Ö÷²¥´óÐã North: It's official!
Post categories: @North,ÌýÖ÷²¥´óÐã North
| 15:39 UK time, Tuesday, 6 April 2010
From this month Ö÷²¥´óÐã North - the proud new parent of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Children's, , Radio 5 Live, and stepdad for Ö÷²¥´óÐã Learning, parts of FM&T and all those teams currently based in Manchester Oxford Road - becomes an official group within the Ö÷²¥´óÐã.
It's an honour and a bit of a responsibility to launch the latest and most hybrid Ö÷²¥´óÐã Group to sit alongside Vision, Audio and Music, Journalism and the rest in helping the Corporation deliver our audience mission.
We've now taken all our three buildings on budget and on schedule which is a cracking place to be.....but now the hard graft really begins.
So, what's next?
Well we have to contract and install our new technology, recruit several hundred fresh staff and that little challenge - from the middle to the end of next year - of migrating wave after wave of journalists, sports staff, children's and learning producers, technologists, radio teams, local reporters, television production and an orchestra into our brand new home on the banks of the Ship Canal.
So what is going to change?
Well, Ö÷²¥´óÐã North is a unique federation of interests - hybrid, pan platform, mixed genre, commissioning and production, research and development, campaigns and content in a new centre designed to make and deliver media for the internet age. No other part of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã is quite so diverse - combining a horizontal slice of Ö÷²¥´óÐã life, rather than the traditional vertical one. We've broken out of the traditional silo, so what can we do as a result?
We want it to be an experiment in creativity and collaboration. A laboratory for the whole Ö÷²¥´óÐã to pilot and experiment with new ideas. All played out in a large and very public space designed to welcome in partners and licence fee payers alike, to help build deeper and long-lasting relationships with the whole North of England - from Carlisle to Hull, Liverpool to Newcastle.
In practice that means we are contemplating lots of new ideas for the place itself and our own people. They include performance on the site every day of the year; a visitor experience that brings licence payers into the heart of our programme-making areas; indies and students living and working right alongside us; technologists and producers working side by side; more fluid careers across genres and platforms; meeting rooms that you book online; mobile working the norm in a hot desk environment; studio rental not studio ownership; and open technologies that encourage plug and play. Even restricting the length of a Ö÷²¥´óÐã North meeting - one hour would be the maximum - not just a crowd-pleaser, a way of cutting down on organisational strain.
Across the North group we are working on a whole range of virtual and physical ideas that we hope will make it a really exciting and innovative place to work.
Having just announced a first big Ö÷²¥´óÐã Children's commission for Leeds based indie True North, a Radio 5Live fund that will help local independent radio producers get started with the network, and the final stages of our £500k @North digital media initiative, things are beginning to heat up. Recently though the most exciting thing that's happened is a visit from the doctor.
The new Dr. Who, Matt Smith, and his team helped launch the new series by visiting Sunderland and Salford with the Tardis last week and showing an exclusive preview of the first episode to lots of excitable school-children. And me. Me and my boy Joe snuck in the back to watch it and it was a real belter.
Events like that make it feel like the whole Ö÷²¥´óÐã is shifting a few degrees further North and let me tell you there are 16 million people there who are going to love us all the more for it.
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