Leandro De Itaquera

But Span's sales director, John Gavan, denies that Span recovered full fees to compensate the agency for loss of earnings. "If the company suffers a significant loss through breach of contract, we may exercise our contractual rights, which merely reflect the common law position." But, he adds, "It is extremely rare for this to occur."The agency is not alone in including a "no notice" clause. "It is entirely Span's right to propose terms of its own choosing in such agreements, as indeed it is entirely the right of the contractor to choose not to accept them," he said. "Client companies pay both the agency and the contractor fees and it is the client's wishes, coupled with market forces, that determine how viable our standpoint is."Mr Pinto, accused in the forum of "opening his mouth and planting both feet in it", declines to comment further. It is the only time that I have been so unhappy in a job that I actually considered trying to leave before the end of the year. I rang Span and asked if there was any possibility of leaving early, and they basically said, 'Tough luck, you signed the contract and you'll have to stay there.' "Two days later, Span waded in, "in the spirit of free speech", with Mr Pinto's response.

"They also have a clause saying that if you leave early, you have to pay them all the money they would have got if you stayed until the end."I had not looked for a contract for some time, and they led me to believe it was standard practice. Span, one of the first companies to use the Net for advertising its job vacancies, decided to drop out of the discussion after its original posting.CIX has 13,000 members, of whom 1,000 could have witnessed the onlinefisticuffs.Liza, the otherwise unidentified contributor to the CIX contractor forum who kicked off the debate, said she had "very foolishly" signed a Span contract for a year. The agency involved, Span (part of Computer People), was said to insist that contractors complete the whole term of their contract or compensate the agency with the full amount of fees it would have earned.When Span reacted by trying to silence the complaints with a lengthy reply from Dave Pinto, its contracts sales manager, wires to the Internet crackled with rage. There is growing resentment among freelancers that while they may be given a month's notice by their employer, and the job terminated if the project finishes before schedule, they may face hefty demands for lost agency fees if they opt out early themselves. Furious exchanges between freelancers and one agency reverberated for two weeks down buzzing lines to a contractors' forum on Computer Information Exchange (CIX). IT freelancers who work through contract agencies are being urged not to sign "one-sided" contracts that prevent them from leaving a job before the term is up. "Disk-based systems have no moving parts, are easier to maintain and cheaper," she said.BBC and ITN technicians will not be so pleased. "This may not necessarily make them all redundant," says Roger Bolton, general secretary of Bectu, the union representing the technicians, "but there will be a serious need for training and new career paths in the next couple of years.".

The report will be broadcast from the server, reducing a laborious process of several stages into a quick and simple job.Anita Sinclair, technical director with the UK-based computer editing company Lightworks, believes the technology will revolutionise broadcasting. The journalist will then cut and paste the footage as one would with a word-processing document.When the report is complete, the journalist will record the soundtrack on to the report and the finished product will be stored on the server, where the news editor will approve and schedule it. The disk is taken back to the newsroom and downloaded instantly to a computer server. With the new Electronic News Gathering (ENG) systems, each journalist will have a multimedia PC and will call up the video footage from the server to his or her desktop. While the technician arranges the sequence of the pictures, the journalist writes the script and then records the soundtrack. The tape is then taken to the news editor, who approves the report and schedules it for broadcast.

Finally, it is taken to the transmission room, loaded into a tape player and played at the given time. However, new technology being demonstrated at the International Broadcast Conference in Amsterdam last month is set to change all this. A host of broadcast equipment manufacturers were courting most of the major European broadcasters and offering them digital newsroom systems.As a result of new camera technology (from the computer-based video company Avid and the Japanese camera manufacturer Ikegami), broadcasters can now dispense with videotape altogether and record on to a special disk-based camera. The prospects of a solution being hammered out before Wednesday - or even 1999, for the next conference - still look desperately remote.. The BBC and ITN are about to introduce computer technology into the newsroom that will revolutionise the process of broadcast news. Over the next couple of years, they will replace videotape equipment with computer technology. The development will enable them to reduce staffing levels and put the technical task of reporting the news into the hands of journalists. Until now, news has been recorded on to videotape, which is then edited or cut into a news report in a cutting room or editing suite by a technician.