RTS Television Journalism Awards

I think the whole concept of blogging - whereby individuals are able to tell their own stories on-line has been an interesting and powerful development over the past few years, and it has driven grass-roots campaigning quite significantly.

In the case of Salam Pax, he was posting his thoughts on life inside Iraq during the conflict, not the political stuff, just the mundanities of living in a war zone. The Guardian picked up on this, and he has been writing similar stuff for them. Annoyingly, I didn't see the Newsnight films (I don't get to see Newsnight that often at the moment) - but if they are as witty and detailed as his online and newspaper articles they will probably have been fascinating.

I think the innovation is getting someone who isn't a TV journalist to produce authored reports, but using the "blog" style - not campaigning as such, just detailing "real life" as they experience it.

Whilst the ITN "Theatre of News" set is technically quite clever - and in some ways innovative (though the technology in use is not new - and so doesn't really count as a technical innovation) - there are still many in the TV community who question its merits artistically.

I think that innovation doesn't just have to be technical - in many ways production innovation (i.e. changing how you editorially cover a story rather than technically) is more difficult because it isn't driven by new, high-tech boxes of kit, it is driven by a desire to tell stories differently, or tell new stories.

I agree with noggin's thoughts on the innovative use of 'blogging' and new ways to tell a story - I only wish I'd seen the finished result. It sounds quite compelling. But to be fair to ITN, I seem to remember reading at the time of the relaunch that a composite of reality and virtual reality with the quality, complexity and scale of the ITV News set had not be done anywhere else before. So although virtual sets have been around for ages, it was in that sense quite innovative.

One could equally argue that although a piece like Salam Pax may be an innovative method of telling a story, it is not strictly a 'technical innovation'. As for the artistic merits of the ITV News set, I tend to agree with many of those concerns, but that will always be a subjective argument.

I can't image there being a huge audience for them
And most of the channels will use awards to promote themselves - although I think saying the whole ITV News Channel is award winning is pushing it a little bit. Having won it so often you can understand Sky having it on their titles etc
It's interesting to see how important awards are. The printed press can use them to 'bash' the TV/Radio media if they want - for example the Guardian used a line earlier in the year that "RTS awards will not be weighing down the mantlepieces at White City" .... only for the Beeb to walk off with 10 of them and then the Guardian having to say "It was trebles all round at the BBC last week when it walked away with the largest-ever haul of gongs at the Royal Television Society journalism awards".