BBC News Online

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BBC News Online is the website of BBC News, the division of the BBC responsible for newsgathering and production. Forming a major part of bbc.co.uk, the website is the most popular news website in the United Kingdom (between 60% and 70% of visitors are from the UK), as well as one of the most popular worldwide, averaging around 15 million visitors per month.

The website contains international news coverage, as well as British, entertainment, science, and political news. Many reports are accompanied by audio and video from the BBC's television and radio news services, while the latest TV and radio bulletins are also available to view or listen to on the site together with other current affairs programmes.

Contents 1 History 2 Features 2.1 UK/World editions 2.2 Columnists 2.3 Real-time information 3 Forum 4 Criticism 5 References and footnotes 6 External links

[edit] History

The site launched in November 1997, headed by founding editor Mike Smartt. Designed originally by Matt Jones, the look of the website has since been redesigned several times including a major overhaul in 2003, primarily by Paul Sissons and Maire Flynn, to coincide with a relaunch of the BBC News Channel. The website went under relaunch again on March 31, 2008 which included wider page designs, clearer links, more video/audio content and a new BBC masthead.

Smartt was later succeeded by Pete Clifton who was subsequently promoted to Head of BBC News Interactive.

The editorial and management departments of the website are based in BBC Television Centre, while the development and site design teams are based in BBC White City - both in the White City area.

The site was named best news website at the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards every year from 1998 to 2001 when the award category was withdrawn.

The design of the site saw a major change in March 2008 when more spacing was added. This was made possible by an increase in the page resolution as more viewers have screen resolutions set to 1024 pixels.

Embedded video was also gradually introduced after the launch of the BBC iPlayer. These are now included in most high profile stories, as well as on the front page itself.

[edit] Features

[edit] UK/World editions

There are two different editions of the site: a UK edition, which gives prominence to UK stories, and a world edition, which prioritises international news. All articles are archived indefinitely and can be retrieved via searching or by browsing the extensive Special Reports section, which contains collections of articles relating to major news stories. The previous seven days' top stories were formerly available through the Week at a Glance section of the website.

As well as pure news articles, the site also contains material to support BBC news, current affairs and factual programmes. The Magazine section contains features prompted by current news stories, as well as a number of regular items within the daily Magazine Monitor blog with various light-hearted sub-sections including 'Caption Competition', 'Reader's Letters', 'Punorama', quizzes and other humorous items.

By a large contrast to the Magazine section, Have Your Say, linked with the radio and television programmes of the same name allows readers to debate issues in the news

A more detailed section of the web site is 'Special Reports, formerly In Depth. This brings together news articles of the same topic or incident and also includes many explanatory articles or diagrams.

Since the beginning of May 2007, BBC News has been streamed live on the UK version of the website.^[1]

[edit] Columnists

BBC News Online has a small number of topic-specific columns written by BBC journalists. Examples include education correspondent Mike Baker's Mike Baker Weekly column and technology commentator Bill Thompson's bill board (formerly bill blog). BBC News Online Science Writer Ivan Noble, diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour in August 2002, shared his experiences of cancer in Tumour Diary until his death on 31 January 2005.

The use of blogs has also grown with correspondents including Nick Robinson, Robert Peston, Mark Mardell, Justin Webb and Evan Davis, amongst others, making use of them to provide updates on the latest news events. The Editors' blog has also seen BBC News editors giving their reasons for editorial decisions, as well as defending criticisms of the BBC.

[edit] Real-time information

The site launched a set of semi-official RSS 0.91 syndication feeds in June 2003 and upgraded them to RSS 2.0 in March 2000^{[citation needed]}. Every news index has its own RSS feed, including the in-depth sections.

Since June 2006 the site has been providing real-time user information on its most popular news stories.

The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. (January 2008) Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.

[edit] Forum

The site has a forum called 'Have Your Say'.

Under then Editor Pete Clifton, the system behind the forum was upgraded in 2005 to allow for comments to be added faster and appear in real-time, subject to varying levels of moderation.

The impartiality of the forums has been criticised by organisations such as News Sniffer: moderators are accused of sometimes appearing to promote their own agenda.

[edit] Criticism

The site is primarily funded by the television licence, paid by all UK households owning a television set, and used to carry no advertising. The World edition has received some subsidy from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office through its grant-in-aid to the BBC World Service. This has led to complaints of unfair competition from commercial rivals. Others note that large numbers of international visitors enjoy the site at the expense of the UK public, leading to suggestions that foreign users be shown advertising or charged subscription fees when accessing the site. Proposals to include advertising on the international version of the website were discussed by the BBC Trust in February 2007, but were opposed by BBC journalists, who feared it would weaken public trust in the impartiality of the BBC. In November 2007, the site did start to carry advertising.^[2] The advertising consists of large animated banners, which has led to complaints that these make the site's content harder to read.^[3]

[edit] References and footnotes

[edit] External links

• BBC News at bbc.co.uk
• BBC News Online - About the site at bbc.co.uk
• About BBC News - News Interactive bbc.co.uk
• BBC News OPML file of all RSS feeds (XML) at bbc.co.uk
• BBC News Errors
• First article on the BBC role in Social Bookmarking on the Internet - The BBC added Social Bookmarking links in August 2007, to their News and Sport articles, raising the profile of them significantly.

What's popular now:

• Real time user information
• About real time user data

Some early pages: (look and feel may have been applied in 2001)

• News article from 22 October 1997 - The oldest article still available.
• See the site from 1997 to present at Archive.org