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When the story broke on the terror attacks in Mumbai there was much talk of news spreading through blogs and social networks like Twitter.  Details of the siege were reported minute by minute by people who were there.  There is no doubt that the rise in citizen journalism and the availability of these channels has provided a new layer of news sourcing where information comes fast and direct.

It was the medium of radio however that brought the events into vivid and immediate focus.  As the siege was taking place Jim Naughtie on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme conducted an extraordinary interview.  Business lawyer Mark Abell was barricaded in his room inside the Oberoi hotel whist the murder and mayhem was taking place.  “As I entered my room there was a massive blast …and the gunfire has been going on throughout the night” he said, ”there is no escape and we haven’t heard anything from anybody.”  The immediacy and reality of the situation along with Mark’s stoic bravery was evident throughout.Mark escaped and was interviewed again on Today, 24 hours later.  He described his release and the full horror of the carnage he saw when he was escorted under armed guard through the lobby of the hotel.

Radio can deliver insight that text or still image based channels never can.   I have always been persuaded by the views of Gary Carter of FremantleMedia who argues that so called ‘old media’ are not replaced by new they continue co-exist.  He argues  ”The only mass communication medium in history to have been replaced by another is the telegraph and …arguably, of course, the telegram was not a mass communication technology.”

We need to stop thinking of media in terms of “newness” and think more in terms of “richness”.   We can be seduced by something shiny and new and but we must still celebrate that which we already have.

So John Sergeant has quit the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing after a barrage of complaints from the show’s judges.  It’s not something that I would usually find too troublesome as I’m not an avid viewer but the BBC has got it badly wrong here.  Strictly Come Dancing isn’t a genuine competition (it’s not even a genuine name - but the bastard offspring of ’Come Dancing’ and the film ‘Strictly Ballroom’).

Shows like this rely on votes.  The voting, and therefore paying public have said quite clearly that they want to watch Sergeant strut his stuff.  This is Saturday night entertainment not an exercise in ballroom excellence.  Hounding John off the programme isn’t what the audience wants and they will say so loud and clear - cue national campaign of outrage through the media and on the web.   This kind of approach is also so outdated.  In a web 2.0 world where the audience can talk back it is no longer acceptable to treat their wishes with contempt. 

Judge Arlene Phillips said: “I’m always sad if a contestant leaves of choice, because you are always expecting to let the public vote them in or out - but John is his own person and he has his own reasons for doing this.”  Oh, come on Arlene.

Unless of course this is all just a brilliant publicity stunt in the classic showbiz mould.  Sergeant leaves, public outcry ensues and Sergeant waltzes back on to the show to dance his way to victory.  Stay tuned.  

For me there are two fascinating questions about the Brand and Ross debacle.  Why did they put out the show with the item in when it wasn’t live and why did the furore gather so much momentum in such a short time over a week after the broadcast?

Why was it broadcast?  Any fool could have guessed there would be an issue and there were some very experienced heads in the approval chain.  I believe that the reason for broadcasting may lie in the fact that by recording the messages on an answer machine the comments were already potentially in the public domain.   With the social web anyone can publish and Ross and Brand realised that.  By not broadcasting they would have acknowledged fault and the recording could still reach the public via the web.  The evidence might be there is in their comments in the a part of the programme that was edited out of the final broadcast: 

Ross: “let’s both put on striped t-shirts and break into his house, merely to delete the answerphone message - let’s see what happens. What could go wrong?” 

Brand:  “Nothing, literally, nothing could go wrong as we smash our way into Andrew Sachs’s house”

Ross: ”break in like cat burglars tonight when he’s in bed”

Brand: “yes while he sleeps”

They must have felt that they had escaped censure when a week went by with no outcry but the press got hold of the story when Andrew Sachs complained.  It might have ended there but for the intervention of the social web once more.  The recording appeared on YouTube and there have been a million hits - somewhat more than the average listenership for Brand’s show.  As the hits on YouTube went up so did the complaints.  A week after the show went out there were just 69 complaints to the BBC at the last count there were more than 30,000.  A coincidence?  I doubt it.

As “Sachs-Gate” rises up the BBC hierarchy, the whole Brand/Ross furore has been an instructive lesson in crowd psychology and crisis management.

On the first point, by yesterday morning 18,000 people had complained about the offending broadcast on Russell Brand’s show. By last night, when both presenters had already been suspended and Brand, ultimately, resigned, another 11,000 had added their ire. Why? And how many of them had heard the actual radio item?

Thanks to Wise Geek for the science bit, it might be something to do with “individuals adapting to the expectations of the surrounding culture…in order to identify with the crowd”. A bit of shared experience or, in this case, a collective moan. It’s certainly a phenomenon that’s playing out in social media situations and shows how a poor response to a crisis can escalate.

It took the BBC from Sunday, when the story broke, to yesterday for the Corporation to act decisively. A Sun journalist I spoke to last night suggested it was the worst example of crisis comms he’d seen. If the BBC had apologised and suspended them both straight away, he felt, the story would have died and each presenter could have carried on as before, though probably wiser to the boundaries of public taste.

The old wag, John Cleese - no stranger to media controversy affecting comedians - says in today’s Times: “It’s important to hire people with enough taste to censor  themselves. I thought Jonathan Ross had that.”

Oh Lord, BBC Business Editor, Robert Peston, is winding up the blogosphere.

OK, he’s become ubiquitous in recent weeks, but is it any surprise? If the most complicated piece of financial data you ever have to tackle is your bank statement, it needs someone good to explain what the hell is going on in the UK and world economy.

Now and then, a journalist comes along who polarises opinion. In the past, Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys have been equally lauded and lamented for their attacking styles.

I’m far from qualified to analyse whether Peston’s work has any part to play in fuelling the market’s current woes. But it’s good to see a business journalist with a slightly ungainly manner getting people engaged with the biggest financial mess in years. It affects us all and we need someone with the brains to translate it for us.