James Shield
@jshield
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Audio producer, making The Wargame for @tortoise & @skynews • previously @thetimes • 3x gold @WeAreAudioUK awards • https://t.co/akwUXTEEvF
Joined June 2012
This is a shocking story by @ManveenRana. More than 400 Russian mercenaries are already operating in Kyiv with orders from the Kremlin to assassinate President Zelensky.
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@JOValpoCH August 2018: Greta Thunberg starts the climate school strike, alone outside the Swedish parliament. September 2019: The movement Greta inspired has grown from one person to millions.
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@whippletom I spent five years in the St Andrews IR department and let’s just say the emails sometimes did not find me well. Only now am I learning it was a counter-espionage measure.
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Kay Burley’s broadcasting live from a graveyard in St Michael’s on Wyre.
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On Monday’s Stories of Our Times: everything we know so far about Covid cronyism. With @Gabriel_Pogrund and @JolyonMaugham. Subscribe for free:.
SCOOP: A Tory councillor who landed £275m in PPE contracts has traded his home in Stroud for a £1.5m, 17th century Cotswolds mansion. Steve Dechan also paid himself £400k, his wife £150k. He said he's using the rest of the profit to create jobs and growth.
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Reminded today of something @ReicherStephen told us last week, about what governments need to do to avoid undermining public consent for lockdown…. Full interview:
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“I wish there would be more of a debate in England about a zero-Covid approach. It seems like it wasn’t even considered.”. @devisridhar on Stories of Our Times:
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The only way to avoid being the PM who cancelled Christmas was to be the PM who cancelled international travel, pubs, restaurants, gyms and universities over the summer. Or be the PM who allowed ICUs to run out of space. It’s been obvious since September that this would happen.
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@Darren_Dutton I love this but it needs this footage of Matt Hancock doing parkour
Great to try a bit of #parkour this morning with @ParkourUK President @SebastienFoucan to learn how anyone can #GiveParkourATry
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More from @Fhamiltontimes and @KieranPAndrews in @thetimes:. Ex-MI6 chief among hundreds targeted by Russian hackers.
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@Peston Sensible people, me included, are doing the right thing and trying to get tested within 5 days of symptom onset as per medical guidance. Patience is not the answer. Incidence is doubling every 8 days now so doubling testing capacity by Oct is nowhere near enough.
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Fair to say Ira Glass is a bit angry about how The Trojan Horse Affair was received over here.
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@youngvulgarian Matt Hancock’s wife and the Oliver Bonas man are due an episode that ends with a knowing look to camera.
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Decided not to be a judge for @britpodawards this year, because they wanted me to listen to about 9 hours of material in my own time for free, which is much more than in previous years. The ‘early bird’ pricing to attend the awards starts at £270 a ticket.
judges judge for free, and nominees are celebrated but can't afford a ticket. who's this actually for @britpodawards? we're very confused and insulted.
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He’s not the right messenger for the things he believes in, but Blair should pivot to running a YouTube channel where he just explains complicated things. He’s a good explainer. Or maybe a cooking channel.
Tony Blair: We were promised by the PM - and Vote Leave - that we'd know Britain's future relationship with the EU before Brexit. MPs must reject a Painful No-deal Brexit, reject the PM's Pointless deal &, in light of all we now know, put the decision back to the People. RT ↓
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Today we commemorate the one-year anniversary of the most chaotic email ever sent to the UK Audio Network (this went to about 2,000 people in the radio/podcast industry)
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Credit where it’s due: Novara has been doing a very good job of longform, thinky interviews with people they disagree with (e.g. Matthew Goodwin earlier this year), and this is an excellent examination of what Rory Stewart thinks.
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Woohoo.
Nominees for Best News & Current Affairs Producer are:. Asya Fouks - The Times .James Shield - The Times & The Sunday Times.Jessica Beck - BBC Radio 4.Josh Kelly - The Guardian .Robert Nicholson - Whistledown Productions.Tim Johns - BBC Audio.
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Unironically think this is one of the best designed pieces of technology of the past 10 years. In a decade defined by Jony Ive it’s a kind of anti-Ive design – utilitarian, tough, modular. I even like the “goodbye see you!” message. Put it in the @DesignMuseum
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Very pleased to be on this list for the sixth year in a row!.
⭐️The nominees for BEST NEW & CURRENT AFFAIRS PRODUCER are: . @alexgbishop @reducedlisten .@jshield.@jamestindale .@rebeccakesby1 @ctvc.@RuthAbrahams5.@willroe2 . #APAs23
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Nicola Sturgeon opening by saying the EU has behaved like “a genuine partnership of equals”, unlike the United Kingdom. Believes Scot govt’s paper, ‘Scotland’s place in Europe’, which predates the Chequers plan, hasn’t been given due attention. #RSAbrexit.
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If you listened to the radio or podcasts in 2020, there’s a high chance they were recorded in a wardrobe.
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Woohoo.
The nominees for. 🚨 Best News Producer 🚨. 1. @AsyaFouks The Times & The Sunday Times.2. @courtneyyusuf The Guardian.3. @elizacasss The Guardian .4. @jshield The Times & The Sunday Times.5. @R_Stonehouse @BBCNewsbeat .6. @rbnicholson @WhistledownProd . #APAs2021
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Please be Crystal Maze
Downing St sources: PM considering number of TV formats as part of election campaign but will not participate in leaders head-to-head debate.
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V pleased to win silver last night for our reporting on volunteer rescuers in Ukraine, the surprising true causes of inflation, and AI:.
@jamestindale @WhistledownProd 📰 Best News and Current Affairs Presenter 📰 . 🥈 James Shield - The Times and The Sunday Times . @jshield #APAs2023
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Our full Failures of State miniseries, with @JCalvertST & @Arbuthnott + hosts @ManveenRana & @DAaronovitch:. 1) Sleepwalking into disaster. 2) Making the same mistake twice. 3) The origins of Covid-19.
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The last time I got an unexpected brown A4 envelope in the post it was a jury summons, so here’s to nice post.
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Built a searchable news firehose to help us make montages for tomorrow morning’s episode. Audio from four news networks gets recorded and transcribed in 15min blocks, all keyword searchable. In a few seconds we can grab every sentence that mentions (e.g.) the constitution.
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A woman has chest pains and phones for an ambulance. It’s nearly two hours until she gets to the hospital, where she joins the ambulance queue outside A&E and a nurse checks her over. Another hour goes by and she’s still in the ambulance. She has a cardiac arrest and dies.
Exclusive: Patient dies in ambulance waiting outside ‘extremely busy’ A&E
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The first mention of Covid in The Times. Friday 10th January, page 32.
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Larry King talking to @JesseThorn about death. A man fuelled by curiosity who lived just long enough to find out the answers to both of these questions.
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Is there any way to just get BBC News notifications for actual news?
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Stories of Our Times has just been shortlisted for best news coverage, best speech presenter, best factual single programme, and best factual series at the @radioacademy ARIAS. Wahey!.
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Raynes Park residents deface a UKIP poster with a Yoda quote. My kind of people. http://t.co/bSHqYOOsuJ.
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Ten years ago I was an NHS management trainee at Stoke Mandeville hospital, reading Shaun's reporting about the Mid Staffs scandal, so I was glad to produce this. A decade on, it's depressing that the KC who chaired the inquiry thinks equally poor care is widespread today.
Ten years ago today, a public inquiry found that patients were subject to appalling and unnecessary suffering at Stafford Hospital. This is how @ShaunLintern helped expose Mid Staffs, & Sir Robert Francis on the crisis in today’s NHS
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This afternoon @hackista and I spoke at @LondonPodFest about location recording – how to get the best audio when you're out and about. Here are some of the tips we shared… 🧵.
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Pleased to win silver in current affairs at last night’s Audio Production Awards for our Polarised episodes with Will Davies and Claire Fox. Wouldn’t have been possible without the talents of @RSAMatthew & @mrianleslie, and my boss Nina who is too wise to be on Twitter.
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@HelenZaltzman There’s something comforting about the paywall fade. Like bad opinions being shouted into the fog.
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Too many places 1) don't pay their interns, 2) then wonder why they have i) a diversity problem and ii) bland thinking. 🙄.
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@DAaronovitch The Scotland anecdote is a thing of beauty:.
Rory Stewart on Steve Hilton is properly funny . ‘He told me rapidly that he wanted to “blow up the Foreign Office”… and get rid of the ambassadors. ‘Later I saw him on the floor, staring at a map, saying: “Fuck me, look how big Scotland is. This is just fucking mad, man”.’
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It’s 5 years today since I joined @macmillancancer for what was supposed to be an 8-week placement from @NHSGradScheme. Oops.
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Working on a daily news podcast in the middle of a global pandemic has finally evaporated the imposter syndrome I used to feel for having an NHS and health policy background instead of the traditional training in radio.
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@hotdogsladies Because you mentioned it (I’m glad you enjoyed it!) here’s the supercut I made of you and Michael Barbaro going ‘hm’:
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“The Lease of the Property also requires you enter into a Deed of Covenant” - excuse me, I am trying to move house not summon a witch.
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Apparently this story has created a hostile environment for Nick Timothy and he has deported himself from Twitter
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In its first year, 2017, I entered a small independent podcast (@WeeklyEconPod) to the BPAs for two categories, winning bronze for current affairs. Three of us went to the awards night. Total cost of entering and attending: £89.30. This year it would be £894.
Very excited to be nominated for The Rising Star Award!. Although the nomination is slightly soured by the fact I can’t afford to go… . What entry-level, independent audio producer could possible pay £318 for a ticket?
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Well that’s one way to transcribe ‘virus experts’. Unless @whippletom was in a very different briefing on Friday.
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If you find yourself wondering if Big Jet TV man is going to milkshake duck himself, and if this is part of the vibe shift, you have spent too much time on this website.
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Woohoo.
📰The nominees for BEST NEWS & CURRENT AFFAIRS PRODUCER are:. @adeaneant.@danielrosney @BBCNewsbeat.@edfjdrummond @thetimes .@jshield @thetimes .Ruth Abrahams.@taryn_ruth13 @thetimes . #APAs2022
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Handy flow chart for any organisations anxious about letting their staff loose on social media http://t.co/CwF5visZjh
http://t.co/zz0nSTqbId.
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Very Niche Tweets: Audio producers should obviously know about LUFS, but beyond hitting the overall loudness target, the *range* of loudness makes a big difference to intelligibility especially when people are listening in noisy environments on stock earphones. Some examples….
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Congratulations to the man who raised that money for the NHS. But £17 million is only enough to fund the NHS in England for 1 hour 6 minutes and 41 seconds. It takes £134,000,000,000 to run the thing for a year. Which is why we can’t slide into seeing the NHS as a charity.
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In the war on cancer, let’s not forget to win the battle for better quality of life
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Going to give this a bash and report back to #audionerdtwitter.
We just released Studio Sound, a one-click toggle that makes it sound like you recorded in a studio even if you didn’t. Available in beta. Get early access here:
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News of John Humphrys' departure from Today reminds me of the time @Maherjane was booked to talk to him about Macmillan's first digital nurse. Remember brainstorming possible tricky questions with @PRPringle, only for Humphrys to ask 'Prof Maher, what about this internet?'
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Sturgeon recounting Donald Dewar’s reflection that the establishment of the Scottish parliament would add a new dimension to the UK’s relationship with Europe. Quite! #RSABrexit.
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Gimlet producer salaries 👀 (from their newly ratified collective bargaining agreement with the unions)
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Feel very fortunate to have spent the last three years learning from such a talented and ambitious team at Stories of Our Times, and to have worked with @A_Loyd_Times and @ManveenRana on our coverage of the fallout of 20 years of war in Afghanistan.
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Getting ready for my last week at @theRSAorg – excited to be joining @thetimes & @thesundaytimes as senior producer on <secret mission> launching in <redacted> 🕵🏻.
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Building a searchable news firehose:. Finally got round to writing about the tools I built for our US election night episode, and how they're changing the way I use audio archive in programmes.
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Let’s turn the abandoned cinemas into temporary podcast studios. Excellent acoustics and large enough to do in-person interviews again safely. Sit at either end of the room, interviewer and guest have their own telescopes. Ahoy there.
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Do you trust charities less following recent scandals?. We’ll be live from the RSA this Friday at 11.30 with @RSAMatthew and a panel of charity experts, following the final part of his @BBCRadio4 series ‘The Charity Business’. Watch and add your Qs here:.
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Five health secretaries in 18 months. You’d have more continuity of leadership if it was an NHS management trainee rotation.
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Newton’s fourth law of physics states that the closer a left or centre-left think tank gets to influence the more likely it is to self-immolate, and so of course my former employers are locked in a dispute with the union they once gave an award.
The Royal Society of the Arts was full of praise for trade unions. until its own workers wanted one.
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If you need a USB mic to send guests that you can also use with your XLR kit after the apocalypse gets cancelled, we’ve been trying one of these and it’s pretty good:
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Come and work with me! Our team is hiring an audio producer to work with us on the new daily podcast from The Times & Sunday Times! Apply here! Ok bye!
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Agree, and it would be good for under-30s too. Implicit in the 30-under-30 stuff is the idea that that’s the cut-off point for new talent. I didn’t work in audio fulltime until I was already 30, because I was working in hospitals and cancer charities.
At the end of 2020, instead of 30 Under 30 and NextGen lists, please profile middle-aged people who just got their big breaks. I want to read about a mother of 2 who published her first novel, a director who released their first studio feature at 47, THAT'S THE LIST WE WANT.
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As of this week I’ve spent longer working for the Times from here than I ever did from the office. The canteen is a hazy memory. I can’t remember which floor we work on. I almost miss the northern line.
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This week in the RSA staff kitchen – what else should be on this board?
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My mortgage deal ends in 18 months. If I had to remortgage tomorrow I’d be paying at least 48% more. The Bank of England seems to think this will help reduce inflation for households. And no matter how you vote at the next election, the policy stays. Surely unsustainable.
Column. On the bomb that is about to go off for anyone with a mortgage.
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