100 years ago, on 2 February 1914, the film Making a Living was released by the Keystone Film Company. It was a comedy, one reel long (1,000 feet, or around 10 minutes), directed by Henry Lehrman. The star was a British comedian, newly arrived in Hollywood, whose first film it was. The actor was CharlesRead More
‘New ways of doing journalism‘ was the enticing title of a seminar held last night at City University in London. It brought together leading practitioners in the new modes of web-based news production whose success (social, and in some cases commercial) is challenging existing models and exciting a lot of people in he news world.Read More
Every now and again someone will come up to me and say that they like something on my blog, and I have to ask them which one. I have produced too many websites, blogs and the like these past few years, leaving several by the wayside (Screen Research, Diving for Pearls, Moving Image, BardBox, TheRead More
The British Library has a television and radio news recording service which we call Broadcast News (and yes we were partly thinking of the wonderful 1987 film of the same title with William Hurt and Holly Hunter when we named it). Broadcast News has been recording UK free-to-air television and radio programmes since May 2010Read More
The national newspaper collection is on the move. Next month, the British Newspaper Library – part of the British Library – will be leaving Colindale, north London, its home since 1932. Countless researchers have made use of the Colindale reading rooms over the past eighty years, and it is held in great affection, but fewRead More
News is not an absolute. Though we talk about world news, what is news to one person is to necessarily news to another. News is a report of an event of specific interest to a particular audience. So it is that online news services such as Google News or Yahoo News offer means to tailorRead More
I wear several hats. Some hats I have worn and now discarded; some hats I have tried to discard but they just won’t slip away. I have found this in my online life, where I have produced blogs on silent films, Shakespeare, poetry, film and media, and the moving image work I do at theRead More
A recent article by Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books has caused quite a stir. Written in the aftermatch of the Jimmy Savile scandal, it exposes a culture of child abuse from past decades perpetrated by various BBC personalities. One of these was the commentator and producer Lionel Gamlin. As a historian ofRead More
I’ve been thinking about news lately. At the British Library we’ve just piloted a television and radio news service, called Broadcast News, which has selected news broadcasts from May 2010 onwards taken from seventeen channels available on Freeview and Freesat. But the service can’t just stand alone. It has to join up with other newsRead More