Several lessons to learn from the BBC Newsnight fiasco, none of them new.
The biggest is that there is no industry on earth which has the capacity to gaze at its own navel better than the media. It sensationalises the sensational and usually draws a grotesquely self-important conclusion. Meanwhile, a child abuse scandal remains unresolved.
It is a story of elephantine management structures which, every now and then, will stumble in a big way. Happens in all big organisations, but in the BBC it's always going to be a very public fail. It doesn't mean the BBC is shot. It does mean it needs some robustly savvy people at senior levels who aren't afraid of speaking out or sounding alarm bells. That's unusual in any bureaucracy, where self-preservation usually reigns, and the higher the salary the rarer it gets. Poor old George Entwistle got cut off from reality.
It is a story, too, of over-excited investigative journalism which wasn't subject to enough wise and sceptical cross-examination. One of the most telling incidents in this sorry episode was an encounter between Iain Overton, of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and Michael Crick, ex-political editor of Newsnight. The BOIJ did the legwork in the Newsnight probe into a child abuse scandal in North Wales and Overton told Crick all about it on the eve of transmission when they met at a social bash. Crick was already familiar with the story, which had been sifted over before. A journalist who has been around a bit, he also knew there was more to it than met the eye. After Overton breathlessly tweeted that a former Tory politician was about to be unmasked as a serial abuser, Crick tweeted a warning.
It's a story of holier than thou. In the media, the BBC is known as a self-regarding organisation which tends to look down on the little people in other TV organisations and newspapers. There was more than a hint of relish in its coverage of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, which focused on the failings of national newspapers (some of whom had been ceaseless critics of the BBC). Unsurprisingly, newspapers are now devoting quite a few column inches to serial blundering at the BBC. La vengeance se mange tres-bien froide, you might say.
It's another illustration of social media's ability to run with a snippet of information and turn it into something poisonously inaccurate. Some of the speculation was clearly political, and people who should have known better (Tom Watson MP, Commons' Speaker's wife Sally Bercow, and Guardian columnist George Monbiot) should hang their heads in shame. Even now, some of the reaction is over-heated and partisan.
In July and August, the BBC demonstrated that it can be the best broadcasting organisation on earth, with peerless coverage of the Olympics. But it isn't peerless all of the time - beneath professional production, some of its routine programming on TV and radio is ploddingly unoriginal and box-tickingly tedious, and there's the sense sometimes that its multi-channel breadth is diluting standout quality.
It doesn't tune in well to some aspects of life, pigeonholing the middle class and the affluent. Despite everything Robert Peston and Stephanie Flanders have done, it still struggles to understand the business mindset beyond the political-corporate prism. Where there should be insights into owner-managers and family firms, we have the entrepreneur as entertainer (Dragons Den and The Apprentice) or reports about workers, bosses, unions and factories which sound like they're straight out of the seventies. This doesn't reflect economic or business reality.
It is prone to corporate hubris, too. Its decision to spend an absolute fortune creating a trophy presence in Salford while abandoning a production base in Birmingham (the UK's second city) was boom-era grandstanding. This money could have achieved so much more if it had been invested in people.
The BBC's Tower of Babel bureaucracy lets it down time and again. Yet it has been the birthplace and the nurturer of immense creative talent. It is a national and international centre of media excellence, a cultural beacon. Its journalism usually sets a consistently high standard.
If these blunders serve any purpose, it will be to make sure that - whatever the competitive pressures, whatever the management nonsenses - nothing is broadcast unless it meets those standards.
Sunday 11 November 2012
Wednesday 7 November 2012
SouthReef: From Dublin to Dubai
SouthReef will go down as a globe-trotting metaphor for the property crash.
It started in Nottingham, got its funding from Ireland, ended up in the hands of an Irish government agency, and is now owned by an Isle of Man entity with a UK subsidiary which is funded by a consortium from the United Arab Emirates.
It will also take the prize for the most unfortunate time to launch a major property development. Construction started in April 2007, just four months before the sub-prime crisis began to explode all over the banking system.
What was once touted as an excellently designed gateway project has stood like a sorry relic ever since, with an unfinished tower and only partially occupied offices.
So, here we are, fully six years after the scheme began, and a finish looks like it’s finally in sight. Who’s bought the project from the Irish Government’s National Asset Management Agency (based, ironically, in Old Canal Street, Dublin)? That’s complicated. Nottingham One Developments is a Derbyshire-registered UK subsidiary of a company of the same name registered in the Isle of Man.
But control actually lies in sunny Dubai, where the new project’s funders are based. Their interest is being managed by former Lendlease executive Colin Wright, who has a string of major Middle East projects under his belt.
The multi-million sum involved in this deal hasn’t been disclosed, nor has the amount Nottingham One’s Dubai backers are investing. But I’m told it is, by their standards, a small project. The signals they were giving out suggest it should be fairly straightforward for them to make it work financially (and I doubt they paid NAMA top dollar).
It looks like they are building up a portfolio of what you might call distressed projects which have still got solid potential. And they are buying at the bottom of the market.
So what was once going to be apartments, offices, restaurants and a hotel will now be a simple residential and office complex. Some of the money involved will come back to Nottingham – Arup are project managing completion and the stout chaps at CPMG have been brought in to redesign the tower for residential use. As of yesterday, a main contractor hadn’t been appointed.
Nevertheless, the sound of hammers will be heard pretty quickly at the Canal Street site: the project is (unsurprisingly) being rebranded Nottingham One, and the SouthReef signs will be knocked down and binned.
SouthReef was the brainchild of architect-turned-developer Andy Grogan and Charlie Fish, of the family building dynasty, Thomas Fish. It isn’t the only name to have disappeared during the six year life of the project: Thomas Fish itself collapsed part way through, only to be bought out by Chek Whyte. His empire, too, would later hit the skids.
Nottingham City Council initially welcomed the scheme because it gave one of the southern gateways of the city something more modern and imposing than the weary old banqueting suite it replaced. It has been desperate to see the site make progress because it regards the whole area – with the empty eastside zone nearby – as unfinished business.
When Nottingham One is completed, probably in late 2013 or early 2014, it will be the first piece in what the council regards as a southern jigsaw: the money it has won under the terms of the City Deal should help it breathe life into the lace market, Hockley and perhaps even Eastside.
With Nottingham One tidying up Southside, this leaves only the thorny issue of Broadmarsh cluttering up the southern gateway to the city. The latest on that long, drawn out saga is one for another day.
It started in Nottingham, got its funding from Ireland, ended up in the hands of an Irish government agency, and is now owned by an Isle of Man entity with a UK subsidiary which is funded by a consortium from the United Arab Emirates.
It will also take the prize for the most unfortunate time to launch a major property development. Construction started in April 2007, just four months before the sub-prime crisis began to explode all over the banking system.
What was once touted as an excellently designed gateway project has stood like a sorry relic ever since, with an unfinished tower and only partially occupied offices.
So, here we are, fully six years after the scheme began, and a finish looks like it’s finally in sight. Who’s bought the project from the Irish Government’s National Asset Management Agency (based, ironically, in Old Canal Street, Dublin)? That’s complicated. Nottingham One Developments is a Derbyshire-registered UK subsidiary of a company of the same name registered in the Isle of Man.
But control actually lies in sunny Dubai, where the new project’s funders are based. Their interest is being managed by former Lendlease executive Colin Wright, who has a string of major Middle East projects under his belt.
The multi-million sum involved in this deal hasn’t been disclosed, nor has the amount Nottingham One’s Dubai backers are investing. But I’m told it is, by their standards, a small project. The signals they were giving out suggest it should be fairly straightforward for them to make it work financially (and I doubt they paid NAMA top dollar).
It looks like they are building up a portfolio of what you might call distressed projects which have still got solid potential. And they are buying at the bottom of the market.
So what was once going to be apartments, offices, restaurants and a hotel will now be a simple residential and office complex. Some of the money involved will come back to Nottingham – Arup are project managing completion and the stout chaps at CPMG have been brought in to redesign the tower for residential use. As of yesterday, a main contractor hadn’t been appointed.
Nevertheless, the sound of hammers will be heard pretty quickly at the Canal Street site: the project is (unsurprisingly) being rebranded Nottingham One, and the SouthReef signs will be knocked down and binned.
SouthReef was the brainchild of architect-turned-developer Andy Grogan and Charlie Fish, of the family building dynasty, Thomas Fish. It isn’t the only name to have disappeared during the six year life of the project: Thomas Fish itself collapsed part way through, only to be bought out by Chek Whyte. His empire, too, would later hit the skids.
Nottingham City Council initially welcomed the scheme because it gave one of the southern gateways of the city something more modern and imposing than the weary old banqueting suite it replaced. It has been desperate to see the site make progress because it regards the whole area – with the empty eastside zone nearby – as unfinished business.
When Nottingham One is completed, probably in late 2013 or early 2014, it will be the first piece in what the council regards as a southern jigsaw: the money it has won under the terms of the City Deal should help it breathe life into the lace market, Hockley and perhaps even Eastside.
With Nottingham One tidying up Southside, this leaves only the thorny issue of Broadmarsh cluttering up the southern gateway to the city. The latest on that long, drawn out saga is one for another day.
Thursday 1 November 2012
Where does Heseltine leave our LEP?
The big question about Lord Heseltine's report into regional growth yesterday is whether it will ever become government policy.
It is a proposal to spend money on a grand scale at the grassroots of the economy, and from some angles looks suspiciously like revisiting what organisations like emda and the Government Office for the East Midlands used to do.
Fair enough, it was a government-commissioned report and Lord Heseltine would not have attached his name to it without some commitment from David Cameron and George Osborne to do something with it.
What does George Osborne, the man who holds the purse strings, want to do? Study it in depth. That could mean working out how some of it could be done without it looking like a u-turn, or it could mean kicking it into the long grass.
A sceptical jury is out on which of the two it means.
There is a lot of simple common sense in 'No Stone Unturned', the name Heseltine gave his search for a way of unlocking regional economic growth. Spending money at the grassroots of the economy is best decided at the grassroots, he suggests. But rather than exhuming old quangos and giving them another name he suggests the work could be done by existing bodies - notably the Local Enterprise Partnerships like our own Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire D2N2, and the Chambers of Commerce (which happens to operate across the same turf up here).
More ambitiously, he also suggests councils should be restructured into two tiers (a sort of city and county arrangement), and that civil servants should be reorganised to serve the economy rather than their department. He's taking on vested interest and political turf here, much of which is quite happy to serve itself.
One way or another, our LEP is heading towards a turning point. There will be a review into its future in the spring and it can't come soon enough. With next-to-no budget and a resource of borrowed time, it has failed to make an impact. While Derby has shown signs of believing it could help their economic development efforts, Nottingham has been dismissive - with a £60 million City Deal under its belt, perhaps it feels it can afford to be.
This leaves us wandering into that miserable world of political rivalry between Derby and Nottingham, a sorry turf which acts as nothing more than another bad advert for politics. It surfaced yesterday in the cool reception given to the announcement that the new LEP chair was another Derby business figure, Peter Richardson.
Put to one side the fact that Richardson is a straight-talker who has considerable respect among business across both counties. Nottingham said nothing about his appointment officially, but it is unlikely to be seen as evidence that the LEP gives an equal proportion of its time to both cities. Whether that's a fair assessment or not, it is one Richardson will have to address.
The LEP is being given just enough money by government to establish a full-time secretariat, and it has a hand in one or two major projects. Will next year's review decide how to give it a real sense of purpose? Or will it wonder whether there's any point continuing? Where government goes with the Heseltine report could play a decisive role.
It is a proposal to spend money on a grand scale at the grassroots of the economy, and from some angles looks suspiciously like revisiting what organisations like emda and the Government Office for the East Midlands used to do.
Fair enough, it was a government-commissioned report and Lord Heseltine would not have attached his name to it without some commitment from David Cameron and George Osborne to do something with it.
What does George Osborne, the man who holds the purse strings, want to do? Study it in depth. That could mean working out how some of it could be done without it looking like a u-turn, or it could mean kicking it into the long grass.
A sceptical jury is out on which of the two it means.
There is a lot of simple common sense in 'No Stone Unturned', the name Heseltine gave his search for a way of unlocking regional economic growth. Spending money at the grassroots of the economy is best decided at the grassroots, he suggests. But rather than exhuming old quangos and giving them another name he suggests the work could be done by existing bodies - notably the Local Enterprise Partnerships like our own Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire D2N2, and the Chambers of Commerce (which happens to operate across the same turf up here).
More ambitiously, he also suggests councils should be restructured into two tiers (a sort of city and county arrangement), and that civil servants should be reorganised to serve the economy rather than their department. He's taking on vested interest and political turf here, much of which is quite happy to serve itself.
One way or another, our LEP is heading towards a turning point. There will be a review into its future in the spring and it can't come soon enough. With next-to-no budget and a resource of borrowed time, it has failed to make an impact. While Derby has shown signs of believing it could help their economic development efforts, Nottingham has been dismissive - with a £60 million City Deal under its belt, perhaps it feels it can afford to be.
This leaves us wandering into that miserable world of political rivalry between Derby and Nottingham, a sorry turf which acts as nothing more than another bad advert for politics. It surfaced yesterday in the cool reception given to the announcement that the new LEP chair was another Derby business figure, Peter Richardson.
Put to one side the fact that Richardson is a straight-talker who has considerable respect among business across both counties. Nottingham said nothing about his appointment officially, but it is unlikely to be seen as evidence that the LEP gives an equal proportion of its time to both cities. Whether that's a fair assessment or not, it is one Richardson will have to address.
The LEP is being given just enough money by government to establish a full-time secretariat, and it has a hand in one or two major projects. Will next year's review decide how to give it a real sense of purpose? Or will it wonder whether there's any point continuing? Where government goes with the Heseltine report could play a decisive role.
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