Media Websites

BBC.co.uk - site cutbacks & beyond

Split from bbc.co.uk (May 2016)

This site closed in March 2021 and is now a read-only archive
CW
Charlie Wells Moderator
JAS84 posted:
World News page now using Reith.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world

Looks like it's been rolled out to a few other sections of the news website including science, health, and in pictures. These sections also happen to be using the wider page layout, and the ones which haven't changed appear to be using the 1000px max-width.

42 days later

JU
Justin
I'm not quite if this has ever been posted here -- it is pretty old (six years), but this multi-page article from The Register about the launch of News Online is a real fascinating look at how the BBC first got the ball rolling for online stuff. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/28/the_bbc_news_online_story
Quote:
Smartt was adamant the site wouldn't lazily publish stories direct from the wire feeds. Instead, he and Eggington wanted to tap into the vast amount of high-quality output generated by the BBC, particularly its World Service division, which broadcast to more than 40 countries. The BBC’s radio journalists used a VAX minicomputer with a system called BASYS (which DEC had acquired in 1992) that became Avid iNews – and also a Unix system called Edit. If the radio news scripts were in a computer somewhere, why couldn’t News Online use them?

Many radio production staff were located overseas, and there was no budget to fly them to London to teach them coding. The web news team wondered how to lift the journalists' work with minimal disruption.

The developers decided to add three simple instructions to the existing workflow: the correspondents or producer must add a headline to the radio script, they must spell correctly, and they must not leave in cueing information – such as advice for a continuity announcer on how to pronounce a name, or when to discard a given script.

“There were bad at headlines at first, and they would write a whole paragraph for them, but they got the hang of it,” said Karas. “But it worked. An editor sitting in Moscow who had never seen a web page was producing web pages.”

Well worth a read if you haven't seen it before, like me.
Last edited by Justin on 11 June 2019 9:41am - 3 times in total
NJ
Neil Jones Founding member
I noticed yesterday that the Business news feed had marked a legacy business story as "breaking news" - it was about BHS "closing", when the company actually fell into administration in 2016. I notice that the BHS website seems to have been relaunched (again) under a brand licence.
NT
Night Thoughts
Justin posted:
I'm not quite if this has ever been posted here -- it is pretty old (six years), but this multi-page article from The Register about the launch of News Online is a real fascinating look at how the BBC first got the ball rolling for online stuff. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/28/the_bbc_news_online_story
Quote:
Smartt was adamant the site wouldn't lazily publish stories direct from the wire feeds. Instead, he and Eggington wanted to tap into the vast amount of high-quality output generated by the BBC, particularly its World Service division, which broadcast to more than 40 countries. The BBC’s radio journalists used a VAX minicomputer with a system called BASYS (which DEC had acquired in 1992) that became Avid iNews – and also a Unix system called Edit. If the radio news scripts were in a computer somewhere, why couldn’t News Online use them?

Many radio production staff were located overseas, and there was no budget to fly them to London to teach them coding. The web news team wondered how to lift the journalists' work with minimal disruption.

The developers decided to add three simple instructions to the existing workflow: the correspondents or producer must add a headline to the radio script, they must spell correctly, and they must not leave in cueing information – such as advice for a continuity announcer on how to pronounce a name, or when to discard a given script.

“There were bad at headlines at first, and they would write a whole paragraph for them, but they got the hang of it,” said Karas. “But it worked. An editor sitting in Moscow who had never seen a web page was producing web pages.”

Well worth a read if you haven't seen it before, like me.


One unofficial motto used at News Online in its first few years referred to the rest of the BBC: "Whoever they are, tell them to f--- off." It served them well.

When Ashley Highfield was BBC Online boss, and rebranded the whole enterprise BBCi, he banned the word "online", which meant the news site effectively lost its name; one of the craziest of the many crazy decisions made at the time.
AS
Asa Admin


Spoilsports. They'll be removing the volume up to 11 option next Very Happy

36 days later

CW
Charlie Wells Moderator
Worth noting the BBC regional news pages have begun switching a new wider layout featuring Reith...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/england/birmingham_and_black_country
...As in the past Birmingham & Black Country is amongst the first regions to go live.
SH
Sh1ruba
Charlie Wells posted:
Worth noting the BBC regional news pages have begun switching a new wider layout featuring Reith...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/england/birmingham_and_black_country
...As in the past Birmingham & Black Country is amongst the first regions to go live.

Do wish they'd update the News logo to Reith as the TV bulletins/channels are using Reith on the logo.

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