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Name: Adrian Van Klaveren
Occupation: Deputy Director BBC News and Controller News Production
Country: UK
Total Questions: 6
Total Answers: 6

Links
BBC Biography
The Guardian

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Answered Questions

Londontowner asked Adrian Van Klaveren: "Adrian, how will interactive news look in, let's say, ten years time? How much further beyond the viewers poll, phone in, e-mailed pics etc, can we realistically go?"
Adrian Van Klaveren answers: "I think the role of debate within the news will be the thing that really develops. At the moment it’s possible for people to react to things whether it’s by text messages or by email but there’s not a..." Show more»" I think the role of debate within the news will be the thing that really develops. At the moment it’s possible for people to react to things whether it’s by text messages or by email but there’s not a sense of something going quickly backwards and forwards and that real exchange of ideas and how that works and I think that will change much more that people can make a point, get an instant response back, in the way that you and I would in a normal conversation. I think broadcasting will be more into that area. I think the use of video interactively is something that will grow, instead of what is essentially a text based interactive content it becomes much more video based and you can actually see the people- and it will become much more engaging to a wider audience I think, if it moves in that way. And a sense that it will be much easier to find the particular debate that you are interested in- today we are still quite led by “What is the Today programme discussing?” or “What is going on on Radio 5 Live?”, or whatever. A sense that we can actually let people set the agenda themselves more than is currently the case, that interactivity will be much more the things the audience want to talk about, as opposed to us trying to guess what we think the audience wants to talk about. Shrikala asked the follow up question: Will this affect the model of journalism – when anybody can be a journalist, will the actual art of journalism suffer? I think that’s the worry but I actually don’t think that will be the case. I think that journalism has still got a very proper and essential role. Journalism, in the end, is about finding things out – its not just about commenting on things – I mean journalism is about going away, getting information, putting it together and then making sense of it and I think that there is a role for that which people will still value hugely- that somebody is able to work out what’s actually going on in terms of how political party funding works for instance – they are going to want journalism on that, not just to say what they think about it. And that will only come from journalists who are spending the time and the effort and have the background knowledge actually to try and make sense of it. I think there is still a very important role for journalism there. "Show less«
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0 comment | Topic: Media | Email to friends | Jan 29 2008 6:37:04 AM
sunnyday asked Adrian Van Klaveren: "I notice that the "most read" and "most emailed" stories on the BBC website are very often not the headline stories but the funny or sensational ones, so do you think that there is an argument for giving..." Show more »"I notice that the "most read" and "most emailed" stories on the BBC website are very often not the headline stories but the funny or sensational ones, so do you think that there is an argument for giving the funny and sensational stories more prominence?" Show less »
Adrian Van Klaveren answers: "I think the argument is a slightly different one. I think the argument is making sure that it is possible for people to find them, that its possible to search for them, that we’ve actually made the navigation..." Show more»" I think the argument is a slightly different one. I think the argument is making sure that it is possible for people to find them, that its possible to search for them, that we’ve actually made the navigation to get to those sorts of stories as simple as we can and that’s something that we’ve been working on. You know we now have an index on our website called “Also in the news” which is the home for that kind of story because you’re absolutely right, I mean there are a lot of people who are keen to read, watch or listen to that kind of content and we have to make it possible for people to get to that and it is a part of what we do. Equally, we can do things through interactive TV in terms of offering that kind of story for people who want to find that through the menu, so I think there’s a role for us in aggregating it and making it findable. I actually think giving it more prominence….I don’t think that the vast majority of our audience feel that what we should be doing, is saying in the end that funny story about the man who was locked in the toilet is more important than what’s going on in Kosovo – they’re not expecting us to do that and actually we would be getting it wrong if we would be doing it that way. It is simply saying they do have a place in what we offer and we’ve got to make it easy for you to be able to get to those stories that we’re not ashamed of them, we don’t hide them away, they are there and for those that want them and want to bookmark it and go back to it, absolutely fine, you can do that. "Show less«
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0 comment | Topic: Media | Email to friends | Jan 29 2008 7:56:15 AM
sunnyday asked Adrian Van Klaveren: "Which one, and why, is your news provider of choice - tv, internet, newspaper or radio?"
Adrian Van Klaveren answers: "I’m not sure I’m very impartial here because I work for the BBC News so I’m terribly partial. I’ll give you the honest answer – where I tend to for choice, is still fairly BBC skewed really – if you’re..." Show more»" I’m not sure I’m very impartial here because I work for the BBC News so I’m terribly partial. I’ll give you the honest answer – where I tend to for choice, is still fairly BBC skewed really – if you’re looking at television, the main things I consume are News 24 and the 10 o’clock news from the BBC. If you look at Radio, I’m a great 5 Live fan just because of the passion and the tone that 5 Live actually brings to it. For newspapers, I’m much more likely to read all of them, there are ones which stand out, I mean actually I always like to look at the Daily Mail because I think the Daily Mail really knows its audience and there is a way into what is actually going on in Britain that you can get from the Daily Mail that you won’t get elsewhere. And I think there is something in that which makes it well worth reading each day. If you are looking at web sources I guess the other place I start apart from the BBC site is, you do look at Google News because there you’ve got such a good digest of what is being talked about, different sources for it, sometimes surprising things. And you know the power of Google News and the reasons it’s growing so fast are precisely because of that – the very easy way to get at a wide range of stories. Because of what I do, you tend to flick through a lot of them [newspapers] as opposed to just reading one. But I will often read the Times, the Mail or the Telegraph. "Show less«
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0 comment | Topic: Media | Email to friends | Jan 29 2008 7:19:54 AM
bonzo1 asked Adrian Van Klaveren: "The BBC often encourages the general public who are "on the spot" when a news event occurs, to submit pictures or video. Do you have any plans to offer payment for this content in the future and will ..." Show more »"The BBC often encourages the general public who are "on the spot" when a news event occurs, to submit pictures or video. Do you have any plans to offer payment for this content in the future and will we ever see a time when BBC users are also encouraged to write their own reports on stories?" Show less »
Adrian Van Klaveren answers: "In terms of payment, generally not – we are asking people to contribute and our experience is that people are usually very keen to contribute to our coverage and be able to give their pictures, their ..." Show more»" In terms of payment, generally not – we are asking people to contribute and our experience is that people are usually very keen to contribute to our coverage and be able to give their pictures, their accounts of the events they’ve actually seen. We’ve occasionally paid for particular content if we have it exclusively and so on, and that will continue, just as we have in the past with amateur video – the only difference is that nowadays there is just much more of it around, because most people have a mobile phone with a camera attached to it and can email it directly from there. It’s just an increase in volume of that but I think the principles are that generally we don’t have plans to pay for that sort of content – there would have to be a very specific reason why that would be the right thing to do. In terms of people writing their own sort of accounts of things, I think there is a place for that. There are two ways in which that really works – there are people who are experts on stories because they’ve got personal involvement, personal experience of it. If you want to hear their accounts because that helps inform your overall understanding of the story, it makes it actually a much more rounded account if you are able, through your website, to say “And here’s an account of a person who knows about this, who has experienced it, has lived through it” or whatever. That’s a good thing to have and in terms of people who witness particular things , you know, those accounts… they don’t just need to be a short email, if somebody feels that they are able to write their own particular account of it, that can be very powerful and very valuable to us. And there is this kind of opening up of the news that you can let people have the space to be able to do that, and you do get a difference of perspectives, a difference of style and so on. I don’t by any means think that it is the entire answer of what it is that people expect from us but I think its a part of it and I think its something that we want to encourage. Shrikala: So you would ask a journalist to go through what has been written to check that it is up to the standards of the BBC? Well, I think the key thing is for people who are reading it, is to understand the basis on which that account is there. If it is an account from somebody who has sent it to us, a member of our audience, I think that’s what needs to be clear to people. I think there is a danger of us for getting into “well we’re going to moderate everything, we’re going to edit everything, we’re going to make it all the same as everything else we would do through our own journalists”. I think you’ve got to make that distinction and to say that actually, this stands there in its own right as long as there are no particular legal defamation problems or anything like that with it – we should check for that. But beyond that I think our role for that sort of account is as a publisher of it, as opposed to people who are trying to edit it and make it conform to our own particular style, our own way of doing it, for the very real fact that if we start trying to do it that way- where we are trying to edit it in lots of different ways- we won’t have the capacity to produce very many of those accounts. It won’t actually achieve the kind of opening up, the kind of democratisation if you like, that actually is the reason for doing it. Because it will be subject to our capacity to be able to edit them much better that we’re very open with the audience, “this is the basis of this, the status of it, it’s not the same as something done by one of our journalists, but we think you might be interested in reading it”. "Show less«
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0 comment | Topic: Media | Email to friends | Jan 29 2008 7:50:46 AM
ryanscribe asked Adrian Van Klaveren: "Is the future of all media going to be via a one-stop service, on either a PC or TV? i.e. there won't be separate TV, PC, newspaper, etc Or will I be picking up e-books (the new Amazon invention), still..." Show more »"Is the future of all media going to be via a one-stop service, on either a PC or TV? i.e. there won't be separate TV, PC, newspaper, etc Or will I be picking up e-books (the new Amazon invention), still listening to a (admittedly digital) radio set, browsing the web and also collecting a paper in the mornings? And how the hell does the media owner pay for these?? Unlike the Beeb, most have to make a commercial success to offer these services." Show less »
Adrian Van Klaveren answers: "Well the two things come together. You can access TV through your PC and you can access your PC through your TV set, you can get text on your radio – all of those sorts of things and that will continue...." Show more»" Well the two things come together. You can access TV through your PC and you can access your PC through your TV set, you can get text on your radio – all of those sorts of things and that will continue. I think actually that the crucial difference is one about the distance away from the screen you sit and I think that’s probably what the difference will be in the future – you know the kind of screen that you might have a few inches away from you – a hand held device, a mobile or whatever – and what content is right for that. There is what you might do in terms of sitting in front of a PC, there is what you might do at your desk or whatever , how you actually work there and what media you consume in that way, and then there is the rather more passive, sit back and sit quite a distance away from the screen and really be entertained, be immersed in something sort of approach. I think the convergence will be more along those lines, that you’ll still end up with those different devices and different forms of content will work for different ones there but that means thinking about it in a very different way from thinking “Oh, this is made for the web and this is made for TV.” I think those distinctions will break down and go away. Shrikala’s follow up: So you think we’ll continue to see people carrying radios and newspapers and watching the news on TV? Well, I think you will have people who are carrying a mobile device which is capable of receiving the radio and I think you can see that happening – you only have to look at the iphone and see that is the beginning of how some of that can actually come together, so you will see that happening. I think in terms of “Is there a role for newspapers in the future?” There is still a role – what newspapers are having to do is to change in terms of kind of content they offer. It becomes more about lifestyle and comment and less about news in terms of the overall package, and there’s a place for that- for people to read at weekends, when they are traveling, those sorts of times- that works and its actually quite a convenient package for being to operate in that kind of way. You know- you’ve got it in your hand and there’s a kind of aesthetic pleasure to it. So I think newspapers are having to re-invent themselves very quickly and in quite difficult circumstances but I think there is still a role for that as long as they can make the economics add up in terms of the costs of printing and distribution and so on, which is a very, very expensive business. Shrikala’s follow up: so for economic success newspapers will have to decrease distribution costs and increase advertising? Well clearly, the economic model there is under pressure in terms of what you can actually do: there is the cost of providing the content, the cost of then distributing it and what you can actually get back in terms of either advertising revenue or the actual costs of buying the publication. I think there will still be a place for that and people will find a way of making that work but they will have to change what they do in terms of the type of content, and continue to do that, and think about how you actually go about doing that – what kind of printing and distribution? "Show less«
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0 comment | Topic: Media | Email to friends | Jan 29 2008 6:50:58 AM