Archives for June 2011

Observing an eight year old explore the web at home as part of a Newsround audience research session is an incredibly illuminating experience.

No messing about - he's straight onto YouTube to look up a clip he's been sent. His best mate sits on the floor, flicking between games on his phone and games on the TV played using the remote.

Across the living room, his four year old brother nags his mum to unlock internet access on the DS so he can look something up on Google. Which deftly (permission granted) he does.

How does Newsround vie for attention in this ultra-connected reality, with its plethora of attractions?

This is the question we asked ourselves when we began redesigning the programme's website. For despite the ardent hopes of some, the majority of the Newsround audience is not sitting down neatly in front of a computer and carefully typing in our URL.

Most children we've spoken to don't see the internet in terms of websites. It's just a place where they can do whatever they're interested in: find out about stuff they've heard about, watch clips, play games, comment on things, communicate with one another.

Happily, Newsround on the web goes a fairly long way towards meeting these needs.

Our web team provides something unique: a rich and imaginative daily diet of distinctive and original news content tailored for 6-12 year olds. And children seek it out. Newsround is the most popular online brand that CBBC has, and a simple yet powerful way of involving our audience in everything we do.

Children come to our content - most often via a search engine like Google - to engage with our stories, clips and topical quizzes; to post their thoughts when things like the rescue of the Chilean miners or the death of Sarah Jane star Elizabeth Sladen touch their hearts.

With this redesign, we've tried to better understand the ways that children are using the internet now, and to use that knowledge to improve the way they experience our content.

So: we've brought in bigger, higher resolution picture galleries - a website led by images rather than text. We've developed a simplified menu based around terms that children understand. We've made our content easier to find. And we're introducing more intuitive ways of allowing children to engage with and comment on our stories, along with more stimulating interactive puzzles.

...out with the old

We want to know what children think of our new site - and we're working in a way that will allow us to adapt it based on what works and what doesn't. We're planning to introduce new features soon.

But there's more work to do. This redesign goes only part way towards answering how Newsround fully involves itself in homes like that of the eight year old boy and his family, and their array of internet connected devices.

Simply sprucing up your website isn't really going to cut it for an audience who don't know a world without Google and social media - where the web is used just as much for communication as for information.

It would be easy to get hung up on the fact that age restrictions mean we can't currently make use of sites like Facebook and YouTube, but the real question for Newsround is: how do we truly insert our content into the vast conversation that children are increasingly having online?

Being the first to know and share what's happening - from tiny details about your life, to huge things going on in the world - has tremendous currency. But it can be difficult for children to safely navigate such a limitless sea of content and potential encounters, and Newsround - increasingly - has a duty to play a useful and important role here as a trusted source of news and information.

Newsround as a programme was set up nearly 40 years ago with the admirable purpose of informing children about the world in a way that's relevant to them. If it's going to continue to do this, it needs to have the agility and boldness to follow the audience where they're going now.

- For more details on the development of the site see this post by my Future Media colleague Phil Buckley.

Daniel Clarke is deputy editor of Newsround.

It is now over two weeks that BBC Uzbek reporter, Urunboy Usmonov has been in prison in Tajikistan. He is accused of having links with Hizb ut-Tahrir, an illegal Islamist group widespread in Central Asia.

Hamid Ismailov, Editor of BBC Central Asian Service, who's been in Tajikistan this week, making Uruboy's case with Tajik authorities, was allowed to visit him in jail briefly yesterday. He rang just after he came out. "I was shocked to see Urunboy so frail" he said, "he was quiet and withdrawn and his eyes were fixed on the security officers, while I was talking to him".

Hamid tried to reassure Urunboy that everyone in the BBC supports him and that messages of support are coming from all over the world - from fellow journalists, major international media organizations, human rights NGOs, and senior politicians and diplomats, who have been pressing Tajik authorities to release him. "I'm not sure whether Urunboy was hearing me", he said.

On the day the news of Urunboy's arrest came, those of us who know him were telling everyone that we know he is innocent. None of us knew then what exactly he was arrested for and what evidence the security agents had against him. We only knew that they had picked him up and kept him overnight, had brought him home in the morning, battered and beaten, had turned over his house, and had taken him away again along with some "evidence".

Two weeks on, we now know that the evidence against Urunboy is a few books and computer files on Hizb ut-Tahrir, and that he had met a few members of the group to interview them, without telling the security authorities. This is nothing other than routine, common practice for any serious and independent journalist. But Uruboy is in jail for it, frail and frightened.

I have been wondering these last two weeks whether, working in the BBC in London, we are taking too much for granted. And whether independent, impartial journalism means anything in the world of the security officers in Khojand, where Urunboy is based. But all they need to do is to read what Urunboy has been writing and reporting for over 30 years to see that he would simply be unable to belong to any group which would see the world through a narrow dogmatic ideology.

If this sounds too abstract, I would quote a thoughtful comment from one of Urunboy's colleagues in Tajikistan in a report for Persian TV. He showed clips of Urunboy, singing and dancing with a large group of women in his family at his son's wedding. "This does not seem compatible with the forbidding world of Hizb ut-Tahrir", commented the reporter in a "measured" and "dispassionate" BBC tone.

This is the Urunboy we all know. Cheerful, gentle, generous, tolerant, utterly honest and open minded. His small office in Khojand is the best place to visit if you want to meet all kinds of interesting people and find out what's going on over a cup of tea.

His essays and novels, and his reporting for the BBC has recorded the great social and political upheavals in his country with compassion and understanding, informed by his broad and sophisticated view of the world.

This is why from day one we all believed he is innocent, and we will do everything we can to get him released. We hope very much that he will soon be able to return to his family, and to continue writing and reporting.

Behrouz Afagh is head of Middle East and west/central Asia at the BBC World Service.

You may have noticed a headline in our "most popular" module about a dog being condemned to stoning in Israel. It was followed a few days later by a denial: Jerusalem court denies dog condemned by stoning. The first story has now been taken down. This is not a step we often take so I wanted to explain why we have done so on this occasion. We based our article on sources we have used in the past: Ynet, a popular Israeli website, and the news agency AFP. What we did not know when we wrote the story was that the Israeli Hebrew-language newspaper Maariv had already published a retraction and an apology. We failed to make the right checks. We should never have written the article and apologise for any offence caused. We have kept the story carrying the denial in the interests of transparency.

Nathalie Malinarich is world editor of the BBC News website.

I wrote here a few months ago about some of the things we were working on to develop BBC News online. Amongst these, I mentioned our ambition to combine the on-demand flexibility of online news with the viewing experience of TV, as the number of internet-enabled TV sets grows.

After several months of editorial thinking, design and technical development, today we are launching a BBC News product for connected TVs. The product will initially be made available on the Samsung platform and will be rolled out to other devices in the UK over time. BBC Worldwide will also launch an international version of the product which will be advertising supported.

The BBC News product for connected TV will deliver a series of video news packages which you can select and play via the remote control. You can also choose from a wider range of news stories in text from BBC News online. The video packages are selected by our On Demand audio and video team in the BBC Newsroom, based on the wealth of video journalism already produced by our TV News and Newsgathering teams in the UK and around the world.

This evolution of online news from desktop to living room TV screen draws on our editorial experience of producing earlier interactive predecessors on TV such as Ceefax, BBC Digital Text and BBC Red Button.

It is also part of the overall strategy for BBC Online, outlined at the beginning of this year, which focuses on a series of 10 "products" (one of which is BBC News), that are seen increasingly as "multiscreen" - working across website, mobile, tablet and increasingly internet-connected TV.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

The BBC has called for the immediate release of its reporter in Tajikistan, Urinboy Usmonov, who works for the BBC World Service. Hamid Ismailov, Head of Central Asian Caucasus Service, has written here about the background to his disappearance, which continues to cause us very great concern.

Liliane Landor is languages controller of BBC Global News.

The team which has for a number of years produced the BBC's disability affairs website Ouch! has this week become part of BBC News. This follows changes to BBC Learning, which has until now been its home department.

 

Much of the Ouch! site will continue, including its blog and its talkshow podcast, and our intention is for the team's coverage of disability issues to reach a much wider audience through stories and features appearing on the BBC News site. Ouch's Damon Rose has explained here, however, why its messageboard will be closing.

BBC News already has a strong track record of covering disability issues, including the 'Access All Areas' coverage last year, and regular news stories on the site. We hope to continue to bring diverse disability stories and context to a broader audience while also maintaining a conversation with the disability community.

Over the coming weeks I will return here to highlight some of the new features the BBC News audience will be reading, thanks to our new colleagues.

Giles Wilson is the features editor of the BBC News website.

You may have seen a news story today about the trial of "IPv6" - a new address system for the internet.

My colleague Richard Cooper has written a more detailed technical account here of how the BBC is tackling this, if you'd like to know more.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

There are few more frustrating experiences for a journalist than knowing a huge story is happening, but being unable to cover it.

The country's protests started in Deraa

Since 16 March, the Syrian authorities have been facing an uprising - first in the southern city of Deraa, then in Homs, Latakia and then Hama - the scene of a massacre by troops loyal to President Assad's father in 1982.

Last week, the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon suggested more than 1,000 people had died in Syria since the start of the violence. Yesterday came perhaps the most serious attack yet. The Syrian authorities claimed 120 security personnel were killed in battles with gunmen in the north-west of the country. The town of Jisr al-Shughour sits on the Turkish border - and was itself the scene of an Islamist uprising in 1980, also brutally crushed with scores of deaths.

All the time the BBC - and other news organisations - been forced to watch and report from outside the country. The Syrian authorities have refused to issue visas for international journalists. So it was good to hear Reem Haddad, the head of Syrian state television and a spokeswoman for the Syrian Information Ministry, tell Radio 4's Today programme she thought the time had come for international reporters to be allowed into the country "to put Syria's point of view".

I couldn't agree more. We're committed to telling all sides of the story. So far, the only pictures we've been able to gather have been those posted by protestors on YouTube.

Reem Haddad also suggested that BBC Arabic's reporter in Syria could report what's going on. Up to a point: his movements are heavily restricted and local journalists are subjected to constant intimidation.

It's not the first time a Syrian official has made promises on air. In March, President Assad's media advisor Buthaina Shabban promised the Today programme that the BBC could travel to Deraa - the seat of the uprising - to report from the city.

Two local journalists working for the BBC were stopped and prevented from reaching Deraa. Two days later they were arrested and questioned for a number of days. Other news organisations have suffered far worse: an al-Jazeera journalist, Dorothy Parvaz, went missing in Syria and turned up in Iran.

Eyewitness reporting is the only way we can really know what is going on - it's vital in providing a balanced picture of the story on the ground. I hope the Syrian government listens to Reem Haddad when she says the time has come to allow international reporters in - we couldn't agree more.

Jon Williams is the BBC World News editor.

The Chancellor George Osborne gave an interview to Sarah Montague live on Radio Four's Today programme this morning. You can listen again here. During that interview he strongly suggested that the BBC's approach to reporting the economy was relentlessly to focus on the bad news and the most gloomy statistics.

 

Ordinarily, we're pretty used to these sorts of claims, part of the political rough and tumble. We regularly receive calls from both Mr Osborne's team and the opposition very keen that we more heavily report this or that statistic, or de-emphasise a particular figure that is less helpful to their stance.

However, Mr Osborne was public in his criticism of how we are doing and chose to give three concrete examples of where he thought we had gone wrong. We feel it merits a response.

1) Mr Osborne claimed that comments made recently by the OECD's chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan, which seemed to suggest the UK might have to change its deficit reduction strategy if growth stayed weak, had been over-interpreted by the BBC.

In actual fact, it was our judgement that these comments had indeed been over-interpreted elsewhere in the media and we made a conscious decision, after an early report, not to report the comments prominently on any of our outlets throughout the day and that evening.

You can read our online piece on the story here and see if you agree it has over-interpreted Mr Padoan's comments as the chancellor asserted.

2) Secondly, Mr Osborne claimed that, after listening to BBC output for the last year, he had yet to hear a single item that large numbers of jobs had been created.

In fact, had the chancellor been listening carefully to Today just an hour earlier (he seemed to suggest he had been but may have missed it) he would have heard our economics editor Stephanie Flanders say clearly that over the last year employment has been very strong and that private employment was especially strong.

Viewers of our main Six and Ten O'Clock News bulletins will know that virtually every single time we report unemployment figures we also give the employment figure for fairness and balance.

It's also worth noting that in our heavily read online coverage we have reported on at least seven job creation stories in just the last few of weeks. Here are a couple of those as examples of this.

3) Finally, the chancellor observed that we only report manufacturing surveys which are disappointing and gave the example of a disappointing Markit survey last week and today's more positive Engineering Employers Federation survey.

In reality, we gave very little coverage last week to a set of three Markit surveys, including one showing the manufacturing sector grew at its weakest pace in almost two years in May. On the other hand we have indeed covered the EEF survey today. There are a large number of market surveys and data each day and we attempt to make the best judgement we can about the editorial strength of the story.

At this point I should say we don't always get it right. Sometimes we may over-emphasise or under-emphasise something. That always ensures a lively and valuable editorial discussion in the newsroom. Very occasionally we may miss something interesting completely, though we'll try to catch up as soon as we realise.

While we understand the political context around all our business and economics reporting, our sole purpose is to report and put context around the data for the benefit of all our audiences, reflecting that there are differing points of view and analysis which may occasionally make uncomfortable reading from both sides of the political divide.

Jeremy Hillman is editor of the BBC News business and economics unit.