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Abbey in autumn light

I love it when the sun is low in the sky and there a storm in the air. With the autumn colours this is a great combination. And there's nowhere better to see the effect than at Bolton Abbey in Wharfedale.

Weather Pics

At Yorkshire Television, we get sent sent photos from around the region. Many are sent to our weather presenters in the hope that they will be included as backgrounds to the forecasts but there are more than can be used. We decided to put many of them into a short movie with narration by one of the weather presenters. Click here to see the weather pictures (not yet mac friendly!)

If you are in Yorkshire can I encourage you to send some of your atmospheric shots to yorkshire@itvlocal.com

Mobisodes

ITV is producing short features for mobile phones. Nothing new there but I'm interested in the thought that content is produced exclusively for mobile phones and for that particular setting.

It seems to me that media content is invariably "repurposed" - this is a way of crudely repackaging the same old content for another time and place. Repurposing, repeating, selling-on whatever you would like to call it, is prevalent in the media world. The cost of producing good TV is high and the number of channels now so vast that producing content for a single service is almost unheard of. Here, at least, the ITV show is an attempt to produce something specifically for a single context.

The BBC has cut its news costs by repurposing media to a large degree. A while back a respected BBC correspondent who told me he was moving to newsreading because reporting had become a multi outlet production line. He told me that he'd spent so much of his time in the field reporting he didn't have enough time to find out what was going on; at least that was the gist of it.

It will be interesting to see how innovative broadcasters can be in developing cost effective formats for single outlets. The encouraging thing from a creative point of view is that the producers will be less reliant on production values and more dependent on great ideas. My criticism of the ITV example is that it has gone down the old route of using celebrity - if you haven't got a good programme idea, there's always a celebrity to fall back on.  There are 140 Hotdesk mobisodes interviews lined up apparently.

ITV Mobile

 

Hello to Shipley & California

I've been using Google Analytics to follow traffic on this site, our ITV Local blog and the ITV Local Yorkshire main site.  If you haven't used Google Analytics can I recommend it to you. I know there is a lot of debate about the accuracy of such services, but the level of detail and flexibilty is interesting.  I know, for example, that the two main sources of visitors to this blog in the last month were Shipley in Yorkshire and California. I don't know if you are in either of these places, but if you are I'm very pleased you dropped by.

Parliament Square

I've occasionally been getting back to London. The last was business trip to the ITV headquarters. The work was dull but any excuse to get out in the capital is welcome. This is Parliament Square where the protesters are still holding out - a bus passes, as they do.

Saturday Mornings

There's a lovely walk from home up the moor. About 20 minutes you're at White Wells, a small isolated cottage housing a tea shop and an old roman bath. The light up here at this time of year is stunning. This has become a regular morning walk on Saurdays with coffee and toast as a reward. Quite a contrast with Munsons or Manyana in Ealing!