Tag Archives: BBC

Washington Post using Apture for article links

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The Washington Post has teamed up with Apture to add embedded links into its news articles. Washington Post articles, video content and Google maps will be linked to using the technology, which, according to a press release, requires only a single line of code to make the links appear.

Information from WaPo’s Congressional Votes Database will be linked to congress and senate members’ names when they appear in articles, as part of the new design.

WaPo content will now be available to other media and political sites that sign up to Apture. Articles already allow readers to view who’s linking to that content in the blogosphere.

Apture’s technology has previously been used by BBC News as part of its inline links trial and its use by WaPo follows the launch of the New York Times’ link aggregation service TimesExtra last week.

Women don’t fare too well on the power league lists

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The Observer’s Women’s Special in the Review section, spanning 80 years of history, made interesting reading over the weekend: apparently men still dominate the top levels of media, politics, finance and … church. Of note were the ‘big lists’ split into male/female ratio. Here are those relevant to the media sector (percentages refer to the female portion of the list):

• Sunday Times Rich List: 1%
Of 95 women listed in the top 1,000, 56 are half of male-female partnerships.

• Vanity Fair ‘New Establishment’ 100: 9%
Three women feature as part of male-female partnerships; only one woman – Angelina Jolie – in top ten.

• Telegraph 100 Living Geniuses: 15%
No women feature in top 30.

• Media Guardian Top 100: 21%
One woman, BBC’s Jane Tranter, in top ten.

• Entertainment Weekly 50 Smartest People in Hollywood: 24%
Two women in top 25.

• Evening Standard 1001 Powerful Londoners: 27%.

Peaceful elections just ain’t news – the dire state of world reporting on Africa

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Yesterday I picked up a discussion on Facebook, via a friend, about media coverage of the Ghanaian elections (voters went to the polls yesterday, and votes are being counted now, if you missed it, by the way) why had there been so little election coverage on the Western networks? Very little on CNN; very little on BBC.

“I was hoping, only hoping that for just a fraction of a moment the media cameras and the pens will slip from Mugabe’s Zimbabwe onto Ghana. Just a bit of positive reportage on Africa! That’s all I was hoping for. But I guess that’s not sensational enough for the Western media. ‘Ghana peacefully elects a new President’… that’s not headline stuff! It simply does not sell,” wrote Maclean Arthur.

Meanwhile, Oluniyi David Ajao rounds up the poor global news coverage here, on his blog. ‘Does Ghana exist’ he asks? He finds it ‘interesting that many of the leading Western media outlets have not made a mention of Ghana 2008 Elections.’

“Perhaps, Ghana does not exist on their radar screen. Ghana, like the rest of black Africa will only pop-up on their monitoring screens when over 1,000 people have butchered themselves or over 300,000 people are dying of starvation, or over 500,000 people are displaced by a civil war,” Ajao writes.

Over on Facebook, others were quick to join in the criticism and call for more African specific coverage, in the form of an African television network.

That’s exactly what Salim Amin wants to set-up, in a bid to counter existing coverage (or lack thereof) with a proposed all-African television network, A24, as I have written about on Journalism.co.uk before. Amin told me in September:

“Everything we get is negative out of Africa. 99 per cent of the news is genocides, wars, famine, HIV.

“We’re not saying those things don’t occur or we’re going to brush them under the carpet, but what we’re saying is there are other things people want to know about. About business, about sport, about music, environment, health…

“Even the negative stuff needs to be done from an African perspective. African journalists are not telling those stories – it’s still foreign correspondents being parachuted into the continent to tell those stories. We want to give that opportunity to Africans to come up with their own solutions and tell their own stories.”

However, Amin is still searching for suitable investors that won’t compromise the ideals and aims of the channel. In the meantime, A24 exists as an online video agency.

The pitiful global coverage of the Ghanaian election reinforces the need for better and wider spread African news coverage, that isn’t just the stereotypical coverage we’re so used to, as Maclean Arthur referred to on Faceboook as ‘the usual images of dying children with flies gallivanting all over their chapped lips.’

Yes, some websites are bridging some gaps (for example, New America Media for the ethnic media in the US, and Global Voices Online – who wrote about Twittering the Ghanaian elections here), but there’s still a heck of a way to go. BBC World Service may have a Ghana Election page, but it’s not quite on the same scale as you might see for a European election is it?

Mumbai and Twitter: how the BBC dealt with Tweets and accuracy

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Some interesting lessons learnt by the BBC News website from last week’s coverage of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, according to a blog post by editor Steve Herrmann.

The site used Tweets which seemed to be reports from Mumbai as part of its live updates page, which also featured news updates and excerpts from correspondents and blogs.

This page has a specific role, explains Herrmann in the post, to provide ‘a running account, where we are making quick judgments on and selecting what look like the most relevant and informative bits of information as they come in’, prior to making more considered reports for the main news items and bulletins.

“These accounts move more quickly and include a wider array of perspectives and sources, not all verified by us, but all attributed, so that in effect we leave some of the weighing up of each bit of information and context to you.”

Referring to one particular tweet about the Indian government attempting to clamp down on Twitter, which many tried to verify at the time, Herrmann asks whether this – and other potentially unverified items – should have been included in the coverage.

Not if it’s not attributed and not if it’s going to appear in a main news item, he says:

“In one sense, the very fact that this report was circulating online was one small detail of the story that day. But should we have tried to check it and then reported back later, if only to say that we hadn’t found any confirmation? I think in this case we should have, and we’ve learned a lesson. The truth is, we’re still finding out how best to process and relay such information in a fast-moving account like this.”

There is an argument for including such reports, whether they come in by Twitter, email or photograph, as means of passing on the information to readers as quickly as possible ‘on the basis that many people will want to know what we know and what we are still finding out, as soon as we can tell them’.

It is clear that with every major news event the site is experimenting and developing its newsgathering and reporting strategy, showing just how flexible and online news organisation needs to be to serve its users at times of breaking news.

Roger Alton, blogger: More female-friendly content, closer integration of multimedia

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Roger Alton, editor of the Independent since July this year, has posted his first blog entry on the paper’s site (hat tip to Adrian Monck). In it he asks readers what they want the paper to report on – whether it’s ‘Strictly or the Large Hadron Collider or Britain on the Booze, or Damian Green or all of the above’.

In his post, Alton adds that the paper’s multi-platform operations should be closely related before moving on to the BBC and Sunday night programming:

“What about Sunday night’s telly? Personally, I can’t stand the BBC – I think it is bloated, bureaucratic, ripe for partial privatisation, and astonishingly inept at handling its own problems. But crikey, it does show fantastic TV.”

We’ll be keeping an eye on Alton’s blogging progress, but in the mean time, what do you want him to write about? Cover prices, front page designs or even *Saturday* night telly…

Official statement from family of BBC journalist, Kate Peyton

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Further to the interview and news item on the Journalism.co.uk main page, here is the Peyton family’s official statement, made following the conclusion of the inquest investigating the circumstances of BBC journalist Kate Peyton’s death in Somalia in 2005. The Coroner’s verdict can be read here, as reported at the Guardian.

“We are gratified that, after nearly four years, the Coroner has been able to offer some advice as to how the BBC might improve its treatment of journalists asked to undertake dangerous assignments – especially when there may be aspects of their personal lives or of the nature of their employment that impair their capacity to make a clear and considered judgment of issues of risk, both to themselves and their colleagues.

“However, we have found it baffling, depressing and exhausting that the BBC has put so much of its energy, and considerable financial resources, into preventing that advice from being heard – beginning in 2005 with a claim from a senior newsgathering executive that it was ‘neither necessary nor appropriate’ to look into the detail of the deployment and the role of Kate’s immediate manager in it, and concluding with strenuous efforts to narrow the Coroner’s scope so radically that nothing would have been considered other than events after Kate’s arrival in Mogadishu.

“We would like to believe that the BBC is sincere in its assurance, given in court, that it will incorporate the Coroner’s advice into its future procedures; but given that, since this summer, it has strained every nerve to prevent him from having the opportunity to deliver that advice, and even now has not ruled out judicially reviewing his decision, we have reason to doubt its seriousness.

“We wholeheartedly agree with the substance of the Coroner’s advice. In light of it, we would like to ask whether it is sensible to employ journalists who may be asked to go to dangerous countries on a regular basis using short-term contracts. In our view, this practice presents a clear possibility of the repetition of tragedies such as this.”

Mumbai bloggers interviewed – video collection

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Here are clips of the various Mumbai blogger interviews. Fuller multimedia round-up here.

Dina, who blogs at Mumbaihelp.blogspot.com and on her own site and Vinu, whose photographs have been viewed by nearly 100,000  (at time of writing) on Flickr, speaking on CNN.

Amit Varma, who blogged a first-hand account, interviewed by the BBC (vision very poor but audio is adequate)


Gaurav Mishra, also interviewed in a text interview on the main page of Journalism.co.uk, here featured in the CBS Early Show coverage, looking at the reportage through citizen journalism:


Watch CBS Videos Online

Organ Grinder: Jeremy Dear: end casualisation in war reporting

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Journalist Kate Peyton, who was killed in Somalia in 2005, was a victim of ‘the creeping casualisation of the media workforce’, argues the general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).

Peyton agreed to work in Somalia to protect her contract with the BBC, says Dear.

“It casualisation makes people disposable and discourages dissent and caution. Staff near the end of their contracts feel they have to go to any lengths to prove their worth,” he adds.