BBC is soo close to the Grail

Not long ago I picked up via Jake a post about an experiment at the BBC that I think has most of the Grail of Public Media embedded in it - When I say the word "Grail" I mean that I think that this is how public media will interact with the public in the new media age. This is what we have all been seeking but only Parsifal - aka Robin Hammam has found. I was so struck by where he was going that I called Robin up ths week and he told me more. See my next post for his interview with me.

Here is the summary  of what got my eye:-

Robin Hamman, senior community producer for BBC English Regions New Media, explained the initiative in an interview with paidContent.org: “We aren’t sure if it’s aggregator, a citizen journalism project or a media literacy campaign - it probably cuts across all three.”

This is a three-month trial launched last week by BBC New Media Central and BBC Manchester:
- Between 10 and 20 volunteers are being recruited across the city.
- Through workshops, participants will be guided through the BBC’s editorial guidelines and production values and then referred to commercial blogging platforms to start their own sites.
- The BBC will monitor RSS feeds from these blogs and highlight the best content.
- Pre-existing local bloggers/Flickr contributors are also invited to submit work or tag content “bbcmanchesterblog” so it can be picked up.

…As for the workload, Hamman optimistically envisages this as a one or two hour job each day for BBC staff — skimming the RSS feeds and wrapping editorial around the best. The rest of the task is to promote the blog to BBC journalists as an efficient source of content about Manchester.