For many people working in TV, the only opportunity they have had to observe Carolyn McCall has been at The Guardian’s annual post-MacTaggart lecture dinners, held at the Edinburgh TV festival.
As the newspaper’s Chief Executive, she co-hosted the events alongside then-editor, Alan Rusbridger. This lack of visibility in TV circles is about to change as she prepares to take over as the first female head of ITV.
RTS Futures assembled a panel of pioneers for its sold-out event at London's Hospital Club in late April, "I made it in... digital". An enthusiastic, youthful audience was eager to learn from their experiences of working at the cutting edge of new media. It learnt, perhaps surprisingly, that television – the dancing dad at an achingly hip party – still has a big role to play in the digital age.
"I’d rather have internet than running water," declares Dan Snow, broadcaster, historian and self-confessed digital obsessive. Not content with making history programmes for broadcasters on subjects as diverse as China’s Terracotta Army and the D-Day landings, Snow is now building an online empire. His new tools are apps, YouTube videos, Facebook, Twitter (where he has a whopping 100,000 followers) and, most recently, Periscope, the Twitter-owned live video app.
