One of the nice things about working for the BBC is that
quite often, if you come across something and think “oh, that’s interesting,”
you don’t have to just leave it there and get on with your day. You can
actually help bring it to a wider audience who might also perhaps find it
interesting, too.
Just over a week ago I saw a post on Facebook about a
photographer in London who had
bought some 1960s rolls of film and found that two of them had already been used back then. One of them contained some damaged
pictures of the University of East Anglia campus in Norwich, with its
distinctive ‘ziggurat’ halls of residence, and he was attempting to see if he
could find out who might have taken the pictures back in 1968.
I thought this would make a nice little radio feature, so
I arranged to interview the photographer, Attila Prester, as well as William
Stileman from the UEA’s alumni department who’d been trying to spread the word and
see if they could help to discover who took the pictures. They both gave very
nice interviews, with Attila in particular being very moving and almost poetic
in how he talked about the power of photography to preserve moments in time and
transport us to long-lost places, and how the people captured in those images
can somehow speak to us across the decades.
One of the upsides of the changes which have taken place
in the local part of the BBC over the past couple of years is that if you’re
doing a story for radio, it’s now a lot easier to also do it for online as
well. So I also wrote
a BBC News Online piece tied-in with the radio package,
which made sense given it was a story about pictures; to have somewhere where
you could actually show the photos was obviously beneficial.
It’s interesting, though, how even given that subject
matter, it’s very clear to me that
the radio package ended up being the far superior
version. Now, there are obvious reasons for this – for one, you can get a lot
more information into a five-minute radio package than you can a 500-word article.
The whole thing has a lot more room to breathe, you can get across more of the
feeling and the emotion, allow the people involved to tell the story in their
own words, and help convey that sense of emotion with a little music. Writing may
be my passion, but radio is my profession – and one I am very good at, too. I’m
not saying this one was a perfect package, by any means – I ought to have done
the narration, particularly the first link,
much more slowly, with
narrating too quickly being a regular failing of mine. But it is still a pretty
good piece.
On a level of personal professional satisfaction, though,
there is also the fact that while I nearly always have the final say over how a
radio piece ends up, that’s not the case with an article. If I make something
for radio, it will hardly ever be changed before broadcast, and if it were to
be – if someone had a serious objection to part of it, or wanted it to be
shorter, for example – they would almost certainly ask me to do the edit rather
than doing it themselves. This has even been the case on the occasions when I
have made things for national broadcast; very rarely has anything ever been
particularly chopped and changed about after I’ve submitted it.
Writing for BBC News Online though is a very different
beast. Partly this is because I don’t do it very often, and even though it can
be an interesting and even a fun challenge to try and write something which
fits in with the required style – I always regard myself as doing an impression
of someone writing a BBC News Online article, rather than someone to whom it
comes naturally! – obviously there will be nips and tucks and changes which
whoever’s subbing it will do, to make it fit that style more properly. But also,
there’s the plain fact that two different writers, or a writer and a sub or an
editor, will nearly always have two different perspectives on how something ought
best to be written.
But it doesn’t just come down to the different ways in
which the different media are overseen and published or broadcast. Sometimes – and it can vary between one or the other depending on the nature of the story,
the interviewees, and the material available – a story is just better told in
one medium than it is in another. I think that the passion with which Attila
speaks makes this a case where sound very much triumphs over text. But then
again, we put the radio piece up on BBC Sounds and linked to it in the article,
so hopefully anyone who read it and was sufficiently interested will have also
had a listen to the radio version.
Have a listen yourself, and see what you think. Or should
that be hear what you think…?
