So I’m talking localisation. Basically, where National news is given a local angle – so if the story is about thousands being stuck down by an illness – you’d go, and find someone who was struck by the illness, interview them, and find local figures. That’s the ideal, anyway. The textbook answer – as provided by @charliebudd:

And therefore, it’s a good thing right? Well, from what I got from the discussion yesterday, the short answer is yes, the long answer ‘yes, if it’s done well.’ – and speaking of doing it well, here’s @AdamWestbrook:

Sure does, but Adam’s in a newsroom that should consider itself lucky to have a reporter AND a newsreader working at any one time. As the world turns into a black hole for moolah, newsrooms across the country are shrinking – and not in the ‘my nan seems smaller than last week’ way, in a X-files ‘where’d Jane go!?’ way. 

The minus side is that trying to do that as a single-man newsroom is a difficult verging on impossible task. The time spent out of the office voxing people until you get lucky is the equivalent of sitting in a box of hay, when all you really need is to sew up the hole in your pants. It’s metaphorically itchy. 

So I guess the real question is – when you don’t have the resources to have a reporter to send out on a national story to get enough audio to back up the local facts… is it not better just to get the story out? Surely, any story strong enough to stand must work on it’s own merit. 

If you’re localising for the sake of it, listeners like @SimonBlake can tell.

But then, if you can get hold of local figures & facts etc that relate to the story, or even get a local businessman/councillor on the phone to talk about the subject, it’s making the story seem like it affects the listener a lot more than hearing Gordon Brown blab about it. And that’s possible, even for a single man. 

There’s something to be said for making my first blog post on the day America has it’s first full day with a new President. That something is ‘that’s a coincidence.’

All kidding aside it’ s a real turning point for a country that’s basically a bit of a shambles right now. The scary part for Barack Obama has to be the fact that he literally has to hit the ground Usain Bolt style – and to be fair to him, he did. 

There’s a way to tell a potentially great leader from a well, potentially rubbish one. Obama had ten inauguration balls – now that’s not bad considering Hitler only had one… so I was told in the playground.

 Closer to home, the NHS has a new constitution… which basically says you have a responsibility not to be fat, else you don’t have as much of a right to free treatment and medicine. My favourite part of the story was the health secretary promising that it doesn’t mean we’d all have the ‘broccoli police’ rifling through our diets. I could think of nothing scarier – mini green trees in bulletproof vests asking why you’ve not eaten spinach for a week. I can’t even consider what I’d do if they had pea-shooters.

Highlight of the day? Asking Arthur Smith where he got his ridiculously colourful trousers – only to be told they were ‘Jean Paul something – one of a kind!’. Check them out here.

-d.n.