BBC considering launching iPlayer on Freeview, as part of a project Canvas, which is looking at delivering web content to televisions, in ways that could also be used by other broadcasters and content owners.
To expand their user generated content coverage, the BBC is now using an ‘interactive reporter’ to cover stories sent in by email or text. In addition, it is now experimenting with external video channel chatrooms, such as Qik.
Michael Howard has written to the Financial Services Authority (FSA) asking for an investigation into reports by BBC business editor Robert Peston that included details of confidential talks between Alistair Darling and Bank of England governor Mervyn King.
The planned launch of a new ethical environmental online magazine was announced today.
Ecoforyou.co.uk will be free to readers offering environmental news, features, interviews and lifestyle tips. The interactive site will include live-links, video, audio and a ‘digital page turn format’, powered by YUDU and hosted by Planet Ink Ltd.
Without a print edition, ecoforyou is aiming to be a ‘100% carbon neutral publication’. The platform, YUDU, advertises itself as a carbon neutral company, off-setting its emissions by donating money to a carbon management company.
The site is relying on marketing through social networks with readers encouraged to use ‘forward to a friend’ buttons.
“We hope that ecoforyou will not only appeal to individual readers but businesses campaigners and industry leaders too,” said founding director, Gerry Cassidy, in a press release.
“They can easily email ecoforyou to their clients, colleagues and workforce and maintain their green credentials, without having to go to the additional expense of their publication.”
Ecoforyou will is not the only digital offering promoting green issues, the BBC already has a well established site, bbc.green.com.
Other eco websites include:
http://www.bbcgreen.com – lifestyle green living.
http://www.ecorazzi.com/ – offers a mixture of celebrity gossip and environmental issues.
http://www.treehugger.com/ – ‘strives to be a one-stop shop for green news, solutions, and product information.’
http://www.ecogeek.org/ – publishes stories daily about innovations that are saving the planet.
Any other favourite green news sites?
ITV chairman Michael Grade has said third parties could be paid to provide ITV with its regional news programmes.
Yesterday saw the BBC’s economic editor Robert Peston taken to task for his influence on the UK’s economy and his cosy relationship with the government:
The Guardian’s Matthew Weaver is worried that his blog might have too much influence, and the Daily Mash joked that Peston had reached a state of transcendence.
Meanwhile the House of Lords Communications Committee asked a panel of leading political journalists if they thought Peston was setting the reporting agenda.
Another BBC editor whose influence has been much discussed is the corporation’s political editor, Nick Robinson, who last night admitted he had toed the government line too strongly during his reportage of the Iraq War, and admitted that he didn’t ‘do enough’ to seek out dissenting views.
Participating in a debate entitled ‘Political campaigners and reporters: partners in democracy or rats in a sack?’ at City University, Robinson said: “The biggest self criticism I have was I got too close to government in the reporting of the Iraq war.
“I didn’t do enough to go away and say ‘well hold on, what about the other side?’
“It is the one moment in my recent career where I have thought I didn’t push hard enough, I didn’t question enough and I should have been more careful,” he said.
“I don’t think the government did set out to lie about weapons of mass destruction. I do think they systematically and cumulatively misled people. What’s the distinction?
“It was clear to me that Alastair Campbell knew how what he was saying was being reported, knew that that was a long way from the truth and was content for it so to be,” Robinson said.
“They knew it was wrong, they wanted it to be wrong – they haven’t actually lied.”
Politicians ‘actively want to avoid a debate the public wants to have’, he said.
For example, he said, Labour was reluctant to debate the implications of a single European currency.
“[The government] wanted to limit the debate to being the five tests. It wanted to avoid divisions, it simply did not want to enter a political debate,” he said.
The Conservative Party are now doing the ‘exact same thing’, Robinson said.
“They don’t want a debate on whether they will tear up the Lisbon EU treaty, they don’t really want a debate about if they will put taxes up or down, or in what way.
“These are active decisions by politicians to keep you ill-informed, and it is our job as journalists to try to fight against that.”
It isn’t the job of a journalist to ‘pick a constant fight with people in power’, he said.
“I don’t see it as a badge of pride to have endless arguments with politicians, although with Peter Mandelson they usually are.”
Internet searches for Robert Peston have soared: Matthew Weaver asks has the BBC’s business editor become too powerful?
At yesterday’s Digital Editors’ Network (DEN) event at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), UCLAN’s Johnston Press chair of digital journalism Jane Singer proposed a plan to free up the reporting time of local newspaper journalists:
Rather than re-writing certain press releases from local organisations and authorities, Singer said, newspaper websites could re-publish these releases untouched with their origins clearly marked.
This system should be in place in a designated section of the site clearly marked up as ‘press releases from Lancashire Police’ etc, and could even be a simple link to an organisation’s website or an automated RSS feed of releases.
Journalists at the paper would then have more time to follow-up on the facts behind the releases and put ‘news’ from organisations into context for readers, said Singer.
The idea was welcomed by some in the room, dismissed by others, who felt that republishing press releases could compromise editorial standards, even if the releases were clearly marked as not from the paper’s staff.
Yet others agreed that this could be a time-saving function of websites and help attract readers to the newspaper’s site as a first port of call for all local information.
So which titles are doing this already?
Wrexham’s Evening Leader has a list of links to local authority sites – providing the information on the site, but without the problem, raised by some editors, of running unedited releases from organisations.
The paper has a widget to receive RSS feeds from the North Wales Police website, which keeps it up to date with its latest press releases. Visitors to www.eveningleader.co.uk can follow a link from our navigation bar to find the page, Christian Dunn, the site’s editor, explained to us.
“It was one of our first experiments with embedding a widget on a section of our site. After listening to some of the ideas from the Digital Editors Networking event I’m going to make more of the section and talk to North Wales Police to see if there is any other material we could display for them,” he said.
“I don’t have a problem taking feeds from organisations such as the police and putting them on our site – as long as it’s clear the content is not written or produced by us.”
The Teesside Evening Gazette has its own take on Singer’s idea: its network of postcode-based hyperlocal websites link out to local community groups’ websites and local authority sites. They also link to BBC weather reports, which can be filtered by postcode too, rather than creating their own weather widgets or feeds.
Outside of the UK, the Knox News Sentinel provides feeds of political news and national news straight from the Associated Press and PR Newswire – and clearly labelled as such. While this isn’t specifically local info, it does take the onus off reporters at the Sentinel from having to repurpose this content.
This can’t be an exhaustive list of site’s putting Singer’s idea in to practice, so who else is doing this – in the UK or elsewhere? And does it work for you?
Yesterday, Beet TV flagged up that a record number of users seeking online media information led to a seven per cent spike in traffic for Akamai, the delivery network which carries the internet flow for NBC, the BBC, Reuters and other news sites.
The current economic turmoil, hurricanes and the presidential campaign has helped boost the need for online information. At their peak, Akamai were registering 3.7 million requests per minute.
The spike follows a trend for online news sites doing well in times of financial strife: last month site traffic ‘exploded’ at the FT.com, as a result of the drop in share prices.
The need for information was felt on Wall Street, coinciding with a redesign of the Wall Street Journal Online. “Monday set an all time record of two million visitors”, a Wall Street Journal spokeswoman told Beet.TV. Traffic on Tuesday was nearly as high. “These are pretty big numbers, considering monthly unique visitors are 17 million,” she said.
The irony is that financial disaster, hurricanes and presidential elections seem to be a good thing for the world of online media.
The BBC’s future lies in the technology that can ‘open it up to the world’ – it is in the position to create a ‘cultural and commercial resource’ for the UK.