The decline of BBC News online

Not sure when it appeared (the actual article is dated 19 May) but Reith appears to have hit the story pages

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-52369053

I like it, and the Most Read looks better in Reith. Hopefully it isn't too long before it is extended to all story pages.

All BBC News online needs now is to accommodate a Dark Mode for readers like they have done for their mobile app.

The state of the News section of BBC news is quite terrible these days.

You land on the News homepage and it is 1250px wide with the old font.

Going into an article the width and menu shrinks down to 980px.

Scotland homepage is in Reith randomly, but the Scottish articles are not.


Are the BBC doing anything about this? Reith came out a long time ago, as a web developer it does not take that long to switch a font over, infact by having all these different versions rather terrifies me what the state of the backend is.

As someone has posted before when the "switching a font" issue as brought up, there is more to it than just replacing the font used. But considering that we can see what the new look is on certain pages that are already using it, there isn't that much of a change, so you would have to wonder why it has taken so long and so little appears to have been done. Reith was unveiled over 3 years ago and changes to services such as news and sport would have been planned in tandem surely. The delay is quite strange and also random as to what sections of the website get it and which don't. They haven't even updated the website with the new BBC News logo, over a year since it started being used on air!

just for a bit of context, the new article is not meant to be a massive visual departure, but is built very differently.

trying to not be too boring about it, but there is a lot of effort going into moving various sites (and bits of sites) from their old infrastructure to something *new*. hence the front page, topic index and articles have all been migrated at their own pace, and cautiously to make sure they don't fall over as traffic increases.

these components are all quite intertwined in ways i don't really understand so it's not been trivial to move things over, and purely cosmetic changes (like moving to Reith) were being held off until this architectural work was ready to pick up.

I found this blog entry from The Editors [here] which is in the new look, but when clicking on The Editors homepage it's interestingly in the older layout. After this I found that practically all blog posts were in the new look.

I think the Reith design looks fine, but I don't quite like how the "nav bar" isn't filled, or how wide the links on the BBC bar are...

This might better explain it.
Part of me would prefer the headline to be sans rather than serif but, having not seen what it would look like, I'm not going to form a proper judgement on that.

Incidentally, today is the 80th birthday of the BBC Burmese Service.

It looks like the global header has been tweaked so that in high resolutions it also lists Sounds, CBBC, and CBeebies. In smaller resolutions the CBBC and CBeebies links drop into the 'More' navigation. Hopefully they'll make a similar tweak/fix to the news navigation so that at least 'Entertainment & Arts' is present in larger screen resolutions.

Looking at news stories posted on BBC News NI this morning, some articles are in their old style and some are in the new style. Why the difference at all? If they can publish articles in the new style then why not just make the decision that all articles are to be in the new style or even delete the old template so a mistake can't happen?

As you'll probably know if you ever read old BBC News articles, they're usually frozen in their original style, which is a bit of a cheat to avoid having to migrate all of their features whenever a new article has been designed.

This time the plan is to move away from the old article entirely to avoid having to support it indefinitely, which means going back and making sure all the various embeds and widgets can work in the new article. The slightly random-looking adoption of the new article is because some are easier to move over than others, so some articles get held back until everything is definitely supported.

Thanks for the clarification.

It seems that every story page on BBC News - well at least all those I could find clicking via the front page - is now in the new Reith format.

In fact the only page I can find which isn't Reith is bbc.co.uk/news!

Does this mean the full switchover, including the logo, is imminent?

Only taken them about two years then to roll it out.