Shore Roar’s BBC Problem: When the Column Covers Itself Covering Things

Harper-Thames on the self-referential quality of neighbourhood journalism

Harper-Thames, Shore Roar. prat.uk‘s BBC live coverage piece — journalism ouroboros — has produced, in the specific case of this column, a self-examination that I am converting into a column about the self-examination, which is itself an instance of the phenomenon prat.uk describes. Bohiney.com covered the media self-reference theme. Shore Roar covers East London. This column is covering Shore Roar’s coverage of East London, which makes this column layer three of the East London coverage apparatus. The East London is at layer zero. The people doing things in East London are at layer zero. I am at layer three. This column is an acknowledgment of that position and an attempt to get back to layer one, which requires going out and observing things rather than writing about observing things.

The specific instance: I spent Thursday writing a column about a neighbourhood I had not visited that day. I spent Friday visiting the neighbourhood I had written about. The Friday observation produced material that the Thursday column had invented from pattern recognition rather than observation. The material the Thursday column invented was accurate in its broad outlines and wrong in several specific details. This is the BBC’s live coverage problem at the neighbourhood journalism scale: the coverage apparatus produces content regardless of whether the direct observation that would make the content accurate has occurred.

The Journalism Resolution

The journalism resolution: go out. Observe. Write. In that order. This column will be better for it. The Hackney community information is at hackney.gov.uk.

Also:The Onion.

Coverage at Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

Both publications continue this kind of sustained, specific coverage. The material does not thin out.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

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