The editors
I’ve always been a fan of BBC news’ ‘Newswatch’ feature, shown on Saturday mornings. It’s interesting to hear debates about the editorial decisions made and the reasons behind them.
Surfing the BBC website earlier this week I was pleased to stumble upon a related website and, in particular, a blog by the editors discussing the ‘issues and dilemmas’ they face. It was also good to see so many comment on the blog posts – before blogs came along it was very rare for the public voice to be so audible (visible?). All too often one or two choice responses (summing up the general tone) would be picked for publishing, and this still continues in traditional print and broadcast media. Where else other than the internet do you get a real flavour for what people think about an issue?
Of course, this also has its downside – for any organisation going through rough times, a few letters in the local or national media is a blessing compared to the tirade people can stumble across if they were to google the matter!
Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments
Tags: BBC news, blog, editorial decisions, google, Newswatch, right to reply
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onewomanandherblog
Interesting. The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has spoken about this world of information transparency where the readers collectively almost certainly know more than the reporter on any given story. So you have a print newspaper alongside an online newspaper and a blog site. Action – reaction – correction – comment.
The BBC faces additional challenges to be fast, global, objective and accurate. Occasionally, it won’t be possible to get it right first time, so best to acknowledge this.
The view I’m coming to is that while you can clearly have successful citizen journalism, you can’t have citizen editing (ie the the editorial role grows in importance). I know about Google News, Digg et al and Ohmynews and the BBC’s ‘most popular’ listings, but still think editors can and should add much to popular votes and machine intelligence.
I hadnt looked at the BBC Editors’ blogs before – thanks for the link.
I agree that it is refreshing to read that editors ‘got it wrong’ and admit that they should have checked the providence of some of their stories (shots at the airport, Twitter bans etc).
With the cut backs in budget for news gathering and reporting, it is going to be more difficult for official news outlets to validate the sheer amount of information coming in during a crisis from ever more sources.
Lets hope the BBC maintains its laudable aims and well doen for the ‘transparency’ and honesty of the Editors’ blogs.
How refreshing to know “professionals” get it wrong. As an amateur in the social media world it is easy to think everyone knows what they are doing. Having recently discovered the growth of citizen journalism due to cutbacks. There is bound to be an equal growth in mistakes made as there is a lack of systems in place to check up on the accuracy.
The advent of the internet has shown that citizens are all too willing to make their views known about news items and happy to leave their comments. They are taking up their right to reply!
It does make me a bit concerned though that groups of people could influence news reporting if they organised themselves, or if they knew a crisis or event was happening. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Spooks!