What I’ve learned in England (so far)

I’ve been in the U.K. for about a week now — long enough to feel guilty for neglecting my blogging duties, but not long enough to really get my head around what’s going on over here.

I was in Preston last week for the Journalism Leaders Programme at the University of Central Lancashire, where I met journalists from Europe and Africa and heard some familiar stories about change-averse newsroom culture. I also visited newsrooms in Liverpool and Birmingham and listened as editors described the very real changes taking place there.

Some trends I’ve observed in the process:

• Twitter is huge here.
• British newspapers, to my surprise, seem to be hurting just as badly as their American counterparts.
• Some leaders are reacting to the crisis creatively and urgently.
• Others are still in denial.

In posts over the next few days, I’ll try to elaborate on each of those points. Meanwhile, here are some happenings in the U.K. media world that have spawned dinner-table conversation in the past week:

• News organizations (and their audiences) mobilize to cover the Great Blizzard of 2009 (as I have taken to calling the few inches of snow that paralyzed London last week).
• Humorist Stephen Fry gets stuck in a London elevator and tweets the entire ordeal for his 100,000+ followers.
• BBC business editor (and blogger) Robert Peston is grilled by MPs in a government inquiry over whether the media contributed to the financial crisis.

Next: England’s Twitter explosion

Photo by Charles Collier via Flickr

• Category: Views
• Tag: Robert Peston, Stephen Fry, Twitter, United Kingdom, University of Central Lancashire