Marc Reeves

Ten questions for GBSLEP, Heseltine and George Osborne

2013-03-18T14:29:00.001+00:00

A post by me originally published on my political blogMy colleague Kevin Johnson argues elsewhere on this blog that the GBSLEP…

via The Chamberlain Files » Marc Reeves http://www.thechamberlainfiles.com/ten-questions-for-gbslep-heseltine-and-george-osborne/7478

Waseem Zaffar gets the POTY!

2013-01-08T09:59:00.001+00:00

A post by me originally published on my political blogSo congrats to Labour councillor Waseem Zaffar, on his landslide victory in…

via The Chamberlain Files » Marc Reeves http://www.thechamberlainfiles.com/waseem-zaffar-gets-the-poty/6271

Some Storify fun in the silly season

2013-01-03T15:54:00.001+00:00

I had a little downtime over the Christmas / new year holiday, and found myself idly playing with Storify on my Ipad, and learnt such a lot I'll be making more use of this tool in 2013.
I've already put together a 'top ten posts' post for +The Chamberlain Files , and done some tinkering to better integrate Storify into this self-hosted Wordpress blog.
Anyway, here's the piece I did over the hols, which got a more

‘It’s the newspapers I can’t stand’

2012-05-12T22:27:00.001+01:00

In Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day, Milne, an idealistic journalist, describes the limitations of newspapers, and then gives the best argument for press freedom I know of. ‘You don't have to tell me,’ he says to Ruth, the bored wife of a mining tycoon. ‘I know it better than you — the celebration of inanity, the way real tragedy is paraphrased into an inflationary

Six months on from the riots, where to now?

2012-02-19T19:11:00.001+00:00

So, six months on from the riots, looting and lawlessness that prompted a heartfelt blog post and a desire amongst a lot of people to ‘do something’, where are we?

I remember writing that that the memory of the events of August 2011 would very quickly fade and the city and its citizens would return to the normality of life with a sort of unspoken acceptance that the divisions exposed by the violence could be ignored once again.

Well, a lot of energy was expended in those first few weeks, and a germ of an idea did start to come together.

A compelling one, and one full

Why 'business as usual' is a fatal response to Birmingham's riots

2011-08-24T09:23:00.002+01:00

Image by marcreeves via Flickr
There have been riots in Birmingham at regular intervals throughout my life, and I’m sick of it.

It's like a simmering pot that occasionally boils over, but instead of taking it off the flame, we just force the lid down ever tighter.

I grew up in Handsworth and saw the impact of the 1981 riots at first hand. I reported on the 1985 Handsworth troubles as a cub reporter, and after living and working away for more than a decade returned to my home city in the still-raw aftermath of the 2005 disturbances.

I remember someone remarking to me then what fantastic changes I must have seen in the city after my years away. They meant the city centre sheen of the ICC, Brindleyplace and the horizon of budding skyscrapers, all taken as symbols of Birmingham’s progress. I saw and liked these developments for

Jeremy Hunt's field of TV dreams

2011-08-23T10:20:00.002+01:00

Image via WikipediaThis was published originally on TheBusinessDesk.com on August 19. I republish it here for archhival purposes.

THIS week I found myself chairing the first ‘Local TV Summit’ organised by the government as part of culture secretary Jeremy Hunt’s mission to get a TV station in every town and city in the UK.
Hunt has set his DCMS civil servants a pretty ambitious goal of creating sustainable markets for local TV where there currently is none, within a timetable that demands that at least some of the new stations are up and running in time to cover the next general election.

With all the engineering and techie stuff paid for by a £25m ‘gift’ from the BBC, and owned by a single ‘multiplex’ company, the belief is that shoestring local stations will come forward to run services for as little as £500k a year, covering local news, sport, and culture at a community level that existing regional TV stations can’t reach.

At this point I should declare my various interests and prejudices that together probably disqualify me from making any sensible observation on these latest plans for local TV.

Talk on social media to Martineau seminar

2011-07-20T12:17:00.001+01:00

Image via CrunchBase
I was invited to speak this week at an event on social media organised by Birmingham law firm Martineau. This is what I said.

Social media throws into exceptionally sharp relief what will be seen as the death throes of traditional media. And by traditional I’m not referring solely – if at all – to the decline of print.

I’m not talking about the physical format of the media – I’m talking about the approach, mindset and

TheBusinessDesk.com really means business

2010-08-02T08:27:00.000+01:00

No apologies for this shameless plug for the web business I work for - TheBusinessDesk.com - because it's a big day for us as we launch new features which in my view take us to a whole new level.

We've just added a new shares & markets channel, which for our business and financially-focused readership is a significant addition to the existing diet of company and economic news from their regions.

But we've not just plugged in a vanilla-flavoured national feed from one of the financial newswires - rather we've worked with the
Read more »

Speech to News:Rewired, June 2010

2010-06-26T09:09:00.000+01:00

I spoke at the News:Rewired conference on June 26, 2010.

I'm still cogitating over what I heard from other speakers at this very well organised and focussed event, and will post on what I conclude later.
For the time being, here's the text of my speech, which a couple of Tweeters called brutal. If that's how it came across, I'm truly sorry: I was aiming for 'passionate.

I’ve three main points to make today:

They’re these:

In a niche, it’s not enough to be a journalist – you’ve got to be a business person too
In a niche business, it’s not enough just to provide information – you’ve got to do other stuff too, even if that’s selling your readers a credit card
A niche audience needs a niche approach – not a mass market one

Why are we talking about niche today? Why has this subject risen up the agenda – why this suddenRead more »

Speaking truth to power: my speech to the CBI

2010-06-06T12:12:00.003+01:00

On Thursday this week (June 10), I’ve been invited to speak at the Senior Executive Lunch of the West Midlands CBI. I’ve been asked to talk about “Tomorrow’s news today - changes to regional media and what the future holds for news journalism.”

It’s a well-worn theme and I’ve spoken on this at many events before, but mostly to media-dominated audiences. In front of an audience of very senior business figures, I thought I would try to give them an insight into where the media is going, and even steer them towards the realisation that smaller media enterprises will become more and more significant in the near future.

This is my first draft, and I’d welcome suggestions for other points to make to this audience.

(June 9 update: thanks for all the challenging and thought-provoking reaction to this post. I never expected to get such a response, as I said nothing here that I've not said before - mostly on this blog as it happens. In the light of yesterday's announcement by Jeremy Hunt that IFNCs are dead, I'll try in the speech to better represent broadcasting issues. For the moment, though, I've concentrated on tidying up some of my editing howlers on this draft and will try to update more fully later. June 10 update: I added a couple of pars about IFNCs and the Jeremy Hunt announcement. They're pasted at the bottom of this post)

Journalism has no God-given right to exist and journalists are owed a living by nobody.

By the same token, none of you have any ‘right’ ~~whatsoever~~ to receive a daily print newspaper that provides you with hundreds of stories focused ~~purely~~ on your needs as a senior business decision maker in this tiny outpost of the global economy.

Sadly, listening both to ~~both~~ journalists and to readers over the past few years, you would think ~~that~~ news journalism was like the air that
Read more »

Why the NUJ needs to get real on Bullivant

2010-04-23T09:41:00.000+01:00

The ever-credulous NUJ removed its head from the sand just long enough this week to hail Chris Bullivant as the saviour of journalism and the Robin Hood of the newspaper industry.

As reported by Jon Slattery and others, NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said: “The launch of the Birmingham Press this week is a vote of confidence in the city as a news centre where the skills of writers, photographers and production journalists can help to provide an added service to readers in a complex modern environment.”

Dear concluded: "We warned Trinity Mirror that by collapsing the scope of its publications in the city and making journalists redundant, the market was being opened up for a competitor happy to recruit skilled staff who became unexpectedly available."

The union’s northern organiser Chris Morley said the Press was a ‘significant step’.

Oh please. To read the comments above, you’d think Bullivant had created in his Knowle nerve centre a newsroom bursting at the seams
Read more »

Meet the Pollyanna editor

2010-04-14T09:53:00.000+01:00

I'm an eternal optimist, but even I can't share the sunny outlook presented by this New Zealand editor, as reported by Roy Greenslade.

"Newspaper companies are effectively reinventing themselves in the digital age and are now providing a compelling, integrated experience for readers and advertisers alike."

That's all right, then.

Read the full post here

SKGNDGUK7XW4

Media mayhem in the Midlands

2010-04-09T14:47:00.002+01:00

THERE’S a lot of activity in the West Midlands medialand at the moment, much of it a microcosm of what’s going on in the sector across the UK and beyond. I wonderered, then, if I could draw any conclusions about the future shape of the media by looking at a snapshot of what’s happening now.

What follows is a pretty incoherent collection of thoughts, and I apologise in advance for my lacklustre excuse for a ‘conclusion’ at the end. You might want to stop reading now, to be honest.

Disregarding the entry of my new venture, TheBusinessDesk.com into the fray, we’ve seen the launch of at least two new Midlands business
Read more »

New business models for news: the Great Wild Goose Chase

2010-01-31T16:22:00.001+00:00

I liked Salon co-founder Scott Rosenburg's challenge to journalists. Don't start from the premise that a newsroom is there to be preserved, and then look for the business model to support it. It should be the other way round, he says, and he's dead right:

"Journalists who set out on the Great Business Model Hunt are trying to figure out how to support a newsroom. This is entirely understandable. If you have a great newsroom -- and as a lifelong reader I certainly feel that the Times does -- then of course you're going to worry about that around the clock once you realize that your old business model is doomed. But it's the wrong question. It's backwards. The newsrooms of today acquired their size and shape and structure thanks to the business model that supported institutions of their size. The world has changed; that model is vanishing. We shouldn't be asking "What sort of business can support a newsroom online?" The question is, "What's the best kind of newsroom that the online business can support?"

Read the whole post here.

What the collapse of the Third Reich tells us about Apple's IPad and newspapers

2010-01-31T10:25:00.000+00:00

This first appeared on my blog for Drum Magazine on January 30, 2010

It's clearly a somewhat inappropriate metaphor, but I can't get the image out of my head of forlorn Nazi soldiers in March 1945 waiting in vain for the Fuhrer's secret weapon to turn the course of the war and secure the destiny of the 1000-year Reich.

But I can think of no clearer parallel to the desperation shown by so many in the newspaper business in their reaction to the release of the Apple IPad. With its ability to reproduce
Read more »

Independently Funded News Consortia

2010-01-08T12:37:00.003+00:00

I'm delighted to have been appointed to sit on the panel to help the UK Government select the consortia to run the Independently Funded News Consortia pilots.
You can read more here and here.
Of course it wouldn't be at all appropriate for me to comment on the process or my involvement in it on this blog or elsewhere, so please forgive the 'radio silence' on this issue from now on.

Going the extra mile

2010-01-04T17:31:00.000+00:00

At a bit of a loose end at the weekend, I thought I would see if there was any mileage in an idea I'd been mulling for a while.

I recently moved to Harborne, a suburb of Birmingham, and was surprised that the district was one of the few in the city without a healthy local community blog. Seeing as I've become a bit of an advocate for these kind of ground-level digital endeavours,
Read more »

Three things I'll miss about newspapers - and three things I won't

2010-01-01T20:34:00.000+00:00

This was first published on January 1, 2010 on my blog for The Drum.

In my last post, I discussed why I was leaving newspapers after 25 years.

I thought I'd allow myself one more nostalgic post before this blog returns to what I hope will be its main purpose - discussing what's new in the world of media from the point of view of someone who's trying to make it as an entrepreneur, digital publisher and jack-of-all-consultancies (as well as some other stuff that might touch on the politics and economy of Birmingham).

And what better way to do this than with some good old-fashioned linkbait - a couple of lists?

So here we go. First: what am I going to miss about newspapers?

Read more »

Paid content or community: business models for the regional press

2009-12-30T14:35:00.004+00:00

As an addendum to my previous post, I thought I'd publish a speech I gave at Warwick Business School in October 2009. It was part of a debate snappily titled 'Does Business News no Longer make for Good Business?' Please note I made the speech just before it was announced that the Birmingham Post was going from daily to weekly publishing, and I would be stepping down as editor.

I've been asked to talk today about the challenges facing the Post and other parts of the media - particularly the printed media, and how we're coping in this digital age.

At the risk of delivering an economics lecture, I hope you'll allow me to share with you the internal workings of the regional publishing business, and particularly address the hot topic of
Read more »

Why I won't be a newspaper journalist on January 1

2009-12-24T07:06:00.002+00:00

This was originally published on my blog for The Drum on December 23, 2009

On New Year's Day 2010, I will for the first time in 25 years not be employed by a newspaper publisher.

No-one is more surprised than me that for a quarter of a century I've made a living variously as a reporter, sub editor, deputy editor, editor, editorial director, publishing director and assistant managing director at various newspaper gigs around the UK.

In other words, it's about bloody time I got myself a proper job.
Read more »

Why the Birmingham Post must change

2009-12-16T13:02:00.003+00:00

This was originally posted on my Birmingham Post blog on August 25, 2009
I have just announced to my staff that Trinity Mirror was starting a consultation process with them over the future of the Birmingham Post, the title I have edited for more than three years.
There are two options for change on the table - each a response to the fact that the Midlands region of Trinity Mirror will lose £6 million next year unless some radical action is taken now. The Post as a key title must play its part in plugging that profit gap, and I'll get to the two options later.

A new era for the Birmingham Post

2009-12-16T09:38:00.006+00:00

This was originally published on my Birmingham Post blog on October 20, 2009
In three weeks' time, the last daily edition of the printed version of the Birmingham Post will roll off our presses in Erdington, marking the end of a publishing tradition that stretches back more than 150 years.
But it also marks a rebirth, as the Post starts a new chapter in its evolution as a multimedia brand and its new life as a must-read weekly title.

When business and boffins collide at #warwickem

2009-06-04T06:32:00.005+01:00

I've been asked to chair the first event for Warwick University's Exciting Minds programme next month - and I can't wait to see what comes out of this highly intriguing event.

Read more »

Twitterdads of the world unite

2009-05-31T17:42:00.001+01:00

I just love the title of an event I've been asked to speak at on June 11 at Fazeley Studios.
My Dad's on Twitter ... But He Doesn't Know Why is described as a 'collaborative mindmap event', which brings to my mind the kind of freaky happenings the Pink Floyd used to hold at the UFO club a million years ago.

Read more »