Our Summer has been dominated by sports and outstanding Irish people. We’ve been producing the radio feature series Winning Women on the Irish women athletes in the Olympics for Newstalk and we’re just about close the long edit on our TV documentary “Beyond Limits’ on the elite athletes heading to the Paralympic Games at London 2012. One of the really delights of our work is being able to move from one genre of story-telling to another. This year we’ve made the award winning history series for RTE Radio ‘Death of an Empire’ as well as the current affairs “Media Show’ and we’re now working on a radio documentary on Ireland’s newest opera company Wide Open Opera. It certainly keeps our minds busy getting to know and understand such diverse topics and subjects. Winning Women gave us the pleasure of meeting women like American Tori Pena who is Ireland’s first woman pole vaulter. Tori comes from Irish-Mexican descent and get to represent Ireland because her granny is from Ireland. We met at Morton Stadium in early July when she defended her national title and she’s someone Irish audiences will love getting to know and to watch during the Olympic Games. We were also also filming that day with sprinter Jason Smyth, who has less than 10% vision and is double gold medallist in the last Paralympic Games. Jason was trying at that Morton athletics competition to become the first Irish athlete to compete in both the Olympics and Paralympics. Sadly he narrowly missed the qualification time and came second to Paul Hession the Irish sprinter who will represent Ireland in the Olympics. Jason, who comes from Co Derry, is a stunning athlete. One of the fastest men in the world and second only to Paul in Ireland’s history as as a sprinter.
Beyond Limits has been an incredible journey. Its a documentary for Setanta Ireland supported, like Winning Women, by the BAI Sound & Vision Scheme, and goes out August 27th just days before the games start. It features world champion hand cyclist Mark Rohan, tandem cyclist Catherine Walsh, teenager champion swimmer Darragh McDonald, runners Michael McKillop and Jason Smyth as well as equestrian competitor Helen Kearney.
have a look at the promo for the documentary and let us know what you think. We’ll be posting more details in the news columns of our web site as August progresses.

We’ve had a good week here at Athena Media Towers ~(currently owned by NAMA!). On Monday night our colleague Seamus Martin picked up our Gold Award in the New York Radio Festival for our radio series for RTE Radio 1 Death of an Empire. It won gold in the history category and beat off competition from three excellent BBC programmes (including a major one on the same topic of the birth of modern Russia) and ABC amongst others. The series started as a conversation over coffee between myself and Seamus at the beginning of last year. It turned into a radio submission which eventually got support from RTE Radio 1 who came behind the idea of Seamus, a former Moscow correspondent, going back to Moscow to tell the story of the death of the Soviet Union and the birth of what has become Putin’s Russia. The recording period covered the riots and protests against Putin and gave us a lively sense of current affairs in a ‘history’ documentary. Although its a five part series its fundamentally a documentary of five parts weaving stories and sounds to try and create a sense of the time. We got great support from many contributors who gave their time and memories and from people who helped us with the project like Laura Haydon who was living in Moscow at the time and helped Seamus record and Marie Stamp, a Canadian now Irish citizen living in Dublin, who helped with the often difficult logs of non English speakers. We logged all the interviews and people in our office like Stephen Corkery found great archive sounds and clips to illustrate the time. Lisa Essuman, the mainstay of Athena Media, managed the project, chasing archives with RTE and trying to get everything within a tiny budget. She did many of the recording here in Ireland and worked with Seamus helping him to become a radio recordist himself. As the producer I worked to try and shape a story which was an audio and sound story. I recorded here in Ireland and in Finland getting great support from people there. We recorded with Lithuanians and connected with the right voices thanks to our ambassador there who was generous with her time and contacts. Everything had to be knitted together - shaped and paper edited into five half hours. A script written for and with Seamus. Seamus’s knowledge and contacts made the project. We worked for over six months on it to a final edit which really became just ten or so days - two days per episode - and there audio editor Lochlainn Harte worked to make everyone sound good - cleaning up speech and helping non English speakers interviews to work. For a very modest budget we managed to make something special and its our thanks to everyone - particularly the people who told their stories to us - for helping to make the series which has now been internationally recognised.
In many ways we were too busy this week to celebrate or pause too much to rest on laurels as we’re in the midst of one of the most fascinating projects - its a TV documentary called Beyond Limits which follows the stories of elite athletes heading to London to represent Ireland in the 2012 Paralympic Games. Check our our promo videos on the vimeo channel
We are shooting with two great people on camera - Barry MacNeill - who has worked with us for many years - and Eleanor Bowman who is even smaller in height than myself and Assistant Producer Paula Cunniffe! They are dogged in getting the right shots and push their own limits every time we shoot. The stories are compelling and deeply moving. People like Mark Rohan, the world champion hand cyclist, who became paralysed when he was 20 due to a road accident. Mark is charismatic and inspiring. We have meet people like Jason Smyth the visual impaired runner who is determined to not just win gold at the paralympics (he is current world champion) but to make every effort to qualify for the Olympics as well. He still has a chance and it all comes down to a nano second in sprinting. We met women like Catherine Walsh a veteran of the Paralympic Games who is a busy working mother of two full on children but she is also world champion tandem cyclist and determined to break the world record in London. These are inspiring heroes that everyone - particularly children - need to get to know. People like 18 year old Darragh McDonald the amputee swimmer who has a golden personality and is set to take a similar colour medal in London if all goes well for him Darragh embodies the title of the documentary. He doesnt give in to limits. He drives, is at school, has lots of sporting interests and swim like a dolphin - with grace, speed and charm.
We love this project. It is quite special and airs on Setanta Ireland in late August just before the Games starts. Its supported by the BAI Sound & Vision Scheme and to them and our contributors we say thanks. Everyone here loves telling compelling stories and nothing could be more compelling than the material we’re working with in Beyond Limits. Join the conversation about the athletes and the Games on twitter and use the hashtag #beyondlimits

We began the Media Show on April 14th and it closed last Saturday after its eight week run. We felt we were just getting into the flow of it but hopefully we’ll get to do it again. In many way it was eight weeks of intense media news with the fall-out of the BAI/RTE Fr Reynolds report, continued debate over ‘Tweetgate’, the exit of Gavin O’Reilly from INM and the rising deficit of RTE which surprised even RTE executives when the Minister announced it had hit 50 million euro. In many ways the summer months will be dominated by sports, Euro2012 and the Olympics and Paralympics, and it will be autumn before the media storms hit once more. Its been a great experience to run the show which now an on-going life on, with podcasts and additional content, and a pleasure to work with the team including presenter Brenda Power. Highlights for me include meeting Conor White Sullivan the young, dynamic and charming Huffington Post Technology Officer as well as hearing from Ted Talks in New York about why over 750 million people are watching their videos. We had just about everyone in our tiny mini studio here in Adelaide Chambers from the Minister, Pat Rabbitte, to RTE MD Television Glen Killane and TV3 CEO David McRedmond as well as my former boss and BAI chairman Bob Collins. We did inside media reports with TV3, the Late Late Show, Newstalk, Storyful, Longford Leader, KCLR and the Irish Times and we had mediawatch columns from diverse people and topics from ex Irish rugby star Orla Brennan on the lack of media coverage of women and sports to community worker Pauline Sargeant on hyperlocalism. All the mediawatch radio columns are in an audioboo channel if you want to catch up.
For us the summer will indeed be sports as we’re working on a TV documentary called ‘Beyond Limits’ on the Paralympics presented by blind and now paralysed athlete Mark Pollock as well as a radio series, produced by Lisa Essuman, for Newstalk on the Irish women in the Olympics called not suprisingly ‘Winning Women’ . For us the chance that we will see Katie Taylor win Gold in London is very personal since we made a documentary with her in 2008 for Setanta as part of the Tv series called ‘Winning Women’ - I have the chance to be there in August and can’t wait to see Katie go for Gold. Whatever happens no one could have done more to get there and to go for gold than Katie Taylor.
A big treat for us on June 18th is the New York Radio Awards where our series ‘Death of an Empire’ is a global finalist in the history documentary section of the awards. We’re up against top competition from BBC, ABC and beyond but our presenter Seamus Martin will be there just in case we like Katie have a chance of going for something shiny. We always try to see our work as world-class standard, as attempting to be as good as we can possibly make it within our resources and abilities, to achieve excellence and to push the boundaries as much as possible on factual content. In the coming months we have new radio projects in hand and from September a documentary-drama series will begin to dominate - but more about that then!

Communications Minister, Pat Rabbitte, meets the RTE Chairman and Board to discuss the critical BAI report. Helen Shaw explores some of the questions and argues good management could have saved RTE from bad journalism.

RTE’s problems are multiple: a E50 million record deficit and a devastating failure in its editorial standards and processes.
The cash crisis is hitting programming. But the editorial crisis cuts far deeper.
The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland’s report into RTE’s Primetime Investigates shows an incredible breakdown in editorial controls. The Minister used the words ‘shoddy, unprofessional and cavalier’.
As a former Head of RTE Radio it is hard to understand how this happened given the experience of the people involved. Long established guidelines were ignored and the lack of documentary evidence and paper notes is contrary to all serious journalistic practice, whether in print or broadcasting. Anna Carragher, the report’s author, talks of ‘groupthink’, a lack of challenge and review, which allowed the team to accept assumptions as facts. But, disturbing as the thirty-four page report is, it prompts many questions.
Central to those questions is the role of RTE Legal Affairs. What was its involvement in the case, what was its advice and risk assessment?
The BAI in its findings, which imposed the E200, 000 fine on RTE for a breach of its legal responsibilities under the 2009 Act, states ‘it is a source of regret’ that RTE did not waive its solicitor/client privilege with its in house legal staff. Why did RTE not do this? Given the scale of the libel and its consequences it is important the public know. The Carragher report expresses concern that the reporter was the sole conduit for contact with Fr Reynolds solicitors. Yet what is disturbing is that the report states that the May 18th RTE response to Fr Reynolds was sent by the reporter but written with the assistance and agreement of RTE Legal Affairs and the Executive Producer and Head of Current Affairs. By May 18th a letter from Mill Hill Fathers offered, for the first time a paternity test. A second letter from Fr Reynolds solicitors on May 19th was copied to Legal Affairs by the team but no reply was sent by RTE.
By May 23rd, the day of the programme’s transmission, a further letter is sent directly to the reporter by Fr Reynolds solicitors. This again offered a paternity test and stated Fr Reynolds would sue for defamation if the programme went out. This letter, while shared with the programme team, and verbally discussed with the Head of News & Current Affairs, Ed Mulhall, never went to Legal Affairs. While Mr Mulhall took full responsibility for the decision to broadcast, it remains bizarre that no one seriously considered the offer of the paternity test. There was such an assumption of guilt they never saw the offer as genuine.
It is not clear if Mr. Mulhall or Legal Affairs briefed the Director General on the paternity test offer. The report states there ‘appears to be no mechanism for alerting the Director General who is Editor in Chief’. In my RTE experience such alerts were standard requirements by Heads of Output.
When did this change and why? RTE is heavy on meetings and has several key editorial meetings across the week. Traditionally the Director General had regular contact with the Outputs Heads in Radio, Television and News & Current Affairs. When did a process develop where a major editorial and legal risk was not flagged to the Director General? The new editorial guidelines and editorial standards board create checks but the key dynamic is the relationship between the Director General and the content divisions heads.
A further, and significant, question for RTE is why they accepted an early retirement package with Mr. Mulhall without waiting for the report’s findings and without therefore providing any opportunity to explore what happened and why. The report does not include the transcripts of those involved but the real absence is an account from the senior manager himself; someone who has such a record for outstanding judgment.
The emphasis on the reporter, who has now taken voluntary redundancy, and the media’s portrayal of her as ‘shamed’ and ‘disgraced’ obscures the fact that layers of management lay between her and the programme’s transmission. She had an Executive Producer, a Head of Department and a Head of Division above her and they had RTE Legal Affairs advice. One might have expected the Head of News to brief the Director General or for RTE Legal Affairs to have flagged an alert given the scale of risk.
Was that risk assessed?
RTE, and independent, stable public broadcasting, is central to our democracy. We need trusted news and critical, courageous investigative journalism. Those who worry that that is in danger must worry about why this happened. The Chairman and RTE Board, who were appointed by the previous Minister, bridge the last Director General and the current one who started the job not long before this programme aired.
Did the board ask questions about editorial risk and structural process? Did they evaluate corporate governance? Did they provide challenge?.
A further question remains over the speed with which RTE reacted to the crisis post the libel settlement last November (indeed RTE knew once the paternity test was done in September what the outcome would be). It was this lack of public action that seemed to prompt the Minister to request the BAI investigation.
RTE needs to move on. It needs to get its finances and operations in order and restore public trust. But the failings identified in the BAI report are not just in journalism but also in management and in managerial structures and operations at the highest levels.
Good management would have saved RTE from bad journalism.
It is not clear that the changes will address the managerial gap. That requires open, engaged and collective leadership from the boardroom down rather than targeting frontline reporters who need support, training and robust editors. We all need RTE to get this right because as Carragher says in her foreword: ‘broadcasting’s powerful place in our society also brings heavy responsibilities and it is right and proper that those who hold others to account are themselves held accountable’.
The stakes are high but if RTE embraces that level of transparency, accountability and openness this dark episode may be the roots of a stronger, more public focused broadcaster. Now that would secure the public’s willingness to pay.

Helen Shaw runs Athena Media who produce The Media Show on RTE Radio 1. She served as MD RTE Radio (1997-2002) and previously worked with BBC NI as Editor news & current affairs, radio.

I mentioned when the Gavan O’Reilly resignation broke late Thursday, a couple of weeks back, that we’re not a live show and the agreement with RTE is that we hand over the show by latest lunchtime Friday so they can check it for transmission.
That’s all fine except media stories are media stories and we’d look a bit daft if we ignored them.
On Wednesday as I was recording this week’s edition (which is about the TV market, RTE’s financial woes and the competitive battle between RTE TV and TV3) I got a call from the Charlie Bird radio show saying they were under the understanding that the BAI report on the PrimeTime Investigates programme about Fr Reynolds would be out on Friday and would I come on the show and talk about it? I said sure but let’s check.
We were told the BAI Authority members were meeting Thursday morning and if they approved the report and its finding it would be published. We would normally edit and close the programme Thursday evening so decided to continue to record and make our show but booked Friday to do the edit. Right through the day the BAI declined to comment on the timescale for the release of the report.
We were told they were busy writing on Thursday and working on a release but no timeframe. Given that our session ended at 6pm, our editor had been on duty since 9am, we completed the episode with all the different elements and had closed by 5.30pm on the basis we were under pressure to deliver to RTE for transmission.

A tweet from Bryan Dobson said the Minister would be on the RTE Six One News if the report was out in time. Clearly it seemed the report was at least with the Minister.
Just after 5.30pm the BAI released the 34 page report, to its site along with its finding. The RTE newsroom led with it at Six One but it was obvious they had not had time to go through it. Throughout the day we were told the RTE DG Noel Curran would make a statement if the report was published and both Six One and Drivetime on RTE Radio 1 had similar responses from the DG and RTE issued a carefully prepared press statement accepting all the finding and showing their compliance with them.

At this stage I was trying to read all 34 pages of the Carragher report, the additional BAI findings document, the lengthy RTE response, the additional John Horgan report which was simultaneously published by RTE, and trying to make sense of it to do a short insert into the top of the Media Show so we could drop a couple of items and replace with a piece on the report and at least reflect it.
By 7pm post the Six One News we had clips of Noel Curran’s response and I had gutted the documents but the most compelling element in the responses was not RTE’s but that of the Minister Pat Rabbitte who broke through some of the PR soundbites with a damningly frank assessment of the report’s findings and called the PrimeTime Investigates programme and the journalistic work behind it ’shoddy, unprofessional and cavalier’. His sense of shock at the detail in the report reverberated. Several times he was asked by the interviewer Bryan Dobson whether he now had confidence in the DG and the RTE Board. He declined to say yes or no simply stating his confidence was shaken and he would be meeting the board and the DG at 8am on Tuesday morning.

Up until that point I had a sense that the release of the report, just before 6pm Friday, on a bank holiday weekend, could mean that its findings and implications were buried. It seemed somewhat contrived that the report issued so late on Friday although we are assured that the BAI was working frantically to get it issued in time and not hold it over the bank holiday weekend. But with all good intentions it did seem to us that if we were struggling to get it into a weekend show (which is operating like a lot of weekend newspapers and magazines) because of our production deadlines then a late delivery of the report would also make it difficult for Sunday newspapers to fully assess the report and with the May bank holiday many people’s attention is off news and current affairs from mid day Friday until Tuesday morning and Morning Ireland (which may now have to revise its 8am start time!)
Pat Rabbitte’s statement that he is calling a meeting with the DG and RTE Board at 8am Tuesday signaled to everyone that this will not get lost in bank holiday traffic and that it will run as a very big media story throughout next week and beyond.

In our own case all we could do was reflect that in the show and flag that we intend to go into the implications and consequences of the report in much greater detail next week and will follow what happens at the Tuesday meeting. We’ve already several key interviews lined up next week from people who have not been heard on this story and can take us much deeper into what happened and why. But our ability to re-make the show at 7pm was non existent and even with the short insert and change we did not hand over the programme until after 9.15pm to be reviewed by the commissioning producer. It takes time to edit, cut to duration and re format for delivery.

So what are the issues? Anna Carragher has done an excellent job in the 34 page report in trying to pull together the threads but there are some real questions that RTE needs to address and I really encourage people to read the actual report and not just the press and broadcast coverage.

The BAI in its findings expresses regret that RTE did not lift its client privilege with its legal advisors and legal team so that that information could have come into the report and its understanding of what happened and why. Given that the chairman of the BAI Bob Collins is a former Director General of RTE it suggests that the BAI believes RTE had the ability to do this legally but did not. We do not have an input from RTE legal affairs in the report but a core part of the report hangs on legal letters from Fr Reynolds to RTE particularly one to the reporter at the centre of the programme on the day of transmission itself when Fr Reynolds once again offered a paternity test and flagged his intent to sue RTE. Its clear from the report that the reporter passed this email letter to the production team, and the head of current affairs. The head of news and current affairs was told by telephone as he was at the Obama event. What remains bizarre is the unanimous decision to go ahead and broadcast the show without any discussion, it seems, about the potential issues involved or the liability to RTE in terms of a court case. It seems from the Carragher report that this letter did not go to RTE legal affairs. It is not clear if that failure would have in fact stopped the transmission because no view is given in the report from RTE legal affairs. It may well have been that the editorial decision to broadcast would have remained but its the events around those legal letters and the day of transmission which are quite revealing about the gaps in RTE News & Current Affairs procedures.
RTE, in its reponse, is keen to show everything that has been done since April in its pre-emptive move before the report’s publication. All that is well and good but some of it raises questions for RTE which may be part of that Tuesday meeting.

1.Why did RTE at an executive and board level react so late? Nothing in the Carragher report will have come as a surprise to RTE since its all based on their own internal material and all this was known to them by latest November given the background to the programme would have gathered for the legal case and for the internal inquiry post the libel judgement. Key people only stood aside when the Minister asked the BAI to investigate, post the libel settlement, on November 23rd. RTE’s failure, at the Board level, to take decisive action after the court case and the fact that the key decision-makers were still in their posts appeared to have prompted ministerial action. As a former member of the executive board of RTE (I was Head of RTE Radio 1997-2002) it is always uncomfortable to see politicians in the midst of the public broadcaster’s operations we have a legacy of political interference in RTE and the direct legacy of Ray Burke’s corrupt actions in radio (see Moriarty report 1!) but public accountability for the publicly funded media is the final responsibility of the Minister. It would have been preferable if the BAI had called the investigation itself but these are new powers and the BAI would normally respond to a request to investigate rather than make that call itself.

The Minister’s decision to invoke the 2009 Act and call for an independent investigate was necessary and we would not have got to where we are now without it. The RTE John Horgan report, issued yesterday post 6pm, is fine but was limited by RTE to exploring guidelines and procedures rather than what happened and why. It is equally not clear why this report could not have been issued at the time of the April guidelines announcements and given context and a rational background to those changes which took many by surprise given the BAI report was not out.

2. Can we believe, given the experience and reputation of the people involved, that this was an isolated programme or has the collapse in journalistic good practice (note-taking for legal purposes is part of Journalism 101) been part and parcel of our programmes? Was the casual approach to ethics, guidelines and referral in this case part of a culture which had developed in that strand or in the division? Can we possibly believe it was isolated? The full transcripts of the team would help us understand that - including the one with the head of news & current affairs - as to why everyone believed this story unquestioning? Was the Director General aware of this programme and to what extent was he aware of it? What level of briefing did the division give to the DG and the executive board? In assessing this programme was there a conversation about RTE’s ability to stand this up in court? If not, why not?

3. RTE’s decision to grant early retirement to the Head of news & current affairs, Ed Mulhall, before all processes were finished has to be questioned. The clarity over who runs the news and current affairs division could have been resolved without that decision being taken. Yesterday the reporter at the centre of the programme resigned and that’s the first time the word ‘resignation’ has been used. There is as RTE tells us an independent HR inquiry going on. The challenge RTE faces is that the burden of this failure of standards, or absence of standards, appears to be falling on the reporter. In any editorial process the reporter is at the bottom of the chain. That is why there are producers/directors, middle managers and finally heads of divisions.
All the non-existent processes that the Carragher report highlights existed under a layer of management. The lack of note-taking, paper records, documentary evidence, challenge and review is all the responsibility of management across the organisation. What is shocking about the Carragher report is that many of the existing guidelines were ignored or misunderstood. People seemed unclear about their meaning. That responsibility - to ensure staff know and understand their responsibilities within an editorially led organisation - is the responsibility of senior management. The appalling failures in management are at the heart of what happened and that is why the word systemic is used in the report. ‘Groupthink’ and a lack of challenge and review can not easily be tackled by new guidelines. It requires leadership. External experts can no provide that.

3. How do we learn? The big message from RTE post the report publication last evening is that the organisation is learning from the events. A key part of that learning will be openess, transparency and an acceptance that things must change completely. It would be good to see external outstanding candidates being seriously considered for the current vacancies. It would be good to see RTE re-investing in journalistic training - not just guidelines and social media training. RTE used to be a primary trainer in its sector. It would be good to see more diversity at executive board level. It would be good to see RTE engaging with the public - in the period 1997-2002 we used to do a road show, led by Kevin Healy, where RTE - including the executive board - went to towns and cities and listened to the public. It would not be a bad idea to open the windows again. Our own humble show The Media Show is a beginning - but we’re not a public feedback show - we can’t do a digital ‘mailbag’ but it is needed. The RTE Audience Council could play a much more prominent role as an interface between the public (who are 50% funders of RTE) and RTE itself. Yet it is still true that the vast majority of licence fee payers have no idea there even is an Audience Council and who is on it let alone its remit and function.
If the Minister is looking at the big picture the independent regulation of RTE is at the heart of this. Does it currently work?If not why? and what are the solutions? Given the financial crisis which is literally threatening the future of RTE - with 2012 promising a 50 million euro deficit -that question of regulation and governance is not academic but may rapidly become one of survival. Let’s hope everyone at that meeting on Tuesday is up to the challenge. Now is not the time to blink.

Anyone expecting our show this evening, April 21st, to be full of Gavan O’Reilly and Independent Newspapers will be disappointed. But I’ll explain. By late Thursday when the story broke we decided it would be everywhere; on radio and TV current affairs and lots of print coverage. So rather than sounding the same we stuck with the programme we’d recorded and edited and decided to focus fully on the issue of cross media and media ownership next week when we can get behind the story and do something fresh and original which will add value to the public conversation. We’re not a live show. We record all day Wednesday with our reporter Paula Cunniffe working on future packages and items across the week. So we edit thursday and generally aim to get the programme to RTE early Friday morning so Radio 1 can hear it before transmission to make sure it is compliant. We are a bit like a weekend current affairs magazine; topical but if something happens Friday or Saturday the challenge will be to decide if it is big enough to warrant us to re-record. And in reality we are not a news programme. Our mission is to get behind media stories so for us the fit is to unpack the very complex issues of ownership, plurality of ownership, concentration, cross-media and policy and with that we’ve got some surprising elements in next week’s show.

This week our show takes a theme of the shift online in media from the online news successes at the Pulitzer Prize awards this week to the success of Mark Little’s Storyful operation, and the question whether the print version of newspapers is dead?. Storyful is a Dublin based global, digital news agency, which is re-writing our definitions of news and journalism while sticking to the principles of journalism 101 that everything is verified and checked. Newspapers have been hard hit by this shift online. We talk to young people who see news as something they get from social media and not newspapers. They rarely buy them and if they read its Metro. We hear from Noirin Hegarty online editor at the Irish Independent, John Burns of the Sunday Times and David Cochrane of Politics.ie. We also look at what happened when we, the audiences, readers and viewers, shift online and how the media money, which is the funding base of much of content, has followed. Gerard O’Neill, chairman of Amarach, the research agency, joins us. By the end of this year it is predicted that 20% of the 900 million euro Irish advertisement revenue will be spent online but the challenge here is that nearly half of that goes into search, into Google and social media sites like Facebook. When people advertise products on your Facebook pageyou are being sold as a produce to advertisers via Facebook. So traditional media, broadcasting and print, is losing revenue through the recession, through a drop in sales for newspapers and more significantly by the movement of media revenue out of content and into search. O’Neill talks about the absentee landlords of Google and Facebook who are stripping revenue from content creators in Ireland.
With over 2 million of us using Facebook more and more money is being spent marketing us there rather than radio, TV and newspapers but the end result is that money is not then going into media companies here producing our radio, television and print media. How traditional media fights back and finds its economic and business connection with audiences in a digital age will be a recurrent theme of our series as its one of the key issues in the national and international media landscape.

Its really interesting that so far the only company that has said a blanket NO to us in our detailed and very polite requests for interviews and access is Google, who as you know are based here in Dublin at Barrow St and are a big employer in the city. Google’s reply, when I said we were talking to media companies, was pointedly ‘but you do know we’re not a media company’. Which most of us will find a little surprising. They mean they don’t make content but in many ways they are the glue in the heart of the digital media business and media landscape. They are how media content is being found, shared and how media audiences/users are being marketed for advertisement. Their revenue comes from media advertisement money and is directly linked to the transformation of the media world. Its a shame that a company that is so central to our media life, and to the sharing of knowledge, is so private about its own work. But they are not alone. I once shared a conference platform in Hillversum, the Netherlands with Apple on podcasting and the classic moment was when a member of the audience, all radio professionals, asked ‘can you talk to us about the future, where things are going?’ to while Apple guy number 1 replied ‘we can’t talk about the future, period’. We all understand there are issues of confidentiality but a sense of openness would be helpful from some of the companies who dominate and shape our media and communications world

So our lead in this week is RTE’s decision to close the London Office, which is one of those stories which is bubbling away since it was announced and will probably get bigger as the closure happens post August. Given our much we interact with the UK we are exploring why RTE took the decision to end London rather than explore cuts and savings in other part of output or even share it across regional and foreign news output? What do you think? Do you value RTE being present in London or do you think it can be covered from Dublin and Belfast which is what the newsroom is saying? We talk to Cillian de Paor, who is acting head of news and current affairs and get the reaction of people like Pat Loughrey, former BBC Director of Nations and Regions. We also ask TV3 CEO David McRedmond for his view and in both cases you may be surprised by what they say.
One of the things we’re doing in the series is adding additional content post the transmission in the form of longer even full-length interviews. We did this twice with episode 1, with a long cut of both the Bob Collins and Hugh Linehan interviews and we plan to do the same within our very limited resources with episode 2 starting with that Cillian de Paor interview. Its all at www.rte.ie/radio1/themediashow
We’ll post links to podcasts and news soon. But keep in touch via mediashow@rte.ie. We may not be based in Montrose but that RTE email gets directly to us. If it is post do send it here to Athena Media, Adelaide Chambers, Peter St Dublin 8 rather than RTE - that’s faster!.

It has been a busy two weeks since we started full time work on the new RTE Radio 1 series The Media Show, with presenter Brenda Power. There’s such a pile of topics, stories and developments every day in the world of global and Irish media that the challenge for us is to be both topical and original; to try and make sure that everyone feels this is a programme for them and that it is relevant, innovative and extremely open-minded. I quess we also want it to be a good and intelligent listen!
We’ve set up a radio essay in the programme called Mediawatch where we are inviting people to pitch 300 word audio opinion pieces which we record and which allow us to bring new voices and
ideas into the discussion around media. In episode one radio fanatic and general good guy Brian Greene has done a beautiful radio essay, with sound effects, on the joys of radio and its relevancy 100 years after its use in Titanic’s tragedy. It is a lovely two minutes thirty audio essay and sets the tone for the kind of ideas and voices we want to encourage. Next week we have a great piece by Cork woman Deirdre O Shaughnessy on the lack of regional voices, writers and accents, in her view, on national media. We’ve another piece coming in which is by an Irish citizen, born in India, who tackles the way Irish media talks and treats the concept of identity, race and belonging. For a country with our level of racial and ethnic diversity where is that all evident in the daily life of the media? Other topics include the very current question of how the media covers religion. Is groupthink a problem for more places than RTE ? (Given that that seems to be one of the core findings of the Anna Carragher BAI report on the PrimeTime Investigates programme on FR Reynolds).
I definitely want to hear from more people with pitches for the MediaWatch slot. It’s not an audio rant but an audio essay; a chance to use radio to tell a story about the media, both Irish and international and your very own personal take on it.
In talking to Brian Greene, who is an enthuastic leader in all things digital, he asked whether I would be blogging about producing the show. So that got me thinking about my own approach to transparency and I figure I need to try and share, as much as possible, how we are thinking about the show and how I am making decisions about its content as producer of the team in Athena Media and with Brenda herself.
This week we had intended the show would have a focus on digital journalism and explore the future of newspapers with people in the midst of trying to answer the question ‘ will the print version of papers die?’. By Tuesday with the leak of the BAI briefing document on the Carragher/Reynolds report in the Irish Times I was considering what impact that made on our first episode. By Tuesday night in watching the PrimeTime programme which covered extensively the leak and the leaked findings of the report (which are it has to be said extremely damaging for RTE) it was clear to me that we had to talk about ‘what happens when the media itself becomes the story? How good are we are covering ourselves?” and that changed the direction of the interviews we were doing on Wednesday and Thursday. Part of the difficulty when the media becomes the story (whether RTE re Reynolds, the Irish Times re Kate Fitzgerald case or Independent Newspapers re Denis O’Brien) is that it is difficult to stand outside and look at it neutrally. And it required specific consideration in the conversation about media ethics, regulation and guidelines. Guidelines, in all media, should, I think, cover specific protocols in what happens when your media organisation is the main news story. We have seen how challenging this is via the Levenson Inquiry in the UK (something we hope to cover fully in The Media Show later).
So episode one brings you a range of different topics from smartphones and media apps to a strong interview with the BAI chairman, Bob Collins, on the leak but more signficantly on the Right to Reply Scheme which is a public ‘Right to Reply’ Scheme launched by the BAI a year ago but which has not been used at all by the public. We raise the issue whether this is because the public don’t know anything about the scheme and whether the BAI and the broadcasters (as it impacts on all broadcasters not just RTE) have done enough to let the public know about the scheme and how they can or could use it. The ‘Right to Reply’ is when you believe your reputation has been damaged by something broadcast - which is untrue - and allows you with no cost to seek a reply and correction. It could be part of how broadcasters like RTE work to heal its relationship with the public and could avoid long complaints processes and legal action if someone can quickly and speedily get a correction and apology aired. What do you think? Listen in tonight to the show at 7.30 on RTE Radio 1. The podcast will be online on www.rte.ie/radio1/themediashow afterwards and we’re going to start posting the long cuts of interviews, starting with the Collins interview, on Monday. So while the on air version of the show is just a half an hour we have the ability to give you the full interviews so you can hear additional material without the limits of slot. Our email is mediashow@rte.ie or contact us here directly at Athena Media via brenda@athenamedia.ie. My key mantra about this show and series is that it is for the public not the media and if in doubt on what we do that is what I put back as a question ‘what is the best approach for the public; what do listeners, readers and viewers think?’ .

Let me know.
And the first episode is just a beginning. We’re just shaping the series and have lots of things in the pipeline including a great series on inside media-houses from the Irish Times, Storyful to TV3. We’re looking for access to just about every influential media force you can think of and if we’re missing one of them let me know.
I am going to try and write a blog note regularly about the production of the show and will share your feedback too. Thanks for reading and hope you can listen.
Our twitter address is @athenamediaie and the hashtag we’re using for the series is #rtemediashow so please do use that so I can find all your comments!
Podcast online on RTE http://www.rte.ie/radio1/themediashow/
and our own site by Monday - and we’ll be posting full interviews from the series so starting with Bob Collins…lots more in that interview on Right to Reply and how it works.

www.athenamedia.ie

It’s strange to get the chance to make a series about your own profession and business - but it is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. From April 14th we have a run with a new radio series, simply called The Media Show on RTE Radio 1 7.30pm, and along with presenter Brenda Power we’ll be getting behind the scene of the media business and helping listeners to navigate their way through broadcasting, print and online. It is a very big canvas from TV entertainment to news & current affairs, from regulators like the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland to the Press Ombudsman, from global companies like Google to Irish broadcasters like RTE and TV3. In many ways Brenda and myself are well fitted to talk media as between ourselves we’ve worked at some stage in just about every form of it; from print to broadcasting to online. But the focus of this series is not media people but the public and our aim is to make a series for citizens about how the media works and how it impacts on their lives. We want to get new voices on air as well as get inside the places and people who make crucial media decisions. We’re planning a series of radio essays giving voices to different slates on media - and the gaps perhaps in media coverage. We’ll be spending time in the editorial rooms of places like the Irish Times and talking to editors, directors and those who decide what we see, hear and read. We’ll go from the traditional homes of content like the Irish Independent to some of the new online challengers like Storyful and Journal.ie. We’ll also be global and look at the trends which are changing the landscape and hearing from New York and London and getting behind the Levenson inquiry as well as finding out how social media is changing journalism and news. There’s fun too; how is reality TV and the daily soaps made? And we’ll be getting into the media mindset of children, young people and older groups talking about their media habits and what they love and hate about what they see, hear and read. It’s an incredible opportunity and one we’re all getting stuck into and thankfully everyone we’re asking to help us is saying ‘yes’ with lots of people saying ‘it’s a great idea, and about time’. We hope the initial run of eight shows will be extended but as always its a test of what we can do and deliver within a tight budget and our ambitions are high.
Hope you can listen and follow the series if not on air then via the podcasts or player. We’re keen to hear from you too so do send us your ideas and thoughts via email or twitter @athenamediaie and we’re using the #rtemediashow.
More details on each show will be posted closer to transmission and we’ll make sure you get lots more additional content via the RTE website and via our own online life.

There’s a lot of talk about media accountability, accuracy and bias at present. Some of it is flowing from the controversy over the so called Frontline and bogus tweet account which was the subject of a BAI complaints decision against RTÉ last week. Some of it comes from the discussion over the proposed changes to the code of fairness and balance for news and current affairs which the BAI is also concluding.

Equally there is discussion over the BAI’s investigation of RTÉ’s ‘Fr. Reynolds’ Primetime and the report by investigator Anna Carragher which is due shortly. In many ways it is good to separate the apples from oranges (or apples from garlic given the week’s other news!). The Frontline ‘fake tweet’ issue is an error of judgement and even good journalists are allowed to have errors. RTÉ has already said ’sorry’ but it does have questions to answer on its processes, its editorial processes, which have been highlighted over the weekend. I don’t think it warrants a public inquiry (and the BAI has already ruled out any inquiry) but Sean Gallagher is open, or anyone else for that matter, to take another complaint against the programme based on the changed and continued allegations. We need to be careful that every single clash over an editorial error or judgement call does not result in endless inquiries which will be both costly and equally fruitless.

The Fr. Reynolds case was and is completely different and separate and the investigation governing it has been triggered by the Minister using part of the Broadcasting Act to investigate the matter. It did not result from a complaint and is not part of the normal complaint process under the BAI. The Fr. Reynolds investigation is not about a live programme and a judgement call within a live programme. It’s about a detailed constructed programme which was seen and vetted by several key editorial people in RTÉ and it’s about the broadcast given the subsequent libel case. What is puzzling about the weekend allegations about The Frontline is that is does not seem that these were made as complaints to either RTÉ or the BAI and have only surfaced post the BAI judgement and in response to news media coverage. If that’s not the case I’d love to be corrected?

For RTÉ the key now is to re-connect with the public in a new and more open, transparent manner. The new social media guidelines which will form part of the overall programming guidelines should be on the home page of the RTÉ website as a click through. The RTÉ Audience Council, which does exist although few know about it, must be given channels to connect with the public and to act, as it was intended, as an interface between the audience and RTÉ so that there is real communications. The Audience Council could really help RTÉ, but try to find it online or via the website and you will struggle. It needs to be empowered.

Emily Bell, formerly of The Guardian newspaper and now of the Tow Institute for Digital Journalism at Columbia University in New York, talks about the Internet and social media forcing journalism to be more transparent in all its processes, more open to its readers, listeners, viewers contributions and feedbacks and to recognising that what is needed today is ’see-through journalism’.

‘See-through Journalism’ is about getting rid of the cloak of secrecy around what we do in journalism and in the media. It’s about seeing ourselves as collaborators with our so-called audiences. It’s about respecting them and ensuring they know how we make the news, how we make decisions, about how we edit and construct stories. An informed and engaged public is more likely to support the valued news providers who offer trusted and accurate news and information stories which help and assist our lives. For RTÉ - and indeed any news organisation - the challenge is to see this crisis as an opportunity to re-invent, to open up rather than close down. RTÉ need to look at ways in which it does this via its website, its own programmes (there is no media programme on RTÉ radio or TV) and more importantly via public meetings. One of the things my colleague Kevin Healy did in my time on RTÉ’s executive board, when he was in charge of public affairs, was to set up an RTÉ road show where managers and programmes literally took to the roads and had open public meetings around the country on RTÉ, programming and feedback. They were lively discussions but the thing is when you open up and say you are listening to your audience, your clients, your customers, you often find that the majority of them support and value you and the conversations that follow allow you to understand and address the negative feedback.

The challenge for the Minister of Communications and the BAI itself is that the Internet does not come under their brief. The Internet and all the content that flows within, and via social media, is not governed by the regulations currently being discussed about broadcasting and equally while the print media loves to attack RTÉ it would have to think quite differently if it had to operate under the same news and current guidelines as the broadcasters. It is time for an overall Media Authority which brings together all forms of media and content creation, which is distributed to the public, and to merge and coordinate the ways in which we think about media regulation. The press is currently self-regulated and we know from other parts of public life how challenging that is as a concept. The conversation now needs to open up to the creation of an integrated media authority which connects and makes rational all the ways in which we as citizens and consumers are served by the media as a public and commercial good.

If you want to follow our work connect with us on facebook and on twitter.

So in terms of numbers there’s no competition. facebook globally is close to 1 billion users and in Ireland its over 2 million. Twitter claims 300 million accounts and 100 million active accounts but in terms of impact on news, information and global communications twitter is having a profound and transformational impact. The current news headlines about facebook’s value link it directly to the emerging value around the facebook advertisement and marketing base. Some Irish brands now spend as much as 30% of their budget in facebook. facebook’s advert and sponsored stories have become part and parcel of any contemporary marketing spend. The attraction is not just the size of the audience you can reach but how defined it can be and how closely you can match your produce or offering to people who might need it. You can run a campaign in facebook for as little as a euro a day and build from there.
For twitter the business model is extremely weak yet its impact and potential power is clear from its use in political civil conflicts whether Syria or Russia or in breaking news stories including the attack and death of Bin Laden last year which broke first and spread globally as a story on twitter. The New York Times says twitter is as fundamental a part of its news distribution as print and boasts that a tweet from the New York Times is shared every four seconds on twitter.
So it spread news, information, views and stories rapidly and globally. It’s changing and disrupting just about every traditional information medium you can think about and in particular it’s changing things for news providers like newspapers and broadcaster news channels. Twitter is fundamentally a micro-blog, its a blog on speed, but it’s still a blog and the best approach to using twitter is to see it as a blog; a way to communicate, to tell and share stories, pictures, videos, ideas and audio and more importantly a way to have conversations and to enjoy the experience of people talking back to your ideas, stories and content. People often judge twitter as a place where silly things get shared and of course that happens. Its all human life; no more than any gathering of human beings. People will exchange views on TV last night as much as the world events in Washington, Brussels and Moscow. They’ll also share stories as they happen; whether its TV, sports competitions or new events. Newstalk recently estimated that up to 30% of all images we use every day are user generated, taken by us, and coming via mobile photo uploads. Mobile use of social media platforms increases utilisation by about 50% so its easy to see how having a smart phone in your pocket with the twitter app means you can take a photo or video or an event, as it happens, and share it globally and immediately. That’s incredible particularly if you think about how it means we can and could leverage the power of citizens. You see this happening for both good and bad purposes. After all its all human life so we’ll use tools for both good and bad purposes. In the London riots you saw twitter being used by rioters to gather crowds and riot but ironically all that information is now being used to prosecute rioters. So it works both ways.
For me twitter is the game-changer. facebook allows real communities to be formed and has had a dramatic and profound impact on how we connect personally and socially. It now forms a significant part of advertisement revenue and that will grow in 2012. But in 2012 the real story will be twitter - with events like the Olympics and Euro 2012 watch and see how twitter becomes part of the way we tell and collect stories and how we as human beings come together in story-telling in online conversations and watch the impact that has - not just on business - but on society. In 2012 newspapers that don’t take on the the transformational nature of online content and in particularly platforms like twitter will miss an opportunity and risk being left behind. Media and technology have already required that we do not get too attached to the current, what exists today, as things are constantly changing. Businesses which look with fear and loathing at the twitter phenonmenon miss the huge opportunity these transformational models provide. Seeing the risks is important but seeing them only means we miss the opportunity which can not just help us survive but allow us to grow.
Adapt and thrive is the advice for media and businesses confronting that challenge. We’re busy running workshops looking at how twitter and social media changes the ways we communicate, connect and converse. We’re regularly working with The Irish Times on its relationship with twitter and online content and in the coming months we will be training with the Dublin Enterprise Board. Give us a shout on 01 4883350 if we can help you make the shift online or work with your teams on their online thinking.