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Used to use STW a lot in the past, but haven't done so for ages. Having the Beeb news pages open at work is kind of understandable, a cycling forum way less so...
Anyhow, been increasingly annoyed at sloppy journalism, inaccuracies and use of vid clips on the Beeb. No authoritative, insightful commentary at all these days.
Coming on here and looking at the links on the MH370 thread (and seeing the guardian and independent output) has shocked me into realising how dreadful the BBC coverage has become 🙁
I think a lot of the BBC news output is markedly poorer than it was just a few years ago.
Agreed, less and less depth all the time. I'm actually a fan of Al Jazeera, more of a world view and a much better quality of journalism
Its not that surprising at all
The BBC's ouput deteriorated after the 20% budget cut the coalition enforced on them
the world news output in particular lost a lot of reporters and their coverage became noticeably poorer
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15186116
its a vicious circle, the right wing press (and we have seen how much successive governments are in their pockets) have made it their mission to criticise the BBC, leading to cuts, leading to poorer service leading to more cuts etc
And a focus on being more populist means competing with the likes of the mailonline which is a race to the bottom
theres still nothing to compete with radio4 and newsnight for comment and analysis though
Agreed, less and less depth all the time. I'm actually a fan of Al Jazeera, more of a world view and a much better quality of journalism
Yup, me too
totally. I used to check the BBC website 4/5 times a day. now I might look once just to see if there's anything I've missed.
not enough UK content for me and too much videos/ articles/ magazine type stuff and dross. it looks more like MSN or Yahoo! every day.
double post
too much videos/ articles/ magazine type stuff and dross. it looks more like MSN or Yahoo! every day.
This^
The BBC's ouput deteriorated after the 20% budget cut the coalition enforced on them
their news budget still dwarfs the competition
you think its bad now.........
Noel Edmunds is on newsnight right now, talking about buying the BBC with a consortium of investors!!
If the BBC can't afford to run BBC3, why do they spend a load of money on iPlayer, a news website and their own weather centre when there are plenty of commercial organisations who can (and do) provide us with a perfectly good alternative?
I think the digital side of the BBC is relatively inexpensive
The quality of news collection and journalism at loads of outlets has fallen over recent years, the Guardian is now woeful on foreign news when it used to be a leader. BBC too has become very narrow in it's coverage through lack of global coverage.
As for the website itself, if you want a cleaner version, use th mobile site:
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news
if it reverts back to desktop site, go to the Mobile Site link at the bottom of the page for the cookie to be set properly.
I use the google news aggregator to get a broader range of news, but dont forget to tell it not to return Guardian, Daily Mail, or Telegraph material if you want to see "different" news. The Murdoch titles dont get returned as they are behind a paywall.
Noel Edmunds is on newsnight right now, talking about buying the BBC with a consortium of investors!!
If that's true I will go to the barricades! It is the end of all that is good.
When they lost Flanders and replaced her with a guy who made his name (?) exploiting inside info (possibly) during the crisis, you realise there is trouble at mill.
The scary thing about the ease of access to news material is you can see you much copying and lasting from the same source goes on and how little journalistic/editorial input there is. Still in the world where the urgent outweighs the important, this is not a surprise.
have made it their mission to criticise the BBC, leading to cuts, leading to poorer service leading to more cuts etc
And a focus on being more populist means competing with the likes of the mailonline which is a race to the bottom
If the BBC can't afford to run BBC3, why do they spend a load of money on iPlayer, a news website and their own weather centre when there are plenty of commercial organisations who can (and do) provide us with a perfectly good alternative?
A lot of the BBC's problems are self made, the expansion of channels spread the talent and oversight too thinly and quality deteriorated throughout. They lost focus on their core strengths and expanded too far too fast, and suffered like many organisations who do the same.
However that said, IMO it was the Hutton enquiry that cut the BBC's news divisions balls off, it was a shame that they and Greg Dyke went down with a simper rather than fighting back. I think most people could clearly see that was an opportunity for journalists to fight for their integrity, and even the aforementioned right wing press looked to be gearing up to back the BBC. But the fight was taken away by the BBC's easy capitulation.
The thing that gets me about *most* journalism these days is the skimming of a story followed by a load of Tweets by irrelevant celebrities like it is somehow research.
far too many links to tweets and twitter for a site that's supposed to be "quality"
still, better than daily wail/excess.
Part of it is the massive improvement on the part of the competition. The Telegraph/Times/Guardian sites are significantly better than they were five years ago.
Another shift is widening the target audience. Like it or not, a large number of people who use the internet for news are attracted by more trivial, light-hearted stuff as much as they are by straight, serious news coverage. So there has been a gradual move towards more feature-based content, lighter stories always visible, driven by stats that show that this is what people actually read when they come to the site.
Of course that's going to displease people who just want the straight stuff, but you have to strike a balance between satisfying them and attracting people for the silly stories, who might just stay and read about something heavier.
I should declare an interest here - I worked for a section on BBC News Online over a 10 year period. It was always funny to see the 'top hitting' stories of the previous day, week and month. Inevitably something about a man with three penises would dominate, much to the chagrin of the 'serious' world news journos, whose piece about the Yemen would get about 20 hits.
The point about cuts meaning less imput from foreign correspondents is a good one, though. On the whole, though, the BBC uses its broadcast correspondents better now than it ever did when I was there. For much of the time they basically saw the site as a lower life form, and refused to provide any copy for us. Most of them couldn't stitch together a coherent written paragraph anyhow. The analysis they do provide now is much better.
The thing that gets me about *most* journalism these days is the skimming of a story followed by a load of Tweets by irrelevant celebrities like it is somehow research.
This exactly. A growing portion of the BBC News site is becoming more and more like Buzzfeed or some of the other 'social news' sites where every headline is along the lines of "you wont believe what X does to Y" or "This is the most touching thing you'll see all day" etc. It's not there yet, but when you start getting articles about weird things on Reddit you know things are getting bad.
I left before the horrors of Twitter etc, but I imagine that is more to do with driving traffic to the site from elsewhere, as a lot of people will use Twitter as a primary onward-referring news source. The language of the headline is not a fixed thing - it's just words trying to attract an audience. Not nice for those of use who like traditionally formatted news though.
It is like a sane man trying to get himself heard in a screaming pack of morons.
Inevitably something about a man with three penises would dominate
Sounds interesting, have you got a link ?
Derble post
I rest my case. 😀
Just for you:
[img] 
[/img]
But which is which?
It is like a sane man trying to get himself heard in a screaming pack of morons.
This.
They sacked all the web journos even before the coalition got in, because the web news was world class, and other media outlets didn't like that.
You mean the BBC still exists other than on Facebook ?
It's been [url= http://www.bbcfrance.fr/ ]dead[/url] for over a year here. No point trying the UK one, the media are blocked.
They sacked all the web journos even before the coalition got in, because the web news was world class, and other media outlets didn't like that.
I heard that many of my former colleagues were actually executed on the steps of Broadcasting House on the orders of our lizard overlords. 🙂
Reading Flat Earth News at the moment - it's a pretty devastating critique of the news media from an insider. I imagine it's only got worse since it was written too.
I think he worked out only 12% of content in newspapers is anything other than stuff they've copied from someone else - hardly anyone does any fact-checking, cultivating sources, or any kind of real journalism any more.
Apparently the BBC aims to get stories up in their website within 5 minutes of the news breaking. You can imagine how much thought and verification goes into those stories.
Apparently the BBC aims to get stories up in their website within 5 minutes of the news breaking. You can imagine how much thought and verification goes into those stories.
Depends where it's broken from, really. If my postman tells me that Maggie Thatcher is dead, I'll probably need to confirm that, whereas if Reuters, AP, or Conservative Party press office releases it, it carries a bit more weight.
The 'story' that goes up in five minutes will be a line in the Breaking News ticker that quotes the top line of the agency copy credited to them.
But you're right, in many cases, most media relies on agency copy while it gets its own assets into the right place. You never saw the mechanism before online news because the necessary delay was built in to the publishing process.
BBC News has always been primarily a distribution hub rather than somewhere that sources a large amount of its own material. I used to work in a specialist area, and had contacts, and sourced my own stories, but there were plenty of other more important stories that needed to be covered at the same time. But those were certainly fact-checked with expert sources as a matter of course.
'Real journalism' is, and has always been, a combination of the two. Interpreting, assessing and rewriting incoming copy, be it press release or agency copy, requires skill too.