Some scenes were disturbingly similar to some of the news pictures broadcast in the wake of the 7 September attacks
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Some scenes were disturbingly similar to some of the news pictures broadcast in the wake of the 7 September attacks.The Power of Nightmares, he points out, did not say there was no threat from al-Qa'ida."What it did say was that that al-Qa'ida was more significant a threat as an idea than it was, or is, as an organisation. Horrocks believes that the scale of the BBC, sometimes a reason for inflexibility in the past, must be turned into an asset, as it offers unrivalled context and explanation."Our job shouldn't be to give [the audience] false comfort, but what we can do is to give them really clear information and a depth of understanding about the causes of those things," he says.It was Horrocks who executive-produced Adam Curtis's award-winning The Power of Nightmares, which brilliantly exposed the potential for politicians to exploit, for their own ends, the public's fear of terrorism.Recently Horrocks was in the audience at the Edinburgh Television Festival when one prominent speaker glibly suggested that - in the wake of London bombings that had made the nightmares a reality - the programme did not now seem so clever. You can't predict the unpredictable, but you can be ready to throw the right resources and the right journalistic intelligence at those events," he says. There are plenty of people who realise that news and commercialism don't mix well."The run of enormous news stories - whether natural or political in content - has been almost relentless in the past two years, he acknowledges."In the past we have thought of these major news events as one-offs Now we see them coming closer and closer together We can prepare ourselves. "If we get outbid that's unfortunate, but so be it," he says, noting that the BBC is bidding with public money "I think it's much, much safer ground for the BBC to be on.
" There's a very great potential overlap between the sort of people who own BlackBerrys and the sort of people who read, or should read, the FT. They are on the move; they are probably making decisions about reasonable amounts of money and they need information wherever they are," he says. " So the next thing we are going to do is be available on BlackBerrys. We've got a form of FT that will be very BlackBerry friendly and we are having constructive discussions with BlackBerry as to how that might develop." Earlier this year, Gowers went to Canada to meet Jim Balsillie, chief executive of Research in Motion (RIM), the Toronto-based company behind BlackBerry. "Most existing websites are too voluminous and clunky and don't look good on BlackBerry," says the FT editor. "I said, 'What do we need to do to be more BlackBerry friendly?' We then produced a streamlined version of the site." There are already 3.6 million owners of the distinctive black portable email/internet/phone devices in the world, with the figure expected to rise to 10 million by the end of next year. Gowers himself joined the ranks just a couple of months ago but has become a devoted adherent to an object deemed by some to be so demanding on the attentions of its owners that it has been dubbed the CrackBerry.
The "stripped-down" version of the FT that will be offered via BlackBerry will be a free service to business high-flyers, who will be able to bookmark the service and use it daily. Gowers himself makes no apology for his unbridled enthusiasm for new technology, which is at the heart of a controversial strategy that has seen him drive forward the online edition of the FT in combination with a global plan to spread the paper edition far and wide, printing in 23 different countries. It is a policy that has allowed critics and rivals to point at declining UK full-price sales and claim that the paper no longer adequately does what those Victorian founding fathers intended it to do: cover the London markets. Very few of them thought of themselves as journalists, and no-one that we've interviewed thought about the commercial potential," he says.
"The idea for most of them that there was any commercial motivation is anathema. They trusted the BBC to treat the information respectfully and, where appropriate, to pass it on to the police."Of course, not everyone has followed this path to the door of the public broadcaster, most notably Nick Sophocleous, an amateur cameraman who chose to sell his pictures of the arrests of two bombing suspects for £60,000 to ITV (and the Daily Mail), even though he was also negotiating with the BBC and Sky.Horrocks accepts that the BBC will "probably be outbid" in future auctions for pictures. For Horrocks, trust is the central issue in ensuring that the citizen journalist elects to give their material to the BBC rather than to a rival organisation."I think there is more the BBC can do," he admits. "The BBC is a big institution and we know from audience research that some people find it slightly forbidding and we need to make it warm, accessible and open." This thinking is reflected in the BBC e-mail address for such information, yourpics bbc.co.uk. Horrocks says: "The idea is that it's your information not ours."A forthcoming BBC3 documentary on citizen journalists has also been an illuminating exercise for Horrocks and his senior colleagues. "Some of them had only taken the pictures because they thought they were going to be late for work and wanted something to show the boss. It was ITV News that landed the most memorable scoop of the London bombings story (footage of the dramatic arrest of two of the alleged bombers) and Sky News was the first to recognise the importance of moving star reporters to the scene of the tsunami.But Horrocks, 46, who has been the BBC's head of current affairs for the past five years (overseeing Panorama and a string of landmark documentaries), thinks important lessons have been learned.He talks in the language of a five-star general controlling his forces: "It's maintaining that network of front-line capability and then deploying the big guns as rapidly as possible."The BBC's unrivalled international network of journalists means that it has a "natural advantage" in getting to stories in Banda Aceh or New Orleans first, he notes, but "what we've then got to do is to send in our strongest firepower in terms of our best correspondents - the Matt Freis, the Jeremy Bowens - and then the top presenters - the George Alagiahs, the people who have real credibility in the field."The key lesson learned by the BBC from the London bombings was the importance of audience interaction, in terms of pictures and eye-witness accounts being sent to broadcasters by mobile phone or e-mail.
Horrocks, who was running a half marathon, makes no secret of his competitive instinct and will be looking to his BBC news colleagues to quicken their pace. "Being first is a good thing, that's what news is about," he says. "Being first and right is very important, but we need to be first with breaking news, first with analysis, and we need to be first with investigations." The BBC hasn't been first to all the big stories of late. Peter Horrocks, who starts work this morning as the new head of BBC television news, chose to spend yesterday afternoon charging around Windsor Great Park, a deer-rich expanse of woodland where King John liked to hunt. Appears in A Many Splintered Thing and wins Most Popular Actor in the National Television Awards.2001: Stars in ITV drama Bob and Rose.2003: Joins QI as a panellist and The Times as a football writer.. Signs a lucrative contract with Abbey National to front its telly ads, allowing him to pay off his own mortgage.1998: Radio 4 show, The Alan Davies Show, is nominated for a British Comedy Award. And Caroline Aherne is a very talented writer and brilliant performer.The CV1991: Wins the Time Out Award for Best Comic.1994: Wins the Critics' Award and gets a Perrier nomination for his Edinburgh stand-up show.1995: Nominated as best stand-up at the British Comedy Awards, and makes his first appearance on Have I Got News for You.1997: Goes on British tour and makes first appearance in Jonathan Creek; the series wins a Bafta for Best Drama.