to the public debate on the public broadcaster’s ‘mission’ and ’scale’. With traditional media companies, in newspapers and radio, suffering badly during this recession the BBC feels the need to stand back from openly commercial or digital projects. Many feel it is part of an internal preparation for the return to power of the Conservatives in the coming elections in that the Torys may feel cutting the BBC down to size is an easy first year target. The BBC is big - over 23,000 staff - and it has massive resources but its impact and strength affects broadcasters far beyond the UK. A strong BBC has always been seen as key for the security of very small public broadcasters like RTE or YLE in Finland. The challenge the BBC faces is less about public appreciation (it is higher than it has been in a decade) or audiences (which are high) but about the growing debate on the role of public broadcasting in the digital sphere. In a sense the BBC’s problem, if it can be a problem, is its success and size.
One would think the issue is cleaner for the BBC since it takes no advertisement, unlike RTE, and therefore is not pulling revenue away from commercial broadcasters and newspapers but the challenge now is that the level of high quality free content that the BBC supplies on the Internet is seen as reducing the competitiveness of commercial players. One would hope that the thinking on the digital channels is open to discussion since both BBC Radio 6 and Asian Network have loyal and commitment audiences and have both proven the need for niche radio offerings and have been key to the strength of the UK digital radio market. It is far from clear that commercial players will provide either channel given the evidence of what is currently available. The decision to stop projects which have taken over a decade to develop and grow will be devastating for those involved but equally for the audiences who now support them. Its one thing to look at the cost of production and the match to mission. It is another to cut off projects which can grow the future of the BBC and indeed, through leadership, the future of all public broadcasters. BBC 6, JAM and Blast are all aimed at the next generation of BBC supporters. Its seems a shame that they are they ones to be targetted and strange that BBC Radio 2 is one of the few stations globally being told to recruit older listeners, 60+, and add more speech to what has always been one of the BBC’s most successful and most loved radio stations.
For BBC Radio 4 there is some fear about the move to add more speech to Radio 2 and how it can affect its remit and audience. Ironically they key concern flagged by commissioners is the obvious one facing the UK this year and its the coming elections and the potential of a major shift in both policy and public thinking. Its a concern in that they want us as programme makers to pitch for programmes for 2011 but none of us know the political framework of the world and society we will be operating in within the UK. Not a big issue for programme makers as we’re used to that process but for the UK which has been in Labour administrations since 1997 the potential shift in power and politics will be significant. For the coming period the big theme is the London Olympics in 2012 and it may surprise some to know that BBC Radio 4 is the most popular station in London. A major London season is planned to celebrate one of the world’s great cities. Although we have to say, while we love London, the city is suffering from one of the worst service attitudes we’ve seen in any major city in recent years. Poor service, unqualified staff, often with no English or knowledge of the place they are working, met us at every location we visited and stayed in across several days. Maybe the London season needs to reflect that as well as all the capital’s glories, history and character. London for all its joys has lost a sense of identity and even pride.

posted by Anita

Athena Media’s Helen Shaw is one of the authors of a new study on digital radio and the future of radio in Europe. The book, which is published by Intellect is produced by the DRACE network, a collaborative pan European research team working together since 2004. The book deals with radio’s digital transition and included a chapter on podcasting and online radio written by Helen. The book is available online from Intellect.

Buy the book on the Intellect website here

Posted by Anita

Read the IFTN story on ‘Pat Falvey: My Private Everest’

Production is currently underway on Athena Media’s latest project, a documentary entitled ‘Pat Falvey: My Private Everest’. The documentary will centres around the life of Pat Falvey, an Irish man who against the odds has climbed Mount Everest four times.

Pat Falvey left school at fifteen, barely able to write who, by his twenties, had amassed a multi-million property fortune. However, by the age of twenty-nine he had lost his business and his family and in despair nearly took his own life. A chance meeting took him hill walking and literally saved him. He vowed to climb Mount Everest and, within six years, became part of a successful Irish expedition. He has climbed Mount Everest four times, reaching the summit twice.

Pat is the only man in the world to have also completed the seven summits twice, and last year walked to the South Pole to honour the memory of the explorers Ernest Shackleton and Tom Crean with one of the world’s most accomplished women mountaineers, Clare O’Leary. Several of his close friends, including Irishman Ger O’Donnell, died in last year’s K2 climb but Falvey is committed to being a 21st century explorer – and to bringing what he has learnt on the mountain back into the boardrooms that both made and nearly broke him. This documentary tells the extraordinary story of Pat’s life and follows him in his latest adventures to the extremes of life, nature and the planet.

The documentary’s team co-ordinator, Anita Walsh tells IFTN: “The project started shooting in January of this year and is set to continue until April or May of this year. We shot in Kerry, Cork and Dublin and we’ll also have Pat shooting footage himself in the North Pole with bullet cameras as he treks.”

‘Pat Falvey: My Private Everest’ is directed and produced by Helen Shaw (Is It Just Me?) and the project’s cinematographers are Barry MacNeill (Xposé) and Niall Foley (Greenfingers). It is expected that the project will be completed in December of this year following its post production which will be carried out in Dublin’s Lotus Media