Tag Archives: BBC

Steve/Adam responds: a more sober YouTube offering

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Yesterday we watched the (ex?) Birmingham Mail’s ‘Adam Smith aka Steve Zacharanda’ rather funny (if ill-advised) video zipping all over the place, and waited to what happened…

It seems (via Adam Tinworth’s blog) that Smith/Zacharanda is handling the whole thing pretty well (he was already leaving his Trinity Mirror permanent job anyway…) Meanwhile Media Monkey plays the cynical card… Anyway, judging from the comments below the videos, and on the blogs, he’s got a lot of support behind him (give him a knighthood, someone writes).

So for the record, Smith says he didn’t cut and paste from the BBC, he is sorry if he damaged the reputation of the company, and the Birmingham Mail is a ‘fantastic organisation, staffed by people who really care’.

US Elections: Guardian rolls out special homepage

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To complement its liveblogged coverage of election day, which is still going at time of writing, Guardian.co.uk has changed its homepage design to the below:

This is a template that could be used for other major news events. As BBC News online editor Steve Herrmann told Journalism.co.uk earlier this week the election has been a great opportunity for news sites to experiment with coverage and layout, developing features for future use.

US elections: the best of the rest on the web

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For those that have been under a rock/on Mars for the last year, the next President of the United States will be decided tonight, giving news organisations another opportunity to flaunt their interactive, live reporting and user-generated wares as the votes unfold.

We’ve already covered Sky News’ election coverage and BBC News’ live online plans, but here’s our round-up of some of the best projects out there – open up twenty browser tabs, sit back and enjoy:

  • NYTimes.com: the paper has set up a political ‘word train’ visualising how readers are feeling. It’ll update with new answers every 30 minutes (thanks to @matthewbuckland for the link). Elsewhere the site’s homepage is dominated by election coverage, with plenty of images and video – making use of the new video player – and a pop-up results widget.
  • Twitter Vote Report: the microblogging tool has been harnessed by a network of volunteers to map voters’ experiences at the polls. Tweets tagged with waiting times (e.g. #wait 120 for a 120 minute delay) are plotted creating a rapidly updating map of problems. Could be a great service for local newspapers in the states to provide:

  • Yahoo: created a one-stop shop, US election microsite drawing together all of its features, including forums, Yahoo Answers, AP and Politico stories and aggregated content from external news sites, a Flickr stream of photos and options to set up news alerts on the candidates.
  • Hubdub: the just-for-fun news prediction site is carrying an election forecast map, which it claims is based on ’51 underlying prediction markets that respond in real-time to breaking news’. Users can view forecasts state-by-state to help them decided where to place their Hubdub dollars when predicting the outcome of questions such as ‘Who will win the 2008 US Presidential Election?’ and ‘What will be the margin of victory in the state of Ohio?’

That’s not enough, I hear you cry. You want more? Well, over at paidContent:UK, Robert Andrews has wrapped up the online coverage from the UK’s newspapers, while Online Journalism Blog chieftain Paul Bradshaw has an extensive list of online activities.

This is only the tip of the iceberg – any other great coverage, tools or websites that need a mention, let us know below.

What-gate? Can the media just make up their minds on what to call the Brand/Ross/Sachs fiasco?

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Little did the architects behind the office/hotel complex at the heart of the Nixon affair (doesn’t sound right does it?) know what an impact the building’s name would have on the British media.

It’s a legacy which has given British newspaper journalists an easy way to coin a name for the latest ‘scandal’ (scandal defined in its broadest sense: we have Flakegate, after all).

But when it comes to last week’s BBC outrage no-one seems to know which gate to stick with:

Media Guardian alone refers to Sachsgate, Granddaughtergate and Manuelgate.

We’ve seen Rossgate from the Telegraph, Brandgate from the Independent. For readers’ sake, since the coverage really doesn’t seem to be letting up, let’s have an agreed gate.

And some consistency please: should the named gate namesake be the perpetrators, or the victims of the ‘scandal’? That particular detail often bothers me: we’ve had Queengate, but also Cherie and Camillagate (Nipplegate of Justin Timberlake fame is a particular favourite).

Reuters and most of the papers/blogs are going with Manuelgate but my vote’s with ‘whatnewanglecanwepossiblytakenowgate’ (she says, fully aware of the irony as she pens her own tenuous angle for this blog post).

Mainly because Rossgate could lead to confusion for the poor pupils at this school in Hemel Hempstead.

Any gates on this particular story I’ve missed? For those that care and are thinking of writing their Masters thesis on the subject, there’s actually a Wikipedia page dedicated to ‘scandal-gates’ (which actually already lists Manuelgate, fyi).

Broadsheet vs Broadband: BBC’s Pete Clifton on citizen journalism

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Speaking at last night’s Media Society event, ‘Broadsheet vs Broadband’, Pete Clifton, the BBC’s head of editorial development for multimedia journalism, shared the corporation’s views on user-generated content (UGC) and citizen journalism.

According to Clifton, asking for and receiving UGC helps the Beeb understand what news items have captured the audience’s attention and what stories out there are not being covered.

“It’s gathering in insights that the audience have that we can make sense of and then making it part of our newsgathering process,” he said.

On moderating the vast amounts of images that get sent to bbc.co.uk, Clifton stressed that verifying these was an enormous and serious task. A team working on the BBC’s UGC ‘hub’ have been trained in Photoshop fakery and verifying contributors for this very purpose, he said.

“The day we just put those up without any questioning of whether that’s right or not is the day we’re in very serious trouble.

“It’s gone through all the filters that our journalism would have gone through. It’s quite labour intensive. We’ve another arm of our newsgathering operation – it can ultimately add to the richness of what we do, but we shouldn’t take it lightly.”

Providing an outlet for this UGC and navigating a path through it is all part of the site’s wider remit as a ‘guide’ to alternative views and content online, said Clifton.

Archant’s director of business development, Ian Davies dies in plane crash

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We just heard news that Ian Davies, director of business development at Archant, has died in a plane crash – as reported at the BBC, Press Gazette and in his group’s newspaper, the Norwich Evening News.

Journalism.co.uk is extremely sad to hear of this tragic accident.

On a personal note, I met Ian and some his colleagues for the first time, at the WAN conference in Amsterdam last fortnight.

Despite cornering him after a long conference session to badger him for information about Archant’s hyperlocal news plans, he was only too friendly towards me, happy to help and give suggestions for stories.

I later had opportunity to chat with him more informally and find a bit more out about his views on the media and what he does. He assured me he would always be willing to contribute to related articles.

True to his word, last week he was quick to contribute to an article I was working on at the last minute. I’m very saddened by the premature end to his life.

In an email he told me he was looking forward to working more flexibly at Archant from January, so that he could fit in more time for his passion, flying. His website shows some of his interests. That his life was cut so short, when he had so much enthusiasm for his projects, seems a particularly cruel hand of fate.

Our condolences go out to Ian’s family, friends and colleagues.

Hunt at Polis: on Brand, Ross and the BBC

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The Shadow Culture Secretary, Tory MP Jeremy Hunt, today made a keynote policy speech on the subject of public service broadcasting, at a Polis event. He talked about opposing BBC local plans, in a wide-ranging speech. You can download Hunt’s full speech here.

@bowbrick on Twitter reported that: “Nothing radical in Hunt’s analysis. Presumably a great relief to the BBC”.

Of most interest seems to be Hunt’s take on the story du jour (economic downturn returning to our screens next week): Brand, Ross and the BBC.

Over at Polis Director, Charlie Beckett’s blog, we read:

“Hunt was careful not to call for anyone to be sacked. He believes that politicians shouldn’t go around trying to get private individuals fired. But he was scathing about the BBC response to the incident and the outrage it has provoked.

Hunt said this was not risky comedy, it was ‘offensive, juvenile behavour’. But what worried him was that the BBC’s slow and limited public response indicates that “the BBC doesn’t understand the huge influence the stars they employ have on the public”.”

BBC Radio 4 Feedback looks at the BBC News blogs (audio)

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When they started, the BBC didn’t know why or what it was for: Nick Robinson tried out one for the General Election in 2001.

Now Robert Peston is getting a half million hits per day.

Here Louise Adamson from Radio 4’s Feedback programme looks at the role of the BBC’s News blogs.

The BBC journalists interviewed stress that the BBC voice has to be considered, and that blogs still go through careful checks.

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