Blueprint for a truly representative House of Lords

Regular readers will know that I take a very dim view of the way members of the House of Lords are selected - and actually think that the half-baked changes that Labour dragged itself into making during its thirteen years in office have made it an even greater embarrassment to a modern democracy than it was before 1997. As I wrote in a post nearly two years ago:

'...there’s still unfinished business and more work to be done. To take but one example, the Blair government finally got around to abolishing the hereditary principle as a basis for membership of the House of Lords, but has left us with entry qualifications to the upper house that are as far removed from any democratic principles as could be imagined.'

Before that, we could at least mount a sort of defence - namely that the House of Lords was a feudal anachronism that successive governments had never quite got around to doing anything much about.

A 'predominantly elected' House of Lords?
Then, for all the coalition government's talk of major constitutional reforms, David Cameron's prime-ministerial debut at PMQ held out little hope for radical change when he declared his support (twice) for a "predominately elected" House of Lords - which sounded suspiciously like an assurance to the undemocratically selected miscellany of former MPs and party cronies that they needn't worry about being forced to vacate their cosy retirement home in the other place.

I do recognise, of course, that there might be a problem with a completely elected House of Lords - especially if its members were elected by a more proportional system than that used for electing MPs to the House of Commons - as it could set off a power struggle between the two houses as to which one had the more democratic mandate.

Listening to me banging on about how to bring real reform to the Lords is something my unfortunate family and friends have been forced to put up with for years.

The most interesting solution so far has come from one of my daughters-in-law. And, with the spectacle of yet more cronies being parachuted on to the red leather benches, it seems as good a time as any to share Anne's proposals with a wider audience.

Membership that's fair and representative
The principle of public service is at the heart of her system for allocating seats in the House of Lords - which would be as representative of the general population as it's possible to imagine and has the following advantages over all the other proposals I've ever heard mooted:
  • Equal numbers of male and female members would be assured.
  • The age distribution would be an accurate representation of that in the population as a whole, thereby eliminating the current bias in favour of the elderly.
  • Representation of different ethnic groups would reflect the proportion of them in the general population, unlike at present.
  • The occupational and socio-economic background of members would also reflect that in the population at large.
  • Members would hold their seats for a fixed term, and not for the rest of their lives.
  • Political motivation to obtain a peerage would be eliminated.
Too good to be true?
Er, no. We already have a well-proven, practical and efficient system that's been achieving all these benefits simultaneously - and has been doing so for a very long time.

Until now, however, it's only been used to select members of the public for jury service.

So why not also use it for selecting members of the public for service in the House of Lords? After all, if juries are capable of playing such an important part in applying the laws of the land, the same people would presumably also be just as capable of revising new laws.

The next step?
A few important modifications to the way jury members are recruited would obviously have to be introduced - e.g. geographical representation, number of members, length of service, how frequently should new members be appointed, remuneration, training, etc.

But it's surely not beyond the wit of government to appoint a Royal Commission, chaired perhaps by a judge or constitutional lawyer, and including at least one psephologist and the CEO of IpsosMORI (and/or other polling companies who know about sampling) to sort out the details and devise a system that would work.

I'd be more than willing to serve on it myself. Unfortunately, however, I don't think it will ever happen.

Other posts on the House of Lords
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Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, 20 years on from her resignation...

When I was doing the research that led to my first book on public speaking (Our Masters' Voices, 1984) Margaret Thatcher was the leading British politician of the day and provided me with much of the data analysed in the book - for which I was and still am extremely grateful.

Later on, when I was writing speeches for former LibDem leader Paddy Ashdown, she provided much raw material for lines that were more or less guaranteed to get rapturous applause.

But those were only two of my debts to her. Another was that I've often summed up my professional life by saying that it came about as a result of being both a victim and a beneficiary of Thatcherism.

Victim of Thatcherism
This was because of the appalling damage her governments inflicted on higher education and research in the UK, not to mention what they did to my standard of living or the two years of insecurity that came to a head in 1981 - when her Education Secretary Sir Keith Joseph commissioned Lord Rothschild to investigate my then employer (the Social Science Research Council) with a view to making a case for closing it down.

Luckily, he didn't oblige, concluding that it would be a 'gross act of intellectual vandalism' to do so. The compromise accepted by Thatcher and Joseph was to delete the word 'science' and elevate the importance of their favoured discipline with a new name: the Economic and Social Research Council.

Beneficiary of Thatcherism
A few years later, the benefit from Thatcherism came when Nigel Lawson's budget of 1988 reduced the top rate of income tax to 40%. That was the moment when and the reason why I decided to risk leaving the groves of academia to become a self-employed consultant and author (links to a fuller story of which can be found in the final post of the Claptrap series HERE).

To that extent, I can claim to be living proof that the official economic case for Thatcher-Reagan tax reductions, namely that they would unleash entrepreneurial zeal, worked in at least one case.

The cricketing simile that put an end to her innings
To mark the twentieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher resignation as prime minister, links to some of my writings about her, both from Our Masters' Voices and this blog, are reproduced below.

I also thought it appropriate to mark the occasion with a clip from the speech that fired the starting gun for what turned out to be a rather quick sprint to the end - coming as it did only 21 days later.

In his speech on resigning as Deputy Prime Minister, Sir Geoffrey Howe, who wasn't renowned as a brilliant speaker, deployed a vivid cricketing simile to describe what it had been like working with Mrs Thatcher.

"It's rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain."

The speech ended with a fairly explicit invitation to other discontented colleagues to stand against her for the leadership:

"The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long."

Three weeks later, she resigned.


There was a rumour at the time that this particular sequence was actually written by Sir Geoffrey Howe's wife - a claim that, so far, I've never managed to verify.

OTHER POSTS ON MARGARET THATCHER
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Prince Charles knew that what he said about Camilla becoming Queen was extremely delicate

Yesterday, I blogged about how the 'pre-delicate hitches' in some of the questions put to Prince William and Kate Middleton by ITN's Tom Bradby could be heard as indicating that he was rather more nervous than his interviewees (HERE).

Little did I expect that more pre-delicate hitches from Prince Charles were about to feature in a big news story on both sides of the Atlantic.

Newspapers don't often print detailed transcripts of what someone said in an interview. But several of the reports of the way Prince Charles answered the much publicised question from NBC's Brian Williams - about whether Camilla would ever become Queen - provided rather more detail than usual, accompanied as they were by dots along with comments to the effect that he'd been 'hesitant' or 'caught off guard'.

Daily Telegraph
Asked by NBC’s Brian Williams if the Duchess would become queen, the Prince, who seemed taken aback by the question, said: “That’s, well…we’ll see, won’t we? That could be.”
Although aides insisted the Prince had been caught off guard and there had been “no change” in the official position, the comment will be seen by many as an indication of his inner thoughts.

Daily Mirror
In a shift from previous statements, the Prince of Wales did not contradict an American interviewer who asked: "Does the Duchess of Cornwall become Queen of England, if and when you become the monarch?" Until now, the official position has been that the Duchess of Cornwall would have the title Princess Consort.
Hesitating, the prince replied: "That's well... we'll see won't we? That could be."

The Guardian
During an interview with the American network NBC, due to be aired tomorrow, Charles did not correct the presenter of NBC's Dateline programme, Brian Williams, when he asked: "Does the Duchess of Cornwall become Queen of England, if and when you become the monarch?" The prince hesitated, then replied: "That's well … we'll see won't we? That could be."

More hitches than a few dots
As you'll see from the video clip, the dots used in these news reports hardly do justice to the extraordinary number of 'pre-delicate hitches' - i.e. at least eleven of them (in blue) - that led up to his most widely reported sentence: "that could be":

"Wehh -uhhh-that's-umm that's (1 second pause) well (0.5 second pause) let's see won't we. But-uhh (1 second in-breath) Ummm (0.5 second pause) that (0.5 second pause) could be."

Hardly surprising, then, that his 'hesitancy' featured in news reports. But one interesting question is whether 'the comment will be seen by many as an indication of his inner thoughts' (Daily Telegraph), or whether it became headline news because of the way he led up to and made the comment - as is implied by the inclusion of dots in the rather inadequate media transcripts.

Whatever the answer, research in conversation analysis suggests that Prince Charles was displaying an awareness that he knew perfectly well that he was about to say something that would be heard by others as very delicate indeed.


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Was the royal engagement interviewer more nervous than his interviewees?

It was quite a coup for Tom Bradby, ITN's political editor, to be favoured by Prince William and Kate Middleton for the first interview after the announcement of their engagement (as for why they chose him, see HERE).

The couple also did viewers a favour by sparing us from having to watch either of the Dimbleby brothers, let alone rival BBC or Sky News political editors, Nick Robinson or Adam Boulton, doing the job.

Who was the most nervous of them all?
But I was surprised to see various interviews with Mr Bradby about his encounter with them, in which he told us how nervous the couple had been during the interview - because there were a number of places where he seemed more nervous than either of his iterviewees.

This was especially evident in the way he giggled as he put some of the more 'delicate' questions.

Take, for example this one about whether they plan to have lots of children - to which Prince William's response is rather more assured than Bradby's question:


More giggles, a few pauses and hesitations came from Mr Bradby when he asked Miss Middleton about what it had been like meeting the Queen for the first time - to which her reply is rather more fluent than his question:


These are only two examples of something evident in quite a number of Mr Bradby's questions during the interview and on which I've blogged about before, namely what conversation analysts call 'pre-delicate hitches' (see links below for more examples).

Taken together, they gave the impression that he was much more nervous and less confident than he usually is when interviewing politicians.

Anyone interested in exploring this further can watch the whole interview below and/or access a transcript of it HERE.



RELATED POSTS ON PRE-DELICATE HITCHES:



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0% of viewers remember all the points made in a BBC PowerPoint-style news presentation

Last night, I discovered that after dinner speeches don't always take place after dinner. I'd been invited to talk about PowerPoint to the Council of the Management Consultancies Association between the starter and the main course, with a Q-A session scheduled to take place after the diners had finished eating their main courses.

As after-dinner speeches are normally expected to be vaguely entertaining, it was a chance to combine a bit of amusement with some opportunistic research into something that, as regular blog readers know, is one of my recurring obsessions - namely the increasing use of PowerPoint-style presentations during British television news programmes (for more on which, see 'Related Posts' at the bottom of this page).

So I ended my talk with the following clip from a BBC Television News broadcast on the financial crisis, in which business editor Robert Peston gives us a 36 second presentation from the other side of the studio.

Research design
The diners were given no advance warning that, about half-way through the main course, they would be issued with a short quiz aimed at testing their retention of Peston's words of wisdom.

If you'd like to join in, don't read down to the questions below, watch the video first and then wait 10 minutes before coming back to have a go at answering them.


MCA Council Dinner Quiz
  1. How much is the recue deal going to cost the government?
  2. How much is that as a proportion of GDP?
  3. How much a year will it cost each tax-payer?
  4. How does Peston describe the recovery in bankers' willingness to lend?
  5. What reason does he give for that?
Rules
  1. No conferring.
  2. To be completed before the end of the main course.
  3. In te event of a tie, the result will be decided by the judge.
Results

As there was only one prize (a signed copy of Lend Me Your Ears), I had to allow for the possibility that everyone might score 100% - which I did by preparing a few tie-breaker questions.

It came as something of a surprise, even to me, that none of the 40 or so participants was able to answer all 5 questions correctly.

Only three of them (7.5%) managed to answer 4/5 correctly - so it didn't take long for the tie-breaker questions to produce a winner.

So what?

I wouldn't want to give too much weight to a research design that was intended partly as entertainment and partly to illustrate one of the themes of my talk. But I do think it's interesting that 92.5% of an audience of highly educated professionals - with far more experience of watching PowerPoint presentations than most ordinary viewers of BBC Television News programmes - were only able to remember three (or fewer than three) of the main points in Peston's report/presentation.

P.S. to visitors from countries outside the UK:
I've been trying to find out whether this trend towards PowerPoint-style TV news reports is a peculiarly British trend, or whether it's also happening in other countries. If you've any information on this, please let me know.

RELATED POSTS


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What happened when a student demonstrator met a former revolutionary in 1968


Today's student demonstrations have got Twitter and the blogosphere going with people recounting their memories of student demos from bygone days. So here's my two penneth.

Essex, 1968
 I was at the Essex University demonstration when some mustard powder was thrown over a visiting scientist and set off a train of events that led to the temporary closure of the university.

After it had opened again, I was also present at a seminar in the sociology department where the visiting speaker was the distinguished sociologist, Professor Amitai Etzioni (above), who was visiting the UK from Columbia University.

Question time
At the end of his talk, one of the students, fresh from the heady days of closing down the university, sought to put Etzioni in has place with such arrogant confidence that both the question and the answer are still with me - more or less verbatim - more than 40 years later:

"Professor Etzoni. One doesn't have to be a theoretical genius to see that your approach is an essentially conservative one. I'd like to ask if you've ever taken a more revolutionary position and, if so, what made you change your mind?"

Unknown to the student (and many others among us at the time), the young Etzioni had been a member of the Palmach, an elite commando group of the Haganah during the years leading to the establishment of the state of Israel.

This is no doubt why he paused for quite a long time before answering:

"I don't normally talk about these things, but as you ask, I will give you my answer. Yes, I was once a revolutionary. But when I was a revolutionary, we didn't occupy university libraries and laboratories. We used bombs and guns and we used to kill people, mainly the British. As for why I gave up being a revolutionary, it was because I saw at first hand what happens to revolutionaries. They end up falling out and killing each other."

His interrogator had no further questions, and the discussion returned to Professor Etzioni's latest book.
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The cost of PowerPoint presentations wastes the UK economy even more than I thought

In an attempt to work out out how much boring presentations were costing the UK economy, I came up with the figure of £7.8 billion a year (HERE).

I was aware that this was probably a serious underestimate of the actual wastage, as it was based entirely on the estimated salary cost per hour of audiences listening to such presentations, and took no account of the time spent preparing slides, hiring venues, audience travel costs getting there and back, tea, coffee, meals, accommodation, etc.

But a recent news story highlights yet further costs that I missed in my earler estimate: management consultants McKinsey & Co were paid £500,000 for a report on the Welsh National Health Service described as 'a compilation of slides', an 'appalling waste' and 'the most expensive PowerPoint presentation ever' (at £6,500 per slide) - for more on which, see HERE).

PowerPoint pioneers?
Although I noted in a recent post that I'm beginning to think that the PowerPoint problem is getting worse, with more and more companies and organisations trying to kill more and more birds with one stone (HERE), what intrigued me about this particular story was that the alleged culprits were top management consultants.

Such companies were not only among the first I ever saw using PowerPoint to collapse two key communicational tasks (written detail + spoken summary) into one, but were also completely resistant to any news or advice about how audiences react to such presentations, let alone how they could improve things.

They know best
On one occasion, I did my best to explain all the obvious problems for speakers and listeners during presentations like theirs - and made the equally obvious point that readers find slides made up of shorthand sentences arrayed as bullet points far less readable than conventionally structured written prose.

"It would work much better" I ventured to suggest "if you got one of the recent MBA graduates on your staff to prepare a detailed written (and readable) report for the client, and then give a presentation to them summarising the main findings and recommendations, and doing so in way as to motivate them to read the detailed material for themselves afterwards."

"Oh no" came back the reply. "That would take far too much time."

The real costs
I remember being amazed by the thought that the cost of this alternative approach would be a miniscule fraction of the daily rates the company was charging their clients - and that the gains being missed out on by both parties were potentially immense.

The news that one such company has just inflicted 80 slides on a public sector client at a cost of £6,500 per slide suggests that, 20 years later, little has changed.

It also points to a serious omission from my original calculation of the annual loss to the UK economy from boring presentations as a mere £7.8 billion and points to an important question that I'd failed to take into account:

How much a year are UK companies and organisations wasting on paying other companies and organisations to have their staff bored, baffled and bewildered by slide-dependent presentations?

Further research is clearly needed...
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A competitor for the US landing card as the most ridiculous questionnaire of all time

Back in June, when I asked the question 'Is the US landing card the most ridiculous questionnaire of all time?', I'd seen few serious competitors.

But I hadn't then seen the latest issue of Your Mendip, a magazine distributed free to 45,000 homes (where 'free' = £0.30 per copy 3 x a year) by Mendip District Council, who are trying to get readers to fill in a questionnaire - tempting us by giving us a chance to win £100 of shopping vouchers.

CAPITA, Mendip District Council's 'business support partner', boast that they design and print the magazine. If, as seems likely, they also designed the questionnaire, it looks as though their market researchers could do with a bit of methodological training.

Look no further than Q5 in this set of options and ask yourself how you would be able to insert a tick if you hadn't read it and had already thrown it away.

The only good news is that it rather looks as though Mendip District Council and/or their 'business support partner' are hoping to discover that no one will notice if they stop publishing the magazine, thereby saving us about £40,000 a year in council tax.

Whether they get enough replies to justify such a daring decision will, I suppose, depend on how many people read far enough to put a tick in box 5. Even then, there would be a serious methodological problem - as anyone who puts a tick in the box would obviously be lying on both counts.

Maybe Mendip should now commission their 'business support partner' to do some further research into the matter ....
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Would Monty Python's merchant banker have spent £1 on a poppy?

All the poppy-wearing that leads us towards Remembrance Sunday seems to make us rather more conscious of charitable giving than at other times of the year.

A couple of days ago, I found myself blogging about how the Royal British Legion could increase its revenue from poppy sales by the simple device of redesigning its collection boxes (HERE).

Today, Stephen Tall's blog raises a related question - 'How do you get young City execs to give to charity?' - that also reminded me of the Monty Python sketch, in which a charity collector tries to get a merchant banker to donate £1 (still the 'going rate' for a poppy 35 years later) to a worthy cause.

An exaggerated case of miserliness perhaps - but anyone who's ever done any collecting for a charity will know that the correlation between the wealth of donors and the generosity of their donations is, to say the least, rather weak.

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You can fault Harman's ginger' jibe, but you can't fault her rhetoric

Whatever you might have thought about hearing the politically correct Harriet Harman referring to Danny Alexander as a 'ginger rodent', the offending sequence was a technically very effective example of how to use the Puzzle-Solution technique to trigger applause (see HERE for a fuller description and more video examples).

It's based on the very simple principle that, if you say something that gets the audience wondering what's coming next, they'll listen more attentively and, if it's a good 'solution', they'll applaud it.

Combining two rhetorical techniques
It can work even better if you use the second part of another rhetorical technique - the contrast - to set up the puzzle.

And that's what happened in this case: the first part of the contrast refers to something they all love - the red squirrel - and the second part contrasts it with something (yet to be named) that they never want to see again.

Setting it up in this way enables the audience to anticipate where it's going early enough to start clapping when she's only half-way through the puzzle - so that she has to deliver the solution against a rising tide of applause:

[A] Many of us in the Labour Party are conservationists and we all love the red squirrel.
[B] [PUZZLE] But there is one ginger rodent that we never want to see again in the Highlands:
[SOLUTION] Danny Alexander.


Or a contrast can provide the solution to a puzzle:
An alternative way of combining these rhetorical techniques is to pose a puzzle and then solve it with a contrast, as in this example from Margaret Thatcher at the start of the 1987 general election:

PUZZLE: From the Labour Party expect the iceberg manifesto.
SOLUTION:
[A] One tenth of its socialism visible.
[B] Nine tenths beneath the surface.

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Time to redesign poppy collection boxes to increase donations to the British Legion

The Royal British Legion, like so many charities, issues its collectors with boxes on which the slit in the top is so small that it shouts out "coins", rather than "notes".

Having just returned from doing her rounds, my wife reports that the 'going rate' is a £1 coin - with three notable exceptions. There was one professional miser, who paid 65 pence (£0.65) in small coins before helping himself to three poppies. One old age pensioner donated a £5 note and another (94 year old) handed over a £10 note for one poppy.

Time to redesign the box
Given the design of the coin box, this doesn't surprise me at all - not only because the meagre slit so obviously encourages meagre donations, but also because it takes determination and a degree of manual dexterity to get a note to go in at all.

With the fiver, our smallest note (both in size and denomination), you either have to fold it long-ways before threading it through the slot, or, if you fold it sideways, you have to fold it again before it will fit into the slit. By the time you've done that, it becomes so fat that it takes yet more effort to push it down into the container.

Two new collection box design features
1. A wider and thicker slit
To urge donors to give notes rather than coins, all that's needed is a slit that's considerably wider and thicker than the present one. I've checked this out, and there's quite enough space on the top of the existing collecting boxes to make the hole long enough to accommodate a £20 note (inserted long-ways from one end).

2 A transparent lid or sides
The pressure on people to hand over a note rather than a £1 coin could be increased by issuing collectors with a float of a few £5 and £10 notes that would be clearly visible to prospective donors through the top and/or sides of the box.

The cost of such a redesign would surely be negligible, but the gains from persuading more people to give notes rather than coins could be very considerable indeed. After all, when our lowest denomination note is 5 times greater than the £1 coin, you only need to collect a few more of them to see a dramatic increase in total revenue.

P.S. 25 October 2011
I wrote to the British Legion about this last year, but received no reply. Collection boxes identical to those used last year have now arrived on our doorstep. So I'll have to try again in the hopes that they'll redesign it in time for next year's poppy appeal.

P.P.S. 24 October 2012
Last year's efforts, alas, failed again and the British Legion is still insisting on issuing  these useless collection boxes. At a local meeting of the Legion a couple of weeks ago, I complained that they never replied to a suggestion that seems to have widespread support. The explanation (from a former officer) was that the organisation is run by NCOs who don't have much of a clue about things like - er - fund-raising...

P.P.P.S. 25 October 2012
Publicity via Twitter has prompted some emails that support the view that all may not be well at British Legion HQ. One said:

'Sadly the Legion is somewhere in the dark ages as to commercial acumen and sense. As always in monolithic organisations, there is strong resistance to change.

 'It is clear that there is a marketing department somewhere in its bowels. but they appear to be more concerned with the glitzy bits like getting celebs to do launches and tacky goods like brollys.'

 Another says that the official launch in London was a bit short on poppy sellers:

'I was at Trafalgar Square just after the launch yesterday. Hordes of folk about, quite a few wounded veterans, press, celebs, stewards, etc. but only ONE poppy seller... yet another opportunity missed.'

And one defends my position (for which thanks):

'Shameful on three grounds:

  1. Patently obvious simple common sense.
  2. Appalling lack of commercial nous by British Legion management.
  3. Unforgivable lack of courtesy by management's failure to reply - even if they [wrongly] disagreed.'
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Free tips for speakers from behind the Murdoch paywall

Having bought a hard copy of The Times earlier today, I'd already read the leaked tips to Labour leader Ed Miliband about how he should handle Prime Minister's Question Time and the various ploys that David Cameron was most likely to use in 'replying' to 'questions'.

But when I saw this Sky News report on PMQ, I began to wonder why I'd bothered to buy it.

I also thought there was something vaguely odd about one Murdoch outlet (Sky News) telling viewers what they could have read had they paid for it by buying another (The Times) and/or by paying to go behind their paywall to read the story online.


Apart from the amusement of seeing David Cameron reading out extracts from The Times, the high spot for me was hearing Ed Miliband (yet again) using one of his favourite youthful lines when he said that the PM just "doesn't get it" (31 seconds in) - unlike Mr Miliband himself, who "got it" no less than six times in quick succession during his Labour Party leadership acceptance speech (HERE).

The tips leaked to The Times had no warnings about overdoing lines that sound as if he's trying to endear himself to younger voters. Nor did they suggest that he should make more effort to pronounce his 't's and cut down on glo'al stops that are unlikely to appeal to anyone but speakers of 'Estuary English'.

For what they're worth, these are the (free) tips that I'd be urging on him in the weeks and months ahead...

Recent Miliband posts:

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BIGBOARD: Are BBC PowerPoint-style news reports going from bad to worse?

The increasing use of PowerPoint-style presentations by BBC Television News programmes is something that's been bothering me for quite a while (for a selection of previous posts on which, see below).

We've known for years that there's much about the modern slide-dependent presentation that audiences detest (Lend Me Your Ears, 2004, Chapters 4-5). We know that it's wasting the UK economy billions of pounds a year (HERE). What I want to know now are the answers to four important questions:
  1. Where did the BBC and its television news producers get the idea that it would be a good idea to stand their reporters next to screens a few yards away from the evening's news reader showing slides to the millions watching at home (many of whom will already have quite enough of being on the receiving end of slide-driven presentations during the working day).
  2. Has the BBC done any research at all into what viewers think of such 'presentations'?
  3. If 'yes', can we see the results, please?
  4. If 'no', why not?
Bigboard?
Last week, I learnt a new word from BBC Newnight's economics editor Paul Mason, who made the following announcement on Twitter: "OK - am getting ready to go on Newsnight to do bigboard about the regressive impact of the SR2010..."

'Bigboard'? Or did he mean 'Bigbored'? Is this the name of the all-singing-all-dancing graphics package that BBC presenters use in stead of PowerPoint, I wondered. So I tweeted Mr Mason to ask him, and he was gracious enough to tweet a reply: "No - there's no gfx package it is all done by our gfx artists from scratch."

But which comes first, the script or the graphics?
As there were only a few hours to go between his tweet and Newsnight going on air, this got me wondering whether he writes the script before the gfx artists go to work on it, or vice-versa? In any event, I thought, a Bigboard presentation sounded like something not to be missed.

So here's a 60 seconds sample from it - in which there seemed to be a few 'innovations' that I hadn't noticed before. But first, and before you scroll any further down the page, see if you notice anything different from the daily diet of slide-dependent presentations inflicted on us by BBC News programmes:


Innovation (1) A lectern
Whereas BBC reporters usually stand next to the screen during their slide shows, Newsnight has invested in an expensive looking circular lectern for the presenter to rest his hands on. Yes, there is a glass of water and some sheets of paper on it, but Mr Mason doesn't use either of them during his presentation and the sole purpose of the lectern is apparently to provide something for him to lean against.

Innovation (2) Camera angle zooms in from on high
As he starts replying to Gavin Esler's question, the camera cuts away to a different angle from somewhere up on the studio ceiling, before gradually zooming down towards him and the video clips that are starting to materialise on the screen behind him.

Innovation (3) Silent movies replace bullet points
In most BBC PowerPoint-style news presentations, the main focus is on bullet points that variously appear, disappear, whizz around the screen and/or explode before our very eyes (e.g. HERE andHERE).

What made this stand out as different was that 16 (yes, sixteen) silent film clips were crammed into the 45 seconds (at a rate of one every 2.8 seconds) it took for Mason got to his first and only bullet-point slide in the sequence.

So what?
A major problem associated with bullet points (and other slides with nothing but writing on them) is that the audience's attention is split between (1) trying to read what's on the screen at the same time as (2) listening to and following what the speaker is saying and (3) looking repetitively from speaker to screen and back again.

All too often, there is the added distraction of trying to to work out what the connection is between what you're reading and what you're hearing (Lend Me Your Ears, Chapter 4), which is one reason why pictorial visual aids tend to be much more helpful to audiences than written ones (Lend Me Your Ears, Chapter 5).

Although BBC news producers and designers seem oblivious to the hazards of slide-dependent presentations, there are others elsewhere in the corporation who are perfectly well aware that slide-dependent presentations can make life difficult for audiences: otherwise, why would their website magazine section have asked me to write a short piece on The problem with PowerPoint to mark the software's 25th anniversary last year?

But pictorial material on its own is no guarantee of success and can sometimes be just as distracting as slides made up of words and sentences as, for example, when the visuals don't illustrate or exemplify a point that's being made. Above all, whatever it is that the speaker is showing to the audience should make it easier for them to understand the message (for more on which, see HERE).

How did these clips relate to the commentary?
The sixteen consecutive clips that appeared while Paul Mason was talking did none of these things, and I can't believe that I was the only viewer who found it distracting trying to work out what the connection was (if any) between what we were watching and the commentary - especially when his reference to Nick Clegg was suddenly followed (illustrated?) by film of Iain Duncan Smith (at clip 11 below):
  1. Two people walking along a pavement
  2. Iain Duncan Smith talking to someone on a street corner
  3. Children on a balcony
  4. Two people outside a building with litter in foreground
  5. Four young men looking out of a window
  6. Two people looking at a building
  7. Building in a sloping grass field
  8. Window with white tube hanging out of it
  9. One end of a building with road barrier in foreground
  10. Empty balcony
  11. Iain Duncan Smith meeting some people
  12. Man at with a flip chart
  13. Iain Duncan Smith at a table with two men
  14. Different camera angle on Iain Duncan Smith and people at a table
  15. Another camera angle on Iain Duncan Smith and people at a table
  16. Deserted balcony gets blanked out by brightly coloured slide
If the minds of viewers start to focus on finding some sense or orderliness in the disjointed images they are watching (and how they relate to the words coming from the person they are supposed to be watching and listening to at the same time) there's a very high probability that the points being made by the speaker will pass them by.

This is exactly what happened to me when I saw this sequence for the first time - and a single viewing is, of course, all that the vast majority of viewers (other than the few of us with fingers on the 'record' button) ever do get to see.

Practical exercise
So, assuming that you've only watched this Bigboard show once, see how you get on at answering the following questions:
  • How much of Mr Mason's presentation can you remember?
  • What was his general point?
  • What details did he deploy to support it?
Glimmer of hope from IpsosMORI?
The concluding slide with the latest news from Britain's top polling company left me wondering why on earth the BBC doesn't commission IspsosMORI to do some independent research into what viewers actually think of this style of news presentation. While they were at it, they could also check on whether there's been any decline in audience ratings for news programmes since BBC journalists started reporting from slide screens at the other of the studio.

The cost of such a project would surely be far less than the BBC's daily spending on the production of ever-more elaborate news-related graphics (not to mention expensive and pointless furnishings like designer lecterns).

At a time when the BBC is also having to prune its budget, here's a chance for them to save millions of pounds worth of licence fees a year - with the added bonus of making their news output easier to follow and less distracting than they are at present.

TWITTER COMMENT UPDATES:

From Alan Firth via link (@diponte - who'd only watched the 'trailer' video posted yesterday - i.e. before any possibility of being influenced by what I'd written above): I couldn't really concentrate on what Paul Mason was saying while the moving images appeared next to him on screen - and I'm wide awake and I'm usually reasonably good at concentrating. It was just 'too busy' - he was talking fast, packing in information, and the images were ever changing. Not a great package, can do better, Paul.

From Cordelia Ditton (@DillyTalk): love this post

From Mary Ann Sieghart (@MASieghart): I so agree! I found that montage of clips incredibly distracting and couldn't remember what Paul Mason had said afterwards.

From Matt Roper (@mattjroper): It's a good post, but I know it's hard to illustrate 'non-visual' stories on television. What would be the alternative?

From Sarah Jones (@SarahTVNews): Good points. It's all far too distracting with pics of no relevance. Yes it may not ... be a picture friendly story but there are creative ways to bring a pkg to life.

From Chris Atherton (@finiteattention): Bottom line: too many pieces of unconnected info at once... If we had the big picture, maybe it'd be easier to retain the individual chunks of information. But there's no real overview.

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BBC Newsnight presentation by Paul Mason, economics editor

Something I haven't done before is to post a video clip before making any comments on it.

But I've been thinking about this one since I first saw it on BBC2's Newsnight on Thursday, 21 October, and thought it might be interesting to give readers a chance to ponder on it for a while before I reveal what I think.

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Nick Robinson's rage video - and the question of free speech for whom?

I came across the news that Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, had lost his temper via a Twitter link to his blog. To save you looking it up, here is how he reports and explains what happened:

'If you were watching the 6 O'Clock News last night, you may have seen a "Troops Out" sign on a large pole being waved behind my head.

'I have a confession. After the news was over, I grabbed the sign and ripped it up - apparently you can watch video of my sign rage in full glorious technicolour on the web. I lost my temper and I regret that. However, as I explained afterwards to the protesters who disrupted my broadcast, there are many opportunities to debate whether the troops should be out of Afghanistan without the need to stick a sign on a long pole and wave it in front of a camera.

I am a great believer in free speech but I also care passionately about being able to do my job reporting and analysing one of the most important political stories for years.'

As he didn't provide a link to where the video can be seen, you can now watch it here:


My complaint about Mr Robinson
Although I don't have much of a problem with what Mr Robinson did, regular readers of this blog will know that I do have a problem with the fact that he prefers the sound of his own voice to those of the people in the news he's supposed to be reporting on. This manifests itself in his constantly telling us what politicians are saying rather than letting us, the viewers, hear and judge for ourselves what they are saying (for more on which, see selection of posts below).

He's not the only BBC reporter who does this, as I noted during their coverage of the US presidential TV debates (in a post on Mediated speeches - whom do we really want to hear? ) which included the following observation:

'.. the reporter was speaking for 2.4 minutes compared with 30 seconds each for the two candidates-- i.e. the BBC forced its viewers to listen to more than twice as much media commentary as we were allowed to hear from the the candidates themselves.'

If he knows there's a problem, why doesn't he do something about it?
The odd thing is that John Rentoul of the Independent on Sunday says that there was a time when Robinson was fully aware of the problem:

'when I worked with Nick at the BBC, we did some reporting on the way in which modern politics was mediated through ever shorter sound bites selected by journalists. Things have changed since, not least because of the internet, which means anyone can watch all of Brown's short speech on their computer. But should we have to?' (full report by John Rentoul HERE).

Needless to say, I don't think that we should have to. The trouble is that Robinson's passionate belief in free speech seems to be rather too narrowly concentrated on preserving his own freedom of speech:

'I am a great believer in free speech but I also care passionately about being able to do my job reporting and analysing one of the most important political stories for years' (N. Robinson, 21 October 2010).

Other posts on Nick Robinson's reportage and mediation:
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Osborne takes a leaf out of Gordon Brown's bluffer's guide to budget speeches

If George Osborne's objective yesterday was to pack so much detail into his spending review statement and rattle through it so quickly that no one had time to take much of it in, it must be heralded as a great success: clearly he learnt a lot from having to listen to so many budget speeches by Gordon Brown.

Reading so quickly means that you can't help stumbling on a few words here and there, and makes it too much of a risk to look up from your script very often or for longer than a split second or two. So all Mr Osborne was able to manage were slight glances away about once every 34 words.

On the three occasions when David Cameron raised his right had to his mouth, I couldn't help wondering whether he was trying to hide or suppress a yawn. And there were a number of moments when it began to look as though Nick Clegg was about to nod off, if he hadn't already done so.

As an exercise, you might like have a go at watching this 3 minute sequence through to the end and then try jotting down all the key points you can remember from it ....

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Twittering journalists: the much followed reluctant followers

Earlier today, I followed a link on Twitter via @MartinShovel (to whom thanks) that led me to FRIENDorFOLLOW, a useful resource that enables you to tell at a glance which of the people you're 'following' on Twitter are (or are not) following you.

Although I 'follow' quite a number of journalists, it had never occurred to me to check on which of them might be following me. Quite a while ago, however, I'd noticed a couple of things about the way they use Twitter:
  1. They do quite a lot of 'chatting' between themselves.
  2. They don't seem to make as much use of the RT function on Twitter (even between themselves) as many of the other people I follow.
Inspired by FRIENDorFOLLOW, I've just done a bit of research into how journalists are using Twitter. Although they're very keen on tweeting news of their latest articles, broadcasts and blogs, they're not very keen at all on 'following' others.

'Follow' : 'Follower' ratios
The results from ten randomly selected British journalists can be inspected in the table below, from which you'll see that, in absolute numbers, Andrew Rawnsley of The Observer is the most diligent 'follower' - though the 262 people he 'follows' only amount to 2.2% of his 12,810 followers.

Top score on this ratio goes to Steve Richards of The Independent, who follows 4.8% of his 1,806 followers. Bottom score is BBC political editor Nick Robinson, who only follows 1 person (@WilHarris, who describes himself as a 'Recovering journalist. Certified media addict. Alleged entrepreneur').

Journalist

Follows

Followers

%

Steve Richards (Independent)

Benedict Brogan (Telegraph)

John Rentoul(Independent)

Andrew Rawnsley (Observer)

Paul Mason (BBC)

Jonathan Freedland(Guardian)

Daniel Finkelstein (Times)

Jon Sopel (BBC)

Laura Kuenssberg (BBC)

Nick Robinson (BBC)

87

166

138

262

77

88

75

58

241

1

1,806

4,622

4,733

12,081

4,578

5,744

7,087

6,545

32,505

22,598

4.8

3.6

2.9

2.2

1.7

1.5

1.0

0.9

0.74

0.004


(Thanks to observant journalist Jonathan Freedland for drawing my attention to an error involving a misplaced decimal point that had put Ms Kuenssberg top of the table when it was originally posted. This has now been been corrected).

Who are followed by journalists?
Although more research is needed on this, the initial results came up with the unsurprising finding that the overwhelming majority of those followed by journalists are other journalists, political bloggers and politicians past and present.

So should the rest of us carry on following them if they don't follow us?
This depends entirely on what you want or are hoping to get from Twitter. But I certainly don't have any immediate plans to go into a huff and 'un-follow' all those journalists who are misguided enough not follow me (i.e. most of them) - for a number of reasons:
  1. Following them is an easy way to keep up with what columnists and commentators are saying (except, of course, those hiding behind The Times's paywall).
  2. Sometimes their articles are interesting enough to inflict on your other followers via an RT.
  3. The possibility of using Twitter's @Journalist'sName 'reply' facility means that you're in with a chance of letting them know what you think about what they're saying.
  4. The same facility also means that you can try to draw their attention to your latest blog posts. Most of the time, of course, they take no notice - but you only need an occasional RT from one of them to see a massive increase in the numbers visiting your own blog, some of whom may actually be tempted to become regular readers.
  5. And that's good enough for me.
P.S. More promising numbers:
Since posting this earlier today, I'm grateful to a number of journalists for responding to and/or showing an interest in the above table. Interestingly, all of them score much higher on the Follow:Follower ratio than any of those in Table (1) above.

Matt Roper - @mattjroper - digital news editor of STV is way ahead of the field and is the only journalist I've come across (so far) who follows more people than those who follow him. Earlier in the day, he'd tweeted "Far too many journalists use Twitter to talk rather than listen."

Mr Roper's only serious contender, Neal Mann - @fieldproducer - who also tweeted '..only following a small number really misses the point of Twitter', is another digital specialist - which probably explains why they are both so far ahead of journalists specialising in print and broadcasting media:

Journalist

Follows

Followers

%

Matt Roper (STV)

Neal Mann (Sky News)

Patrick O’Flynn (Express)

Mary Ann Sieghart (Independent)

1,878

1,730

207

266

1,307

2,356

930

1,427

144.0

73.4

22.25

18.6
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Clapping out the conference season

Thirty years on since I first got interested in how applause works in speeches, I'm still adding gems to my collection of video clips. This year's star exhibit came when the accountability of clapping (or not) became headline news with David Miliband's reproach to Harriet Harman for applauding his brother's declaration that something she'd voted for was wrong.



It reminded me of a fascinating moment from the Thatcher era, when the accountability of not applauding in the right places was highlighted by Peter Snow in a Newnight interview with Francis Pym:



Viewing applause as 'anthropologically strange
When people ask me how I came to do the research that changed my life (see Our Masters' Voices and the Claptrap saga, links to which are listed HERE), my answer is that I was merely trying to follow one of the central pieces of methodological advice from the founders of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

According to them, the starting point for escaping from the limitations of the hypotehetico-deductive model of science that had held (and continues to hold) sociology and psychology back was to follow the maxim: try to view the familiar and the ordinary as 'anthropologically strange', no matter how mundane it may be.

To give you an idea of what this means (and by way of bringing my posts on this year's conference season to a suitable close) I've spliced together some close-ups of audiences in action over the past few weeks.

Before watching it, imagine that you're a Martian anthropologist. You've just been beamed down to earth on your first mission of exploration, you've arrived in the middle of an audience at a party conference and this is what you see. Then ask yourself what, if anything, you'd make of what members of this alien species are doing:


A research project?
If, having watched it, you're wondering why it ends with an artificially extended sequence of Michael Gove in action, it's because I think there might be something going on here worth further examination. Having watched it several times (!), I get the impression that there could be a connection between his eye-blinking and the rhythm of his hand movements.

As it happens, I have neither the time nor the inclination to pursue it further. But if anyone else can be bothered, I'd be fascinated to know what, if anything, you come up with.

This year's conference season posts:
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