The blog, edited by Chris Jones, will be a place where ‘decision makers and experts can talk about things going on inside the BBC’ it says.
“This could include anything; from major announcements to how parts of the corporation operate. We’ll also be highlighting and linking to the fascinating debates happening on the many other blogs, message boards and other social media, inside and outside the BBC website.”
What’s the difference between a refresh and a re-launch? We’ll leave that for the Guardian and the BBC to fight out…
The Guardian today reported that a ‘radical redesign’ and re-launch of BBC websites is planned for March 2010, with a focus on social media – according to the paper’s sources.
Among the changes outlined were a ‘a new homepage and underlying hosting platform,’ radical changes to news navigation, commenting facilities on programmes, the launch of the Open iPlayer and new connections to third party platforms.
The BBC, however, denied such a ‘radical overhaul’ to Journalism.co.uk, although it said ‘a refresh of the BBC News site’ will take place in due course – as previously reported.
In a statement it said:
“We’re always looking to improve the BBC experience for our users but contrary to reports, we are not planning a radical overhaul of the BBC’s websites.
“We are looking at how we can genuinely make BBC Online part of the web and meet our users growing expectations that they can contribute in different ways to our web site, and more broadly how we can share our technologies with other media companies.
“The website for Strictly Come Dancing as well as the Open iPlayer are examples – and as previously announced, we are planning a refresh of the BBC News site in the new year. Any investment in BBC Online is tightly assessed for market impact and public value before we commit to it.”
Further explanation will be given further down the line, a spokesperson told Journalism.co.uk.
In March 2009 director-general Mark Thompson announced that the BBC must cut £400 million from its budget within the next three years to avoid going over its statutory borrowing limit. Thompson said the corporation was targeting a five per cent cost reduction for television programme cost, year-on-year, for the next five years, a cumulative saving of 20 per cent.
While Thompson said that he agreed with parts of Bradshaw’s RTS speech and said that a ‘radical and open-minded’ review of the BBC would not dismiss the suggestion that the coporation had reached its limits of expansion, the director-general said he found some of Bradshaw’s ideas ‘frankly puzzling’.
“He [Bradshaw] set out a long list of the current BBC public services. By the way, I don’t know many broadcasters who haven’t launched multiple services over the past decade. But with one or two exceptions, these new BBC services weren’t approved by the BBC Trust. They were approved by the Government of which Ben is a member. Indeed, the Government asked the BBC to launch a range of new services to help with their policy of encouraging the public to move to digital television and radio. Ben’s surprise at these services is itself surprising.”
In an interview with the Guardian, BBC director-general, Mark Thompson, said that executives are considering the part- privatisation of the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide.
Thompson also said that the provision of free BBC online news was ‘utterly non-negotiable’. “I would rather the BBC was abolished than we started encrypting news to stop people seeing it,” he told the Guardian.
Nuria Leon, a journalist and postgraduate student at the University of Westminster, recently demanded an explanation from BBC director-general Mark Thompson regarding the lack of varied BBC news content from Latin America. You can listen to the encounter here.
Now she needs journalists’ help: for her MA dissertation in media management she wants to find out what journalists think about coverage of Latin America in the UK. [NB: Latin American countries listed here, and UN information on the Americas here.]
So, if you think there is a hole in English-language reportage from that part of the world, please help her out. Here are her questions. Please leave your thoughts below, or email her directly: n.leon at my.westminster.ac.uk.
1. Given your own experiences:
a. What do you think causes a gap between between Latin America and the UK in regards to the distribution and production of news?
b. What would help create a direct link between both markets for the production and distribution of news?
2. What do you think about international news agencies and their service from Latin America?
3. Do you think there is a demand for customised news services, rather than homogeneous news packages offered by international news agencies?
4. What benefits would you see if both markets started to conduct direct, continuous and permanent business?
5. Do you think the UK would be receptive to more Latin American news content?
6. Do you believe there is a niche for such a service? A need?
7. More generally, what could help reduce the gap between Latin America and the UK news industry?
Journalism.co.uk had been surprised to learn at last month’s Journalism in Crisis event that the BBC used only stringers to cover South America, according to director of news Helen Boaden.
The location of global bureaux ‘is something to do with your colonial past’ she said, adding to comments by BBC director-general Mark Thompson, when he was questioned by an irate audience member on the corporation’s lack of coverage in that part of the world (specifically Latin America).
Audio here:
Does the BBC really have no bureaux in Central and South America? Well, the BBC press office later told Journalism.co.uk, it depends how you define stringers and bureaux.
There is a distinction between ‘newsgathering hub’ bureaux and ‘non-hub’ regional bureaux the BBC spokesperson said. While there are no ‘newsgathering hub bureaux’ in South and Central Americas, there are four regional offices, located in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Havana. How many in each, Journalism.co.uk asked.
Two in each of the four cities: one producer and one local fixer, both on sponsored stringer contracts with retainers. Other individual stringers cover the rest of the continent other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, with freelancers working from Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Chile and Jamaica.
It’s an interesting question: where are international news organisations’ bureaux and why? A particularly pertinent one to raise, given the difficulties in accessing material from Iran at the moment. The BBC office in Tehran remains open, but permanent correspondent Jon Leyne has been ordered to leave the country, the corporation reported yesterday.
While the BBC had two producers inside a Gaza office in 2008, it did not have any permanent crew on the ground and this affected its coverage of the crisis at the end of that year, and the early part of 2009.
It was helpful for Al Jazeera to have people already based in Gaza, as its two correspondents told Journalism.co.uk in a live-blog interview in April.
NB: Whether Al Jazeera were the ‘only’ English-language international broadcaster in the area for the 12-day media block is still a bone of contention: a journalist later reminded Journalism.co.uk that his employer, Iranian government-funded Press TV, was also reporting from the region during that period.
I got a peek behind the stage curtain last week, at the University of Westminster / British Journalism Review Journalism in Crisis conference (May 19/20). Geoffrey Davies, head of the Journalism and Mass Communications department, gave me a mini-guided tour of the equipment borrowed for the event – it allowed the live-streaming of the conference throughout; a real bonus for those at home or in the office.
The Journalism.co.uk beat means that we cover a fair few industry and academic conferences, and so we get to compare the technology efforts of the hosts themselves. While Twitter conversation didn’t flow as much as at some events (not necessarily a negative thing – see some discussion on that point at this link) the students’ own coverage certainly made use of their multimedia skills. I contacted a few of the students and lecturers afterwards to find out a few more specifics, and how they felt it went.
“We streamed to the web via a system we borrowed from NewTek Europe, but might purchase, called Tricaster. It’s a useful piece of equipment that is a television studio in a box,” explained Rob Benfield, a senior lecturer at the University, who produced the students’ coverage.
“In this case it allowed us to add graphics and captions downstream of a vision-mixer. It also stores all the material we shot in its copious memory and allowed us to store and stream student work, messages and advertising material of various sorts without resorting to other sources.
“Some of our third year undergraduates quickly mastered the technology which proved to be largely intuitive. We streamed for two solid days without interruption.”
Conference participants might also have seen students extremely diligently grabbing each speaker to ask them some questions on camera (making Journalism.co.uk’s cornering of people a little bit more competitive). The videos are linked at the end of this post.
Marianne Bouchart, a second year at the University, blogged and tweeted (via @WestminComment) along with postgraduate student, Alberto Furlan.
“We all were delighted to get involved in such an important event,” Bourchart told Journalism.co.uk afterwards. “It was an incredible opportunity for us to practice our journalistic skills and gave to most of us a first taste of working in journalism. I couldn’t dream of anything better than to interview BBC director general Mark Thompson.
“We worked very hard on this project and we are all very happy it went on that well. My experience as an editor managing a team of journalists to cover the event was fantastic. We encountered a few scary moments, some panic attacks, but handled the whole thing quite brilliantly in the end – for inexperienced journalists. I can’t wait to be working with this team again.”
“I really wish I hadn’t decided to ask this question.
“I love the BBC and I’m a big beneficiary from the BBC, but I have to say listening to your [Thompson's] critique, I thought you were showing some sort of guilt about what the BBC website is doing to other commercially operated websites, you know, run by newspapers and you were trying to say the BBC might paddle it, that guilt, by sharing resources online (…) I understand it would be a very good way forward.
“I don’t quite know how it’s going to work. I wonder if the simple solution might well be to carve up the licence fee and give a slice of it to the Sun, some to the Daily Mail…”
Thompson answered, to paraphrase, that it probably wouldn’t work very well.
A little more fully: there are countries where they’ve tried that, said Thompson. And the problem is, he said, that if you’re not careful, the ’subsidy you need’ gets a bit bigger every year; and secondly, as a public service broadcaster one would ‘begin losing the critical mass’ in terms of the organisation’s culture, calibre of the output and public accountability.
In the meantime, enjoy the clip at the end of this post: when Paxman dipped his toes into YouTube waters for Newsnight (which, incidentally, BBC director-general Mark Thompson later confessed to never having seen till that evening: “I had no idea – I’d missed that”).
So Journalism.co.uk asked Paxman: you’re a little sceptical about social and new media, then?
“It’s a joke [his YouTube video - see below]! One of the functions of journalism, seems to me, [is that] it sifts and analyses – and it’s great to have a lot of raw material, but someone still has to sift it to make sense of it,” he said.
There are occasions, for certain stories, he said, ‘when one spends a lot of time looking at blogs… comments… it’s just time wasted.’
“We haven’t yet developed a mechanism for synthesising what comes out – we’re currently at a stage where someone goes to a rally and writes down the comments of everybody there. That’s no way to report an event – it doesn’t tell you very much,” Paxman said.
“We still need journalists forming perception and analysis of what’s happening – that’s getting drowned out by this Babel-like cacophony. But we’re at a very early stage of development with it. I think there are new things going to happen.”
And, does he still advise wannabe hacks to go and do something more sensible and worthwhile, like become a brain surgeon?
“You do it [give advice] with a certain knowledge that those who are determined won’t be put off anyway. But, I think, overall, the prospects in this trade are not good,” he told Journalism.co.uk.
“Wages are being cut – [there are] apparently respectable newspapers which actually survive on work experience people – and not paid. This is no good! When you’re 21 you don’t think about it. You’ve got to think about it: the longevity of it, [being able to] afford to put a roof over your head and feed your kids etc.
“It’s always been a young person’s trade I think, but it’s even more that now.
“I personally believe in it of course – I think it’s a really worthwhile activity. But it is, I think, the case that there are more immediately socially worthwhile things that you could do with your life. I just think these are strange circumstances.”
Working in journalism and want to boost your digital skills? Questions about starting a news business online that you've been too afraid to ask?
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Working in journalism and want to boost your digital skills? Questions about starting a news business online that you've been too afraid to ask?
