The Evolving Newsroom

The radio documentaries, aired by the BBC World Service, look at what we would be missing if everday mundane things had never existed. This week they look at copper.

"Without copper there'd be no lighting, electrical power for lighting, no radio, no renewable energy systems, no working automobiles, air conditioning or refrigerators, no digital electronics, no computing, no safe drinking water distribution...

"We each have just under half a fingernail of copper in our bodies..."

The last documentary was about Cows and included a UK farm run on Hindu principles and the cow's crucial role in the discovery and development of vaccines, among other things.

Brilliant.

In fact, BBC World Service Documentaries wins the RSS Feed of the Month award.

A few tips on using social media from BBC blogger Robin Hamman:

"Social media isn't something you add to a website, it's something you do. When I look back over the social media projects I've been involved in over the years, it's obvious that the key variable upon which success, or failure, is dependent is to what extent social media has actually been integrated into the overall editorial proposition."

Among the examples Robin gives are:

Works: A chat room where the presenter dips in and out of the conversation, reads comments from the chat on air, uses the chat room to actually drive part of the programme works because the effort expended in hosting the chat is well spent.
Doesn't Work: A stand alone chat room fails because someone with better stuff to do has to sit there and moderate it.

Worth a look.

I meant to link to this a while back. For those of you interested in mobile developments, check out the BBC's latest offering of the mobile version of bbc.co.uk.

9.30 this morning, NZ time:

News of a big fire in London's Camden Market reaches me on Twitter via a news feed from Netherlands-based BreakingNewsOn. They seemed to be getting information from Sky TV.

By 10am NZ time, the Guardian had a picture and good story up complete with eye witness reports. The Times had a smaller report and was asking readers to send in pictures. The Telegraph and Independent had nothing, nor did the Evening Standard.

By 11am, nzherald.co.nz was running the story and asking New Zealanders living in London to send in pictures. Using a combination of Reuters reports, their own staff and TV coverage,they had a pretty good outline of the story. Stuff.co.nz didn't have anything.

At 11.10am a couple of google searches brought up coverage by BBC, CBC in Canada, AFP, AP TV, Sky, Jerusalem Post (carrying an AP report) and plenty more. Conspiracy theories and other conversations were under way on Yahoo Answers, Neogaff, Suzy's photos and elsewhere.

The BBC, in inimitable style, had a full report, pictures, video of eye witnesses and the scene, links to related sites including the fire service, Camden Council and Camden market, and was asking readers for information, pictures and video. (Shame international viewers have to sit through an insurance ad before the video footage plays, kills the sense of immediacy somewhat).

By 11.45am, Guardian had really fleshed out the story, as had Sky and BBC. Times had added three pictures and NZ Herald one (all agency pics). Telegraph had nothing, Stuff was running Reuters copy and pic, the Independent had PA copy with no picture and the Evening Standard was running a headline on the ticker. TV3 was running APTN copy and video, TVNZ had Reuters copy with no footage.

Notably, search for 'fire', 'camden' and 'london' on YouTube brought up nothing. Am I missing something? No sign of ugc on any of the news sites yet, all agency footage and eye witness commentary gathered by reporters on the scene.

Wow. That was quick. I noticed a typo earlier on a BBC story and decided to see if they had a way for readers to contact them about howlers. Sure enough, click on Contact Us, then Website, and you get this:




So I sent in the typos. Sure enough, 5 minutes later when I checked the story again, the changes had been made. Deeply impressive. Even more impressive was that I'd mistakenly referred to the story as being about Argentina when I meant Venezuela, and they were kind enough not to point that out to me. Admirable restraint.

The process could be a bit simpler - you have to open the story in a second browser tab so you can copy and paste the typos and the story's url into the feedback form - although no doubt there are plenty of pointy-headed typo-spotters like me who will be sufficiently motivated to do so. It would be better, though, if they could make the feedback form automatically open in a new window.

I've written about this before and have no doubt I'll do so again. All news sites should make it easy for their users (and fellow staff) to send in typos and mistakes they've spotted. Users get to feel involved and valued and you get free proofreading. It's a no-brainer.

It's also not that difficult to do. Just set up a group email address which all relevant web editors are copied into. Duty web editors take responsibility for monitoring and responding to feedback on their section. Simple but effective. Or am I missing something?

The Telegraph in London from time to time invites guests in to respond to questions set by readers. The most recent was BBC director-general Mark Thompson.

Telegraph Communities Editor Shane Richmond blogs about that here, along with the BBC, the licencing fee that part-funds it, and a response to blogger Martin Belam's summary of the Q& A and his thoughts on Mark Thompson 'getting off easy'.

Entertaining blogs and an interesting idea. Haven't been back in NZ long enough to know if anything similar happens on any of the news sites here.

Does it?

John Birt talks to iPM about the beginnings of the BBC's website 10 years ago. He talks about going on a study tour and meeting dotcom evangelists in the US when 'the scales fell from my eyes' . He came back to the BBC to proselytise only to be met with blank faces and a fair amount of resistance. (Sounds familiar). It's a good interview in which he talks about being proud of the site's achievements over the years. Quite right too.

The BBC website, always a pioneer, remains so and still sets trends and standards that others worldover follow. Yes, that is in large part due to the fact that it's long had a giant staff and buckets of public money to play with. A good number of those staff, mind you, will soon be gone as the latest round of redundancies kick in - necessitated by another major cultural and structural shift, this time to accommodate the demands of convergence.

In addition to the interview, the post talks about the BBC's new modular homepage which launched late last year in beta. It looks extremely promising although I've found it a bit clunky and UK-centric so far and have temporarily abandoned it. I will go back to it, though.

The BBC says: "The new page is made up of customisable and moveable widgets that allow users to determine the layout of the page and give them a greater level of control over what information they want to see.

"As well as the tailoring the page to their own requirements users can, for the first time, listen live to BBC radio directly from the homepage and browse the evening’s BBC tv schedules."

There's been huge chatter about the site, a disproportionate amount of which is in appreciation of the analog clockface adorning the top right corner. Mind you, to be fair, it is fantastic. Most of the chatter, as far as I can tell, has been favourable and rightly so: the BBC is leading the way on this aspect of personalisation.

Personalisation has been talked about a lot in media companies in recent years. It's been applied here and there to email services and the like, and some sites have launched user-centric areas with some degree of personalisation, such as the Telegraph's user-blogging site My Telegraph.

But this is the first I've seen of an interface where the user can experience the whole website from their own personalised homepage. Are there more out there?

Peter Horrocks, head of BBC newsroom, posts a speech he made at the University of Leeds' Institute of Communication Studies about where user generated content fits in at the BBC. The BBC is restructuring its newsroom with the UGC team sitting alongside the news teams supplying content for broadcast and web outlets - there's more detail in the post.

Peter covers a lot of issues including how much weight to give to user comments, how many resources to commit to managing them, not letting the 1% of the audience who comment drive the news agenda, how to find the wheat within the chaff that will turn into compelling stories and how to apply journalistic principles to the process.

"We cannot just take the views that we receive via e-mails and texts and let them dictate our agenda. Nor should they give us a slant around which we should orient our take on a story. At their best they are an invaluable information resource and an important corrective to group-think. They very often ask direct or apparently naïve questions that get to the heart of the subject – they can be gold dust for interviewers for instance.

"But we need to be very clear about how many contributions we get, their statistical significance and the weight we should attach to them. The BBC gets an average of 10,000 e-mails or posts in a day to its Have Your Say site. That can soar on big news days. That sounds an enormous number. But up to 5 million people can come to the BBC News website on a single day. That means that fewer than 1% of our users, even on the most active days, are choosing to say something to us. What organisation – a political party, a business, a trades union – would allow its stance to be totally driven by such a small minority?

"Of course a small proportion could be indicative of a wider population, but we can’t be sure. Rather than playing a numbers game to drive our agenda I instead encourage our teams to look for thoughtful or surprising views and opinions. In other words we still need to be journalistic with this material, as we would with any other source."

It's a considered piece and I recommend reading it. The comments add a lot too.

BBC Newsnight's Paul Mason talks to Beat Blogging about Newsnight's exploits on Facebook, his blogging experience and more.

"Me and my editor, Peter Barron, have the view that you've got to be on everything and try everything.

"It's got to be guerilla-ist and full of zeitgeist and very witty otherwise nobody is interested."

It's a good read.