http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sz6t

I can always tell when we've recorded a good edition of The Bottom Line: it is one where I have not had to speak very much.

Don't get me wrong. I love speaking. It's what I'm paid to do. And before we record the programme I always make sure that I have plenty to say on the topics we're discussing.

Fortunately, however, I'm modest enough to know that the Bottom Line is really about the guests rather than the presenter. And for the programme to succeed, it needs to show the guests at their most fluent and expressive.

And that is where the challenge of the programme lies.

To succeed, the conversation has to fizz; the guests have to bounce comments off each other and push their point out, rather than have it pulled from them. In short, the guests have to converse like the professional talkers who fill the airwaves - journalists, politicians, artistic performers and academics.

But the interesting fact is that when you take a significant number of business people out of their comfort zone and put them in a radio studio, they are not relaxed about practising the art of conversation.

Business-people are trained in all sorts of communication: they can bark orders or sell washing powder or talk to Powerpoint presentations. They are just not bred to appear on Midweek.

Put a microphone in front of many of our guests they are a little taciturn; they like to think about what they're saying; they are worried about disagreeing with the other guests or speaking out of turn. Sometimes, they even wait to be asked a question.

Unchecked, none of these habits give the programme the natural flow we are looking for. (After all, you would never feel a dinner party had been very stimulating if it consisted of the host simply asking a sequence of questions to one guest at a time). So my job as presenter is to make all the guests feel comfortable with the task at hand.

Now, over time I've made an interesting observation on what works and what doesn't in making the more reticent guests relax.

I used to give a rather vague pre-show chat to them all, emphasising that they should feel free to speak without being spoken to; that they could make their point when they wanted to, and even interrupt if it sounded natural.

But this turned out to be too imprecise. Business-people are task oriented and hungry for new skills. They want their briefing to be more target-driven.

So I have discovered that if, before the recording, I instead tell them that "on at least three occasions in the programme, you should make a comment without having been asked anything by me", they converse in a far more casual way.

In fact, some of the best conversations occur when I jokingly suggest the show is a competition to see who can initiate the most points and talk most.

Tell them that, and the discussion flows. I have to do very little work. To the listener the result is a programme that has a more variable pace and one that is altogether easier to listen to.

But I expect it's only programmes with business guests that would find the way to foster a natural-sounding round-table chat by giving specific advice upfront of a rather unnatural kind.

Evan Davis presents The Bottom Line, Dragon's Den and Today

The new series The Bottom Line begins this evening at 2030.
Some pictures taken at a recording of The Bottom Line in Broadcasting House last July

It used to be so simple when people asked what I do. "I work for the BBC," I would say. "I'm a radio producer, making programmes for Radio 4." Simple.

But since last summer, it's not been quite such a straightforward question to answer. "I'm a senior multiplatform producer." Cue puzzled look. Producer is fairly self-explanatory. It's the multiplatform bit that confuses.

I'm a member of a small team that's part of Radio Current Affairs. We make a number of long-running series and one-off current affairs documentaries, for, er, radio - mainly Radio 4, Radio 5live and the World Service, but also occasionally for Radio 3, the Asian Network and 1Xtra. (When we're not fending off fox attacks of course).

Our programmes include many Radio 4 stalwarts like Money Box, File on 4, From our Own Correspondent and In Business, along with younger series like More or Less, The Bottom Line and 5live's Donal MacIntyre. Plus lots of specials such as the recent Reith Lectures, the current three-part series on the history of MI6 A Century in the Shadows, and the forthcoming four-part series Robert Peston and the Moneymakers.

Our output is incredibly rich and diverse. And the multiplatform team's job is to make the most of it, and find new outlets for our journalism across the rest of the BBC.

This could involve anything from making a shorter version of a documentary for The World Tonight, or Woman's Hour, setting up an interview with one of our reporters on Today or 5live Breakfast, or liaising with colleagues on the Asian Network, the World Service or Radio 1's Newsbeat to enable them to produce their own pieces from our content.

Despite being a radio department, we also increasingly generate material for television as well. Our reporters regularly pop up on the News Channel to talk about our stories, often accompanied by clips which we have filmed as well as recorded for radio - as was the case for this interview which Simon Cox did with Dignitas founder Ludwig Minelli for The Report

We've also made short television 'packages' for BBC Breakfast - such as this investigation into the controversial Yes Loans company.

It was filmed and edited by my fellow multiplatformer Ruth Alexander, at the same time as the reporter Samantha Washington made a radio 'package' for Money Box and a separate item for Radio 5live's Donal MacIntyre programme, also part of our department. Another shorter version ran in radio and television news bulletins.

Why? The answer is simple. It enables us to get much more bang for our - or rather, your - buck.

And that's before we've talked about the web, which is another crucial platform. As is often the case, the Yes Loans story, was also written up for the BBC news website.

It has almost ten million unique readers in an average week, and so is a supremely important target for our programme material.

We therefore spend a lot of time liaising with our colleagues in the different sections of the news website - especially The Magazine - to try and tempt them to commission articles from our reporters and producers.

We don't just turn our content into written features either. We also make picture galleries - such as this one from a Crossing Continents programme about life in a Mumbai slum.

Our programmes have also generated fantastic audio slideshows, such as this one - inspired by a Radio 3 documentary about Yiddish's struggle for survival.

More slideshows accompanied our 90-part (yes, 90) series for Radio 4 America, Empire of Liberty - all still available online (David Reynolds wrote about the series for the blog).

And that's not to mention the time we spend making sure all our programmes are present and correct across the BBC's digital landscape, be that on the Radio 4, 5Live or World Service websites, or the iPlayer or in the podcast directory. And not forgetting our work with sites beyond the BBC, such as Twitter, which I've already discussed here.

The common thread which runs throughout all this work is that, er, it involves a great deal of extra work. Many of our programmes are made by one producer and one presenter - often the same person wears both of those hats. Asking them to wear an additional multiplatform hat is tricky.

Getting our content onto other platforms is not a copy-and-paste kind of operation. In every case the journalism has to be re-imagined for a different medium and/or a different audience.

Although we always hope to bring people back to the original programme, each separate audience has to be satisfied by the version of the story which they receive - wherever and however they get it.

Our job is to make that process as efficient as possible. To help achieve this, I've spent much of the last year on an extended training boot camp, learning to shoot and edit video, make pieces for television, produce content for the web and more.

Along the way, I've had to get to grips with a frankly bewildering range of different (and often mutually incompatible) systems: from CPS and IPS to APS and PIT, from Jupiter and Q-cut to Premiere and VCS, and not forgetting Top Cat and (of course) Top Cat 2. And no, I didn't make any of those up.

It's been a demanding twelve months, but also exhilarating. So - multiplatform producer. Not a great job title, but definitely a great job.

The picture, Tokyo station platform 9 and 10, is by heiwa4126 and is used under licence.
Jennifer produced the multiplatform activity around the 2009 Reith Lectures and wrote about it for the blog.
Jennifer's multiplatform team worked with Radio 4's More or Less to produce last week's video in response to the Muslim Demographics YouTube hit. Watch the video here. Listen to the programme here.

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Advice of a rather unnatural kind

Being multiplatform