tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5962879730025443182024-03-05T04:37:06.963-08:00FieldsportsChannel.tvThe best hunting, shooting and fishingCharlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-40706795987038175222019-12-12T11:07:00.000-08:002019-12-13T01:01:07.200-08:00A New Deal for Nature – bigoted, prejudiced and makes surprising senseThe musical <i>Cabaret</i> is touring the UK and playing to packed houses. In it, John Partridge makes a super Emcee, faced with the growing horror of the rising power of the Nazis. His camp splendour turns to heart-tugging pathos when he cries: ‘All we are asking is eine bisschen <i>Verständnis</i> - A little understanding’. And it is that understanding that is the main ingredient missing from Caroline Lucas’s fine attempt to begin a national debate about the greening of Britain.<br />
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Just before the general election 2019, former Green Party chief and its only MP Caroline Lucas published a <a href="https://www.carolinelucas.com/sites/carolinelucas.com/files/A%20New%20Deal%20for%20Nature%20web_1.pdf" target="_blank">document</a> she commissioned for her party. Prepared by Patrick Barkham, Mark Cocker, Jake Fiennes, Jeremy Mynott and Helen Smith, it offers proposals for a national policy on the environment.<br />
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The key name to notice is Jake Fiennes. Brother of actors Ralph and Joseph, composer Magnus and film directors Martha and Sophie, Jake is a former gamekeeper, in charge of wildlife management and conservation Lord Leicester’s 25,000-acre Holkham Estate in Norfolk. As a Fiennes, he is smack on top of the Guardianista set who are his co-preparers. As a gamekeeper, he is an obvious outsider.<br />
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Given the heritage of its writers, forgive the report for erring on the characteristically pompous. In the manner of Thomas Jefferson, they start it with: ‘<b>We hold it as self-evident </b>that humans, like any other species, are a part of nature’. Perhaps that’s its core problem. It makes the kind of assumptions you would expect of the pompous. On page 5 it lists the amenity value of the countryside as ‘sports, running, cycling, playing with our children, walking with friends and family’ – leaving out hunting, shooting and fishing which, whether they like it or not, is what most people enjoying the amenity value of Britain’s national parks outside the main summer season are doing most of the time.<br />
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‘If you took the references to British nature out of William Shakespeare’s plays, then there would be deletions on every page,’ they say – but they don’t say that if you take the references to fieldsports out of the English countryside there would be blank pub signs and unnamed roads, woods and fields wherever you look. These writers prefer their countryside to be defined by literary references than by rural references.<br />
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We can establish from their preamble that although, like fieldsports enthusiasts, they are keen to restore the countryside to its natural glory, they layer on an animal rights fundamentalist’s horror of fieldsports.<br />
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Where they have a point is in their summary, that they ‘distrust any simple and single solutions to the national nature crisis, such as “plant more trees”’.<br />
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This is a profoundly sensible view to take. The countryside is too complicated for any solution to work in isolation. That’s why so many politicians founder on simple policy ideas, such as then DEFRA secretary Michael Gove’s mishaps trying out the word ‘sentience’ for the first time.<br />
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The report’s authors are who they are. We can’t get away from that. So what do they say that makes sense?<br />
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They call for a more robust statutory nature framework that puts, for example, wildlife at the heart of planning. From a pure fieldsports point of view, this makes sense (though from the point of view of living in a working, breathing countryside, it is maybe not so sensible). Every footprint you leave in the countryside kills some small creature. Get over it. They call for a return to the Joint Nature Conservation Committee system of UK-wide policy because, they say, ‘The old NCC’s public pronouncement on the importance of wildlife was always measured and this reasoned and independent voice will be restored to make the challenging case for wildlife’. As long as it is not tyrannical in its actions, that works better than the franchising of nature management we see through the split between Natural England, Natural Resources Wales, Northern Ireland Environment Agency and Scottish Natural Heritage.<br />
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Their statement ‘Provision for wildlife will be maintained at a constant and appropriate level which is unaffected by changes of government or administration personnel’ is surely right. This should come as a matter of relief to government ministers who know that DEFRA can be a graveyard for political careers. No longer will they have to make wildlife-affecting decisions.<br />
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The report's authors want an end to the sale of peat by 2022. Peat is to the countryside what coal is to industry – a dependency that has to end.<br />
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They want the Nature Recovery Network beefed up. Good idea – but don’t give these authors the credit when it is mainly due to Dr Beeching for closing down branch railways and creating a system of natural motorways that has helped the spread of deer and other wildlife since the 1960s. Well done, Dr Beeching.<br />
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They want ‘every farmer [to] devote a minimum of 15% of their land (including linear features) to nature, and be paid to do so’. Whether this is the right percentage or not – and it is likely that this figure should not be written in stone – this is a considerable improvement on the pure conservation Marxism proposed by former DEFRA consultant Dieter Helm in his book, <i>Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside</i>.<br />
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They want ‘Proper transport links’ by which they mean public transport links, ‘established to ensure that the system of national parks or other designated landscapes can be visited without reliance upon cars’ and ‘visitors need to reflect the full diversity within the nation’. Excellent idea. Just one thing: all the report’s authors are white and almost all are men.<br />
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Dogs ‘can cause damage and disturbance to livestock, wildlife and some habitats, for example, rivers and lakes’ so should be kept on leads or banned. Great idea. Bad luck for dog owners, but it is true. Where this needs to be proportionate is where local landowners / wildlife managers give permission for dogs. Their wildlife management should be their call.<br />
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The report calls for ‘support for new farming practices’. Brilliant. Surely one of the biggest problems facing the countryside is urban/suburban failure to recognise where their food comes from.<br />
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‘“Cide”-free farming’ and ‘artificial/synthetic fertilisers phased out by 2040’ both make sense. The ‘polluter pays’ principle does not seem to apply to farmers. It is time it did, not because farmers need punishing but because pouring poisons into river systems is environmentally unaccountable. This is one of Dieter Helm’s more sensible observations<br />
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What’s not to like about the report’s authors’ education statements, including ‘Rewrite the Education Act, Section 78, to put nature at the centre of the state National Curriculum from nursery to secondary school’? Well – just one thing. Fieldsports needs to be at the heart of this, because fieldsports are the main wildlife management technique in the countryside. Ignoring fieldsports in the classroom is to promote propaganda in the classroom.<br />
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Thank goodness they avoided the trope so often used by land reformists under the guise of wildlife policy to rewild or ‘re-tree’ the countryside. Instead, they offer policies for planting trees in urban areas. I can’t comment whether this is a good idea. We don’t have muggers in the countryside.<br />
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Their fishing policies make good sense. Commercial fishing may be characterised by one word: greed. Surely, that must stop. But in case you think Caroline Lucas’s pals have a monopoly on this kind of thinking, anglers have been saying it for decades – and been ignored, just as the report’s authors ignore them now.<br />
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Unfortunately, these sensible ideas are outweighed by what does not make sense. The biggest problem in this report is a blinkered and bigoted whole section on hunting and shooting. The authors make a couple of attempts to square the Green Party’s opposition to fieldsports with a more sensible approach. Perhaps this is where we see the influence of Jake Fiennes come to bear. The call for a ban on lead shot is, for example, no more than what the European Chemicals Agency is already driving through – though the report authors don’t offer a sensible alternative, nor do they deal with problems such as what happens when you fire copper into trees. Oh yes. You kill them.<br />
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You can tell the narrowmindedness from the opening paragraphs, which says: ‘Shooting for fun is abhorrent to many people and yet a small but vocal minority passionately maintains these past-times [sic]’. 600,000 gun licence holders is not small. It is this mistake, made by Marion Spain at Natural England when she waved through a ban on the general licences because she believed only a few thousand people go pigeon shooting, that nearly cost her job.<br />
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Then it gets worse. They go for several now permanently fabulous examples of intolerance, including ‘ban the release of non-native game birds’ (what about non-native hares, muntjac and other introduced wildlife? Should they be wiped out, too?), ‘license all game shoots’ and ‘licence all animal control’ (by whom? The League Against Cruel Sports?), ‘ban the shooting of snipe and woodcock’ (don’t forget to ban the wind changing from easterly to westerly during these birds’ autumn migration, which is what kills most of them), ‘outlaw medicated grit’ for grouse (don’t forget to ban other artificial bird welfare such as bird tables and bird boxes), ‘new certified training scheme and licence for gamekeepers’ (does that mean the many young keepers coming out of the UK’s gamekeeping colleges can take advantage of the multi-million-pound gamekeeping contracts currently only available to the RSPB, such as the eradication of stoats on Orkney or mice on Gough Island?), ‘manage our deer population’ with ‘regional targets for per-hectare deer population’ (because they believe that deer on an open hill versus deer in forestry on that hill versus deer around watercourses should be kept at precisely the same number and that that will mean jobs for tens of thousands of ‘deer monitors’), and ‘further reform the Hunting Act’ (because they and other Islington restaurant-goers don’t like foxhunting). All this shows a basic failure by the report’s authors to acknowledge that almost all woodland visible from their railway carriage windows is put there for hunting and shooting.<br />
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They wouldn’t be a Green Party report if they did not include a call for a ban on ‘intensive moorland management in designated areas’. The report says: ‘At least 1.3 million hectares of upland Britain are influenced by management for grouse shooting and a significant proportion falls within designated areas. Management of these areas has to be compatible with the wildlife and environmental purposes of the national parks.’<br />
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This misses the enormous good work that grouse moor management does for wildlife, protecting peatlands, creating firebreaks in a landscape increasingly at risk of wildfires, providing 85% of the world’s heather upland, and providing a breeding ground for a significant proportion of Europe’s waders. Grow trees on it and we will lose those waders.<br />
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Happily, they are not as extreme as the Revive group or the Wild Justice organisation, both founded by BBC TV’s Chris Packham. The report’s authors’ failure to back Revive and Wild Justice’s policies puts Packham out on more of a limb than usual.<br />
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The authors call for ‘enhanced support’ (cash) for upland farmers as long as they don’t spend it on game. Why not game? Pure bigotry. This is such a pity when their more reasonable statement, that ‘There has been a devasting, well-documented and continuing decline in the abundance and diversity of Britain’s wildlife in recent decades, arising from causes like intensive agriculture, habitat loss, pesticide poisoning, pollution, land development and other human impacts’ does not include the words ‘hunting’ or ‘shooting’.<br />
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The authors of this report are committed to government not just providing a framework for conservation policy, but providing the people who carry out that policy. Their new ‘Council for Nature’ sounds OK, but not if it comes with teams of government marksmen who carry out the work so ably and freely carried out by fieldsports enthusiasts already. That’s how regulated hunting, all over the world, is the major contributor to wildlife conservation.<br />
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Again and again, they fail to recognise the patchwork nature of the UK countryside – that so-and-so’s nature conservation efforts here are negated by so-and-so’s desire to plant oilseed rape there, or that X shoots all deer but leaves woodcock, while Y shoots woodcock and ignores deer, and that this produces a millefeuille countryside that works. Their statement ‘Proper population counts are the foundation of all overarching conservation measures’ goes against the basic principles of wildlife management: you know your ground well enough to look at it and say: ‘there are too many / not enough / about the right number of…’ and take action accordingly.<br />
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Whether or not it is any good at bringing down TB in cattle, one of the failures of the recent badger cull is its bureaucratic dependence on a mantra of X badgers per sq km. We agree that ‘Funded research is an essential part of effective conservation action’ – but we in the shooting community point to the word ‘part’. Research should not lead conservation action.<br />
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Oh and – yes – they want to end the badger cull for what they unscientifically call its ‘political and partisan scapegoating of badgers’. Then they make the sensible call for ‘a need for localised and selective licensing of badger control to protect ground-nesting native birds’.<br />
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Finally, there is the stuff they don’t cover. They want classifications untouchable by the planning system but they make no mention of the ludicrous industry that has popped up of rehoming wildlife while property development takes place. A countryperson involved in -day-to-day wildlife management would like to see ‘responsibility to wildlife species, not individuals’, enshrined in the rules. ‘Responsibility to individual animals’ should be confined to livestock.<br />
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They don’t mention the ‘mission creep’ that classifications such as SPAs enjoy. In 2019, on a whim, Natural England bosses ruled there can be no pest control under the general licences with 300 metres of an SPA. If they get their way with an increase in national parks, will that suddenly attract, years down the line, a shooting ban within those parks? If so, it’s no to new national parks, please.<br />
The ‘Healthy rivers’ paragraph is excellent – but where is the recognition that the only group who already carry out the work they want – to ‘re-wet, re-establish water meadows and return natural river courses’ – are anglers?<br />
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The ‘biosecurity’ section makes good sense too. But where is the acknowldgement that the main group of people shooting grey squirrels in order to protect native reds are the people who own the 12 million airguns in the UK?<br />
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Good intentions burst from every page of <i>A New Deal for Nature</i>. Practical conservation measures are there, but they are scribbled over with extremist views on who should run the countryside and why the 100,000-year evolution of fieldsports should be written out of policy. Surely they believe in evolution?<br />
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Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-44994764406529965302019-12-05T05:14:00.000-08:002019-12-05T05:14:09.051-08:00Werritty, grouse and British public life<br />
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You will read a great deal about grouse and hen harriers before Christmas as the Werritty report into grouseshooting in Scotland is published. But this is one little bombardment in a huge war being fought along a giant front. Here is the strategists' guide to what's going on.</div>
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Get set for the middle ground battleground. The hunting/anti-hunting debate is one long trench warfare front. It is broadly divided into three sections: the national politics of countrysports are at one end, the media battle for public opinion is at the other. In the middle is the day-to-day policy and public opinion as enacted by civil servants, local and regional government, the police and the judiciary. </div>
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The allied fieldsports of hunting, shooting, fishing and falconry have, to date, been winning the national political battle. National politics reacts to votes and science. There are no votes to be had from countrysports, either for or against it. Science - admittedly paid for by pro-countrysports interests, but peer reviewed - comes down in favour of countrysports as a positive contributor to conservation. Even without the paid lobbyists telling them, it is not hard for MPs and MEPs to understand that the UK woodlands are not put there for their benefit by the railway companies, that the benefit all wildlife, they are there for hunting and shooting, and that without hunting and shooting, they would go. Luckily for countrysports in the UK, landowners form a large part of their support base. </div>
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Fishing and falconry have gone some steps further. Thanks in part to former MP Martin Salter, anglers have successfully presented themselves as the main national pressure group interested in water flow and quality. Falconers have successfully been enshrining their sport as a matter of national heritage.<br /></div>
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At the other end of the trench system, the axis of antis are the ones winning the media war. The media is a good place to present stories and actions in isolation, and to offer a binary view of the world. It is hard to put across the complexity of the 'why hunt?' argument, especially when faced with the simplicity of the 'cute rabbit' argument. </div>
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Where both sides need to commit resources next is into the middle ground, and the antis are already better at it. All major organisations, pro- and anti-hunting, have at least one retired police detective on their staff and an appointed legal firm.<br /></div>
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In January 2019, Chris Packham's organisation Wild Justice changed the game. Lawyers are not an add-on to its operations. They are its operations. These are lawyers who are able to hold civil servants, the police and even other lawyers to account. </div>
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To the more right-wing among the pro-countrysports side, the change in the law's purpose from social framework to bureaucratic swamp allows Wild Justice to gain a cynical advantage. The right wing can whinge all they like. People in City suits now have more say over crop protection than farmers. Get over it. The right wing lost that round and they need to learn to work with what they have got.<br /></div>
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This came home to me most strongly at the EFRA committee meeting, chaired by Neil Parish MP, into the conduct of Natural England over the April 2019 general licences debacle. NE acting chief executive Marion Spain and outgoing chairman Lord Blencathra looked like rats in traps. They repeatedly assured the committee that it was not their - Spain's and Blencathra's - fault, and that they had no alternative but to comply with Wild Justice's lawyers' wishes. Incoming chairman Tony Juniper sitting next to them was more assured - the problem took place before he arrived - but he made every effort to distance himself from it. Marion Spain's greatest misjudgement was her belief that pigeon shooting is a minority sport, undertaken by a few thousand farmers. She repeatedly failed to acknowledge or even apparently understand that the reason her organisation's email and website crashed and remained crashed for days was the sheer number of pigeon shooters trying to find out what was going on. Our website crashed, too. Fieldsports Channel broke the news story and had 85,000 hits on that page in 12 hours. </div>
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The effect of Wild Justice on the other organisations, both pro and anti, is and certainly should be far-reaching. The League Against Cruel Sports has been losing ground, battling its members, and losing its staff. The effectiveness of Wild Justice versus the ineffectiveness of the League is hastening the League's decline. Do not confuse that with a loss of core support for an anti-hunting message among animal rights fundamentalists. I was on stage at Bird Fair in August 2019, presenting the case for grouseshooting, and the 400-strong audience was fervid. Anti-hunting campaigner Dominic Dyer's speeches in the summer at Hen Harrier Day and Bird Fair helped produce large numbers of supporters in black balaclavas to protest at grouse shoots in August 2019.<br /></div>
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There have been failures. Chris Packham's anti driven grouseshooting Revive coalition has not done as well as Wild Justice. He would like to convert Revive's media success into national political clout. Adroit though he is with the media, so far that has not happened. In my opinion, he is lobbing shells from the media trenches into the parliamentary trenches, and he does not yet have the firepower. </div>
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The Churchill of countrysports parliamentary support, James Gray MP, gave an excellent and funny speech to 80 diners at a grouse dinner I hosted in West London in October. In it, he pointed out that there would may not be a grouse dinner in 2020. There was laughter. He turned to those laughing and said, coldly: "There really may not be a grouse dinner in 2020," and they fell silent.<br /></div>
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What else can an attack on the middle trenches achieve for the antis? Liverpool Council's decision to block the British Shooting Show from taking place in its exhibition centre is an interesting case. I went to that, and it quickly became obvious that pro-countrysports lobbying had not reached these urban, regional politicians. I tried to imagine the cost to BASC and Countryside Alliance of changing opinions at this level of public life and I could not. Councillors unanimously - even the Tory - backed mayor Joe Anderson's ban on the British Shooting Show. BASC put up a good quality spokesperson, Garry Doolan, who even has a Liverpool accent, but it was hopeless. In a bar afterwards, one of the councillors told me that the underlying issue was gun crime, even though most people in countrysports will tell you that the difference between gun crime and pheasant shooting was buried years ago. </div>
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Perhaps a barrister would have worked in Liverpool. Only the law frightens officials. Alongside Garry, perhaps we could have had a lawyer pointing out that Joe Anderson's ban was discrimination and would result in a painful court case. Wild Justice did not need to field a lawyer here - but they could have done.<br /></div>
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Where are the risks and the weak spots for the antis? They are over-reliant on a pliant media to support their middle-ground message. With the terrestrial broadcasters and most newspapers broadly aligned to anti-countrysports sentiment, they see no threat. But broadcasting is changing, as the barriers to viewers disintegrate, and it becomes possible, for example, to win the US presidency with a single Twitter account. In that world, anyone who relies on their position as the man on the Air Ministry roof, telling viewers what is going to happen, is going to look obsolete beside the kind of 'social broadcaster' who can put an arm around a viewer and persuade them by saying: 'This is what I think, this is why I think it, but no need for you to think it yourself...'<br /></div>
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The pro-fieldsports allies have not stepped up to this threat. They should continue their activities fighting rearguard in the media, and on the front foot with politicians, but they need to engage rapidly in the middle ground. </div>
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Here's what my outfit is doing. At Fieldsports Channel, we have come to the conclusion that YouTube channels are or can be social movements with lightweight manifestos alongside their role as 'light ent'. This is partly thanks to the collision between entertainment and politics, and partly thanks to the social nature of the TV we offer. <br />
We have successfully crowdfunded a journalist, starting in January 2020, part of whose job will be to punch the antis in the media. </div>
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Next hire will be another crowdfunded body, whose job will be to take action on discrimination against countrysports in the media, and bullying against hunters and shooters. This will have a media dividend for us, but is more of a middle-ground job, fighting battles in Ofcom and IPSO, Facebook and YouTube. </div>
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The anti-hunting side has already started using Facebook and YouTube's own policies to suppress pro-hunting content. In November 2019, we put out a film about violent hunt-saboteurs swinging martial arts weapons in front of children out with the Cheshire Hunt. The antis forced YouTube to take down that film on a cyber-bullying charge. We re-uploaded it to Vimeo. The antis forced Vimeo to take it down for copyright reasons, even though all of the footage belongs to us. They know that Vimeo does not have the resources to pursue most copyright cases so it simply takes down films when it receives complaints. There is going to be an element of attrition here, as both sides try to beat each other off social media. </div>
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<br />2020 will be an interesting year. The general licences review will be a test of the strength of Wild Justice's legal muscle. BASC has put resources into stopping their attack, but battlefield historians like me have yet to report an outcome. </div>
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The Werritty report into driven grouseshooting, due in December 2020 will be a test of regional lobbying clout on both sides. With the environment brief devolved to the regions, all sides need to step up lobbying in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.<br /></div>
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I expect anti-hunters will consolidate their work in the middle ground and expand it. I hope the pro fieldsports allies find a salary between them to make the same attack. It hurts me to promote work for lawyers - but that's what will have to do.</div>
<br />Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-27667745389572019422018-07-31T07:49:00.005-07:002018-08-01T01:01:00.240-07:00The rise of the unofficial YouTube MCNWant to start an MCN? Why? Lots of channel owners hate them and, if you are in a specialist consumer area such as hunting (which is where we are), you would need almost all the top hunting channels as members to meet the minimum eligible viewcount.<br />
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That has not stopped a new class of MCN from stepping up to the plate. It's the Website Curated Network. I'm calling it the WCN. Yup, you saw it here first.<br />
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It's a website that curates a lot of videos and even other posts from different sources. It operates outside the permission but with the encouragement of YouTube. It adds editorial value around each video with the aim of becoming a one-stop-shop for viewers - it offers links to useful stuff - and then it takes all that to advertisers in its market and to Google Adsense. And if YouTube bans any of the content, well the website can swap the video element over to Vimeo, Facebook or any of the other TV-embedding social media. The page URL on the website for that content remains the same.<br />
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Take <a href="https://weshootapp.com/" target="_blank">WeShoot</a>. It started out as a pure social media website and app based on the look and feel of Facebook. Since GDPR, it has become a hybrid news/social media site. Its main thrust is clayshooting but it covers all shooting sports. It views the world from a user point of view, asking what do you like? You can post your shooting/hunting related content, either directly to WeShoot or via a link from existing site. It even allows you to post via an RSS feed, so you can maintain your presence on YouTube or Facebook and post automatically on WeShoot at the same time. And it fills in the gaps with posts from established media such as the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcFugrtlMtDmX1yMp6x_C0Q" target="_blank">ISSF YouTube channel</a>, which provides excellent coverage of the trapshooting scene. WeShoot was founded and remains funded by clay pigeon trap manufacturer Laporte. It has taken a while to get to where it is, but we believe at Fieldsports Channel that it has a bright future.<br />
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Another good one is <a href="http://huntmag.eu/">HuntMag.eu</a>. As well as original content, it's a place to curate what's going on in hunting across Europe, which gives it a pan-European campaigning edge. There is enough original content to make it a destination in its own right, and enough curated content to give it critical mass as an authoritative source. It is a pure news site and curates other, suitable videos and posts to reflect its editorial 'promise'. It is produced from Malta in multiple languages.<br />
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In Germany, our favourite is <a href="https://www.geartester.de/">Geartester.de</a>. Its editorial promise is good quality, honest tests of outdoor/hunting/shooting gear, which again comes from curated content as well as direct posts to the site.<br />
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These three websites provide 'honesty of basis'. From a consumer point of view, they have clear editorial direction, and from a subscriber point of view, they hold nothing back from the user. There are no secret password-protected areas that break the sense of trust a viewer has to have with a website.<br />
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This is where we are going with <a href="http://fieldsportschannel.tv/">FieldsportsChannel.tv</a>. We produce enough content every week to make us a destination in our own right, but we also have news programmes that call on videos and pictures from across the web and help give us 'news currency'.<br />
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There are plenty of new websites with one foot in the past, reflecting the 1990s when scheduled TV was normal and viewing figures opaque. New from the USA, GEN7 Outdoors <a href="https://gen7outdoors.com/gen7-outdoors-live-streaming-hunting-and-fishing/" target="_blank">streams scheduled outdoor programming</a> 24/7 in 1080 HD using <a href="http://streamotor.com/">Streamotor.com</a> and on to outlets suck as <a href="https://channelstore.roku.com/en-gb/details/82008/gen7-outdoors" target="_blank">Roku</a>. Each episode is aired three times a week, morning, afternoon and prime-time. All show’s past episodes are available on demand for 12 months. As the TV business shows again and again, the tactics of the past continue to make money. Audiences are slow to change their viewing habits.<br />
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GEN7 consists of TV shows such as Camo Crusade and Real Outdoors USA. At time of writing it claims 6.6m web-based views, 4.4m via TV apps and 2.1m elsewhere. This level of popularity is not borne out by its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRUqAvHXU7ZXm9_2IosXlGg" target="_blank">YouTube</a> presence, which currently has just 86 subscribers, but I'll leave GEN7 to back up its claims.<br />
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The trend towards WCNs is not all carrot. There is stick, too. Hunters and shooters have a strong belief that YouTube is anti-hunting/shooting. After a flurry of community strikes earlier in 2018, there is little evidence of that now. But that's why <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/sootch00" target="_blank">Sootch00</a> went to <a href="http://getzone.com/">GetZone.com</a>, which currently hosts films using just <a href="https://www.jwplayer.com/" target="_blank">JWPlayer</a>.<br />
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So how do these WCNs make money? The answer is off-YouTube deals.<br />
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Formerly against YouTube's terms of service, throughout 2018, YouTube has been more and more happy to allow channels to make off-YouTube deals. The bosses at Google, which owns YouTube, realise that encouraging channels to talk to advertisers produces greater engagement from advertisers with YouTube. Fieldsports Channel makes almost all of its income from product placement deals.<br />
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There was a time when that would have had an impact on our editorial integrity. I ran the theatre at the Game Fair this year (2018) and asked the audience for a show of hands on this one: does it bother you that our videos are funded by product placement? They said no. They are quite capable of ignoring the products and enjoying the narrative anyway.<br />
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There are problems for being a WCN over a pure YouTube channel. When competing for ad dollars, it is a significant problem for these new websites that they have no standardised or believable method of viewcounting in the way Google/YouTube provides. The best they can do is aggregate the views they get on their member YouTube channels. Our viewcount on YouTube is more than 100 million and only 4% of those are embedded in external websites and apps, so we know we are a long way from making our website the core of our business.<br />
<br />
The next step is for the WCNs to wake up to their position as, each one of them, a mini Netflix. Currently, TV viewers may construct their evening's viewing around cruising around YouTube or Netflix or the new website content curators. As WCNs and top quality channels now count their videos in the 1000s, viewers will learn to spend an evening on just one of them.<br />
<br />
<hr />
<br />
<b>A quick word about subscription sites</b><br />
<br />
Many video publishers look at this market and decide that viewer subscription is the way to deal with it. They don't need to initiate and maintain personal relationships with advertisers. It's a nice, clean, mass-market ad proposition: put €1 into the advertising machine and take €9.99 subscriptions out of the tray at the bottom.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://bearplay.tv/">Bearplay.tv</a> is a new one, which serves the Scandinavian hunting market. Made up of broadcasters including Rasmus Boström and his dogs, the Bravader Brothers and Kristoffer Clausen, it collaborates closely with some of Nordic’s largest hunting magazines, such as <i>Jaktjournalen+Jägare</i>, <i>Jaktmarker+Fiskevatten</i> and the online magazine <i>Vildmarken</i>. You pay US$4.99/month to view. It goes up against <a href="http://jaktflix.se/">Jaktflix.se</a> which charges SKr42/month for its subscription TV.<br />
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<br /></div>
Kristoffer Clauser also runs his own subscription TV site at <a href="http://www.clausentv.com/" target="_blank">Clausentv.com</a>. Other subscription sites include <a href="https://www.jaegermagazin.de/jaeger-welt/jaegertv/" target="_blank">Jaeger TV</a> in Germany and <a href="https://www.myoutdoortv.com/" target="_blank">MOTV</a> in the USA. MOTV, which recently merged with DVD producer Hunters Video, charges US$9.99 a month and does not release viewing figures. Jaeger TV comes as part of a magazine subscription and claims 13,000 users. That's tiny compared to the audience YouTube hunting/shooting channels achieve but it provides an income that not far short of what the YouTube channels are making when they successfully leverage their WCN appeal.<br />
<br />
Subscription works for Netflix and Amazon but we believe that, long term, it will not work in specialist consumer markets. Too many people in subscription TV are pointing to the good old days, pre-YouTube, when you could expect 20,000 people to pay you €15/month. YouTube has removed that market.<br />
<br />
We hope to be proved wrong. If we are right, it remains to be seen whether these subscription channels will be able to make the jump to being ad-funded channels. But they are certainly well-placed to aggregate content from a number of YouTube and other TV producers, and make that pitch to advertisers.<br />
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Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-15290044630488420832018-06-26T01:05:00.002-07:002018-06-26T01:05:27.925-07:00Age restriction on YouTube - what to doOur YouTube channel covers hunting and shooting, so our videos are often age-restricted - and some videos we age-restrict ourselves.<br />
<br />
Our advice is don't appeal them. We find they don't last forever -
unless you appeal against them. Here's a screen shot of the analytics
from one of our films.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBHyjDTGXcCLfj3EqpDu0weqVNu3kM7Ty6A7hAbpjys41zNkRM_uwkXJNzAjQaJSLn19cd1S2MYK6KXdXNcp_sZeBHV1NnQAGv_iTFJf_tMiptzzs9BJSZXuC9xwHMR_DUK9AmqCvZmyR0/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-06-26+at+08.55.54.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="457" data-original-width="1110" height="131" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBHyjDTGXcCLfj3EqpDu0weqVNu3kM7Ty6A7hAbpjys41zNkRM_uwkXJNzAjQaJSLn19cd1S2MYK6KXdXNcp_sZeBHV1NnQAGv_iTFJf_tMiptzzs9BJSZXuC9xwHMR_DUK9AmqCvZmyR0/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-06-26+at+08.55.54.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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You can see the times it has been age-restricted (almost no views) and the times that restriction has been lifted. In its life so far, it has been age-restricted three times and has achieved nearly 5m views.</div>
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I have asked YouTube about this. Tey have no idea how or why the restriction is lifted - but, in the films where we appeal, the restrictions are <b>not</b> lifted.</div>
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What about doing the age-restriction yourself? in the short term, it slows down the chance of that video getting a big audience. Age restriction means the video has no chance of appearing in the crucial Suggested Videos column on the right of the YouTube screen. However, it is not disastrous. </div>
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Here is the graph for a video we age-restricted ourselves. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi76HO1lrDTsSq4OIwqLIl0P7wS_tOXIGtxvgH6-hbD_EE7STb2AC5XAMjLsnLlkvvNHwcuunOrEUPO2NR8zHquwBmtvFew3bPMT0ZX8khpwqNc0wD1jxtGni4FI1sxY11bylcukHQvCbc6/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-06-26+at+09.02.37.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="1083" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi76HO1lrDTsSq4OIwqLIl0P7wS_tOXIGtxvgH6-hbD_EE7STb2AC5XAMjLsnLlkvvNHwcuunOrEUPO2NR8zHquwBmtvFew3bPMT0ZX8khpwqNc0wD1jxtGni4FI1sxY11bylcukHQvCbc6/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-06-26+at+09.02.37.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Where it has done well is where someone on another social media platform - usually Twitter - has shared the video. Age restriction is chic! This film has still achieved 1.25m views.</div>
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<br />Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-4474400296847748002016-02-08T08:48:00.001-08:002016-02-08T08:48:45.207-08:00How I hate emphatics<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://thestudyabroadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/P1000771-w500-h500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://thestudyabroadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/P1000771-w500-h500.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
The motto of the modern media reader or viewer is "I'll be the judge of that". It may lead them to death by natural disaster as they ignore warning signs but they stay true to it. And perhaps truest when it comes to the use of emphatics in newspaper copy.<br />
<br />
In his book <i>My Trade</i>, Andrew Marr points out that the number of noughts in a statistics is in inverse proportion to its veracity. He also says that you should answer any headline that starts 'Is this...?' with the answer 'No'. To these, I would like to add rules about emphatics, which have spread like disease into press releases, and from there into the media itself. We know that words such as 'some' and 'very' mean nothing. There's a new breed of word, led by the iniquitous 'stunning'. I hate stunning. I do not feel stunned when I read the word 'stunning'. I am sure I do not want to feel 'stunned'.<br />
<br />
Not only are these words worthless, they are overused. Nearly 30% of the emphatics I come across are the words 'luxury' and 'luxurious'. That is followed by 'excellent' on 20% and 'perfect' on 12%. Imagine that. 12% of everything I read about is perfect. How happy my life must be.<br />
<br />
Press releases fulfill a valuable function for me. They are a source of facts - of numbers, of descriptions, of amounts. I use them for that. I can see that sneaking the word 'stunning' into a press release that eventually makes it out as broadcast or news copy gives a sense of third-party endorsement from the media. But I believe that is now knocked out by the numbness that readers feel towards these words. They look at something which is 'stunning' and they say "I'll be the judge of that".<br />
<br />
Here is an example of a proper reaction to an emphatic. The WCs in trains used to carry the message 'Do not flush in any station', to which wags could add the words 'except Yeovil', 'except Doncaster' or 'except Paisley' depending on which part of the country they were. The train companies have cleverly spotted that this graffiti is due to a wayward emphatic: the tawdry 'any'. The signs now correctly and efficiently read 'Do not flush in station'.Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-8263373619289318302015-10-15T08:43:00.000-07:002015-10-15T08:43:09.958-07:00Tech in the shooting world<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://sportsmansnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Hunting-GPS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://sportsmansnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Hunting-GPS.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for finding deer, it doesn’t
work for hitting birds, and it hardly helps gutting and cooking them
afterwards. You can stare at YouTube films all you like: printed books are
better, more convenient and don’t run out of battery or go pop in the rain. Worse
still, tech is nerdy, like sitting in front of an X-Box, the opposite of
getting out there and actually doing it. But I love tech for shooting. I am a
happy nerd.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The GPS has revolutionised the gamebook. It offers the
warmth of an entry that reads ‘There are more geese than ever, many thousands’, the brutality of the entry ‘Various: 4’ and it gives you something else. Ever
since the coming of the railways, sport has become mobile. We can now head for
the Highlands or the lowlands and, once arrived, shoulder our gun and walk
forth. Thanks to Google Maps we can revisit our greatest exploits. <o:p></o:p></div>
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As someone who is lucky enough in his job to go shooting all
over the world, Google Maps has made my life relivable in front of crackling
fire, whisky in hand, dogs snoozing at feet. A KML file does what a gamebook
should do. Upload it to Google and you can swoop in and out of the glens or the
rides where you stalked, you can tramp the mud like the wildfowler you were or skim
like a grouse over pixelated moorland. It can bring it all back in a similar
way to the antlers mounted on the wall, or the photograph of you holding that
fish.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The first example I saw of tech invading the tweedy fortress
of sport was in the 1980s when a friend of mine caught a salmon and took a
photograph of it on the river bank next to a tape measure. He then blew up that
photograph to actual size, mounted it on a board, cut it out and hung it on a
wall, providing him with more detail though less sensuality and certainly
easier dusting than anything Malloch of Perth might manage. We little group of
fishermen in those days tried to think of many reasons why this tech outrage
might not be a good thing but we had to agree, it is effective. Thirty years
later, today, many of that little group own mobile phones and a few even type
their own letters.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Today there is wearable tech. I make films with <a href="http://www.georgedigweed.com/" target="_blank">George Digweed</a>, 26 times world champion shot and – little-known fact – keen early
adopter. He once made a DVD while wearing what he calls a ‘fireman’s helmet’
camera set-up that gave the viewer an idea of what he was seeing down the
barrel of his gun. He has since been on the look-out for ways of recreating this
sight picture even better, and experimented with everything from GoPro’s new Sportsman
Mount to Google Glass. He hasn’t found it yet but he is still looking.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://ep.yimg.com/ay/yhst-66049453130018/gopro-hero-sportsman-mount-asgum-001-20.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ep.yimg.com/ay/yhst-66049453130018/gopro-hero-sportsman-mount-asgum-001-20.gif" height="238" width="320" /></a><br /><span style="text-align: start;"><i>GoPro’s new Sportsman Mount</i></span></div>
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For my most recent birthday, I got the watch I wanted. It is
called (truly awful name coming up) an LG Watch Urbane, similar to an Apple Watch but it belongs to the
Google universe. It doesn’t make me any more urbane than I am already (at least
in my own mind) but it does repeat the notifications from my mobile phone in
watch form and allows me to ignore them with a peevish twist of my wrist,
rather than fishing around in my pocket, pushing aside conkers and spent
cartridges in order to locate my phone. I love that. As yet, I have found no useful hunting,
shooting nor fishing app in the ‘Android Wearable’ section of the Google Play store,
but I have hope that someone will think of one. It is waterproof, which will
help.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Another thing it does that pleases me mightily is that it tracks
my health. Like most shooting types, exercise is not my problem so much as
whisky intake and I am glad it has not worked out a way of tracking that. It
actually seems to be impressed that I exceed my target daily footsteps by a
factor of two or three. Perhaps insurance companies will start to favour hunting types. And the best bit is that it only has four states for
mankind: walking, bicycling, travelling by car, or travelling by public
transport. It works out what you are doing by matching your location with
topography. So, if you are walking along a railway track, it assumes you are
travelling by train. It logged the 25 miles I did driving round farm tracks
looking for cullable deer as bicycling, buzzed me on the wrist and gave me a
perky little message about how much better I must be feeling. How right it is.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Further reading:<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<ul>
<li>The GoPro Sportsman Mount can be found on <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/GoPro-ASGUM-001-Sportsman-Holder-Camera/dp/B00F19Q4LY#charlesjacobyaut" target="_blank">Amazon</a> </li>
<li>That geese quote is in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=9781783030057#charlesjacobyaut" target="_blank">The General's Game Book: The SportingLife of a Military Gentleman</a> by Dare Wilson </li>
<li>Olympic star shooter Peter Wilson has brought out the
<a href="http://e-gamebook.com/" target="_blank">e-Gamebook</a> app which is available for Apple devices only, so I haven’t tried it, but
everything he does turns to gold so it must be worth a look. </li>
</ul>
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Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-31020063075603857902015-08-17T07:53:00.003-07:002015-08-17T07:53:52.640-07:00The BBC 'does' the CLA Game Fair<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CLO-zL5WUAAVaY-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CLO-zL5WUAAVaY-.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Muffin & Mina, the Fieldsports Channel cockers, as Tweeted by BBC Countryfile</i></div>
<br />
Imagine a tweed-coated, gumbooted farmer in a flashy London nightclub. Well, it's been a bit like that with the BBC's visits to the CLA Game Fair in 2015.<br />
<br />
BBC1's primetime <i>Countryfile</i> led on on it this week. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0671pzs/countryfile-cla-game-fair" target="_blank">Click here</a> for the show. BBC Radio 4 broadcast its flagship news programme <i>Today</i> from the show. Jim Naughtie's spaniel recently died, aged 16. He got quite misty-eyed at the sight of the Fieldsports Channel cockers in the front row of the Game Fair Theatre audience. And he made an excellent piece about the spirit of the Game Fair which you can no longer listen to because of the BBC's peculiar attitude to copyright.<br />
<br />
There were some odd bits, of course. They still regard hunting and shooting as 'controversial' rather than 'normal', so it still gets a breathless, newsy of coverage. They are still surprised that shoots are where conservation takes place and the RSPB is all about money and fundraising. They seem to think it is the other way round. Also, lion hunting might not be overwhelmingly popular among British shooting folk but the #Cecil story was raging and the CLA Game Fair is the go-to place for those Brits who do want to book a lion hunt. No mention of that on the BBC. Maybe they don't know.<br />
<br />
Give them time. What's important is that the CLA game fair gets more visitors than the Glastonbury Festival and now it is on its way to getting a tiny percentage of the airtime too. Well done the BBC!Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-23208619814970996392015-06-23T09:43:00.001-07:002015-06-23T09:43:12.594-07:00What your YouTube channel should do when it leaves an MCNYou want to get your channel back on its feet and earning money as soon as you can (we have done it with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/fieldsportschannel" target="_blank">our channel</a>). Here is what to do:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>You need to reapply to be a YouTube partner which it will quickly prompt you to do when you visit your <a href="https://www.youtube.com/my_videos?o=U" target="_blank">video manager</a>.</li>
</ul>
<br /><ul>
<li>You need to link your Adsense to your channel (so that you can be paid). Go <a href="https://www.youtube.com/account_monetization" target="_blank">here</a> and follow the instructions. If you don't have an Adsense account (same login and password as your YouTube account) it will show you how to get one. <i>Newbies beware! Adwords is how you buy advertising from Google, Adsense is how Google pays you to run their ads next to your content</i>. </li>
</ul>
<br /><ul>
<li>You need to check that all your films are monetised. The dollar symbol <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirgsSuR6r7JrpMkjDgdodn9hOqyLDKKkgIhCCeNbVEWJxNBdiTJdsO_a1jpdf_OEz4luXb2pLvy5ULUYw80cIKReMQWbpVlz8Fp0fcYph-P3Q6Vxgs3L_fyGC8LtYZZbhQ5brURMgKqN9O/s1600/dollars.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirgsSuR6r7JrpMkjDgdodn9hOqyLDKKkgIhCCeNbVEWJxNBdiTJdsO_a1jpdf_OEz4luXb2pLvy5ULUYw80cIKReMQWbpVlz8Fp0fcYph-P3Q6Vxgs3L_fyGC8LtYZZbhQ5brURMgKqN9O/s1600/dollars.gif" /></a>next to them in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/my_videos?o=U" target="_blank">Video Manager</a> needs to be green not grey.</li>
</ul>
<br /><ul>
<li>We have more than 2,000 films and at first it looks like you can only do 30 at a time, page by page. After I did five pages, however, it gave me the option to do the whole lot at once using <a href="https://www.youtube.com/my_videos?o=U&ls=notmonetized&vmo=notrevshare&pi=8" target="_blank">this link</a> which may work for you. The magic words you are looking for in a message at the top of the screen are "All 30 videos on this age are selected. Select all your videos."</li>
</ul>
<br /><ul>
<li>You will notice that some of the stuff the MCN did for you has been deleted. For example, we were enabled to do YouTube Shows. That was taken away from us when we split from our MCN. Get over it.</li>
</ul>
<br /><ul>
<li><b>Why did we leave our MCN?</b></li>
</ul>
<br />
Our MCN, Rightster, was good for us. They were helpful and they paid promptly. We have started selling our own preroll packages to advertisers, so it was time for us to go and set up our own MCN.<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><b>How do we set up our own MCN?</b></li>
</ul>
<br />
Watch your Google+ page. Eventually, a link will appear in a corner asking if you want to... there's no applying for it.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
Hope this helps!</div>
Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-56741304774202411442015-05-28T02:16:00.001-07:002015-05-28T02:16:25.846-07:00The ASA is still gibbering under the table<p dir="ltr">The ASA has made its first tentative moves against YouTube. After spending the last ten years hoping the YouTube problem would go away, it has cracked down on sponsored content on YouTube. </p>
<p dir="ltr">YouTube video featuring vlogger Ruth Crilly giving tutorials about makeup has been banned by the advertising watchdog for not making clear it was sponsored by Max Factor. The video appeared on the Beauty Recommended YouTube channel which is run by Procter & Gamble-owned cosmetics brand Max Factor.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Characteristically, the ASA aimed its attack on P&G not Google. And they know that if they had gone for Ruth, a YouTuber, she would have said no.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The ASA can now go back under the table and resume gibbering, knowing that that was a job well done.</p>
Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-91725210986690839662015-02-23T09:12:00.000-08:002015-02-23T09:14:46.965-08:00Small business and HMRC: the logins and passwords you need to knowThe UK Government makes a great deal of the new 'simplified' tax system for small businesses. If you want to obey the law and pay your taxes online, however, we at Fieldsports Television Ltd have discovered that you need 50 special codes, passwords, names, addresses, personal details and URLs. Some you will know. Most, however, are issued by an HMRC office which can be anywhere in the country. The game is for you to work out which that office is, what its phone number is, and which codes you need to find before they can release the code you are looking for. To make it more entertaining for the tax officers, you will find that, like the staircases at Hogwarts, HMRC moves things around overnight.<br />
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If you are thinking of starting a business in the UK, here is a short guide to what you need, in the order in which we got ours:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Your Government Gateway user ID: a 12-digit number you get from HMRC, sometimes written as one long number, sometimes in groups of four digits with a space between. It is worth having this and your password somewhere easily to hand because the HMRC website logs you out every few minutes and deletes your information, especially irritating when you have spent time filling in a form that requires lots of calculations</li>
<li>Your personal Government Gateway ID: a 12 digit number, usually written in groups of four digits</li>
<li>Your BillPay User number: possibly your two initials followed by six digits</li>
<li>Your company VAT certificate issue date</li>
<li>Your application date to join the VAT Flat Rate scheme </li>
<li>Your acceptance date for joining the VAT Flat Rate scheme </li>
<li>Your VAT flat rate: a percentage</li>
<li>Your VAT periods: usually three months at a time</li>
<li>Your Corporation Tax Reference: a 10-digit number sometimes written as 10 digits straight, sometimes in groups of five digits prefixed with a three digit number and a slash. We got this from CT Operations on 020 8633
4500. They will try to give you just the ten-digit number - don't let them! This is a trick. Get the three-digit prefix as well.</li>
<li>Your Corporation Tax long period suffix code: ours is a five-digit number starting and ending with the letter A</li>
<li>Your Corporation Tax short period code: ours is a five-digit number starting and ending with the letter A </li>
<li>Your Employers PAYE Reference: a three-digit number followed by a slash, two letters and then another five-digit number. We got ours from 08457143143, hold to end of
menu, then press 6</li>
<li>Your Accounts Office Reference: a three-digit number followed by a slash, two letters and then another eight-digit number. We got ours from 08457143143, hold to end of menu, then press 6 . This reference
seems to be for PAYE, on the basis we got it from the same place as the PAYE information. Some HMRC offices only deal with their own taxes, some with groups of taxes</li>
<li>HMRC’s bank account which claims to be in Shipley of all places but is actually held in London: account name HMRC Shipley;
Account number 12001020; Sort code 083210; Address Citi, Citigroup Centre,
Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5LB. There is another bank account which claims to be in Cumbernauld. Make sure that whatever you pay goes to exactly the right bank account with exactly the right reference, otherwise HMRC gets to keep the money and ask for it again. For example, payments to PAYE require a different reference number for each month you make a payment, and you cannot make more than one month's payment in a single transaction. Again, any deviation from this and they will take your money and demand it again. </li>
<li>Your Corporation tax code, which will be posted to you, once you have applied for it: ours is two letters, a number, four letters, two numbers and another three letters</li>
<li>Your PAYE activation code, which will be posted to you, once you have applied for it: ours is two letters, a number, two letters, two numbers, a letter a number, another letter, and two numbers</li>
<li>Your VAT Registration Number (also called VAT Number): a nine-digit number</li>
<li>Your VAT Service User Number: a six-digit number</li>
<li>Your date of registration for VAT (also called Effective date of
Reg): we got this from from VAT Online Services Helpdesk 0845 010 8500</li>
<li>The final month of your last submitted VAT return: we got this from VAT Online
Services Helpdesk 0845 010 8500</li>
<li>Your Box 5 figure on your last VAT return submitted. we got this from VAT Online
Services Helpdesk 0845 010 8500</li>
<li>Your company file date</li>
<li>Your 'Event Date': we write this as 'N/A' because we don't know what it can mean</li>
<li>Your branch number: this is a funny one. If you don't have any branches and an HMRC online form asks for a branch number, you have to write three zeroes '000' or your form will be turned down and you have to start again</li>
<li>Your application submission number to join PROOF: a three-digit number, a dash and then another six-digit number</li>
<li>Your PROOF authentication code: ours is two letters, a number then three letters</li>
<li>Your PROOF security code: ours is a number, two letters, two numbers, a letter and then another two numbers</li>
<li>Your company Number, also known as your Companies House Registration Number (CRN): an eight-digit number - sometimes you need to drop the first zero - it depends on the form - and the form will never tell you whether it accepts your number with or without the first zero. </li>
<li>Your incorporation date (i.e. when Companies House told you that you had become a company). Some of this you can get from the Corporation Tax registration helpdesk 0845 6055999</li>
<li>Your MCOL customer number (if you need to make any small claims): two letters and then ten digits</li>
<li>All companies’ VAT numbers that you deal with in the EU - but only in the EU</li>
<li>Your ECSL/ESL (same thing) secret code, which they will post you in a letter like a National Lottery scratchcard. This will not cost you any money but there is (of course) a £500 on-the-spot fine if you forget to get it</li>
</ol>
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Here are the other logins you will need but, which, happily, you already know or can find out or make up:<br />
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<ol>
<li>HMRC login - your email address</li>
<li>HMRC password - you get to make this up</li>
<li>Your and your employees' National Insurance numbers: two letters, six digits and a letter </li>
<li>Your passport number</li>
<li>Your driving licence number </li>
<li>Your first school</li>
<li>Your last school</li>
<li>A memorable place </li>
<li>A memorable date </li>
<li>A memorable name</li>
<li>Your mother's maiden name: </li>
<li>Your bank account number and sort code</li>
<li>Your postcode</li>
<li>Your company name</li>
<li>Your Companies House login: your email address</li>
<li>Your employees' birthdays</li>
</ol>
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We have spent weeks of work finding out all of this. I hope it is useful.</div>
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<div>
Failure to have this information leads to fines. They ring you up when they want to fine you, tell you that you are to be fined, how much and you have to pay it there and then by credit card. Our biggest fine was £1750.</div>
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I wrote to my MP about HMRC's service. He referred my letter to HMRC who told my MP not to worry, that the online tax system is simple.Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-5330976560325663362015-02-21T02:00:00.001-08:002015-02-21T02:10:12.053-08:00China time: goats are good<p dir="ltr">We have done it with subscribers. Broadcasting in English, fronted by the English, our Youku subscribers have now overtaken our 70,000 YouTube subscribers. It took 18 months to get to 70,000 on Youku compared to 68 months on YouTube. Draw your own conclusions about crowded platforms.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Crucially, revenue from Youku is close to revenue from YouTube and one month exceeded it. </p>
<p dir="ltr">We are on YouTube because it offers the biggest and best platform for what we do. Our audience now splits into three: core fans, passing trade on YouTube and passing trade on Youku. Core fans don't mind on which platform we use.</p>
<p dir="ltr">It's the year of the goat. <a href="http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODk3MDQ1MjMy.html">Here's my new year's message - for Youku not YouTube: 【视频:新年快乐】http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODk3MDQ1MjMy.html(来自于优酷安卓客户端)</a> </p>
Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-26612253788215574312015-01-22T23:24:00.002-08:002015-01-22T23:24:31.679-08:00Found myself<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://40.media.tumblr.com/e208b84904f9a2dfc4d3d956d933112c/tumblr_nieljovP8I1u1hvc9o1_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://40.media.tumblr.com/e208b84904f9a2dfc4d3d956d933112c/tumblr_nieljovP8I1u1hvc9o1_1280.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
Oh lawks I just found myself. Illustrator Tony Ruth's Scarry-style look at Silicon Valley applies to all of us who sell the web. Visit <a href="http://welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com/">welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com/</a>Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-180634392611020882015-01-03T08:41:00.000-08:002015-01-03T08:41:44.505-08:00Online Apps for a Perfect Small BusinessTo run a YouTube channel, you need dedicated staff who can work from home. To run a business where everyone works from home (in our case Hawkhurst-Taunton-Cambridge-Shanghai), you need great web services to look after the business end of the operation: invoicing, email marketing, CRM, advertising and the rest.<br />
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A friend who runs a small company asked what online software packages we use. This is a list of them. For each one we chose, we looked closely at what else is on offer. Here they are with their pros and cons.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
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<h2>
Invoicing</h2>
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<a href="http://invoice.zoho.com/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="new"><img border="0" src="http://css.zohostatic.com/invoice/Jan_02_2015_2_21678//zbooks/assets/images/logo-invoice.png" height="35" width="200" /></a></div>
<a href="http://invoice.zoho.com/" target="new">Zoho Invoice</a> is excellent. It’s a straightforward WYSIWYG invoicing programme, and we occasionally dazzle our accountant or our bank with our forecasting or accounts reporting abilities using its reports module.<br />
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<h2>
Customer Relationship Management</h2>
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<a href="http://crm.zoho.com/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://www.zoho.com/partner/crm/images/zoho-crm-logo.jpg" height="35" width="200" /></a></div>
<a href="http://crm.zoho.com/" target="_blank">Zoho CRM</a> is where we store info about contact with potential advertisers/sponsors. This is where every company starts to be different, but Zoho CRM serves our needs well enough. It has good reporting modules and a system of feeds, so I can watch everyone else’s activities and try to make sense of it.<br />
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<a href="http://mail.zoho.com/biz/index.do" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="41" src="https://css.zohostatic.com/zmail/v288/biz/img/zmaillogo.png" width="200" /></a></div>
There are lots of other ‘apps’ in the Zoho suite which we don’t use and I feel a nagging guilt that maybe we ought to. One we use occasionally is <a href="http://mail.zoho.com/biz/index.do" target="_blank">ZohoMail</a>, which now allows you to mail people directly from Zoho CRM and provides a ‘coverall’ environment for switching between the Zoho apps we do use. We should do more with this but we don’t. We spend so much of the time offline, on the road and working with our mobile phones, like the Google suite of programmes, ZohoMail works best when it is attached to a 15Mb pipe. I haven’t found one of those where we work in the UK countryside yet.<br />
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<h2>
Audience marketing</h2>
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<a href="http://www.constantcontact.com/features/signup.jsp?rc=940125854&sru=1104746721183&fc=f&cc=RAF-REFLINK&pn=ROVING" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://static.ctctcdn.com/lp/images/standard/bv2/site/full-site/CTCT_horizontal_logo.png" height="33" width="200" /></a><span style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></span></div>
<a href="http://www.constantcontact.com/features/signup.jsp?rc=940125854&sru=1104746721183&fc=f&cc=RAF-REFLINK&pn=ROVING" target="_blank">ConstantContact</a> has been a wonderful help. It is consensual email marketing, so every email we send to our audience list starts with a challenge to ‘unsubscribe if you don’t want to receive these emails’. Because of that, they tend not to, and I think they feel more engaged as a result. It is strict on permissions. I once uploaded the contents of my address book to ConstantContact which resulted in five spam returns in the next mail-out. I got a call from what sounded like a schoolma’am in Wisconsin who ticked me off. I promised not to do it again. They hold marketing seminars in the UK as well as where they come from in America. Unfortunately, they do not support cookie retargeting, but there are apps you can add on to ConstantContact that do. You will find them all listed <a href="http://marketplace.constantcontact.com/" target="_blank">here</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.gochime.com/" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;" target="_blank"><img alt="http://www.gochime.com" border="0" src="http://www.gochime.com/images/clientregistration/logo.png" height="73" width="200" /></a><br />
For retargeting non-opens of our emails, we use <a href="http://www.gochime.com/" target="_blank">GoChime</a><br />
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<h2>
Sync CRM with audience marketing</h2>
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<a href="http://marketplace.constantcontact.com/Listing/applications/cazoomi/PML-2864" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://www.cazoomi.com/wp-content/themes/cazoomi/images/logo.png" height="43" width="200" /></a></div>
We use the <a href="http://marketplace.constantcontact.com/Listing/applications/cazoomi/PML-2864" target="_blank">Cazoomi</a> app to sync our Zoho CRM with our email server, ConstantContact.<br />
Cazoomi, is OK – it syncs with its own folder in ConstantContact. We have several folders, including viewers, customers, press and different lists we handle for our customers. We have to manually sync each address in the Cazoomi folder with our other Constant Contact folders.<br />
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<h2>
Audience marketing</h2>
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<a href="http://www.perfectaudience.com/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: black;"><img border="0" src="http://www.perfectaudience.com/assets/logo_pa_marin.png" height="22" width="200" /></span></a><span style="background-color: black;"></span></div>
We want to reach two kinds of viewers – those who have heard of us and those who haven’t. We use word-of-mouth (Facebook, Twitter etc) for those who haven’t heard of us and concentrate instead on those who have heard of us. <a href="http://www.perfectaudience.com/" target="_blank">PerfectAudience</a> handles the bulk of our advertising. It is superb – a great value retargeting platform. We just have to make sure that our campaigns are not too in-your-face. There is no point telling everyone how wonderful FieldsportsChannel is – we want our viewers to work that out for themselves. Perfect Audience’s sale to Marin seems to be a positive too. They took the trouble to ring me up and introduce themselves.We spend about US$80 a month on our account with ConstantContact.<br />
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<h2>
Social Media</h2>
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<span style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><a href="http://hootsuite.com/" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://hootsuite.com/var/hootsuite/storage/images/media/images/media-kit/branding/logo-light-backgrounds/53206-2-eng-US/logo-light-backgrounds.png" height="118" width="200" /></a></span></div>
<a href="http://hootsuite.com/" target="_blank">Hootsuite</a> is a work of genius. It allows you to hit lots of Facebook groups at once, multiple Twitter accounts, and it is worth joining the Hootsuite University to find out what else it can do. It costs a few dollars a month.<br />
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<a href="http://app.tubularlabs.com/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://tubularlabs.com/assets/img/logo.svg" height="41" width="200" /></a><span style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></span></div>
<a href="http://app.tubularlabs.com/" target="_blank">Tubular</a> is a fast way to find influencers on YouTube – people who are commenting on your channel or tweeting your films’ URLs who will reach a lot of people. And a good Tweet or plug from another channel is the secret of success on YouTube. Good though it is, Facebook doesn’t come close.<br />
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<a href="http://rootjazz.com/tumblingjazz/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://rootjazz.com/tumblingjazz/images/tumblr-bot-logo.png" height="200" width="200" /></a><span style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></span></div>
<a href="http://rootjazz.com/tumblingjazz/" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://rootjazz.com/tumblingjazz/" target="_blank">TumblingJazz</a> is, as it says on the tin, the ultimate Tumblr bot. It’s a desktop programme and there always seems to be a bit more anti-virus activity after I install a new update but nothing that AVG can’t cope with.<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/goog_1513876170" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://d3rnbxvnd0hlox.cloudfront.net/assets/r2012/ifttt_logo_83-65d592184e38b0b79b241d0a436b0ca1.svg" height="96" width="200" /></a><span style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></span></div>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/goog_1513876170"><br /></a>
<a href="http://ifttt.com/">IFTTT.com</a> is brilliant. We have an account with such a web of recipes cross-posting Facebook to Wordpress and Twitter to Tumblr that I sometimes have to switch them all off and start again. You have to get your head round RSS feeds, but if you don’t do that, then you are going nowehere with any of these apps.<br />
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<h2>
Video editing</h2>
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<a href="http://www.avid.com/US/products/media-composer" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://ir.avid.com/common/alerts/AVID/default/logo.gif" height="80" width="200" /></a></div>
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This is least important to us. There are several good editing programmes. David, who does most of the filming and editing, uses <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/products/media-composer" target="_blank">AVID Composer</a> <br />
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<a href="http://www.adobe.com/CreativeCloud" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2014/07/Tad_CCLogo.png" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
I use <a href="http://www.adobe.com/CreativeCloud" target="_blank">Adobe CC</a> and pay a £50/month subscription for it, which gives me Photoshop, Bridge (very useful as an SEO tool and often ignored), InDesign, AfterEffects, Dreamweaver and the rest. One day before I retire I will learn the animation programmes.<br />
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<a href="http://www.apple.com/uk/final-cut-pro/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: black;"><img border="0" src="http://www.apple.com/euro/final-cut-pro/a/generic/images/product_title_light.png" height="29" width="200" /></span></a><span style="background-color: black;"></span></div>
<br />
And of course many of our freelancers use <a href="http://www.apple.com/uk/final-cut-pro/" target="_blank">FinalCutPro</a><br />
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That's it. The complete package for running a YouTube channel. Now you just have to learn to use this stuff...<br />
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<br />Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-23661393150366088052014-07-27T09:04:00.001-07:002014-07-27T09:04:44.472-07:00Manifesto for a better YouTube<p dir="ltr">These are our demands:</p>
<p dir="ltr">Everyone is their own MCN<br>
MCNs change hands for $100s of millions, yet their business model hangs by a thread. The only thing they do that nobody else can do is sell ads on to specific channels. Everything else they offer, like magical lines in to YouTube management is flimflam. So you want to be seen exclusively by the LisaNova audience? you place your ad through Maker/Disney. (1) This is not the democratisation of content+cash we YouTubers signed up for and (2) we at Fieldsports Channel - prevented from placing ads on our own channel - have to resort to product placement within our films to place the $350,000 of annual adspend that comes our way. We would like to spend it on YouTube but we can't. Wake up YouTube - we could make you rich!</p>
<p dir="ltr">Content ID matches for everyone<br>
Stop the Content ID civil war on YouTube, and use this software to crack down on other video sites that rip off honest YouTubers' films. Yeah - talking to you MailOnline and LiveLeak. What bugs us at Fieldsports Channel is that MailOnline, for example, will rip off a film, run their own ads in front of it and credit it YouTube / FieldsportsChannel. As a former magazine editor, I know that the advantage of a double credit is when one side rings up to complain, you say you got permission from the other. Well, YouTube, stand up for us. You trawl these websites with your content ID match software and you say to them: 'Either produce the written permission from the YouTube channel concerned, or take down the film, or, best of all, swap it for a film embedded from YouTube'. Last time I had to ring MailOnline to ask politely to swap their version of my film for my version of my film, the Mail wonk got aggressive and said: 'Are you threatening us?'. No - you are bullying us.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Everyone can have an EPG<br>
YouTube is king of VOD but in a way which denies that scheduled programming takes place. The market for VOD is driven by lean-forward, mouth-shut, clicky-click viewers. Scheduled programme viewers come home from work, slump on to sofas, their mouths open, and switch on the TV as a kind of voluntary tinnitus. A lot of them do this with terrestrial and satellite TV who could be watching YouTube if they thought they could get scheduled programmes there. Why doesn't YouTube introduce an EPG function for playlists? As well as being available as VOD, playlists play on a loop, with a TV guide style list of what's coming up and when, taking the decision of what to watch and when out of the hands of people who would rather not make those decisions.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Look after the little guy<br>
YouTube has become a sharkpool of channels that have sophisticated alarm systems for trending films. Anyone whose video races up to a few thousand views in a few minutes gets the call: sell your film to us for $150. Who are they to trust? The nice man on the phone or the faceless black, white and red organisation? So, YouTube, celebrate these trending films, and remind them that they will make more money from YouTube. And stop your silly habit of making one channel the only YouTube search result on Google Search. Get those Googlers to develop a lighter touch about what's trending on YouTube.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Playlists - sort them out<br>
Here's our thing: Fieldsports Channel puts out three long-form magazine programmes a week, each consisting of several short items. We used to upload them as standalone long-form films (15-40 minutes), then reupload the individual items as short-form standalones (1-15 minutes). That means we uploaded all our films twice. And due to what passes for broadband in the UK, it took us 100 hours of not going out to upload the long-form films alone. Now we upload everything as shortform, including the links between the items, and bundle the items together as a playlist to make a programme - see http://bit.ly/fieldsportsbritain243 - but... playlists fall a long way short of YouTube's promise. Some of our viewers bought 'smart' TVs just to watch our programmes, they tell us. Playlists don't work on smart TVs. A lot of our viewers watch us on iPhones and iPads. We lost the iPhone viewers overnight and the iPad viewers tell us they are only comfortable watching the playlist when it's embedded in a website. And why does a playlist need to buffer between items? Is it such a surprise to YouTube that someone watching one item on a playlist will want to watch the next item seamlessly? Doh!</p>
<p dir="ltr">Flagging - keep it proportional<br>
Nobody knows how many flags a video needs before YouTube age-restricts it. But we at Fieldsports Channel know it is definitely a number and not a percentage of a film's likes. Here's how we know. Our films are about hunting, shooting and fishing. Not everyone like us for it. Read the comments - we get about a dozen death threats a month. Most of our viewers, however, do like what we do. You can tell by the number of likes we get compared to the number of dislikes. Pro-hunting feeling is beating anti-hunting feeling on our channel by a factor of five. Sadly, any of our films that reaches a million views will - guaranteed - be age restricted because of the number of flags it has received. Age restriction kills a film's views. That means the maximum any of our films can earn is $2,000. If it weren't for product placement, that would have seriously limiting effect on what filming we could do. Make flags into a percentage of likes, YouTube. It will stop you being in the illogical position of waiting for a film to be seen by a million children before you decide children can't see it.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Life is more than 12 topics<br>
YouTube splits the world into just a few subjects. Fieldsports Channel is a hunting/fishing channel. We are one of more than 500 channels devoted to hunting, fishing and shooting sports, generating 100s of millions of views a month between us. Yet we sit uncomfortably as a Sports channel next to weird channels about wrestling and the high jump. Sometimes we make a break for it and list our films as Pets & Wildlife, but then we get surrounded by cats and hamsters. Stop being hidebound by oldfashioned TV industry ideas about what people watch, YouTube. Take your inspiration from the specialist consumer magazine industry, which is much better at carving up the world into interests and other demographics. If you are going to pigeonhole special interests, do something clever like match the popular subreddits.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Fake views<br>
Clamp down on this hard. Every few months, someone from Mountain View goes public and says that Something Must Be Done about Virool, viewbots and clickfarms. Well, do it. We're tired of waiting.</p>
<p dir="ltr">YouTube Pay / YouTube Shows<br>
Great ideas. What went wrong? Don't get me started.</p>
<p dir="ltr">All of this adds up to one slogan: 'YouTube democracy'. YouTube is a wonderful platform - we YouTubers are completely cool about the money it makes for Google. But it only works because everyone gets the views and the revenue share they deserve. </p>
Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0Bondo, Switzerland, Bondo, Switzerland46.33539 9.554165tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-65066275316484499862014-07-21T13:24:00.001-07:002014-07-21T13:24:14.658-07:00YouTube Help - FAQs<img src="http://nebula.wsimg.com/1b8437b7dd920e94a2456f01db8322a0?AccessKeyId=AF3BF6027D826D17BFDA&disposition=0&alloworigin=1" />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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These are the three YouTube questions I get asked most frequently (with answers):</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>How do I find sponsors for my YouTube channel?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Go out and look for them. If your channel is getting less
than 100,000 views a month, you will need to do a production deal on a
day-rate. Film production companies charge around US$1,000-£1,000 per person
per day, depending on the size of the film. Over a million views a month and you
can start charging for audience too, in the price range $15-£50 per thousand
views. You already believe in your channel. Now get good at selling.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>How do I get more views?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For audience, go to any of the big channels in your sector and
ask if you can do a collaboration with them. You film them at the same time as
they film you. You do an annotation to their channel -
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/yt/playbook/en-GB/annotations.html">http://www.youtube.com/yt/playbook/en-GB/annotations.html</a> - and they do one to
you. That's the fastest free way to audience. It took us two years to get
to a million views a month. These days I think it would take us three or
four years, because there is so much more competition. PS. Read the whole of
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/yt/playbook/">http://www.youtube.com/yt/playbook/</a> - it's excellent. Do not use Virool or
anyone like that. YouTube will close you down.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>Got any editing tips?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sharpen up your film editing with:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Music. Free copyright-free tracks at <a href="http://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music">http://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music</a><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
GFX. Buy or create a nice preroll graphic that you can use
on all your films. We use <a href="http://www.bearleft.tv/">http://www.bearleft.tv</a>
and <a href="http://www.icarley.co.uk/">http://www.icarley.co.uk</a> - prices
start at £250.<o:p></o:p></div>
Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-46109217039878713832014-07-04T03:21:00.001-07:002018-08-24T07:22:38.271-07:00Bloody Daily Mail<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/sitelogos/logo_mol.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/sitelogos/logo_mol.gif" height="60" width="320"></a></div>
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"Are you threatening us?"</div>
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<br /></div>
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"Of course not you moron." </div>
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<br /></div>
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That's what he would have heard me say if I hadn't instead said "Of course not". Yet again I have had to ring up the Daily Mail's web pirates MailOnline to ask them to take down a YouTube video they ripped off from our channel. </div>
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You have to hand it to them for their world domination of news. 56.1 million monthly uniques, according to their <a href="http://www.mailconnected.co.uk/uploads/files/MailOnline-Summary.pdf" target="_blank">latest figures</a>. That's about twenty times what we get. However, they are getting there by stealing and lying.</div>
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<br /></div>
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They used to get in touch and ask if they could use a clip from a YouTube video we put up, or even if they could embed the video. In 2013, they started sending a peremptory email to our associated Gmail account (which we don't use much) saying, basically, 'We want to use one of your films, hope that's OK' and then they would use it. Now I have to read MailOnline to make sure one of our videos isn't up there, earning them preroll advertising money they are not paying to us.</div>
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<br /></div>
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And then they get arsy when you hack into the MailOnline telephone system and find the right person to ask them to take down the video. "Are you threatening us?" - I mean, really.</div>
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Other YouTubers I talk to are equally fed up. What would be wonderful would be for YouTube to extend its Content ID service beyond YouTube, so it polices MailOnline and other pirate video sites. Yes LiveLeak, I'm talking to you. </div>
<br />
In the meantime, I console myself with the words of comedian Hugh Laurie: "I read the Daily Mail. I prefer it to a newspaper."Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-29575229296928232632014-06-29T10:05:00.001-07:002014-06-29T22:46:48.007-07:00New YouTube Creator app - yay!<div dir="ltr">
<img src="http://img.talkandroid.com/uploads/2014/06/youtube_creator_studio-450x450.png" />
</div>
<div dir="ltr">
<b>Before using it... </b><br />
About time! I've been looking for something like this for five years. I can manage comments on it while on the move (there's a lot <u>of</u> 'on the move' at Fieldsports Channel) and - I haven't used it yet - I hope it includes a big friendly video manager. Full review to follow. In the meantime, here's the link to the Android app store <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.youtube.creator">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.youtube.creator</a><br />
<br />
<b>After using it... </b><br />
Very good. I will give it four out of five stars. It lets you deal with comments while you are on the bus, it gives a graphic overview of your analytics that you can flash at potential sponsors.<br />
<br />
<b>Anything wrong with it? </b><br />
Yes. The Edit Video function does not work on my phone - a Samsung Galaxy Mega. I hope that, when it does work, I will find it allows scheduling.<br />
<br />
<b>How to improve it? </b><br />
When I rule the world - or at least YouTube - a future browser-based video manager will include mass editors for preview images, tags, titles and descriptions. That is not the app's function. It needs to remain lightweight and for making tweaks to titles and descriptions, replying to comments and basking in the warm glow of analytics. As well as fixing the bugs, on the Videos tab, I want to see:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>More ways to sort videos than just Recent Uploads and Popular Uploads. I would like to see Unlisted and Private there too. </li>
<li>Comments passing approved spam back into the Published folder. This is the same fault that the new <a href="http://www.youtube.com/comments">http://www.youtube.com/comments</a> page has - you can approve a comment that's sitting in the spam folder, and it will go live, but it won't appear in the approved folder, so you can't then reply to it or thumbs it up or down. </li>
</ul>
Nice work YouTube.<br />
<br /></div>
Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-38745023142859122962014-06-27T23:12:00.001-07:002014-06-29T22:43:11.891-07:00YouTube's big innovation week<div dir="ltr">
At Apple, they wait months, they start the drum roll, they light the fireworks and they reveal a new iThing that looks a lot like the last iThing but is slightly slimmer and faster.<br />
There's a jolly and enthusiastic way innovations tumble out of YouTube. It's more like Smurfland. But are the <u>ideas</u> relevant to the common creator?<br />
60fps films?... nice one, a bit jerky, will appeal to slow-mo guys<br />
Tip jar?... so you are saying that the sweary, unwashed, clump of humanity we are pleased to call our audience is kind and giving too? I hope it works but I'd feel safer with Kickstarter.<br />
The good thing about YouTube enthusiasm is that, backed by cash, it carries them through. It's more likely I am wrong about the initiatives than they are.</div>
<div dir="ltr">
Full story here<br /><a href="http://tpt.to/a4zZFwt" target="_blank">http://tpt.to/a4zZFwt</a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisv-FryJmJR3v1ebH3m4eF0SI3h4ZGarsEs8yJwKXtZlFR-Cdgm5YujLs-dIUU9OZIXGsg7QUyZKTlhDiFlriSFI3YthwWPzAAAkW5SRwjOdUH0hknTggA-uG8YiLkRCBMyioB2VrdkGyc/s1600/christin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisv-FryJmJR3v1ebH3m4eF0SI3h4ZGarsEs8yJwKXtZlFR-Cdgm5YujLs-dIUU9OZIXGsg7QUyZKTlhDiFlriSFI3YthwWPzAAAkW5SRwjOdUH0hknTggA-uG8YiLkRCBMyioB2VrdkGyc/s640/christin.jpg" /> </a> </div>
Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-47417979886083177082013-11-09T01:42:00.000-08:002013-11-09T09:14:19.547-08:00The chamber of horrors that is #YouTubeShows<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.hrp.org.uk/Images/TOL_Main.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="229" src="http://www.hrp.org.uk/Images/TOL_Main.jpg" width="320"></a></div>
<br>
YouTube is like the Tower of London. It’s a hotchpotch of structures, put up with successive king’s ransoms, and overall gleamingly impressive and attractive. But like the Tower of London, you can open doors on horror chambers.<br>
<br>
One of these is YouTubeShows. I suppose only a few people in the world know in which dark period YouTubeShows was conceived. If this were the Lord of the Rings, I would employ a party of dwarves to sing about it. By the time YouTubeShows reached me, it was a half-formed wish to bring the UK terrestrial network into YouTube. The BBC, Channel4 and Channel Five put their programmes out as shows, with vanity addresses starting http://www.youtube.com/show/...<br>
<br>
That suited us at <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/fieldsportschannel" target="_blank">Fieldsports Channel</a>. We like our programmes to be shows for lots of reasons.<br>
<br>
We have 206 episodes of our flagship programme <a href="http://www.youtube.com/show/fieldsportsbritain" target="_blank">Fieldsports Britain</a>. YouTube playlists are limited to 200 films. Shows are unlimited.<br>
<br>
Become enabled for YouTubeShows and you get a nice shiny new ‘Shows’ tab in Video Manager, where you can add new shows, give them their own artwork, and create identities for stuff you are doing within your channel. We cover subjects as diverse as clay pigeon shooting and flyfishing. YouTubeShows allows us to separate out our films in a way the playlists, with their one-size-fits-all artwork, cannot.<br>
<br>
So what went wrong with Shows for YouTube?<br>
<br>
Firstly, the TV shows from the terrestrials turned out to be not as popular as the networks, Neilson and Barb have led us to believe over the years. It must have been crucifyingly embarrassing for UK TV star Sarah Beeny to see her shows on YouTube averaging just double-digit views.<br>
<br>
Instead of abandoning the networks, YouTube went on the offensive. If the YouTube algorithm is a bit perplexing in the mainstream part of the site, it turns cartwheels out in YouTubeShows. Go to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/YouTubeShowsGB">http://www.youtube.com/user/YouTubeShowsGB</a> and try it out.<br>
<br>
FieldsportsBritain is listed in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/channel/SBCw3Fkt1AFIU" target="_blank">Sports</a> and it averages 30,000 views an episode. However, ‘Top Selling’ is Fox’s series The League, which is too coy to show its viewcounts. The League’s recent episodes have each achieved a stunning 0 likes and 0 dislikes, which gives you a clue.<br>
<br>
We are a weekly show, 7pm UK time every Wednesday. The ‘Latest’ Sports Shows list films going back six months, most of them from Channel4, the sole survivor of the UK terrestrial networks on YouTube. They do not list us.<br>
<br>
The next thing to go wrong was YouTube’s next move. YouTube followed the Richard III protocol and simply walled up the princes in the Tower, hoping nobody would go and look for them. Shows are hard to find and I don’t think I have ever seen them promoted out in the wider YouTube.<br>
<br>
In the latest version of YouTubeShows, there are lots of references to ‘free’ episodes, which makes me think that there is a vague idea in Googleland that YouTubeShows could become the mainstay of the YouTube Pay channels – a kind of halfway house to what I have no doubt will be the superbly successful <a href="http://youtube.com/movies">YouTube.com/movies</a>. But there seems to be no appetite for that from either viewers or channels.<br>
<br>
As a YouTubeShows' supporter, I was sad when I went to apply for a new show we are launching on our channel and found that YouTubeShows had been discontinued. We plug our show pages in all our social media and most YouTube film descriptions. We believe in YouTubeShows, for all its faults.<br>
<br>
According to YouTube on <a href="http://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1730903">http://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1730903</a>, ‘We are in the process of more deeply integrating the Shows feature with other parts of YouTube, such as channels and playlists. The new series playlist feature is a great way to organise your episodic content moving forward.’<br>
<br>
The YouTube wonk who wrote that believes saying something is great makes it great. No it doesn’t. I have started to see more and more of this kind of behaviour from YouTube. Mendacity is a first step to evil, which would be trite if it were not for Google’s promise about evil..<br>
<br>
For as long as it lasts, you can view our show page at <a href="http://www.youtube.com/show/fieldsportsbritain">http://www.youtube.com/show/fieldsportsbritain</a>. It’s a bit wobbly, in keeping with the spirit of YouTubeShows. It doesn’t always list the latest episode at the top. It chooses which others to list on a more random basis than we are used to even from YouTube. Its view-counters seem to have a mind of their own, clocking only a handful of the our viewers and usually maxing at 301.<div><br>
I’m not complaining. If I were complaining, I’d be writing this on the YouTube Partner Forum, which itself can feel like shrieking in a dungeon.<br>
<br>
Working in the YouTube environment is a bit like working in the Tower of London. You never know when you are going to get boiling oil poured on you. But it keeps you on your toes.<br>
<div>
<br></div>
</div>Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-88493529415732547542013-05-28T15:29:00.002-07:002013-05-28T15:42:22.480-07:00Adam Welz and wildlife snuff movies<a href="http://www.medialifemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/yukon-men.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="199" src="http://www.medialifemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/yukon-men.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small; text-align: left;">Yukon Men - <i>aired on Discovery Channel, it makes Adam angry</i></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
I enjoyed Adam Welz's <i>Guardian</i> blog piece <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/nature-up/2013/may/17/bloodthirtsty-wildlife-documentaries-reality-ethics" target="_blank">Bloodthirsty 'factual' TV shows demonise wildlife</a>. It highlights the big holes in the TV networks'
coverage of our treatment of wildlife and hunting. It ends more on questions than answers. I'd like to give the answers a go but there will be more questions.<br />
<br />
The hunting narrative is deeply engrained in
us - throughout human history, hunting stories have made compelling
listening. The format is similar to a Greek comedy: the hunter goes
out in the morning and after much tribulation brings down the beast.
It helps the drama if the animal, bird or fish is either rogue, pest
or edible. It offends Adam that Discovery Channel make so much of the rogue.<br />
<br />
You should be able to draw a fairly straight line from the cave
paintings of Lascaux to what I and my colleagues put out on
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/fieldsportschannel" target="_blank">Fieldsports Channel</a>, which includes a weekly half-hour TV show about
hunting/shooting/fishing called <a href="http://www.youtube.com/show/fieldsportsbritain" target="_blank"><i>Fieldsports Britain</i></a>. A YouTube
channel, it gets more than a million views a month, so is bigger
than one of the UK's Sky Sports channels.<br />
<br />
When it comes to coverage of hunting, I believe the mistake the BBC makes is to use the word 'cruel' in
its guidelines. Leaving aside hunting's position a long way down the
list of 'cruel' things people do every day, from driving cars, through eating fish and chips to
owning cats, this ban on 'cruelty' has led to the UK's terrestrial
broadcasters abandoning the hunting narrative. It is good news for
Fieldsports Channel because, when we want to bring in both viewers
and advertisers, it means we are kicking at an open goal. But it is
bad news for the hunting format, because films in this rising genre
can easily fall off the straight and narrow of hunting adventure and
into a seething pot of wildlife snuff movies. There are plenty of
them on YouTube, which has acted to ban some.<br />
<br />
Broadcasters don't have a settled vocabulary for how to present
hunting TV items yet. I think that is part of the reason why
National Geographic and Discovery won't reveal to Adam Welz their 'cruelty
policies'. <br />
<br />
YouTube's guidelines are woolly:<span style="background-color: #fbfbfb; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px;"></span> "Don't post videos showing bad stuff like
animal abuse, drug abuse, or bomb making". Maybe this is YouTube
acknowledging that the world has not yet come to a conclusion about
what is and what is not acceptable. <br />
<br />
Across TV-land, it's a mess. Part of the blame for this can be levelled at the
broadcasters' sports departments, which never successfully wrested
'hunting' from natural history departments and only recently
succeeded in doing so with fishing. <i>Extreme Fishing</i> was commissioned
by C5 Sport, and its audience is massive compared to the much
better-made, more worthy and beautiful Hugh Miles series <i>Catching The
Impossible</i>, commissioned by a natural history department and finally
shown on C4. Hunting programming should be a function of sports departments, not natural history units.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.martinbowler.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/john-bernard-hugh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="122" src="http://www.martinbowler.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/john-bernard-hugh.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Filming </i>Catching The Impossible</span></div>
<br />
YouTube gives us a world audience. I have found different cultures
have different views about what Fieldsports Channel does but there
are, across the world, two debates about our output which run
concurrently. The first is whether hunting is acceptable or too
'cruel' to show on television. This tends to be between a majority who favour hunting and a minority of anti-hunting activists who seek out hunting online and troll it, hack it and abuse it.<br />
<br />
The second is the debate about
whether brutality to animals is acceptable or not, and where to draw
the line on films that show gratuitous violence towards animals,
inhumane slaughter, and the abandonment of what the Americans call
'fair chase' and what we British call 'sportsmanship' that neither
adequately describe how to treat the wildlife we hunt. <br />
<br />
I am always happy to debate the first point - and that was why I
became the subject of a fox-lovers' feeding frenzy when I appeared
on the C4/More4 show <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA4nikpIfn0" target="_blank">Foxes Live</a></i> vs Brian May last year. But I think it is more
valuable to debate the second.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://i2.ytimg.com/vi/AA4nikpIfn0/mqdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://i2.ytimg.com/vi/AA4nikpIfn0/mqdefault.jpg" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>On the set at </i>Foxes Live</span></div>
<br />
So Adam, if you read this far, I expect we would disagree about much of the natural world if we met, but good work so far - now start a crusade.Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-78460094873321120772012-09-24T02:41:00.003-07:002012-09-24T02:41:49.150-07:00The YouView box - what a waste of our money<img src="http://assets.youview.com/whatson/promos/Double_carousel_free_TV_image_280612_5.png" /><br />
The big broadcasters have come together to launch the YouView box in time for Christmas. Gawdelpus what a waste it is.<br />
<br />
Connected TVs are cheaper and do more. Connected TVs start at £100 while the YouView box is £250.<br />
<br />
With the YouView box you only get access to catch-up from channels such as the BBC and ITV. With a connected TV (and most TVs sold this Christmas will be connected) you get all that plus much, much more. You can get access to services such as LoveFilm, Netflix and Hulu, and you get YouTube, the daddy of them all. You get none of that with YouView.<br />
<br />
This is a desperate attempt by the broadcasters to hang on to their viewers. More than that - it's a desperate attempt by these channels' executives to hang on to their jobs. YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Facebook and the rest show what people want to watch - and you would have seen little of it on traditional television in the last twenty years.<br />
<br />
The channels on YouView have survived because they have a monopoly. All they have to try to do is produce TV that's slightly better than the other channels on YouView (even the name is a tribute to YouTube). All that is changing.<br />
<br />
Happily, Samsung and others are advertising their connected TVs hard too. Let's hope their ads are good enough to persuade the public away from YouView.<br />
<br />
BBC and ITV executives may hope that YouView is enough of a walled garden for them to keep their jobs. It's not a garden. It's a museum for networks that will soon be extinct, whether or not they produce this protectionist rubbish, which they did mainly at licence-payers' expense.<br />
<br />
They have had a generation to waste the opportunity that television presents. Don't buy YouView and you will get better TV.Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-64545222622064246352012-03-23T03:02:00.003-07:002012-03-23T08:52:44.061-07:00Do not adjust your sets<div><p>One thing I hate is people who say, "One thing I hate," because there are of course lots of things they hate. For instance, shark attacks are hateful. <br>
Leaving sharks aside for a mo, one of the many things I hate are corporate press releases which say that so-and-so is 'excited' about such-and-such. There are usually plenty of better things to be excited about. But here at Fieldsports Channel, there is a lot to make us jiggle about in annoying way:<br>
* YouTube has accepted our flagship programme Fieldsports Britain for 'YouTube Shows'. Fieldsports Britain is now listed alongside the BBC's Top Gear and Channel 5's Fifth Gear.<br>
* Fieldsports Channel has broken through half-a-million monthly views on YouTube, making us one of the biggest hunting websites in the world. We have nearly 250,000 unique monthly viewers on YouTube, more than ten times thenumber of people who buy the popular British hunting magazine Shooting Times.<br>
* We have signed with multi channel network <a href="http://www.Base79.com">Base79.com</a>, which is chaired by former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie and counts Mr Bean, Ministry of Sound and the Football Association among its talent. We bring with us a number of YouTube's most popular hunting/shooting/fishing channels, taking monthly YouTube views in this sector to around 1 million. Our own YouTube site <a href="http://www.youtube.com/fieldsportschannel">www.youtube.com/fieldsportschannel</a> is now a hub for fieldsports. We aim to make it a must-see channel for anyone interested in our world, who plans their evening TV entertainment around YouTube. Hollywood can provide 'the big film' - we are 'the big game'.<br>
* We are about to launch our first foreign language programming, in German, French, Italian and Spanish. This is backed by a number of new overseas sponsors.<br>
* We have a raft of new main sponsors to add to a gang that includes the Countryside Alliance and Browning. We welcome Zeiss, Team Wild including Realtree, and Archant magazines.<br>
* We are launching new programmes across YouTube for Team Wild and Archant, and we are delighted that the UK hunting magazine publishers have at last woken up to YouTube. We are helping them all with content, including IPCMedia and Blaze Publishing. As the consumer press collapses, before it undoubtedly re-emerges smaller and better, YouTube beats the blog sites as top destination for its writers and its readers to go.<br>
People often ask why we don't go on to proper UK telly. Well, look at the figures. This is proper telly. The TV executive sleeping beauties from the big networks who are trying to save their jobs with 100ft-high 'walled gardens' such as YouView can only regard YouTube with envy. Over the last 60 years, BBC sport and light entertainment has successfully replaced the fireplace as the focal point in Britain's front rooms. Now it's time for us to replace the BBC. <br>
When I am thrown to the sharks for daring to say 'the one thing I hate', the last words you hear from me will be: "Go community".</p>
</div>Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-6706566866813870892011-08-12T23:58:00.000-07:002011-08-12T23:58:35.053-07:00Shooting and the new class systemShooters run the country, I'm glad to say. The British establishment is warmly pro-fieldsports. But don't take that as guaranteed. <br />
Royal backing for shooting sports is a given, you would have thought. But should we take it for granted? And does it matter these days? Or are the royals no longer important? Two events that occurred within a week of each other gave us the answers to these questions, which go to the heart of the British way of life. One was the engagement of Prince William to Kate Middleton and the other a speech given by the Duke of Edinburgh to shooters.<br />
The first question, about royal support for shooting, was answered fully by the press during the fluff that followed the royal engagement. We all know that Prince William is a keen stalker and his brother a keen game shot. The newspapers concluded and one of them even predicted that the Middleton parents’ invitation to Balmoral to go stalking sounded a note as loud as Westminster Abbey’s wedding bells. <br />
Kate will oneday be Queen Catherine and Kate is a shooter. This is important – not because her name will be taught in schools for generations to come but - because when it comes to sport shooting, the newspapers, led by the BBC, often adopt an overly-laborious way of explaining it to readers, as much as to say that shooting is against the natural order of things. Kate shoots, which is an easy shorthand that explains shooting sports to the wider public. <br />
There is a rot in the press over guns, as any of us who have worked in the shooting industry over the last 32 years will have spotted. Newspapers often take not just a consciously anti-gun stance but one which shows a cultural gulf between the chattering classes and shooters. You will notice that whenever the newspapers play their annual joke of sending their least likely young writers to try out pheasant shooting for a feature article, those writers play up to the gag by giving overblown explanations of the guns and the sport. They do this partly in order to distance themselves from it. Yet these are the same writers who can write comfortably about criminal shooting.<br />
Next - the words of Prince Philip, the thinking royal-watcher’s crumpet. On a visit to BASC’s Marford Mill headquarters, he said that the media is the second most important establishment of state. I assumed he would say the royal family is the most important. But he doesn’t - and he goes on to say that he doesn’t know whether politics is more important than media or not. That doesn’t much matter. Whether he believes it’s (1) royals, (2) media and (3) politics or (1) politics, (2) media and royals are over and above this tawdry ranking, he makes an admission that redraws British social boundaries in just a couple of sentences.<br />
What Prince Philip is talking about is who runs society in Britain and what society is. We all know what it was. In 1947, when he married Princess Elizabeth, society was class-based (as Ronnie Barker said in the 1960s, standing between Ronnie Corbett and John Cleese: “I look up to him because he is upper-class; but I look down on him because he is lower-class”) and it was run by politicians with a solid ‘establishment’ background. Establishment in those days had a lot to do with the landed aristocracy.<br />
The class system was Britain’s shariah law - it helped keep order but it had drawbacks. Between the 1980s and today, it has been replaced.<br />
Today, we have a system based on people either having privilege, comfort or discomfort. People are defined by how they live and, perhaps worryingly, what they own. <br />
Where does this leave the royals? There’s a vicious darwinism attached to being a royal. They are always at the mercy of events. So the Romanovs ran out of luck in revolutionary Russia just as the Grimaldis in Monte Carlo lucked out by owning the casino. Our modern royals emerged from being what may now be described as gang bosses in the 15th century, through being the leaders of military juntas, to being emperors and now having to find a new role. At worst, that will be as spokespeople for the privileged classes. But I think they are going to do better than that. <br />
Our royals have always managed to keep a foot in the other classes. For the working classes, they have put on super events such as the plucky Queen Mum visiting the East End while German bombs rained down. The middle classes have been the toughest nut for the royals to crack. Now that Kate Middleton has joined up, they can claim the middle classes as stakeholders in a right royal future. Prince Philip is right to have royals at the top of the pile.<br />
The thing some worry about is how to carve up the hierarchy beneath the royals. The old staple of the belted earl no longer exists. As privilege replaces upper classes, perhaps we will see a (more honest) system whereby everyone who owns a helicopter gets a peerage. It’s almost at that stage already.<br />
I think what Prince Philip is talking about is a period of fantastic social mobility - and we are living through it right now. Like a train, it is heading in one direction. It could be derailed but the direction will remain the same.<br />
What this rather rambly article is leading to is a conclusion that the shooting industry has a good social basis for growth. Despite considerable class turbulence, Britain will continue to respect a system where the royals are our ‘first family’. Top down, the class system will change from being aristocratic to an oligarchy based on wealth. It will not be meritocratic as many newspapers suggest unless we believe that money equals merit.<br />
As long as we actively introduce new people to our sport, shooters will continue to run the country. Shooting will continue to be an aspirational sport. The antis will continue to snap at the heels of shooting and will continue to inflict cuts on the sport via Home Affairs Select Committees and others, but they will remain outside the mainstream of this new establishment.<br />
Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-19058135840309785882011-07-28T22:49:00.000-07:002011-07-28T22:49:21.103-07:00Why O2 thinks shooters are criminalsI have to go to Sweden to see Norma. Anyone else might think she is some Abba-style blonde for who I have fallen but I am sure I can trust the readers to realise I am talking about the Swedish ammunition company Norma. Being a modern sort of bloke, I do more than half of my internet surfing on my mobile phone – a tablet-like think called unfortunately a ‘Dell Streak’, which makes anyone watching me use it recall the days of the brick telephones of the 1980s. It was free from the telephone provider O2, which provides my and 20 million other people’s mobile phone services. <br />
Unlike many of the other 20 million, I have learnt to enjoy some respect from O2, because of the mount of minutes I rack up each month. I was once in a queue at the phone shop of pay-as-you-go customers who had clearly not paid-as-they-had-gone. The staff were grumpy by the time it got to my turn. “What’s your phone number?” demanded the teenage mooncalf behind the counter. “07850 195353,” I replied. He tapped the numbers into the system – and his manner changed as he watched the screen. “Oh sir,” he said, suddenly respectful. “Everything in here is free to you.”<br />
“Jolly good. I’ll take her. Have her washed,” was my immediate response, but happily it stayed in my head.<br />
So with the modern appliance I now have, finding Norma’s physical address is a doddle. I tap it into Google on my phone and… oh. What’s this? I’m not allowed to view the website until I have reassured O2 that I am over 18. I have to pay £1 for the pleasure of making them feel certain about my age. And there is some blurb about how I will get £2.50 credited to my account. Suddenly I am feeling shirty. <br />
Firstly: how dare they stop me from visiting the website of a legitimate company. Secondly, I own a website called Gundealer.net which receives lots of hits form people trying to find the address of British gunshops, very often on their mobile phones, so are O2 users banned from visiting that too? Thirdly, I have been a customer of O2 for 19 years, so how come I have to prove all of a sudden that I am over 18? And fourthly, what’s this £2.50 refund for a £1 payment – surely a scam? Am I going to have to pay £1 for re-reassurance of my age every time I visit a website?<br />
My worst fears are quickly realised. Norma.cc and Gundealer.net are both proscribed websites and the length of my relationship with O2 has apparently no relationship with my age. According to O2, this is so that “customers are protected by the age verification system”. I’m not feeling protected. I’m feeling excluded. And it is not just shooting websites. I can’t even access some car websites.<br />
Looking at the problem on the Blogosphere, there is similar anger to my own. Some people have gone into their local phone shops, said “take a look at me, I’m clearly over 18” and had the bar taken off without proving age or ID. I am still fuming that I have to make the half-hour journey into my local town in order to do that. Smoke is rising from the keyboard as I type this. The phone companies have joined the call centres and the railway companies in their disdain for customers. Paying £1 to prove my age so I can continue to use what I consider to be a handy business tool in the industry I which I work is like being apologised to on an empty station platform by a recorded message or held in a queue of equally frustrated callers and recorded for ‘training purposes’. It is a plain lie, and as erring politician after erring politician has learnt about the British public, it doesn’t matter if you err – just don’t lie about it. We don’t forgive liars.<br />
Of course, as a fearless crusader, my next step is to contact O2. “This is likely to cast you as the bad guy in my next column,” I wrote to them in a typically Britishly unstrongly worded email..<br />
They are clearly feeling a bit sensitive about this PR disaster because a spokeswoman got back to me within minutes. <br />
“Like all operators and ISPs, O2 is required to block illegal and criminal content, as defined by the Internet Watch Foundation,” wrote my correspondent Sarah Taylor. “In addition, we also have policies in place for content rated 18+. All the operators subscribe to a classification framework, drawn up by the Independent Mobile Classification Board (IMCB), for content that they promote or market.”<br />
Grrr – in what way is Norma, a company that goes back to the 19th century and is one of the pillars of the international sporting shooting industry, “illegal” or “criminal”? <br />
“O2 applies the same framework to Internet access,” she continues, unaware of mounting fury. “Sites are automatically categorised and, if they are deemed suitable for those aged 18 and over, they require age verification. You will appreciate that as the internet is so vast this can only be done in an automated way. Inevitably some websites are mistakenly caught up in the block. Where that happens, we will of course take action to unblock sites, where appropriate, and as quickly as possible.”<br />
Well actually Sarah I don’t appreciate why it had to be done, let alone done automatically. I cannot see why O2 has this sudden burst of what it believes is conscience and bans a customer of nearly 20 years from using its service until they make an ex gratia payment from their credit cards.<br />
“We apologise if - as a customer or as a website - you have been inconvenienced by this new system, which we are applying for the purposes of child protection and not for any commercial gain.”<br />
Don’t try to occupy the moral highground Sarah. That’s the same as lying. Your company cocked it up.<br />
It is interesting that O2 is trying to blame other organisations. I got in touch with the IWF and the IMCB. Both deny the shooting website ban came from them.<br />
The IMCB provides guidelines for and arbitrates on paid-for content delivered to mobile phones. This is typically ringtones, but can include video. As a result, it bans ‘violence towards realistic humans and animals’ and ‘any emphasis on the use of easily accessible lethal weapons, for example knives’. It does not, however, specifically ban activities such as gambling or shooting. Its classification advice says: “No theme is specifically prohibited though these may be subject to other legal requirements. Content must not actively promote or encourage activities that are legally restricted for those under 18 such as drinking alcohol or gambling.”<br />
Similarly, the IWF only takes reports on issues related to its remit: child sexual abuse images hosted anywhere in the world; criminally obscene adult content hosted in the UK; incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK; non-photographic child sexual abuse images hosted in the UK. “We do not deal with shooting websites,” says a spokesperson.<br />
So O2 has come up with its new found dislike of shooting sports all by itself. Well not quite. This goes back to the fuzzy-headed but pernicious actions of the Advertising Standards Authority, which last year issued a list of ‘demerit’ activities such as pornography, betting tips and, inexplicably, shooting sports. The ASA has banned legitimate shooting sports from its world while still encouraging violent computer games and films. This clear case of minority bashing now has an enthusiastic follower in O2. Even IMCB spokeswoman Dr Shirley Dent confirms her organisation has been guided by information from Ofcom and the ASA<br />
Eventually my anger subsides. I send a respectful email back to Sarah: “Thanks for your positive response. Of course, that leaves me without a bad guy for my column now,” I write, along with a (far from comprehensive) list of shooting sports websites I have asked O2 to relist.<br />
“How very gracious of you,” she replies.<br />
Right, that’s it…Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-596287973002544318.post-43572949486048444602010-11-20T06:57:00.002-08:002010-11-20T06:58:00.036-08:00Prince Philip, Kate Middleton and the rise of a new class systemThe Duke of Edinburgh is the thinking royal-watcher's crumpet. In a speech released on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er68qm-XkwE">Fieldsports Britain</a> this week, he said that the media is the second most important establishment of state. I assumed he would say the royal family is the most important. But he doesn't - and he goes on to say that he doesn't know whether politics is more important than media or not. That doesn't much matter. Whether it's (1) royals, (2) media and (3) politics or (1) politics, (2) media and royals are over and above this tawdry ranking, he makes an admission that redraws British social boundaries in just a couple of sentences.<br />What Prince Philip is talking about is who runs society in Britain and what society is. We all know what it was. In 1946, when he married Princess Elizabeth, society was class-based (As Ronnie Corbett said: "I am working class and I look up to him") and it was run by politicians with a solid 'establishment' background. Establishment in those days had a lot to do with the landed aristocracy.<br />The class system was Britain's shariah law - it helped keep order but it had drawbacks. Between the 1980s and today, it has been replaced.<br />Today, we have a system based on people either having privilege, comfort or discomfort. People are defined by the level of comfort in which they live. Andrew Neil came up with the first knockings of this replacement or class when he edited The Sunday Times in the 1980s: he is the one credited with driving an agenda that 'retail' is news.<br />Where does this leave the royals? There's a vicious darwinism attached to being a royal. They are always at the mercy of events. So the Romanovs ran out of luck in revolutionary Russia just as the Grimaldis in Monte Carlo lucked out by owning the casino. <br />Our modern royals emerged from being what may now be described as gang bosses in the 15th century, through being the leaders of military juntas, to being emperors and now having to find a new role. At worst, that will be as spokespeople for the privileged classes. But I think they are going to do better than that. <br />Our royals have always managed to keep a foot in the other classes. For the working classes, they have put on super events such as the plucky Queen Mum visiting the East End while German bombs rain down. The middle classes have been the toughest nut for the royals to crack. Now that Kate Middleton has joined up, they can claim the middle classes as stakeholders in a right royal future. <br />What's so joyful for the royals is that the Middletons represent more than a middleclass that doesn't exist any more. Their online toyshop, Party Pieces, puts them firmly at the heart of retail Britain, of the aspiring comfortable class. Mr and Mrs Middleton are members of a suburban class who may be descibed as 'upwardly rural'. This is Dodi marrying Diana brought up to date and managed effectively by the Palace for the benefit of the royal family.<br />If the royals can 'lead' this kind of society, then soldiers will continue to want to go into battle in the Queen's name, rather than saluting a flag.<br />The thing to worry about is how to carve up the hierarchy beneath the royals. The old staple of the belted earl no longer exists. From the 'robber barons' onwards, the dukes and lords have never sorted themselves out easily. As privilege replaces upper classes, we will probably see a system whereby everyone who owns a helicopter gets a peerage. It's almost at that stage already.<br />The honours system will remain but it will be as relevant to society as it is relevant that pillar boxes are red. I expect we will have to abolish the notion of 'service' and run everything on a reward-based system. A future Prince William of Wales may consider dropping the motto "ich dien" - "I serve".<br />The good news is that this new system provides a defined role for the Church of England. It will exist for anyone who opts out of the aspirational classes, who does not require a Sega Mega Wii Drive to achieve happiness. This will take anglicanism back to its roots in humility and meekness, will mean they can be a bit more autocratic about women and gays, but it means they will have to take hold of the media and start using it to their own ends. But with the rise of the internet as a media delivery mechanism, this is open to them.<br />I think what Prince Philip is talking about is a period of fantastic social mobility - and we are living through it right now. Like a train, it is heading in one direction. It could be derailed but the direction will remain the same.<br /><i>To see Prince Philip make his comments, visit <a href="http://www.fieldsportschannel.tv">www.fieldsportchannel.tv</a> and watch Fieldsports Britain, episode 51</i>Charlie Jacobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00598730590206398096noreply@blogger.com0