Some really interesting points there... With my slight bias ;-) and the fact my wife worked for BBC News Interactive for five years, my instant reaction was very similar to Matthew's - but from real world experience I know full well that if the BBC places the word 'sex' in it's headline it gets huge hits - or other keywords like 'Brittany', 'Cute kittens', 'Gruesome', 'Horrible Death'.... It doesn't mean that the BBC is out of touch because that particular story is 4th on the front page index, 2nd on the nation index, and 1st on the local index - and it's 1st on the most popular... It just shows that users click on interesting headlines above all else... Especially if they think there's something a bit naughty in there...
I'm not suggesting any journalist at the BBC does this... But I've known people to 'sex up' their headlines to increase hits... For the most part I think BBC News is beyond that... But it does happen. m -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Matthew Somerville Sent: 01 November 2006 14:40 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] BBC Touch Chris Riley wrote, reordered slightly: > In particular I think its useful for highlighting issues the public > care more about. For instance a couple of says ago whilst Pakistan was > the headline, most of us were reading the climate change story. Are you sure Pakistan was the headline? The "climate change story" became a subheading just after midnight on the 29th, became the main headline around 07:50am, and stayed there, as far as I can tell, right through the 29th and 30th October, until 04:05 on the 31st October when the main headline became the Prince Charles/Pakistan story for around 15 minutes (data from my front page archive: http://www.bbc.co.uk/homearchive/ and my news archive). > On the web page you'll see subjects they want us to read about vs. > what we're actually reading about for the past 24 hours, and past 2 weeks. "they want us to read"? That's not the point of the editorial (by which I mean the ordering of stories on the front page) at all, in my view. I have BBC news in my RSS reader, so that gives me the latest news. I click on the ones I want to read, but that shouldn't affect in any way which ones the BBC decide are important. They hopefully weight stories by more than popularity, otherwise all the stories would be about celebrities and kittens? :-) What your site measures (presuming the popular feed goes on page views, which seems likely) is which stories have been clicked on, not read. I frequently click a headline if it sounds interesting, read the first paragraph, decide it isn't or I already know the story, and close the page. If lots of people are like that, then that makes that story a popular story even though it isn't at all. So what you're actually measuring is how good BBC headlines are at getting people to click through. Similarly, if a BBC post gets linked to from Slashdot or Boing Boing, it will almost certainly become a most popular link. But that doesn't mean it is most popular in terms of the "what we're actually reading about", just that lots of people read those sites and click links, realise the first paragraph tells them all they need to know, and that's it. Most emailed would perhaps be a better XML feed to use than Most popular, as then at least people have gone out of their way to send the story to someone else. But that doesn't change my first point - the story that is most emailed will be the one about a man marrying a goat or somesuch, which I wouldn't think should be a "top story" anywhere, no more than the "also in the news" bit of the front page for humour value. Lastly, surely the headline stories on the front page are, quite possibly, new news. The stories that are most popular are going to be those that have been most widely distributed, by email, IM, RSS, whatever, and so will almost certainly be a few hours behind. So I wouldn't expect the headlines to match the most popular? > I don't have any desire to highlight any hidden agendas the BBC's > editorial staff might have (although I guess it can), but more from an > interest in how "in touch" are the BBC with what the public actually > reads and cares about compared to what they think we do. Why would the BBC want to be "in touch" with spammers? I say this because of the story some months back of the BBC's "MSN charging" story from 2001 suddenly becoming very popular - "On Sunday it was the most-read business story" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4778046.stm - a complete irrelevancy from the headlines point of view. :) -- ATB, Matthew | http://www.dracos.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
