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PowerPoint on radio and television revisited

A warm welcome to BBC Radio Scotland listeners who may have found their way here after listening to this morning's discussion of PowerPoint on MacAulay & Co.

If you'd like to know more about the Anti-PowerPoint Party, you can watch the president's video above and/or sign up to support it HERE.

There's a certain irony that this is not the first time I've been invited to discuss PowerPoint on BBC Radio or the BBC website - but not on BBC television - because other parts of the corporation, most notably BBC TV news and current affairs programmes, have been falling into the trap of broadcasting more and more slide-dependent presentations by reporters 'on location' at the other side of the studio (see links in section 2 below).

Visual aids or visual crutches?

The challenge of how to avoid inflicting death from 1,000 slides and make more effective use visual aids is something I've been teaching, writing and blogging about for years - and you can find out more about the subject from either of my two most recent books - both of which are available from Amazon in hard copy and/or downloadable immediately as Kindle editions:

Or, you can check out some of my other blog posts on the subject below, many of which are illustrated by short video clips:

1. PowerPoint:

2. TV news via PowerPoint:

3. Alternatives to PowerPoint

PowerPoint and the demise of Chalk & Talk: (3) Glimmers of hope

Welcome to anyone who's arrived here, directly or indirectly, via the link on yesterday's BBC website - in which case you must have an interest in speaking and presentation. If so, that's what this blog is mostly about, and you can see a list of (and link to) everything that's been posted here since Gordon Brown's party conference speech last year by clicking HERE.

As this is the third in a series of three posts marking 25 years of PowerPoint, you might like to look first at the previous ones on 'The beginning of the end' and 'The lost art'. And, if you haven't already seen it, you might also like see the short piece on yesterday's BBC website, where there's also an interesting, if worrying, slide show about PPt.

As it’s probably too late for a cultural counter-revolution that would take us back to the good old days when chalk and talk ruled supreme, the best we can hope for is that salvation may be at hand in three glimmers of hope built into presentational software like PowerPoint.

1. Dynamic and animated functions
The first is that the dynamic and animated functions make it fairly easy to simulate some of the benefits of chalk and talk by enabling you to put things up as you talk about them – whether by building points up step-by-step, or by creating diagrams that appear to draw themselves on the screen.

2. Pictorial and graphical functions
Another glimmer of hope is that PowerPoint has tremendous pictorial and graphical capabilities that make it easy for speakers to make the most of the fact that audiences find genuinely visual slides, such as pictures, simple graphs, etc., much more helpful than ones made up of nothing but words and numbers.

3. Blank slides
Finally, you can bring considerable relief to your audiences by switching everything off for a while – either by pressing the relevant button on the keyboard or by inserting slides consisting of nothing but a black background, both of which make it look as though there’s nothing on the screen at all.

This is, in effect, the electronic equivalent of turning over to a blank page on a flip chart or rubbing chalk off a blackboard, and forces listeners to focus on nothing else but you and what you are saying – at least until the appearance of the next slide.

BUT:
Unfortunately, only a tiny minority presenters are making any use of any of these options. The vast majority of slides I see still consist of seemingly endless lists of bullet points, and the full potential of PowerPoint is still a long way from being realised.

The 1960s argument about blackboards versus whiteboards may be a thing of the past, but it is surely time for an urgent debate about the relative merits of using slides, chalk and talk and other types of visual aid.

Otherwise, the danger is that the real cost of the new orthodoxy will not be the millions spent on computers, software and projectors, nor the enormous waste of time and money resulting from people attending presentations from which they get little or no benefit – which, for the UK, I’ve estimated at more than £7.8 billion a year.

The real price and the real tragedy will be the incalculable long-term damage that will come from continuing to believe that PowerPoint is a foolproof panacea for presenters, when it's no more than a tool. And, like any tool, its effectiveness depends on its users understanding its limitations, as well as its strengths.

(Although this is more or less where I'd originally planned to end this series, the interest stimulated by the BBC website means that there could well be a few more related posts in the not too distant future).

PREVIOUS POSTS ON POWERPOINT INCLUDE:
• PowerPoint program on BBC Radio 4
• BBC Television News slideshow quiz
• How NOT to use PowerPoint
• If Bill Gates doesn’t read bullet points from PowerPoint slides …
• An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation
• PowerPoint presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)
• Slidomania contaminates another BBC channel
• There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint – until there’s an audience
• BBC Television News: produced by of for morons?
• PowerPoint comes to church

PowerPoint and the demise of Chalk & Talk: (1) The beginning of the end

A warm welcome to anyone who's arrived here via the BBC website - in which case you're probably interested in speaking and presentation. If so, that's what this blog is mostly about, and you can see a list of (and link to) everything that's been posted here since Gordon Brown's party conference speech last year by clicking HERE.

We may have reached the 25th anniversary of PowerPoint, but how many of us will be celebrating?

This is the first in a series of three posts on one particularly destructive part of its legacy of collateral damage to our ability to communicate with each other.

When new universities were being built during the 1960s, there were arguments at some of them about whether to install blackboards or whiteboards in the lecture theatres. The pro-blackboard lobby opposed change because, they claimed, it would spell the end of tax relief for damage to clothes from chalk dust. Advocates of white boards thought them trendy, modern and more in keeping with the architecture of the new universities.

But one thing that was never questioned by either side was that writing or drawing on boards, whether black or white, was an indispensable part of the presentational process.

Today, the debate would be about what kind of computer and projection systems should be installed, and what would never be questioned would be the effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations – even though there remain serious questions about whether this dramatic technological shift in the way visual aids are used was a change for the better.

Like a 20th century Pandora’s box, the computer, aided and abetted by Microsoft, has unleashed new and previously unheard of maladies on millions of unwary victims. Chronic slide-dependency has reached pandemic proportions, its main symptoms being a compulsive urge by speakers to put up one boring slide after another, and an inability to say anything without reading from prompts on the screen. It has inhibited the ability of presenters to convey enthusiasm for their subjects and infects those on the receiving end with confusion and self-doubt as they slip quietly into a coma, blaming themselves for their inability to absorb so much information in so short a space of time.

Ask people how they like listening to the modern slide-driven style of delivery, and you’ll soon discover a deep groundswell of dissatisfaction. Go a step further and ask how they rate the slide-dependent majority as compared with the eccentric And tiny minority who still use chalk and talk, and the verdict invariably comes down against the new orthodoxy.

As for how a style of speaking that audiences don’t much like became the norm I’ve discussed in more detail elsewhere (along with the relative merits of other types of visual aid). Part of the story is that it probably all come about because of a terrible accident.

AN UNEXPECTED RESULT OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

Slide-dependency can be seen as the legacy of a change in the way the overhead projector – PowerPoint’s immediate ancestor – was originally intended to be used. The invention of the OHP, if anyone can remember that far back, was designed to overcome a problem with using chalk and talk when speaking to large audiences, namely that people couldn’t see what was being put on the board from a long distance away. So the original natural habitat of the OHP was the large auditorium, where speakers used them in much the same way as they’d used blackboards, writing on a roll of acetate and winding it forward whenever they ran out of space.

Then came what must surely be the darkest day in the history of the modern presentation: the arrival of a new breed of photocopiers in the 1970s that was no longer limited to copying on to paper, but could print directly on to sheets of acetate. What seemed rather a small technological step turned out to be a giant leap into completely new way of presenting. More and more speakers stopped writing and drawing as they went along and started using pre-prepared slides made up of lists that were, in effect, their notes.

This new style of delivery not only survived the replacement of OHPs by computerised graphics, but was also implicitly encouraged by assumptions built into programs like PowerPoint.

Most of the initial templates it offers to users are for producing lists of bullet points. What’s more, a fairly recent version came equipped with the added bonus of a set of 23 ‘model’ presentations to make your life easier. They were made up of 214 slides, 94% of which – yes, more than nine out of ten of them – consisted entirely of written words and sentences.

In the light of this, there’s something very strange to hear a Microsoft executive announcing that one of the best PowerPoint presentations he ever heard had no slides with bullet points on them, or when Bill Gates himself didn’t use them in his TED presenation.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all about the PowerPoint revolution was that no one seemed to notice what was happening, let alone stop and ask whether anything important was being lost by the sudden death of chalk and talk.

But, having continued to advocate the effectiveness of using blackboards, whiteboards and flipcharts, I can report that none of my pupils who has tried it out has ever regretted it, and most say that they achieved better rapport with their audiences than they had ever experienced when using slides. This, together with other evidence accumulated over the past twenty years, has convinced me that a wider discussion of its forgotten benefits is long overdue.

(To be continued in Part 2: 'The lost art').

PREVIOUS POSTS ON POWERPOINT INCLUDE:
• PowerPoint program on BBC Radio 4
• BBC Television News slideshow quiz
• How NOT to use PowerPoint
• If Bill Gates doesn’t read bullet points from PowerPoint slides …
• An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation
• PowerPoint presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)
• Slidomania contaminates another BBC channel
• There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint – until there’s an audience
• BBC Television News: produced by of for morons?
• PowerPoint comes to church

How many corporate birds can you kill with one PowerPoint presentation?

It's just over a year since the BBC website magazine invited me to write a short piece on The Problem with PowerP0int to mark the 25th anniversary of its invention.

It didn't include some of the points made in my book Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy about why the slide-dependent presentation has become so firmly established as the 'industry-standard model' in so many companies and organisations - even though there's so much about it that turns audiences off.

Reasons why it became entrenched included the following (pp. 59-60):

• Ease and convenience
One of the great attractions of the slide-driven approach was that it offered an easy way of appearing to be prepared and professional. The mere fact that you had some slides to show was enough in itself to qualify it as a ‘proper’ presentation in the eyes of audiences, who were increasingly conditioned to expect nothing else.

• Standardisation
Large corporations seized on the prospect of imposing a uniform and consistent message across different presentations by issuing standardised sets of slides to their workforce. But it showed little or no sensitivity for the end consumers who were condemned to listen to the presentations.

When a global computer corporation was launching new products, its British company was so appalled by the amount of detail on the slides that they established a special group, whose job was to scrap them and design presentations for UK audiences from scratch.

• The ‘no notes’ illusion
Manufacturers of overhead projectors used to proclaim yet another alleged benefit of the acetate revolution: with our machines, you can speak without having to use any notes. This was an extraordinary claim on two counts. Actually, they didn’t free people from using notes: all that happened was that speakers stopped glancing down at their notes and started looking at the screen to find out what to say next.

Note also the apparent belief that there was something wrong or shameful about being seen to be using notes. This ignored a rather obvious fact: in all traditions of public speaking, whether preaching, lecturing, political speechmaking or giving a best man’s speech at a wedding, it is, and always has been, perfectly normal for speakers to use notes.

• “Hard copy of slides available afterwards”
Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever been issued with such a pack will know, some sets go straight in the waste bin, and others are filed away, never to be seen again.

POSTSCRIPT 2010

When I was writing that, one of the main problems was that PowerPointwas being widely used in a vain attempt to kill two birds with one stone (and not doing either very well):

Notes for the presenter
Summary reports on the presentation

If I were writing today, I would have to add a few more to the last of the headings above:

"Copies of slides available afterwards AND

beforehand,
on the company intranet,
on internal emailing lists,
on corporate websites*
and anywhere else you can think of posting them"

This is because more and more of my clients are trying to use a single PowerPoint presentation to do more and more communicational jobs.

"Yes," they say, "we know that very detailed slides make for horrendous presentations, but there's nothing we can do about it: our directors have decreed that PowerPoint slides have to be provided both as 'pre-reads' (a new word, destined no doubt for the Oxford English Dictionary) for the audience, and as information to go on the record for the benefit (?) of others in, and sometimes outside, the organisation."

So:

Never mind all the problems for speakers and audience of endless lists of bullet points.
Never mind how much information-overload they inflict on audiences or how little anyone will take in, let alone remember.
Never mind the fact that bullet points and/or lists of sentences don't convey much to readers who didn't hear the presentation in the first place.
Never mind the fact that proper prose is much easier to read and much more intelligible than lists and disjointed sentences.
Never mind if we can pretend that we're successfully achieving numerous communication objectives at a single stroke.

But what's the point of it all if these single strokes are doomed to fail on every front?

The $64,000 questions no one ever dares to ask

How much damage is this doing to our corporate objectives?
How much is all this wasted time costing us?

God knows what the answer is to the first of these. But I did have a go at calculating an answer to the second one a few years ago (HERE):

If a company employs 200 managers at an average salary of 30,000 p.a., and each of them spends an average of one hour per week at presentations ... the annual cost to the company will be £178,000. Grossed up, the estimated cost to British industry as a whole comes to a massive £7.8 billion a year.

That calculation was almost certainly an underestimate, as it only took into account the salary cost of those actually attending presentations. Not included were the costs of time spent by presenters preparing their slides, travel, venue hire, refreshments, accommodation, etc.

The growing cost of trying to kill more birds with one stone

My experience of running courses over the past year or two suggests that the problems associated with the industry-standard model of presentation are getting worse than I'd thought when I finished writing Lend Me Your Ears six years ago.

We seem to be entering a world in which 'Death by PowerPoint' is becoming 'Holocaust by Powerpoint'.

Slides are becoming busier and more bewildering than ever, as more and more companies require their staff to use them for a myriad of different purposes (simultaneously) - without ever bothering to stop and ask how effectively any of these purposes are actually being achieved.

As a result, the billions of pounds, dollars and euros being poured down the drain by Western economies must be far greater than the estimates I came up with only a few years ago.

(* P.S. For training purposes, I admit to being rather grateful that so many companies proudly display their PowerPoint presentations on their websites, as it provides an endless and readily accessible supply of awful slides for illustrating the worst excesses to participants on my courses).

Other posts on using visual aids

Einstein 'chalk & talk' competition

Twitter strikes again: without it, I might never have heard about this terrific way of modifying the picture of Einstein that was featured in the first of my posts on 'chalk & talk' a few days ago - so thanks again to Olivia Mitchell for tweeting it.

It suggests a competition for the best entry on the blackboard.

All you have to do is to click on 'modifying the picture' above, write whatever you like on the blackboard and email your version of the picture to me before 10th September.

PRIZE: The best entry will receive a free signed copy of Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches and Presentations OR Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy - in both of which there's more on the relative merits of 'chalk & talk', PowerPoint and other types of visual aid.

Meanwhile, you can mug up on related issues from these earlier posts:

PREVIOUS POSTS ON CHALK & TALK
• PowerPoint and the demise of Chalk & Talk: (1) The beginning of the end
• PowerPoint and the demise of Chalk & Talk: (2) The lost art
• PowerPoint and the demise of Chalk & Talk: (3) Glimmers of hope

PREVIOUS POST ON OBJECTS AS VISUAL AIDS
• Objects as visual aids: Obama & Archbishop Sentamu in action

PREVIOUS POSTS ON POWERPOINT INCLUDE
• PowerPoint program on BBC Radio 4
• BBC Television News slideshow quiz
• How NOT to use PowerPoint
• If Bill Gates doesn’t read bullet points from PowerPoint slides …
• An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation
• PowerPoint presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)
• Slidomania contaminates another BBC channel
• There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint – until there’s an audience
• BBC Television News: produced by of for morons?
• PowerPoint comes to church

PowerPoint on BBC Radio Scotland

I'm about to be interviewed about PowerPoint on the BBC Radio Scotland Business Show.

You should be able to listen again on BBC iPlayer HERE - about 11 minutes in after end of the news and discussion of Scottish pub business.

This particular feature was prompted by two recent posts on the BBC website:

And there's much more on visual aids in my books!

"There's nothing wrong with PowerPoint - until there's an audience"

The other day, my wife went to a meeting that had been advertised as a social event, but which turned out to include a number of unscheduled PowerPoint presentations. On the way out, she said to the friend she was with that she would not have bothered to go if she’d known that they were going to have to listen to three speakers reading from PowerPoint slides.

A stranger overheard her complaint, turned round and sounded as though he was looking for an argument. “There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint” he asserted, but then added the profound words “until, that is, there’s an audience.”

And he does have a point. I’ve now asked hundreds of people how many PowerPoint presentations they’ve been to that were inspiring or memorable. It’s a question that typically produces a deathly silence. Most people struggle to think of a single instance, and the biggest number anyone has ever managed to come up with is two.

Further investigation into these rare exceptions usually reveals two important facts: (1) the slides were mostly pictures illustrating what the speaker was talking about, and (2) there weren’t very many of them.

However, the idea that slides are essential to the modern business presentation has become so entrenched that you sometimes have to be careful about questioning the dominant orthodoxy – and not just when you happen to be on your way out of a presentation. When I wrote about the (many) problems they create for audiences in Lend Me Your Ears, my publisher’s lawyers tried to get me to tone down some of my comments in case Microsoft, purveyors of PowerPoint to the world, decided to sue.

I refused to change a word, on the grounds that I wasn’t saying anything that couldn’t be confirmed by even the most casual research into audience reactions to slide-dependent presentations – and you have a defence in English law, if you can show that what you are saying is true,

In any case, it’s not actually Microsoft’s fault that slide dependency has become the industry-standard model of presentation. There may be some fairly dubious assumptions built into PowerPoint (e.g. the first set of templates offered to users positively encourages them to produce lists of written words), but the global epidemic of presentational paralysis that we’re up against was actually spawned much earlier by the misuse of overhead projectors – aided and abetted by a technological ‘advance’ in photo-copying technology.

I say the ‘misuse of overhead projectors’ because they were originally invented to solve a problem with writing and drawing on black boards and white boards (which has gone down well with audiences for generations) in large auditoriums, where people can’t always see what’s being written on the board.

That’s why a key component of the first overhead projectors was a winding roll of acetate that enabled speakers to write and draw on it as they went along, and project their handiwork on to a big screen that everyone could see.

All was well for a while, but the rot set in during the 1970s (before anyone had thought of PCs, let alone PowerPoint) thanks to the invention of photo-copying machines that could print just as well on acetate as earlier models had done on paper.

The main casualty was the ancient (and very effective) art of ‘chalk and talk’, through which many of us learnt much of what we learnt at school and university. It was replaced by the use of ready-made slides, consisting mainly of lists of written headings and sentences that were actually the speaker’s notes.

So widespread and comprehensive did this practice become that overhead projector manufacturers were soon able to cut their production costs by discontinuing the winding rolls of acetate, and it wasn’t long before machines that would only accept ready-made slides became the norm.

The advent of computer programs like PowerPoint may have made slides easier for audiences to read than in the days of acetates, but how many of us, when we’re sitting in an audience, really want to read and listen at the same time? And how many of us, when speaking to an audience really want to supply our listeners with a continuing source of distraction?

As the stranger said to my wife the other day, “There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint – until there's an audience.”

(A fuller discussion of the pluses – and yes, there are some pluses – and minuses of programs like PowerPoint can be found in my books, Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches and Presentations, London: Vermilion, 2004 & New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, and Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy, London: Vermilion, 2008).

0% of viewers remember all the points made in a BBC PowerPoint-style news presentation

Last night, I discovered that after dinner speeches don't always take place after dinner. I'd been invited to talk about PowerPoint to the Council of the Management Consultancies Association between the starter and the main course, with a Q-A session scheduled to take place after the diners had finished eating their main courses.

As after-dinner speeches are normally expected to be vaguely entertaining, it was a chance to combine a bit of amusement with some opportunistic research into something that, as regular blog readers know, is one of my recurring obsessions - namely the increasing use of PowerPoint-style presentations during British television news programmes (for more on which, see 'Related Posts' at the bottom of this page).

So I ended my talk with the following clip from a BBC Television News broadcast on the financial crisis, in which business editor Robert Peston gives us a 36 second presentation from the other side of the studio.

Research design

The diners were given no advance warning that, about half-way through the main course, they would be issued with a short quiz aimed at testing their retention of Peston's words of wisdom.

If you'd like to join in, don't read down to the questions below, watch the video first and then wait 10 minutes before coming back to have a go at answering them.

MCA Council Dinner Quiz

How much is the recue deal going to cost the government?
How much is that as a proportion of GDP?
How much a year will it cost each tax-payer?
How does Peston describe the recovery in bankers' willingness to lend?
What reason does he give for that?

Rules

No conferring.
To be completed before the end of the main course.
In te event of a tie, the result will be decided by the judge.

Results

As there was only one prize (a signed copy of Lend Me Your Ears), I had to allow for the possibility that everyone might score 100% - which I did by preparing a few tie-breaker questions.

It came as something of a surprise, even to me, that none of the 40 or so participants was able to answer all 5 questions correctly.

Only three of them (7.5%) managed to answer 4/5 correctly - so it didn't take long for the tie-breaker questions to produce a winner.

So what?

I wouldn't want to give too much weight to a research design that was intended partly as entertainment and partly to illustrate one of the themes of my talk. But I do think it's interesting that 92.5% of an audience of highly educated professionals - with far more experience of watching PowerPoint presentations than most ordinary viewers of BBC Television News programmes - were only able to remember three (or fewer than three) of the main points in Peston's report/presentation.

P.S. to visitors from countries outside the UK:

I've been trying to find out whether this trend towards PowerPoint-style TV news reports is a peculiarly British trend, or whether it's also happening in other countries. If you've any information on this, please let me know.

RELATED POSTS

PowerPoint and the demise of Chalk & Talk: (2) The lost art

A warm welcome to anyone who's arrived here via the link on today's BBC website - in which case you're probably interested in speaking and presentation. If so, that's what this blog is mostly about, and you can see a list of (and link to) everything that's been posted here since Gordon Brown's party conference speech last year by clicking HERE.

As this is the second in a series of three posts marking 25 years of PowerPoint, you might like to look first at the previous post on 'The beginning of the end'. And, if you haven't already seen it, you might also like see the short piece on today's BBC website.

1. A more ‘natural’ form of communication
One of the great advantages of chalk and talk is that there is something very natural about it: unlike speaking from slides, it has a close parallel in everyday life. We’re very used to showing others where a place is by drawing a map on a scrap of paper; sometimes, we’ll sketch out a diagram to explain what something looks like or how it works.

Chalk and talk simply extends the practice of writing on the back of an envelope to the bigger canvas of a large vertical surface that everyone can see. But the lack of an everyday equivalent of speaking from slides makes it a more contrived and less natural form of communication.

2. Less interference with eye-contact
Slides also have negative side effects that make it more difficult for presenters to hold the attention of audiences, central among which is the serious disruption of eye-contact. This is partly because speakers spend so much time looking at the screen, and partly because audiences have to keep glancing from speaker to screen and back again for however long the presentation lasts.

With chalk and talk, these repeated breaches in eye-contact are less of a problem – for the very obvious reason that you are never more than an arm’s length away from whatever it is you are showing to your audience.

3. Better coordination between the talk and the visual aid
Speaking about what you’re putting on the board while you’re doing it more or less guarantees that there’ll be a very close connection between what you’re saying and what everyone is looking at – which makes it much easier for listeners to stay on track than when they have to read up and down lists, trying to find a connection between what they’re hearing and what they’re reading.

4. Protection from information overload
Of all the innovations that came with the arrival of slide-dependency the most disastrous was the ease with which you can project large amounts of detailed written and numerical information on to the screen, a practice based on the dubious assumption that people can readily absorb complex detail at a glance.

By contrast, chalk and talk protects audiences from being overwhelmed by such massive and painful information overload, because it forces speakers to develop their arguments step-by-step and at a comfortable pace that’s easy for listeners to follow and take in.

5. Spontaneity and authoritativeness
Writing things up as you go along also involves a degree of spontaneity, authoritativeness and liveliness that’s hardly ever achieved with slides. I’ve now asked hundreds of people how many really enthusiastic and inspiring slide-driven presentations they have seen, and most of them have trouble in coming up with a single example.

But with chalk and talk, whatever’s being written or drawn on the board is being done here and now for the sole benefit of everyone in the room, rather than being a pre-packaged list that’s been cooked up in advance and perhaps even been circulated beforehand. Unlike speakers who have to look at their slides before they know what to say next, someone using a board or flipchart has to be in full control of their material and can convey an air of confidence, authority and command over the subject matter that’s much more difficult to achieve when using slides as prompts.

(To be continued and concluded tomorrow in Part 3: 'Glimmers of hope').

Graphical domination of BBC TV News goes from bad to worse?

For a while, you'll be able to enjoy, if 'enjoy' is the right word for a series of PowerPoint style presentations, last night's BBC News at 10 on iPlayer HERE.

It starts with a seated Huw Edwards reading out the headlines for about 1:30 minutes. Then, he reappears standing in front of a screen, where distracting dollar bills float into heaps in front of the Capitol in Washington DC behind him.

As he clutches a sheet of paper that doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose, numbers about what he's telling us start appearing behind him. Occasionally he makes as if to look at them before handing us over to their Washington correspondent.

Plenty more graphics follow until a flip chart suddenly appears at 14:41 minutes in, with people sitting behind it. But don't worry, our economics correspondent isn't going to write on it, as the numbers and words plop on to the chart, giving the game away just before she's had time to tell us the news about them.

Scroll on to 21:01 minutes, and Huw's back on his feet again with paper in his hands again and more pictures behind him again - soon to be followed by a series of bullet points zooming threateningly in behind his back.

But the barmiest sequence of all comes in at 22:25 minutes into the news, when our medical correspondent suddenly reappears in the middle of a series of concentric circles next to what could be some towers. And towers they turn out to be - tall enough to hold a list of 10 bullet points. As if that weren't enough, the next two towers are tall enough to accommodate 11 bullet points.

23:09 minutes in, we learn why the concentric circles are there. Our medical correspondent is actually standing in the middle of a pie chart, that starts whizzing around him as he tries to point out the numbers that have appears

Regular readers know that I've complained about the BBC's assumption that PowerPoint style presentations are just what viewers who've spent the day suffering from PowerPoint want to see in the evenings.

I've wondered about how much such expensive-looking graphics cost and whether the BBC ever does any research into how audiences respond to news that's presented in this way.

If so, it's surely time they published the results. If not, I'd be glad to offer my services...

Other posts on TV news via PowerPoint:

How NOT to use PowerPoint

When the manuscript of my book Lend Me Your Ears was in its final stages before publication, my publisher's lawyers tried to get me to 'tone down' some of the sections that were critical of the style of slide-dependent presentation that has become the industry standard in so many companies and organisations.

They were apparently worried that it might prompt legal action from Microsoft, but I refused to make any changes for two reasons. First, my understanding of the law on defamation is that you have a defence if you can show that what you were saying is true. Second, sales would surely benefit enormously if the purveyors of PowerPoint decided to litigate.

Unfortunately, sales of the book had no such PR boost. Nor, as far as I know have other critics been sued, and I remain baffled as to why the lawyers were so cautious when stuff like the following is freely available on YouTube and, as far as I know, hasn't attracted any attention from Microsoft's legal department.

P.S. (Five months later): The interesting question is who got YouTube to remove the above version 'due to terms of use violation'? And did they think that there aren't any other copies still posted on YouTube (e.g. HERE) and/or below?

FOR MORE ON POWERPOINT AND RELATED PROBLEMS, SEE ALSO:
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint - until there’s an audience
An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation?
If Bill Gates doesn't read bullet points from PowerPoint slides ...
PowerPoint Peston
PowerPoint style presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)
Slidomania epidemic contaminates another BBC channel
BBC Television NEWS: produced for or by morons?

If Bill Gates doesn't read bullet points from PowerPoint slides ...

I’ve just been watching a talk by Bill Gates on How I'm trying to change the world now - the full version of which can be seen HERE.

Unfortunately, his plans for changing the world don't seem to extend to instructing Microsoft to withdraw, or at least radically overhaul, their market-leading presentation software.

Apart from his subject matter (defeating malaria and improving the quality of teaching), there were three other things about his presentation that struck me as interesting.

1. Bill Gates knows better than to read bullet points from PowerPoint slides
Although he showed a few slides (mainly pictures, maps and graphs), he did not use any that consisted of long lists of bullet points, and therefore didn’t have to keep turning round and reading from them – like the vast majority of PowerPoint users I’ve seen over the years.

If the founder of Microsoft has no use for the opening templates PowerPoint offers to its users (i.e. headings and lists), why doesn't he have any qualms about allowing his company to make millions of dollars from giving millions of people the false impression that listing bullet points is a sure-fire route to making an effective presentation?

2. Bill Gates knows that some technologies can help teachers but not that others can hinder them
Although he singles out video and DVD as technologies that can help to improve the quality of teaching, he seems completely unaware that other technologies, (e.g. PowerPoint, electronic whiteboards, etc.) might be reducing the quality of teaching.

Again, isn’t it time he woke up to the fact that PowerPoint may have led thousands of teachers and lecturers down a blind alley that's leaving millions of students a year in a state of boredom and/or confusion?

3. Bill Gates knows that objects can be used as effective visual aids
Apart from the applause for his announcement that he was going to give everyone in the audience a free copy of a book, the most positive response came when he took the lid off a jar and pretended to release mosquitoes into the auditorium (see below).

This may be about as far away from relying on PowerPoint slides as you can get, but is a simple and effective form of visual aid (for more on which, see HERE where you can watch examples of the Archbishop of York and Barack Obama doing something similar).

If only Microsoft would preach what its founder practises, there might be a chance of saving the world from the ever-spreading epidemic of death by PowerPoint.

BLOG INDEX: Sept 2008-August 2009

This is a list of everything posted since the blog started in September 2008.

It's updated at the end of each month, and you can access direct links to each post by clicking HERE or from the monthly lists on the left.

AUGUST 2009  
• Obama on Kennedy got more applause than ‘normal’
• Tabloid tirade about Ted Kennedy from the Daily Mail
• PowerPoint on BBC Radio Scotland
• Joe Biden's moving tribute to Edward Kennedy
• The Banksy exhibition at Bristol Museum
• Einstein 'chalk & talk competition
• On the death of Edward Kennedy: 'the dream shall never die'
• What's 'news' about Gordon Brown not answering a question?
• Meheribian's moans about the myth
• Verdict after four weeks on Twitter
• The 'detective story' principle and puzzle-solution formats
• Showing what you mean: more from Professor Sir Lawrence Bragg
• A Nobel prize winner's views on slides versus 'chalk & talk'
• PowerPoint an the demise of Chalk & Talk: (3) Glimmers of hope
• PowerPoint an the demise of Chalk & Talk: (3) The lost art
• PowerPoint an the demise of Chalk & Talk: (1) The beginning of the end
• Body language news from Germany
• Dreaming of sex costs the nation £7.8 billion a year: the cost of boring presentations
• No smoke without ire
• Mrs Clinton's gem for interview collectors
• Observing England's cricket team in the face of defeat
• Guardian ahead of record?
• PowerPoint program on BBC Radio 4
• To be or not to be: a question for individuals or the state?
• BBC plug-a-book sho slot for aging new left author

JULY 2009  
• Televised interviews and political communication
• Thatcher had more teleprompter troubles than Obama
• Jargon & gobbledygook refresher course
• How many numbers can you get into a minute?
• Will The Times be investigating Lord Rees-Mogg’s House of Lords expenses?
• Why is the MoD involved in planning Harry Patch’s funeral?
• Clarke has more to say about Brown than a few weeks ago
• Book plugging news
• Why doesn’t Amazon have a Spanish site?
• Media debilitated by swine flu news pandemic
• More standup comedy from Gordon Brown
• Standing ovation for Gordon Brown after anecdotes about Reagan, Cicero and Demosthenes
• Gordon Brown’s tough decisions and/or rehearsal for defeat
• White paint, red lights and fuel conservation
• Are you ahead of reading this post?
• Nudging in a more enlightened direction
• Moon rhetoric from Neil Armstrong, JFK & Werner von Braun
• Rhetoric revival?
• Book plugging
• How to stay awake during a repetitive ceremony
• BBC plug-a-book shows: how and why is so much offered to so few?
• Puzzle-Solution formats
• BBC rediscovers the 'Lost Art of Oratory' (again)
• Welcome to visitors from the BBC website
• D-Day memorabilia from Normandy to Lüneburg
• More on body language & non-verbal behavior
• Guinea pigs
• Non-verbal communication
• A commentator likely to keep his job
• Non-verbal communication and height
• Welcome to visitors from the BBC website
• How to use video to study body language, verbal & non-verbal communication
• Is the 'Daily Telegraph' borrowing from blogs?
• More bad news for Gordon Brown
• Translation and fantasies of global domination
• Pious and expensive twaddle from strong man Straw
• There’s no such thing as a boring subject

JUNE 2009  
• Monty Python, conversation and turn-taking 
• Margaret Thatcher, body language and non-verbal communication
 • NLP: No Linguistic Proof 
• Body language and non-verbal communication video 
• The 250 posts landmark
• Another body language & non-verbal communication cartoon 
• 'Check against delivery' 
• Body language, non-verbal communication and the myth about folded arms & defensiveness 
• Another expenses dilemma 
• The urgent need for EU directives on tea-making and lunch times 
• Expenses? • Imagery worthy of Obama in speech by the Governor of the Bank of England 
• News on BBC radio is sometimes very good indeed 
• Dudley Moore’s ‘Little Miss Muffet’ by Benjamin Britten 
• BBC Television News slideshow Quiz 
• No flies on Obama! 
• ‘Sound-formed errors’ and humour 
• BBC Television News informs, educates and entertains without slides! 
• Politician answers a question: an exception that proves the rule
• Combining rhetoric and imagery to get your point across 
• Did the MP's manure come by appointment? 
• Interview techniques, politicians and how we judge them 
• Banksy officially on show in Bristol
 • Is the media no longer interested in what goes on in parliament? 
• “Labour’s not for turning” – Peter Hain 
• Presidential heights 
• Why it suited Brown and Blair to take House of Lords reform no further
 • Monty Python’s Election Night Special 
• Euro-election coverage: was the BBC’s graphical overkill a violation of its charter? 
• Lord Mandelspin strikes again 
• Brown does a better job than Obama at the 65th anniversary of D-Day
 • How Caroline Flint gave the game away about expecting a post in the cabinet
 • Gordon Brown’s honesty about the death of New Labour 
• D-Day 65th Anniversary (2): a reminder for Sarkozy and a challenge for Obama 
• D-Day 65th Anniversary: (1) A British soldier returns to Gold Beach 
• The end of free speech? 
• Obama: Echoes of Berlin in Cairo 
• Inspiring speech for polling day by Peter Sellers 
• Pre-delicate hitches from the White House 
• Body language and non-verbal communication 
• 'Pre-delicate hitches' from Brown as he avoids answering a question about the Queen 
• The end of the beginning 
• How NOT to use PowerPoint 
• Why has Gordon Brown become a regular on the Today programme?

MAY 2009
• Ronald Reagan's moving tribute on the 40th anniversary of D Day
• Driving a car can make you look younger than you really are
• Planning to say 'um' and 'uh'
• The ‘delicacy’ of Mrs Clinton’s ‘consequences’ for North Korea
• Clinton on North Korea: "There are consequences to such actions"
• Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Oscar acceptance speech
• Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayor received five times more applause than ‘normal’
• Two tips for David Cameron after today’s speech on political change
• Bishops' attendance rates and allowances in the House of Lords
• Climbing out of the manure?
• Since when were Archbishops experts on democracy?
• Disputing the meaning of applause
• House of Lords expenses: Lord Rees-Mogg on gravy trains
• House of Lords expenses
• Goodbye from Mr Speaker
• What a fine Speaker!
• What a poor speaker!
• Sky Sports swindle
• Is the MPs' expenses scandal a hidden legacy of Thatcherism?
• Rhetoric wins applause for questioners on BBC Question Time
• Applause for Dimbleby's questions on BBC Question Time
• The liveliest Question Time ever?
• Why it's so easy for politicians not to answer interviewers' questions - and what should be done about it
• MPs expenses claims merely reflect British attitudes towards home ownership
• Well, well Wells!
• A prime minister who openly refused to answer an interviewer’s questions
• UK Speechwriters' Guild
• Gordon Brown's interview technique: the tip of a tedious iceberg
• Eye contact, public speaking and the case of President Zuma
• Chicago!
• Weatherization
• Notes from a large continent
• Are there more longer words in American English than in British English?
• Virgin mile-high poetry

APRIL 2009
• The Turnip Prize
• What’s the difference between a flu 'pandemic' and a flu 'epidemic'?
• Oxford professor models jeans
• A great source of videos for anyone interested in speaking and presentation
• A Tory leader's three evasive answers to the same question
• Jobsworthy News: Council official to walk along a path that doesn’t exist
• Was Kenneth in Wallanderland worth a BAFTA?
• A Labour leader with no interest in spin!
• David Cameron's attack on the Budget used some well-crafted rhetoric
• Gordon Brown seems to agree that Labour is ‘savage’ and ‘inhuman’?
• Poems for St George's Day
• Inspiring banking imagery for Budget day from Martin Luther King
• Budget speech boredom and television news tedium
• When the young Paddy Ashdown surprised himself by the power of his own rhetoric
• Obama’s rhetoric identifies with Martin Luther King but appeals to a wider audience
• A day when LibDems cheered at being told they all read a broadsheet newspaper
• Time for Gordon Brown to say "sorry" to savers
• Burnham, Kinnock and the danger of speaking in a sports stadium
• Derek Draper – another psycho-therapist who talks too much and listens too little?
• A smear that never was
• Derek Draper breaks a basic rule of conversation
• INTERLUDE
• Gordon Brown’s G20 address ignores an important tip from Winston Churchill
• Is there an open-mouthed school of acting?

MARCH 2009
• Gordon Brown is finding the Jacqui Smith expenses story more ‘delicate’ than he says
• ‘The Lost Art of Oratory’ by a BBC executive who helped to lose it in the first place
• Another Tory speech that marked the beginning of the end for a prime minister
• Rhetorical techniques and imagery in Hannan’s attack on Gordon Brown – edited highlights
• Did the media ignore Hannan because they think speeches are ‘bad television’?
• Does Daniel Hannan’s attack on Brown tell us what makes a speech memorable?
• UK media slowly wakes up to Daniel Hannan’s speech
• Media Coverage of Daniel Hannan’s attack on Gordon Brown
• It’s time Brown stopped recycling other people’s lines
• Daniel Hannan v. Gordon Brown at the European Parliament
• Jargon and gobbledygook comedy sketch
• Check the fixtures and fittings before you speak
• Why haven't the Lib Dems learnt from Obama’s use of the internet?
• If Bill Gates doesn’t read bullet points from PowerPoint slides ...
• An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation?
• ‘From Stalin to Mr Bean’: putting two parts of a contrast in the right order
• How to improve impact by sequence, repetition and a rhetorical technique
• Brown’s ‘poetry’ heads up news of his speech to Congress
• Unexpected poetry in Gordon Brown's speech to the US Congress
• The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
• Gordon Brown’s model example of how to express condolences

February 2009
• The day Barack Obama discovered his powers of oratory and rhetoric
• How to make reading a slide sound interesting
• PowerPoint style presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)
• The 'magic' of Oscar acceptance speeches
• Does Mrs Clinton really know someone everywhere she goes?
• Personality cult as an antidote to tribalism?
• Kenya holiday reading

JANUARY 2009
• Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose is the fairest democracy of all ?
• Rhetoric and imagery in President Obama’s inauguration speech
• The good news from the House of Lords
• Memorable lines in President Obama's inaugural speech?
• The great camcorder con-trick
• Obama’s inauguration rhetoric won approval for some uncomfortable messages
• Rhetoric and applause in Obama’s inaugural speech as a measure of what the audience liked best
• A line I don't want to hear in today's speech by President Obama
• The enduring challenge and importance of funeral orations
• Has talking the economy down become a dangerous self-fulfilling prophesy?
• Kate Winslet ignores Paul Hogan’s advice to award winners
• Slidomania epidemic contaminates another BBC channel
• How would Obama's rhetoric and oratory sound from a London back street?
• Clinton, Palin and the legacy of Margaret Thatcher
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part III. The education of a female orator
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part II. ‘ The Iron Lady’
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part I. Cultural and vocal challenges
• “May we bring hope” – 30 years since Margaret Thatcher took office as Prime Minister

DECEMBER 2008
• Ready made words for Mr Obama from a previous president’s inaugural speech
• Neutrality in the Queen’s Christmas speech
• What did Santa say before “Ho, ho ho!”
• You don’t have to be Barack Obama to use rhetoric and imagery
• High-risk practical joke for an office Christmas party speech
• End of year poll on PowerPoint presentations
• Obama’s rhetoric renews UK media interest in the ‘lost art’ of oratory
• Gordon’s gaffe explained
• The Office Christmas Party Speech: roads to failure and success
• The Queen's Speech, 2008
• Rhetoric, oratory and Barack Obama's 'The Speech', 2004
• "There's nothing wrong with PowerPoint - until there's an audience"
• What’s in a place name?

NOVEMBER 2008
• Content-free sermon by Alan Bennett
• 50 years since Peter Sellers recorded his memorable political speech
• Talking the economy up
• Talking the economy down
• Why lists of three: mystery, magic or reason?
• Tom Peters: High on rhetoric but low on content?
• Bobby Kennedy nearly got it right about Obama
• ‘Reliable sources' on where Obama’s 'Yes we can' came from
• Will there be any ‘rhetorical denial’ from the Obama camp?
• The Queen’s Speech: an exception that proves the ruler
• Rhetoric & imagery in Obama's victory speech
• Not Clinton, not McCain but Obama
• How the BBC handled one complaint about Ross

OCTOBER 2008
• Another BBC News Slideshow
• Don't put the clocks back
• BBC Television News: produced for or by morons?
• Experience and inexperience in presidential campaigns
• Presidential debates – tedious television but better than commercials
• A secret of eternal youth?
• PowerPoint Peston
• Hair today, win tomorrow: baldness and charisma
• Pesky Peston?
• ConVincing Cable
• 'Mature, grown-up and statesmanlike' at the lectern

SEPTEMBER 2008
• Cameron takes to the lectern in a crisis
• Objects as visual aids
• Powerpoint comes to church
• Mediated speeches -- whom do we really want to hear?
• Wisdom of forethought?
• Time for Cameron to surf applause?
• Did Gordon Brown take my advice?
• Eternity, eternity and eternity
• More tips for Gordon Brown
• Tips for Gordon Brown's conference speech

BLOG INDEX: Sept 2008-March 2009

This is a list of everything posted since the Blog started in September 2008.

It's updated at the end of each month, and you can access direct links to each one by clicking on the title above or HERE.

MARCH 2009
• Gordon Brown is finding the Jacqui Smith expenses story more ‘delicate’ than he says
• ‘The Lost Art of Oratory’ by a BBC executive who helped to lose it in the first place
• Another Tory speech that marked the beginning of the end for a prime minister
• Rhetorical techniques and imagery in Hannan’s attack on Gordon Brown – edited highlights
• Did the media ignore Hannan because they think speeches are ‘bad television’?
• Does Daniel Hannan’s attack on Brown tell us what makes a speech memorable?
• UK media slowly wakes up to Daniel Hannan’s speech
• Media Coverage of Daniel Hannan’s attack on Gordon Brown
• It’s time Brown stopped recycling other people’s lines
• Daniel Hannan v. Gordon Brown at the European Parliament
• Jargon and gobbledygook comedy sketch
• Check the fixtures and fittings before you speak
• Why haven't the Lib Dems learnt from Obama’s use of the internet?
• If Bill Gates doesn’t read bullet points from PowerPoint slides ...
• An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation?
• ‘From Stalin to Mr Bean’: putting two parts of a contrast in the right order
• How to improve impact by sequence, repetition and a rhetorical technique
• Brown’s ‘poetry’ heads up news of his speech to Congress
• Unexpected poetry in Gordon Brown's speech to the US Congress
• The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
• Gordon Brown’s model example of how to express condolences

February 2009
• The day Barack Obama discovered his powers of oratory and rhetoric
• How to make reading a slide sound interesting
• PowerPoint style presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)
• The 'magic' of Oscar acceptance speeches
• Does Mrs Clinton really know someone everywhere she goes?
• Personality cult as an antidote to tribalism?
• Kenya holiday reading

JANUARY 2009
• Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose is the fairest democracy of all ?
• Rhetoric and imagery in President Obama’s inauguration speech
• The good news from the House of Lords
• Memorable lines in President Obama's inaugural speech?
• The great camcorder con-trick
• Obama’s inauguration rhetoric won approval for some uncomfortable messages
• Rhetoric and applause in Obama’s inaugural speech as a measure of what the audience liked best
• A line I don't want to hear in today's speech by President Obama
• The enduring challenge and importance of funeral orations
• Has talking the economy down become a dangerous self-fulfilling prophesy?
• Kate Winslet ignores Paul Hogan’s advice to award winners
• Slidomania epidemic contaminates another BBC channel
• How would Obama's rhetoric and oratory sound from a London back street?
• Clinton, Palin and the legacy of Margaret Thatcher
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part III. The education of a female orator
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part II. ‘ The Iron Lady’
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part I. Cultural and vocal challenges
• “May we bring hope” – 30 years since Margaret Thatcher took office as Prime Minister

DECEMBER 2008
• Ready made words for Mr Obama from a previous president’s inaugural speech
• Neutrality in the Queen’s Christmas speech
• What did Santa say before “Ho, ho ho!”
• You don’t have to be Barack Obama to use rhetoric and imagery
• High-risk practical joke for an office Christmas party speech
• End of year poll on PowerPoint presentations
• Obama’s rhetoric renews UK media interest in the ‘lost art’ of oratory
• Gordon’s gaffe explained
• The Office Christmas Party Speech: roads to failure and success
• The Queen's Speech, 2008
• Rhetoric, oratory and Barack Obama's 'The Speech', 2004
• "There's nothing wrong with PowerPoint - until there's an audience"
• What’s in a place name?

NOVEMBER 2008
• Content-free sermon by Alan Bennett
• 50 years since Peter Sellers recorded his memorable political speech
• Talking the economy up
• Talking the economy down
• Why lists of three: mystery, magic or reason?
• Tom Peters: High on rhetoric but low on content?
• Bobby Kennedy nearly got it right about Obama
• ‘Reliable sources' on where Obama’s 'Yes we can' came from
• Will there be any ‘rhetorical denial’ from the Obama camp?
• The Queen’s Speech: an exception that proves the ruler
• Rhetoric & imagery in Obama's victory speech
• Not Clinton, not McCain but Obama
• How the BBC handled one complaint about Ross

OCTOBER 2008:
• Another BBC News Slideshow
• Don't put the clocks back
• BBC Television News: produced for or by morons?
• Experience and inexperience in presidential campaigns
• Presidential debates – tedious television but better than commercials
• A secret of eternal youth?
• PowerPoint Peston
• Hair today, win tomorrow: baldness and charisma
• Pesky Peston?
• ConVincing Cable
• 'Mature, grown-up and statesmanlike' at the lectern

SEPTEMBER 2008:
• Cameron takes to the lectern in a crisis
• Objects as visual aids
• Powerpoint comes to church
• Mediated speeches -- whom do we really want to hear?
• Wisdom of forethought?
• Time for Cameron to surf applause?
• Did Gordon Brown take my advice?
• Eternity, eternity and eternity
• More tips for Gordon Brown
• Tips for Gordon Brown's conference speech

How effective are Sky Newswall presentations?

Regular readers will know that I've never been much impressed by the way in which BBC television news and current affairs programmes like Newsnight have become more and more dependent on PowerPoint-style presentations by their reporters (see below).

Unlike the BBC, Sky News doesn't have its reporters standing on one side of a screen but directly in front of their cinemascope-style 'newswall'.

Watching some of their reports on Libya, I began to think that it worked rather better than the BBC's reporter-standing-next-to-a-screen approach. But there are two reasons why I don't feel able to decide between them just yet.

The first is that I don't see it as often as BBC News and therefore need to watch more Sky News before being able to come to a definite conclusion.

The second is that the above clip uses a map, and maps can be a very helpful visual aid for audiences (see Lend Me Your Ears, pp. 152-3).

In fact, the above clip from Sky News reminded me of a brilliant lecture I attended about twenty years ago. The subject was the Soviet economy and the audience was made up of delegates on a general management course. The lecturer's only visual aid was a gigantic map of Europe and Asia that was pinned on the wall behind him. Rather than using a wobbly laser pointer, his pointer of choice was a billiards cue with which he punctuated his lecture by urgent dashes from side to side to point at the places he was talking about.

The Sky News presenter in the above clip doesn't dash from side to side - and was certainly a lot less worried that I was when a graphic of a jet fighter plane zoomed in and nearly hit him (1.05 minutes in).

But the question is: how effective are 'newswall' presentations when they're showing something other than a map?

I'm planning to watch Sky News more closely in the weeks ahead and will report back in due course. Meanwhile, I'd be interested to know what other viewers think about Sky's 'newswall' - and whether they think it's an improvement on the way BBC News replicates more conventional PowerPoint presentations.

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