Nothing on Gabcast yet but will be getting to it sometime today. Wanted you to read this though:
And finally: the war


Our pick-and-mix culture means that viewers, not broadcasters, will decide future TV news schedules

Mark Lawson
Friday July 6, 2007
The Guardian

Following two reports this week on audience loss of confidence in broadcast news, it's likely that future media historians will look back in wonder at examples of the "and finally" item which traditionally ended ITN's News at Ten. This jaunty story - an unusually musical domestic pet, an actress's unwise choice of upper clothing - was offered as reward and relief, like a sorbet at the end of a meal of strong meat.

But the convention of the playful payoff revealed two assumptions about television journalism: that the audience would sit attentively through a whole bulletin; and that there was a league of seriousness for news stories, in which war, murder, mortgages and cancer research were placed before sport, which in turn was ranked ahead of jokes.
Even now, a key part of interviews for jobs in TV and radio news asks the would-be employee to construct a "running order" for a programme from a list of notional items. Is a stabbing in Solihull more important than a massacre in Africa? Does a movie star's aversion to underwear matter more than a scheme to get under-12s reading?

In the last five years, the correct answers in these interviews have sharply changed. The ambitious applicant would be sensible to avoid the suggestion that exposed celebrity genitalia are inherently less noteworthy than starving Ethiopians. The tradition of "and finally" items lapsed partly because, these days, what might once have been a light signoff could easily be leading the headlines