How’d it go?

So we’ve done our presentation….

we were in time….

everything worked.

So I guess that’s good!

Questions were good and I think we answered in a well rounded and info- heavy way… no debate, but I’m not sure a debate would have been possible on this topic.

Personally, I felt like I spoke a little fast… because we had so much to get through…but that’s no excuse really.

I hope people enjoyed it anyway and had a little something to think about…

Our presentation

How can the quality and diversity of the news output be maintained in the digital age?

Comments / Questions and Concerns

If you have any comments, questions or concerns please post them here!

How reporting on “Breaking News” has changed in the digital age.

At 08:50 on the morning of the 7th July 2005; 3 bombs exploded on the London Underground within 50 seconds of each other.

On that day the BBC 10 O’clock news led with two mobile phone video clips sent in by the public. The main picture on the BBC news online service was taken by a passer-by. The age of citizen journalism was established.

More than 300 emails containing an average of 3 images and about 30 video clips were sent to the yourpics@bbc.co.uk address. The iconic picture of the devastated bus at Tavistock Square was sent to the BBC within 45 minutes of the bombing and was used on the front pages of the Guardian and the Daily Mail the following day. Some mobile phone video footage was on air just 20 minutes after being received by rolling news channels.

As this tragedy happened within minutes, footage and experiences, of the immediate event, from passers-by and people involved in the attack were far more relevant, than that by reporters and told the story more accurately.

Immediate

For us the worried citizen sitting at home as this news story unravelled – we were able to keep fully up to date with rolling news being broadcasted on TV and on the online news pages.

However the BBC on that day were slow to respond. In the fear of reporting false accusations they were one of the last broadcasters to report that the incident was in fact a bomb. They were running with the story that there had been a power surge disruption within the city.

This slow response was because the BBC had only just published it’s new editorial guidelines, which stated, ”accuracy is more important than speed.”

Roger Mosey, head of BBC television news, said that the BBC would only “put on screen what we know is right – reports from our own correspondents, the official emergency service figures and information from members of the public that we’ve checked out”.

However Nick Pollard, head of Sky news, said that viewers have come to expect a more complete picture of what is going throughout the day when breaking news occurs. He says: ”We take very seriously our reputation as the place to turn to when there’s big breaking news. It’s what we’re there for. We tell viewers what we can see, what we know and what we don’t know.”

Number crunching

As many scrambled to find out the latest information, the BBC, Sky News and the Guardian websites reported a large increase in traffic. News websites accounted for 5.6% of all online traffic on 7/7/2005, up nearly 50% on the previous day.

As more and more are turning to the internet for their news fix…it becomes increasingly important that the sources are telling us everything we need to know about the event. In my opinion the BBC were too cautious on that day. Sure, the BBC are a source of trust and reliability  - but when news is breaking within seconds, we too want to be kept informed at the same speed.

The BBC have now admitted that they have rewritten the policy and guidelines since the 7/7 attack.

Head of Sky’s news service, John Ryley, has said:  ”News does not usually break cleanly. Big stories emerge in dribs and drabs, bits of information from many sources. Often conflicting and confusing … when a big story breaks we report new information, clearly attributed to its source, even if things turn out differently. It was precisely that policy that the BBC decided to adopt after the London bombings.”

Question Time Moves To Glasgow

Cuts across the board have apparently prompted the move of Question Time to Scotland. Now this to me seems a little odd given all the work they must have to do at Westminster.

Is this an aim for diversity? Is it the rules gone a little mad? Or, is this a good move?

Article in the Guardian on Question Time.

Question Time is produced by an outside company but it’s staff report to the BBC.

The History of Social Media

BBC ran a radio series on social media….where it came from and where it’s going….and here it is…..

BCC Radio 4: The Secret History of Social Networking

Get the lowdown on what the BBC thinks of this form of digital media…

Radio in the Digital Age

There are mixed opinions on Radio in the digital age despite the technological prowess making it more accessible to people at different points in the day.

You can listen to radio on the web now. That alone enhances the potential listenership, reaching those who haven’t got access to a radio set at the time, or the wider audiences across the globe who wouldn’t be able to get the frequency on the radio.

RAJAR released figures in 2009 about radio listenership expanding steadily and so did BBC Radio. Alexis Forsyth from Cardiff University has compared the positives and negatives of radio going on the technology platform.

Keeping quality in mind, a personal experience may help illustrate a point. As assistant producer of Cardiff City Phone In (CCPI), we were constantly contacted by listeners before, during, and after the show – giving us their feedback on different aspects of the show we produced.

While this may not be different from the time when technology hadn’t made as much headway, the difference here is it didn’t stop at direct phone calls. There was an online communal forum set up to discuss each CCPI show as it was broadcast.

When I personally had to step in once to present the show on a last-minute notice, we feared a negative backlash from the listeners. While none came over the phone, we had to watch out for the comments on the forum as well.

That’s added a realm of consumer control. There’s more scope now to criticise a bad broadcast or praise a good one. It isn’t just restricted to letters to the editor anymore.

The BBC: The struggle to maintain quality and diversity

It seems difficult to see how, given the major changes being made, the BBC will be able to maintain quality and, even more so, diversity in their output.

The most recent and pressing issue comes not as an issue in Britain, but will seriously affect the worldwide following the BBC. The corporation has been able to maintain levels of around 130 million listeners around the world thanks to the grants-in-aid funding of the service prior to this year.

Meanwhile, over the last few years at least, in Britain they continued to raised the price of the license fee in order to focus on output in our country whilst presiding over a World Service that funded itself. I have to admit that I have never really followed much of the output from the World service, but by the sheer numerical value of the listeners it receives you can see how important it is to the rest of the world. You can read into the story more here.

‘Further cuts’

Prior to the World Service cuts the BBC announced they would also be ceasing to provide a number of services online, such as Switch and Blast, as well as community sports site 606. Full details on the cuts can be found here.

Quality and diversity are two words that can be defined varyingly according to who you are asking. For instance I may not be too fussed about seeing Switch and Blast cut from the BBC services, but I’m sure there are plenty of teenagers who will disagree with me entirely. Output diversity is for me, I imagine, entirely different to someone from Newcastle, or someone who is not of British origin but is a British citizen; it is almost certainly not the same for men and women, or children and adults either; or for differing religions for that matter. This means that to provide true diversity in their programming the BBC’s output has to cater for an extremely heterogeneous population: all of whom expect very different things.

Secondly, quality: another word that can take on a variety of meanings depending on who you ask. Quality to one person may be a high quality drama or soap, whereas to another it may be fantastic sports coverage; or indeed it may be a high quality debate on a programme like Question Time.

‘Difficult’

In a period where cuts are being made across the country, the BBC have been placed in an increasingly difficult position with regards to maintaining the high levels of quality and diversity in their output. Without money and funding the BBC are surely going to be unable to provide the quality and diversity they have done in years past. The lack of funding will have a noticeable effect: the licence fee has been frozen, the corporation is having to take over a proportion of the World Service funding, and, like most businesses in this economic climate they are struggling to keep up the level of service that has become synonymous with the corporation itself.

It will be interesting to see if the cuts that have been made recently will have a positive impact on maintaining the quality of its core output; or, whether the dismantling of its fringe services will just lead to discontent as fewer people in the growing British populous find themselves catered for in specific niche markets.

We are all journalists – the rise of online media.

“What is news?” To many this may seem an easy question to answer and it is. News is what is new; it’s what’s happening; it’s the here and the now. Look it up in a dictionary and you’ll get this: “A report of recent events or previously unknown information.”

However, we live in a world where news is being created every second of every day. Newspapers, radios and TVs are already saturated with news and are simply unable to report on every detail occurring around the world.

Considering our brains naturally filter out information it regards as being un-important , it is unnecessary for us to have access to every news story – or at least this was what we all thought.

In the summer of 1991 the world, as we knew it, changed forever.

Enquire within upon everything.

The World Wide Web was born. Inspired by the book ‘Enquire within upon everything’ the inventor Tim Berners-Lee opened up a whole new world, to us the consumer.

The greed for news

Since 1991, news has become accessible to the masses. With the click of a mouse we are able to know and find out almost anything we wish. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year we are now able to read, learn, discover and explore what is happening in the world we live in.

It didn’t stop there

With the sudden influx of social media websites, news is no longer a one-way street. The term ‘citizen journalist’ was formed to describe us everyday people, going about our everyday lives witnessing first-hand everyday news.

Finally, we have all been given a platform in which we can export our findings into the world.

For example when the US Airways flight 1549 crashed into the Hudson river in 2009 this photo, taken on a mobile phone, http://twitpic.com/135xa circulated around the world within hours via the social network Twitter.

What next?

The BBC news website is the second most popular website in the UK (coming second to YouTube) and with 35-40 million unique visitors a month it is one of the top 5 news sites in the world.

With the speed in which news is required to be accessed these days, the output quality and accuracy has been brought into question. In my next blog post I will be looking at the challenges online media is facing.

User Generated Content on TV

This is something we see on TV that screams of the digital impact on the medium. Smartphones mean anybody can capture an image, a bit of footage, some sound and send it to a news outlet.

Citizen journalists

The everyday folk who see something newsworthy and capture it before the professionals even know it’s happened. Great really! But also dangerous. UGC has sped up news. Where before TV outlets had to get someone on the ground, to a far away, unwatched corner, now there are potential eyes everywhere. Pictures in a moment. Sometimes they make the news.

The media coverage 7/7 bombings for example, was dominated by mobile phone video in the underground and the most famous image from that day was taken on someone’s phone.

In this case UGC allowed the viewer to be in the thick of the action. A place where journalist wouldn’t, couldn’t, have gone. So yes, it adds to the quality and the diversity of output.

It’s not that simple though.

What about some images that people filmed? Distress, the dead, people wounded on the side of the road. Citizen journalists generally don’t know the rules. They don’t know where the line of decency lies and how fine a line it is. They might not be aware of the broader implications of the event, what lies beyond the frame of the film. They might seek out the trouble and put themselves at risk getting good pictures.

If this is then broadcast what does that do to the quality of output?

If a journalist, who hasn’t actually witnessed these events, stands beside these pictures and reports, how trustworthy is that?

Do they lose credibility or are they admired for keeping up with the 24/7 rolling news demands?

The BBC, acknowledges that UGC contributes to the diversity of their output, but realizes that quality is at stake. A few times they have chosen to give up great pictures because of the way they were gained, risking look like they lag behind the likes of Sky. But, crucially, attempting to retain quality.

Their website COJO explains:

CoJo site