The Newsroom

20 years of the BBC News Channel (BBC News 24)

Thursday 9th November 2017 marks 20 years since it's launch (November 2017)

This site closed in March 2021 and is now a read-only archive
IS
Inspector Sands
itsrobert posted:

Just to support what Inspector Sands is saying here - I'm a librarian and this is absolutely true. The amount of times in my career so far I have found items that have been mis-catalogued is unbelievable. All it takes is a typo in the metadata and it makes it more difficult to find. Cataloguing standards have changed over the years and so has the competence of various librarians. Another problem is that sometimes someone will have updated the classification number and either not relabelled the item for forgot to update the catalogue record.

One big issue is that archivists aren't really valued, in the minds of those who make the technology and the managers who buy it. To them video just archives itself. They forget it needs metadata to make it usable. The BBC has an archive of almost the entire output of 5 Live available on its intranet. Brilliant as long as you know time and date you want


Many years ago my then employer upgraded their news production systems and decided to get rid of their long serving tape archivists as the system archives stuff supposedly automatically. A few days later there was a massive fuss because no one could find anything. They eventually hired another archivist but with a backlog of months of packages and rushes to sort through and catalogue

Journalists don't get it either, all the time they'd ask me to put something in the archive and then be unwilling to write down for what was actually in it.

There is a nice feature the BBC had as part of its Redux system which saves the subtitles as searchable metadata for its output. It works quite well for things like people and news stories and to an extent places. But it's very blunt you can't specify things like shots of, say Cheltenham. You get mentions of Cheltenham in news stories, contestants on Pointless from there, racing results etc.

This is going a little off topic....
WO
Worzel
Inspector Sands posted:
itsrobert posted:

Just to support what Inspector Sands is saying here - I'm a librarian and this is absolutely true. The amount of times in my career so far I have found items that have been mis-catalogued is unbelievable. All it takes is a typo in the metadata and it makes it more difficult to find. Cataloguing standards have changed over the years and so has the competence of various librarians. Another problem is that sometimes someone will have updated the classification number and either not relabelled the item for forgot to update the catalogue record.

One big issue is that archivists aren't really valued, in the minds of those who make the technology and the managers who buy it. To them video just archives itself. They forget it needs metadata to make it usable. The BBC has an archive of almost the entire output of 5 Live available on its intranet. Brilliant as long as you know time and date you want


Many years ago my then employer upgraded their news production systems and decided to get rid of their long serving tape archivists as the system archives stuff supposedly automatically. A few days later there was a massive fuss because no one could find anything. They eventually hired another archivist but with a backlog of months of packages and rushes to sort through and catalogue

Journalists don't get it either, all the time they'd ask me to put something in the archive and then be unwilling to write down for what was actually in it.

There is a nice feature the BBC had as part of its Redux system which saves the subtitles as searchable metadata for its output. It works quite well for things like people and news stories and to an extent places. But it's very blunt you can't specify things like shots of, say Cheltenham. You get mentions of Cheltenham in news stories, contestants on Pointless from there, racing results etc.

This is going a little off topic....


...But fascinating all the same. Smile
VM
VMPhil
I've just noticed that the two versions of the launch day clip with Gavin Esler and Sarah Montague are actually different recordings altogether (or 'takes' if you will). The clean version is perhaps from a rehearsal earlier on in the day.

It's quite subtle but Gavin Esler's delivery is a little different, and more obviously the monitor to the left of Sarah Montague is showing them live on the air in the off-air recording with the burnt in clock, whereas on the clean recording with no graphics it's showing something else (the Prelude programme that was on before?)

Play a game of spot the difference (besides the dodgy aspect ratio in the off-air recording)

Clean (watch)
*

Off-air (watch)
*
Last edited by VMPhil on 11 November 2017 11:16pm
HA
harshy Founding member
n9 was well lit then as well, all the lightbulbs at the top lit, as BBC World took over, they year by year turned those lights off by 2005 that side of the newsroom was not very bright at all.
VM
VMPhil
Because my mock flag countdown/top of the hour sequence on the last page received a lot of kudos, here is my attempt at a full length version of one of the two alternate sequences, coupled with the unused alternate music.

MY
MY83
And, because I was bored and insomniac, here are (fairly reasonable) extrapolations of the various flags - fictional and otherwise - used in the three sequences, knocked up in half an hour in Powerpoint.

Judging by this page https://ukfree.tv/article/1107052487/Want_to_see_24_weird_flags_of_the_world_that_BBC_W which I only Googled after I'd done my little project, I've missed one out - a yellow and red sawtooth.

*
*
*
RK
Rkolsen
VMPhil posted:
I've just noticed that the two versions of the launch day clip with Gavin Esler and Sarah Montague are actually different recordings altogether (or 'takes' if you will). The clean version is perhaps from a rehearsal earlier on in the day.

It's quite subtle but Gavin Esler's delivery is a little different, and more obviously the monitor to the left of Sarah Montague is showing them live on the air in the off-air recording with the burnt in clock, whereas on the clean recording with no graphics it's showing something else (the Prelude programme that was on before?)

Play a game of spot the difference (besides the dodgy aspect ratio in the off-air recording)

Clean (watch)
*

Off-air (watch)
*

Maybe there was a separate camera nearby filming a package for one of the main bulletins? With a major launch like this I’d imagine there would be some there getting b-roll on stills.
IS
Inspector Sands
I always preferred the pre-1997 flags, much more classy. The idea of using elements from flags is such a good one for a global channel, means you feature almost every country... but at the same time none of them
CW
Charlie Wells Moderator
Inspector Sands posted:
But as I say things are a bit different now as storage has got cheaper and it is possible to keep everything broadcast, and the BBC has been doing that since about 2006, but it's off air so not that useful especially in the case of the news channel where everything will have a clock and ticker on it.

Worth noting that back in 2007 their archiving policy for the news channel was. ..
Quote:
And just to be clear, the BBC policy is to keep every minute of news channel output for 90 days (in line with the Broadcasting Act in the UK). After that we are obliged to keep a representative sample - and we interpret that to mean roughly one third of all our output. We also keep a large amount of individual items (such as packaged reports or "rushes" - ie original unedited material), which we use for operational reasons - such as when we come to broadcast fresh stories on the subject.

Taken from http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/03/part_of_the_conspiracy_2.html

It's quite possible the BBC's policy has changed since then. (Is it slightly tragic I recalled it had once been mentioned in a bbc blog, before then googling for it?)
itsrobert and Inspector Sands gave kudos
JO
Joe
Charlie Wells posted:
It's quite possible the BBC's policy has changed since then. (Is it slightly tragic I recalled it had once been mentioned in a bbc blog, before then googling for it?)

Yes.


But that doesn't mean I wouldn't have done exactly the same. Very interesting, thanks!
IS
Inspector Sands
Charlie Wells posted:

It's quite possible the BBC's policy has changed since then.

Maybe, although that sounds fairly reasonable in terms of workflow even now when storage is bigger and cheaper. If you've not clipped out any useful material after 3 months you're never going to


As I say one big change is that systems like Redux exist now. That records the transport streams containing all the BBCs channels and stores them permanently. So in the case of the story behind that blog, these days there would be a continuous off air recording (at least of the News Channel, maybe not World) of the output for a lot more than 90 days
NG
noggin Founding member
Inspector Sands posted:
Charlie Wells posted:

It's quite possible the BBC's policy has changed since then.

Maybe, although that sounds fairly reasonable in terms of workflow even now when storage is bigger and cheaper. If you've not clipped out any useful material after 3 months you're never going to


As I say one big change is that systems like Redux exist now. That records the transport streams containing all the BBCs channels and stores them permanently. So in the case of the story behind that blog, these days there would be a continuous off air recording (at least of the News Channel, maybe not World) of the output for a lot more than 90 days


Yep - though Redux has only been running since mid-2007. (Earlier stuff on it is digitised VHS viewing copies largely)

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