- Tim Levell
- 22 Dec 06, 03:08 PM
Newsround has long been associated with breaking news about Harry Potter, not least because our reporter has set himself up as something of a world expert on Harry Potter. He can get through to people in Bloomsbury, Warner Bros and even JK's office faster than anyone we know.
This has meant that we have tried to take a step back from too much Harry Potter coverage in recent months and years, because we don't want Newsround to be known only for that story, and also because we don't want to be seen to be pushing a "product".
But it still amazes me that, whenever we have a Potter story, the response is astonishing.
On Thursday, we were the first news organisation in the world to confirm that JK Rowling had announced the title of the seventh and final book. . had started moving upwards before we'd even finished publishing the page.
We are watching appear in our inbox at a rate of several a second.
There's a worldwide web of fans who are out there, ready to pounce on any Potter story as soon as it's published. We aren't trying to hype him, honest. But we just can't avoid the power of the web response.
Tim Levell is editor of Newsround
- Peter Barron
- 22 Dec 06, 01:38 PM
Congratulations to Joe Blanks who - if you've been following this you'll have deduced - has won our Oh My Newsnight competition with his film about Malawi (which you can watch here).
In the spirit of the competition I don't know too much about Joe or how his film got to be made, but he appears to be just 16 and the film was the runaway winner among our viewers. I thought it was terrific - a powerful story, snappily produced, and the idea of letting British schoolchildren taste the food that goes to their African counterparts did more to humanise the issue of aid than many a professionally produced news item.
My personal favourite though was Matthew Bristow's extraordinary piece about the making of cocaine in Colombia. Some viewers grumbled that it should have been disqualified on the grounds that it had already appeared on YouTube before we announced our competition, but I think that would have inappropriately nit-picking. Matthew's film had the rare distinction of showing something I suspect most people didn't already know and had certainly never seen on TV - quite an achievement. It was also a bold idea to produce it without any commentary, making the subtitled list of the ingredients that go into making cocaine even more chilling.
Thanks to everyone who entered and took part in the discussion, the voting and indeed the controversy. I'm bewildered that anyone could seriously suggest that allowing our viewers ten
minutes out of the hundreds of hours of airtime Newsnight produces each year to tell us what they think is important is somehow a negative development. At the very least we've had a great debate about the value of user-generated content, which has surely been the media story of 2006.
So would we do it again? I hope so, but that'll depend on whether there's demand for Oh My Newsnight 2, and a fresh supply of films worth showing). .
Peter Barron is editor of Newsnight
