- Craig Oliver
- 31 May 06, 04:45 PM
There's been a steady drip of information about the massacre at Haditha - 24 Iraqis, including a two-year-old girl, allegedly murdered by US Marines.
It was clear someone needed to bring together the information. John Simpson and I spent the Bank Holiday sifting the eyewitness evidence. We needed a major centrepiece graphic to explain what happened - and it needed to be definitive.
To make it happen I wrote a properly sourced script - it came out at over a minute long. John laid down an audio guide track because it is incredibly difficult to make a long graphic fit a piece that is fed from the field. The graphics department started by creating 3D models of the American military vehicles, a taxi, a checkpoint and the three houses where the massacre happened. This took most of the day.
The 3D models were then handed over to another designer whose job it was to put them in context and add graphic text. The process of building the graphic took eleven hours.
I hope it helped the audience visualise and understand the horror of what allegedly happened - you can watch the piece in full by clicking here.
Craig Oliver is editor of 大象传媒 News at Six and 大象传媒 News at Ten
- Fran Unsworth
- 31 May 06, 01:16 PM
It seems eyebrows were raised about 大象传媒 world affairs editor John Simpson鈥檚 appearance on rival broadcaster, Sky News, from Baghdad yesterday. In the wake of the tragic deaths of the CBS news team, he was asked to take part in a discussion of the safety issues for journalists covering Iraq.
Sky asked us if they could interview him in the morning and we agreed. (There was a bit of a communication breakdown in that those of us involved in the decision failed to tell others, so it came as more of a surprise to some in the 大象传媒 than it should have.)
But more interesting is the question of whether or not John should have appeared on a rival broadcaster. And I am intrigued over how this was reported on the :
鈥淥ne in the eye for Sky," it reported. "In a curious move, Simpson appeared on the roof of a Baghdad building to talk about the dangers of working in Iraq while his opposite number, Sky's foreign editor Tim Marshall was sat cosily in the studio. ...maybe the 大象传媒 was trying to get one over its news rivals.鈥
I can assure the diarist that the 大象传媒 was not trying to put 鈥渙ne over" a news rival. He or she seems unaware that safety is a strictly non-competitive issue between media organisations. The London-based broadcast media - the 大象传媒, Sky News, ITN and CNN - all meet up regularly to share information and advice about reporting from dangerous places.
Yesterday Sky News illuminated for its audience how news organisations go about operating under such dangerous security conditions. All credit to them for interviewing someone with huge credibility and first hand experience - even if he does work for the opposition.
Fran Unsworth is head of Newsgathering
- Amanda Farnsworth
- 31 May 06, 11:54 AM
"A nation of knives" scream some tabloid newspapers this morning. So we talked a lot at our editorial meetings today about what we should do, and how to approach the spate of stabbings that have become so prominent recently.
To some extent it's true these things go in cycles. I remember the last time knife crime really ran as a story over a number of weeks was when was killed, and then inevitably other stories and events moved the issue out of the headlines.
But how do we report without just adding to the hysteria? I think the key here is context. It is a fact knife crime is on the increase - that's why the government is bringing in new laws to tackle it. But who exactly is carrying a knife? Why do they do it? And what can we do apart from bringing in new laws to combat it? It's these questions we need to answer in our coverage and not simply give a list of incidents of knife crime and essentially tell the viewers to be afraid.
Amanda Farnsworth is editor of Inside Sport.
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