Puffbox

A very interesting post from Kevin Marsh, head of the BBC’s college of journalism, reflecting on the Panorama fuss earlier in the week: ‘This is how it is now and will be more so in days to come. And it’s not a bad thing for Big Journalism. If the argument for investigative journalism is that things done in the light are done with more integrity and accountability than things done in the dark… then the argument for investigating journalism – for audiences and those journalism puts in the news to investigate journalism – is unanswerable.’

First task of the day: uninstalling Internet Explorer v7, and getting used to v6 again. I’ve decided that too many clients are still sticking with IE6, for reasons I don’t immediately understand. But since you can’t (easily) have both on the same (XP Home) machine, I’ve had to make the choice… and the only sensible choice is to ensure you’re coding compatibly with the vast majority of clients. A relatively painless process, thankfully, with no obvious signs of side-effects. But it still feels very odd to be taking a backward step. I thought it was being forced on people automatically?

If you haven’t seen it already, here’s the video of Panorama reporter John Sweeney losing his rag whilst filming for tonight’s BBC1 exposé of Scientology. It’s quite an extraordinary interviewing technique.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=hxqR5NPhtLI]

I must admit, I was immediately cynical; we’ve had a run of Monday morning items on the BBC news agenda which have been blatant adverts for the Panorama show later in the day. (This has been the subject of some discussion on the BBC’s Newswatch slot.) So I didn’t immediately realise that it wasn’t the Beeb who had released the clip.

It’s actually been posted on YouTube by a user called ‘johnalexwood’, who includes in his biography that he is a ‘Scientologist living in East Grinstead’; his wife works for the Church of Scientology London, and his favourite book is Dianetics, often described as the bible of Scientology. So he is not an impartial observer to the exchange.

It makes for an interesting game of tit-for-tat news management. Broadcast-quality pictures can be produced on a camcorder costing barely £100; broadcasting facilities (via YouTube) are free; and the broadcasting process itself is trivially simple. Journalists used to be ‘superpowers’: they were the ones armed with cameras and airtime, and hence able to act with impunity. Now the interviewees are armed too.

And you know what? I bet the Beeb don’t mind too much… I’ll definitely be watching the show tonight. I hadn’t planned to. And I bet I’m not alone in that.

UPDATE:  there’s a very nice piece from John Sweeney himself, buried on the BBC site, in which he writes: ‘Davis had been goading me all week, and on the seventh day I fell into his elephant trap. He shouted at me and I shouted back, louder. If you are interested in becoming a TV journalist, it is a fine example of how not to do it. I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it makes me cringe. I apologised almost immediately, Tommy carried on as if nothing had happened but meanwhile Scientology had rushed off copies of me losing it to my boss, my boss’s boss and my boss’s boss’s boss, the Director-General of the BBC.’

There’s an interesting post on Martin Stabe’s Fleet Street 2.0 blog about local newspaper group Archant‘s plans to use mapping for news presentation. Geotagging (as described by Archant’s Ian Davies) is a pain in the back end, as it’s often impossible to pinpoint the exact spot relevant to a particular story… but it’s the only way to do it.

Otherwise you just end up with algorithm-based guesswork, as in this example. Ben O’Neill does a really good job with limited detail to work from… but inevitably you end up with false locations. Like at the moment, a story from BBC Somerset is positioned inexplicably in Coleraine, Co Londonderry. Or a piece on the World Bank is plonked in Mousehole, Cornwall. (And FYI: the World Bank is not based in Cornwall.) I also note a recurring problem with the new Northern Ireland First Minister, and a town just west of Glasgow, but I suppose that’s bound to happen.

It’s funny this subject should come up today because, although it’s too early for me to blog about it yet, I’m currently working on something related to maps and news presentation myself, on behalf of a major UK news outlet. It’s the sort of think a geek will look at and say ‘duh, I could have programmed that.’ But we’ve designed the production interface for speed and simplicity, allowing stressed journalists to produce something really quite intricate with minimal effort. And I’m convinced the potential is huge, bringing a new level of interaction to the presentation of the Big Stories. If all goes well, it should see its first use (of many, I hope) in June.

As (exclusively!) revealed here earlier in the week, the Guardian has introduced a new ‘network front’ page at www.guardian.co.uk. It’s a now familiar formula, expanding to fill a 1024×768 resolution, with bigger fonts, bigger pictures, and bigger gaps. The ‘downward wipe’ rollover effects on the promo boxes are the cutest touch I’ve spotted… but don’t all the usability studies tell us people respond to words rather than images? Yet you won’t see the text until the image has grabbed you. Inevitably, the immediate reaction is negative… but doesn’t that always happen?

Crucially, it turns out not to be a site redesign. This one ‘entry point’ page is probably the single most popular page on their site, so it’s fair enough to concentrate efforts there. But I don’t think anything else has changed beneath… and it now looks even more out-of-date than before.

The ‘raft of changes’ promised by Emily Bell could really do with an outboard motor. Creative editor Mark Porter describes it as part of an ‘18-month programme to redesign and rebuild every part of GU’… but frankly, it’s already 18 months too late.

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say the Telegraph’s new ‘My Telegraph’ blogging platform is revolutionary. Others – specificially, The Sun and Express – have opened ‘personal’ areas within their sites, but both are underwhelming. ‘My Telegraph’ has clearly been put together by people who ‘get it’.

A (relatively) brief registration process gives you a blog with a unique selling point: the address has ‘telegraph.co.uk’ in it. Don’t underestimate the value of this: having seen the attendance at the recent Telegraph bloggers’ Open House, it’s clear to me that people in the UK are happy to define themselves in terms of the newspaper they read. I was very clearly among an audience of Telegraph People (and I have to say, at times, it felt a little uncomfortable). A lot of people will take great pride in quoting their URL: my.telegraph.co.uk/myname.

Shane Richmond and co deserve a lot of credit for developing a blogging platform which includes relatively complex functionality, but makes it very simple. Huge buttons with friendly icons, lots of in-context instructions, a ‘wizard’ approach to blog authoring, sensible URLs for the individual blogs, and a spacious design all make it a very welcoming experience. The ‘blogs I read’ list, which lets each blogger point to his/her friends elsewhere on the platform, will encourage a good amount of casual browsing.

At the moment, though, it’s a fairly self-contained area. The ability to ‘save’ blog posts, and the listing of my ‘comments’ on other blogs, seem to be restricted to the MyTelegraph section… not the journalists’ blogs, and not the (real) newspaper content. Personally, I think I’d have looked to merge the ‘reader blogs’ and the ‘journos’ blogs’ a bit more, maybe even going so far as to close down the ‘blogs.telegraph.co.uk’ section and migrate the ‘professionals’ over to the ‘amateurs’ platform. (Version two, perhaps.)

I’m provisionally impressed. But the project will stand or fall purely on the basis of the community it develops. Having met many of the dedicated Tele community at the recent Open House, I’m convinced they have a ready supply of people wanting to take part. All the elements are in place. But if they think the hard work has just finished, I’m sorry – it has only just started.

Is a redesign of the Guardian website F-I-N-A-L-L-Y on the cards? I’ve just been forwarded an email from Emily Bell (editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited), responding to a design query raised by a friend of mine, advising him to ‘have a look on Thursday’. Oooh, exciting. And very brave, if we’re expecting A Historic News Story to break on Thursday. (Apologies if this is widely known, and I’ve just missed it.)