Puffbox

BBC world news editor Jon Williams is a bit of a latecomer to the ‘news judgement by statistics’ party. In my time with the Sky News web team, I made a special point of analysing the statistics every single day; and we had a regular weekly date in the diary to look back over the previous seven days, and consider what it told us about our audience and our coverage. I think we’re talking 1999 or 2000 here… so Jon just isn’t right to say ‘just a few years ago, audience involvement was restricted to letters of complaint, requests for record (sic) on the radio – and of course the staple of radio, the phone-in.’ Unless the BBC weren’t reviewing their own stats…?

He concludes that some stories inherently deserve to top the running order, whether the audience deems them ‘popular’ or not. And vice-versa: cute animal photos get lots of clicks, but aren’t inherently newsworthy. Fair enough, Jon, but I didn’t hear anyone saying the opposite. (He might at least have drawn comparisons with online news sites like Digg, where popularity absolutely does decide the running order.)

This subject always recalls a story which made me wonder if I’d pushed it too far. Having spotted a recurring trend in the weekly ‘most popular stories’, one of my journalist colleagues decided to open a story on human cloning with the words: ‘There could soon be two Britney Spearses walking the earth…’ 🙂

Always remember: with a website, you can see the sort of live usage data which marketing professionals in any other discipline spend (literally) millions on. And you’re getting it free of charge.

It’s here. Internet Explorer v7 has arrived… so it’s time to download, cross your fingers, and hope that all the pages on your site work properly. If they don’t, you’ve got a few weeks before it gets delivered to (more or less) every Windows PC on the planet via Microsoft’s automatic update service.

They were published a month ago, but I’ve only just seen a picture of the much-heralded ‘hub and spoke’ integrated newsroom at the (Daily) Telegraph‘s new offices in Buckingham Palace Road. Ian Douglas, writing on his technology blog, defends the concept in the face of criticism in today’s Independent from a former editor of the Express:

There are myriads of small skills involved in writing a good headline or producing a decent story that are individually not especially complex but collectively make all the difference. These skills do not transfer well from print to radio or from video to column writing… Convergence encourages the wrong kind of journalism. The stuff that does translate well is precisely the stuff that we want less of, the journalism of very little value.

Ian responds:

The joint commissioning process for print and online, the hub-and-spoke office layout with all departments within hailing distance of each other, the daily touchpoints creating rolling deadlines, all these things are designed to create insightful and reporter-led news coverage when it’s wanted rather than once a day.

I think both are probably right. Some old-school colleagues probably won’t adapt too well to the new approach. Some people just don’t have good faces for video, or good voices for audio. And likewise, those from a TV background will need time to get away from the rather pithy style of a video voiceover. It will take time. But the rolling news revolution has already happened, and it’s high-time you all got with it.

RSS is by far the best known means of taking information out of the browser, and onto the desktop… and even then, admittedly, it isn’t that well-known yet. Of course, with IE7 about to drop, it’s going to be a big few days for RSS consumption – suddenly, without realising it, a whole lot of people will have some pretty sophisticated RSS reader software on their PCs. But there’s a lot more to this than just RSS.

As part of the big UK government content management project I’m currently working on, I’m pushing an idea to deliver a feed of new – and perhaps more importantly, future – website content via the iCal calendar format.

We reckon our website will add maybe half a dozen new items on a typical day. A lot of these will be news items or new publications. As they go into the system, they will all (inevitably) have a date attached. So we’re going to offer a ‘calendar view’ showing all the major additions to the website for each day of the week. We’re shamelessly basing the presentation on Outlook’s seven-day view: so at a glance, you’ll see all the items posted on Monday, on Tuesday, etc through to Sunday. Note, we’re not just talking about ‘dates for your diary’ – more like a rolling ‘what’s new’ listing.

You’ll be able to go back to previous weeks, perhaps to catch up on new items posted while you were on holiday. But you’ll also be able to go forwards, to see details of anything that has been pre-announced. For example, the publication dates for government statistics are often set months in advance. So in our calendar view, you’ll be able to click on ‘next week’ to see anything which is planned to happen, assuming of course that it has been publicly declared. (And there are plenty of reasons why that might not be the case, not least security.)

And if it can be done as a calendar, we want to put it into your calendar. iCal, as a feed format, is built into Apple’s iCal software, Firefox’s calendar cousins Sunbird and Lightning, and online services like 30boxes or Google Calendar. But Microsoft’s new versions of Windows and Office will (finally) bring proper iCal integration to the masses. Just as you do with RSS feeds, you’ll be able to pick up the URL of a feed, and subscribe to it in your calendar application (say, Outlook). Then, as if by magic, our dates will be shown alongside your dates.

There are plenty of examples out there in terms of calendar sharing; there’s a whole website dedicated to sharing calendars in iCal format. This one, for example, lists all Arsenal’s forthcoming games – and the guy even updates it after each game with details of the scorers, etc. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen iCal used as a ‘content feed’ like I’m planning.

It probably isn’t all that revolutionary. I’m not sure how many people will ever use it… but it won’t put any additional demands on authors’ time. The whole beauty of content management is to allow re-use of your web content in other forms and formats… so why not? 🙂

One of the most valuable lessons I picked up during a stint in proper journalism (with Sky News) was the maxim that ‘if you can’t be bothered writing it, nobody will be bothered reading it.’ So with that in mind, I’ve just deleted a half-finished post about the Sony Ericsson M600 mobile phone. I was going to spend a few hundred words wondering how such a gorgeous smartphone – which, finally, might be the perfect combination of phone and PDA – can possibly be shipped without a camera of any sort. But one sentence is probably adequate. Still a lovely bit of kit, though.

Fascinating political progress at the Northern Ireland talks being held just now at St Andrew’s… although not necessarily on the Northern Ireland situation. Basically, the party is ‘blogging’ the peace talks – and they’ve been told off for breaking the ‘spirit of confidentiality’ of the talks. Quoted by the BBC, party spokesman Alex Benjamin says, with some merit:

These summits cost taxpayers, and this one in particular up to about £500,000. We thought it was time that people should have a chance to see what is actually happening inside. In reality, there’s a lot of time spent sitting around, a lot of time spent having coffee or watching television, so it’s not quite the perception that people think it is.

Assuming they continue to apply some common-sense discretion (at least until the recriminations start), this is a remarkably forward-thinking move by a typically more conservative party. A look behind the scenes, no matter how mundane, will certainly help build voter engagement.

The UUP is a party in serious decline, with a need to refresh its image (and its membership). Its rival on the pro-London side, Ian Paisley’s DUP, has fresher faces in its front-bench team (apart from the Big Man of course), and has generally done a better job online, too.

I’ve noticed a couple of people have arrived here looking for the video of Sion Simon MP pretending (er, I think) to be David Cameron. So here it is, courtesy of Youtube.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=X9DYULkAhWI]

For the record, its original location is here; and you’ll note that the offending uploader is ‘baggymp‘ – aka Tom Watson, Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East. You’ll also note that the community’s reaction is less than favourable – featuring a remarkably broad array of words like ‘moron’, ‘muppet’, ‘loser’, ‘idiot’, ‘tosser’, ‘fanny’, ‘cretin’.

Very interesting to read Nick Robinson’s comments on his ambivalence towards his appearance in last night’s Mrs Pritchard thing. In offering something of a confession, and questioning the editorial judgement of his peers and/or superiors, he demonstrates perfectly the transparency and humanity which makes blogging successful. It’s precisely the sort of thing Robert Scoble used to get praised for whilst at Microsoft. But then again, Nick’s  a virtual nobody in cyberspace; his blog is only the 63rd most important political blog in the country, according to the author of Britain’s second most important political blog (same league table).

It used to really amuse me when you saw ‘real’ news reporters appearing in fiction. Frankly I’m getting a bit bored of it.

Me? I didn’t watch Mrs Pritchard last night. As revealed exclusively here last week, I watched Danny Wallace monkeying around with chimpanzees and bonobos. Much more interesting, and probably more politically valid. If you didn’t see the show, you can watch it on broadband here for the next week.

News today of another new global TV news channel coming our way soon… and this time, it’s the French. France24 is a joint venture between the country’s two main TV broadcasters: the private TF1, and the public France Televisions. Launch is due before the end of 2006, and will include two channels – one entirely in French, the other 75% in English (with plans for an Arabic element from next summer). It will be available as a free channel, via both digital TV networks and broadband.

It’s interesting to see the number of references to CNN, Fox News, the BBC and Al Jazeera in its press-pack. Also on your Sky Digital EPG, you’ll find the Chinese CCTV, the German Deutsche Welle, and so on. The BBC has announced plans for an Iranian-targeted channel as well as an Arabic channel. At some point, one assumes the English-language Al Jazeera will finally launch.

There are an awful lot of broadcasters out there, trading quite happily on their ties to the motherland, but pleading that ‘no, we’re actually fair and balanced.‘ (OK, possibly not CCTV, but you get my point.) But in a world of media plurality, where there are countless sources out there, all basically covering the same stuff, maybe that’s not a problem. Choose the one you personally trust, and nail your colours to their mast. That’s how Fox became America’s no1. Why shouldn’t it work globally?

Regardless, it’ll be great to have a proper French-language news channel out there. (Euronews doesn’t count.) Access to French TV whilst on my ‘year out’ was the single biggest contributor to my fluency in French.

PS: I hope people don’t mind the prevalence of pictures on recent posts; I’m experimenting with WordPress’s image functionality.

If you need a (very) good freeware screen capture utility, including the ability to ‘grab the whole document top-to-bottom’, I can highly recommend FastStone Capture. A cosy 1.2MB download, with all the functions and outputs you’ll be wanting (and more), and there’s even a ‘portable’ version of it. Which is handy if – let’s say – you’re using a PC on a corporate network, and the IT division has blocked installation of new software.