Where did you hear that?
Secret[] Private[x] Public[]
Ian Forrester
Senior Backstage Producer
BBC R&D North Lab,
1st Floor Office, OB Base,
New Broadcasting House, Oxford Road,
Manchester, M60 1SJ
________________________________
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brian Butterworth
Sent: 16 March 2010 12:49
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [backstage] Fwd: [IP] C-Span Puts Full Archives on the Web
I understand that the BBC trash the output from the News channel after
28 days. Shame, really.
On 16 March 2010 12:02, Dave Crossland <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
Good stuff.
Regards, Dave
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Dave Farber" <[email protected]>
Date: 16 Mar 2010, 11:56 AM
Subject: [IP] C-Span Puts Full Archives on the Web
To: "ip" <[email protected]>
Begin forwarded message:
From: Richard Forno <[email protected]>
Date: March 16, 2010 7:31:59 AM EDT
To: Undisclosed-recipients: <>;
Cc: Dave Farber <[email protected]>
Subject: C-Span Puts Full Archives on the Web
March 16, 2010
C-Span Puts Full Archives on the Web
By BRIAN STELTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/arts/television/16cspan.html?pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON — Researchers, political satirists
and partisan mudslingers, take note: C-Span has uploaded virtually every minute
of its video archives to the Internet.
The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23
years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide
new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally
announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday.
Having free online access to the more than
160,000 hours of C-Span footage is “like being able to Google political history
using the ‘I Feel Lucky’ button every time,” said Rachel Maddow, the liberal
MSNBC host.
Ed Morrissey, a senior correspondent for the
conservative blog Hot Air (hotair.com), said, “The geek in me wants to find an
excuse to start digging.”
No other cable network is likely to give away
its precious archives on the Internet. (Even “Book TV” is available.) But
C-Span is one of a kind, a creation of the cable industry that records every
Congressional session, every White House press briefing and other acts of
official Washington.
The online archives reinforce what some would
call the Web’s single best quality: its ability to recall seemingly every
statement and smear. And it is even more powerful when the viewer can rewind
the video.
The C-Span founder, Brian Lamb, said in an
interview here last week that the archives were an extension of the network’s
public service commitment.
“That’s where the history will be,” Mr. Lamb
said.
C-Span has been uploading its history for
several years, working its way to 1987, when its archives were established at
Purdue University, Mr. Lamb’s alma mater.
The archive staff now operates from an office
park in West Lafayette, Ind., where two machines that can turn 16 hours of
tapes into digital files each hour have been working around the clock to move
C-Span’s programs online. They are now finishing the 1987 catalog.
“This is the archive’s coming of age, in a way,
because it’s now so accessible,” said Robert Browning, director of the archives.
Historically, the $1 million-a-year operation
has paid for itself partly by selling videotapes and DVDs to journalists,
campaign strategists and others.
Mr. Browning acknowledges that video sales have
waned as more people have viewed clips online. “On the other hand, there are a
lot of things people now watch that they never would have bought,” he said.
The archives’ fans include Ms. Maddow, who
called it gold. “It’s raw footage of political actors in their native habitat,
without media personalities mediating viewers’ access,” she wrote in an e-mail
message.
Similarly, Mr. Morrissey said the archives made
“for a really intriguing reference set.” He pointed out, however, that the
volume of videos “is so vast that finding valuable references may be a bit like
looking for a needle in a haystack.”
C-Span executives said they hoped that its
search filters would be up to the task. Mr. Lamb said, “You can see if
politicians are saying one thing today, and 15 years ago were saying another
thing.”
He added, “Journalists can feast on it.”
One of the Web site’s features, the
Congressional Chronicle, shows which members of Congress have spoken on the
House and Senate floors the most, and the least. Each senator and
representative has a profile page. Using the data already available, some
newspapers have written about particularly loquacious local lawmakers.
C-Span was established in 1979, but there are
few recordings of its earliest years. Those “sort of went down the drain,” Mr.
Browning said. But he does have about 10,000 hours of tapes from before 1987,
and he will begin reformatting them for the Web soon. Those tapes include
Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign speeches and the Iran-Contra hearings.
In a tour of the site last week, Mr. Browning
said the various uses of the archives were hard to predict. He found that a
newly uploaded 1990 United Nations address by the Romanian president Ion
Iliescu was quickly discovered and published by several Romanian bloggers.
While C-Span does not receive Nielsen ratings,
a recent poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that 52 percent of voters
said they watched it at least once in a while. The poll did not distinguish
among C-Span’s three channels. The original one, C-Span, shows every House of
Representatives session; C-Span2 does the same for the Senate; and C-Span3
shows committee hearings, briefings, conferences and other events.
The archives of all three channels have been
mostly uploaded, but they can only be streamed. Mr. Browning said video
downloads were on his agenda. Users can embed the videos on other Web sites and
clip small sound bites for repeat viewing.
The clips can help citizens gain access to
important information, of course, but they can also be entertaining.
Last month one of the top clips on the C-Span
site was from President Obama’s health care summit meeting, but it wasn’t of a
comment about proposed legislation, it was of Vice President Joseph R. Biden
Jr. caught on a microphone saying, “It’s easy being vice president.” A
spokesman for the vice president told reporters that Mr. Biden was “obviously
joking.”
Regardless, the archives are a reminder that
the cameras are always recording. For politicians or anyone else captured by
C-Span, Mr. Browning said, “there’s no more deniability.”
Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now>
<https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/>
<http://www.listbox.com>
--
Brian Butterworth
follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/briantist
web: http://www.ukfree.tv - independent digital television and
switchover advice, since 2002
