Did a really nice day’s directing for BBC Magazines today, shooting an intro video for the iPad edition of BBC Good Food Magazine with a cameraman friend of mine.

It’ll be available in the new year. It’s the first iPad magazine I’ve seen in detail, and it looks great. And I’m a sucker for these sort of gadgets anyway...

I do hope that tablets like the iPad enable the magazine and newspaper industries to survive in the future. A journo friend was explaining to me recently that if, as a freelance writer who isn’t Charlie Brooker or some other celeb, you earn 25p a word, then there simply isn’t time for investigative journalism with proper research if you want to pay the mortgage. So you get Wikipedia-researched “comment” columns, recycled Reuters/AP items, or press releases.

If iPad papers put circulations back up, maybe there’ll be a bit more money around for quality writing, instead of some magazines just printing celeb press releases and stills as if they were stories.

It means we have to be willing to pay properly for papers again, though. We all ditched print papers because we could read the news for free on the websites, and when papers charge for their website, we just go elsewhere. I hope iPad/tablet magazines are attractive, convenient and cool enough that we’ll pay proper money for them, and they can pay journos to write the good quality stuff they’d like to, if only they could afford to.

Caught one of the BBC Young Talent of the Year episodes we shot in September - Andy and the camera boys from Bruizer made an old aircraft hangar look a lot more stylish than it did in reality :)

Some more shooting with a much older and wiser cameraman friend of mine this week - lots of people with great stories in this industry, but fewer and fewer who can say they started life projecting rushes for Hitchcock...

I was in a meeting in the BBC’s White City media centre this week, in the TARDIS meeting room, trying to play down my unreasonable level of excitement at being in a room with old cyberman heads from the 80s... Can’t imagine how people actually get work done in there.