A very interesting article written by Pete Clifton, Editor of the BBC News website. I remember seeing the image of the murdered Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov on Tuesday, and drawing a short breath at the reality of it. Not least because it was the lead story, with the image being surfaced at the top of the BBC's news homepage. I briefly questioned the BBC's editorial decision, but then realised that this was one of the reasons the BBC is the most respected news organisation in the world.
I'd never really thought about it, but he points out that there is no 9pm watershed on the internet. Articles are either there or they're not, so binary judgment has to be made as to whether content can be submitted. I wonder how workflow works on their homegrown site to enable this. I would hope that there's a healthy balance between editorial flare and responsible publishing.
It's also interesting to read that the first four paragraphs of news stories are also fed to other media, including Ceefax, the BBC's now archaic text-based TV offering. I wonder how its readership has changed with the advent of the internet and digital TV - when will they pull the plug? It would be intriguing to find out how much integration work has been done at the BBC: how much of this is done automatically, and how much needs to be copied and pasted from one system to another? I remember discussions surrounding the possible integration of Directgov's digital TV and web services 18 months ago. The systems were not particularly compatible, nor was the content being delivered to each, so the decision was made to divorce the two. If the reverse decision had been made, would it be live yet? Who knows?
From a commonsense perspective, why would you separate the delivery of these two channels? Content is content is content, so surely it makes sense to write once, deliver many. However, each of the devices that you have to cater for - the web, kiosks, PDAs, digital TV, WAP (?), an intranet, maybe even paper - has such differing qualities and make-ups that doing this is hard. I often heard the rule of limiting the number of words on a digital TV page to 40, which does not sit comfortably alongside the content-rich articles that you can easily digest on the web. Such differences in content rules, security requirements, screen size etc. also have an impact on information architecture - imagine trying to get the BBC News site's IA in all its glory on to WAP, for instance. Layer on top of this the BBC's decision to offer myriad language alternatives, and you have a multi-dimensional problem that must be great to be a part of.
In the Pete Clifton article, there is an extract from a letter from English teacher Henry Pfister (made up name?) which single-handedly explains the current state of the British education system. His use of my favourite Latin intervention is lovely.
