- Steve Herrmann
- 10 Aug 06, 02:40 PM
One of our concerns in covering has been to make sure traffic load to the News website doesn't cause problems for our users.
So far our technical team have successfully made sure it hasn't, but traffic certainly has been heavy. By lunchtime we'd already had about the same number of page views as we'd normally get across a whole 24 hours. The top story alone had over three million page views, several times more than on a normal day.
According to , the second most read story so far has been our round-up of travel advice and information from all the main airports. We've given this a lot of prominence and had people dedicated to updating it all morning, helped by all the readers' on-the-spot accounts which we are getting - it looks like that has paid off as our users are clearly looking for this information.
UPDATE 1530: Anthony Sullivan, who helped develop our traffic stats monitor, adds that it has been showing traffic levels between 60% and 70% above average today - the largest volume since July 7th last year.
UPDATE, Friday morning: Yesterday turned out to be one of our two or three biggest days on record for traffic, with 6.8m unique users and 50m page views. The most read stories were , and . Audio Video usage was also very high - particularly the live stream of News 24 coverage - and we received about 10,000 emails from users.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the
- Daniel Pearl
- 10 Aug 06, 12:01 PM
So - we awake to news that a major terror plot has been thwarted. Security sources claim that the group, who have been under surveillance for months, wanted to explode as many as 10 planes, probably somewhere over the Atlantic.
Thousands of travellers are stranded, planes have been cancelled and the country's security threat has been raised to its highest level. There are a lot of questions we'll be trying to answer during the course of the day, for example:
• 1 - How close were we to "mass murder on an unimaginable scale"?
• 2 - Have the security services found any explosives?
• 3 - Why did the police decide to swoop today?
• 4 - Were they members of a foreign terror cell or were they British-born?
• 5 - How will this change the way we fly? Will we have to get used to flying without any hand luggage?
There are plenty more - let us know what questions you'd like answered, or if you can answer any of these.
Daniel Pearl is deputy editor of the Ten O'Clock News
- David Kermode
- 10 Aug 06, 11:59 AM
I talked, in my last blog, about interactivity with our audience and I mentioned the importance of getting a sense of how our viewers are responding to a story.
This morning was a case in point.
A major terrorist plot had been foiled - we were told. There was chaos at some of Britain's airports, which was bound to get worse. And people were understandably worried.
We 'rolled' on the story from 6am, when we went on air, reporting on the unfolding developments and taking a break only for the briefest summary of other news, the usual regional bulletins and a short weather forecast.
Although we didn't read out emails or texts - the fact that our viewers were worried was hardly 'news' in itself - the traffic coming in from viewers did help to inform both the tone of our coverage and also the direction it took. We had a sense of the some of the questions our viewers wanted answered (some of which we'll return to tomorrow) and we also heard from people caught up in the chaos.
Glancing through the emails and texts at one point, I was also reminded of the challenge we face with repetition.
New viewers are turning on all the time - they want information. Viewers who've been with us for a while want new information, but they don't want to hear the same things repeated endlessly. There were a few people who told us to "'move on" and talk about something else. There were others who told us we'd provided a really coherant flow of essential information, for which they were grateful.
I hope we got the balance right.
David Kermode is editor of
- Richard Jackson
- 10 Aug 06, 11:45 AM
This morning's programme was an example of when the previous 24 hours' work, leading up to 0600, is ripped up and thrown out of the window.
Just before we went on air, we learned about which, we're now told, prevented "mass murder on an unimaginable scale".
Our planned programme was junked and we were quickly into rolling news mode. There were two key elements to the story; the operation by the police and MI5 to arrest people thought to be planning attacks on aircraft, and the chaos caused to air travellers throughout the UK by heightened security.
Reporters like Anna Lee on Teeside, Ross Hawkins in London and James Shaw in Glasgow were woken by dawn phone calls scrambling them to get to their nearest airport. Others like Stephen Chittenden rang in - he was scheduled for a relaxing day off - instead he dashed off to Stansted Airport to see what was happening there.
But our reporting effort wasn't restricted to 大象传媒 people. As soon as we went on air we asked our audience where they were and if they could help us paint a picture of what was going on around the country.
One of the first responses wasn't all that encouraging. "Is it really 2 much 2 ask u 2 do the journalistic work rather than rely on the public to text you on every major breaking story?".
Undeterred, during the course of the first hour of the programme we heard from Kevin at Gatwick, Simon in Jersey, Michael at Heathrow and Jimmy in Edinburgh as we sought to reflect the scenes of confusion and delay at various airports. Other texters appeared throughout the programme as the scale of the chaos became clear.
We also heard from who was listening to Five Live on her way to the airport and rang in with her own tale of queues and crowds.
Plenty of other people gave us information about what was going on in their locality - and lots of people texted in questions they wanted answering. Some were downright impossible for us to help with - at 0611 someone asked, "I am flylng tomorrow - was wondering if the weight limit will be increased to take account of the five kilos that normally go in the cabin".
By the end of the programme, Easyjet and British Airways had come on to help us answer those questions. Others wanted to know what was happening with Eurostar services or whether their relatives flying in from other parts of the world were likely to arrive on time.
Finally, it's on days like these that you learn about who might be listening to the programme. When sports presenter Juliette Ferrington arrived at Manchester City for a scheduled news conference, she was greeted by . When she confessed she'd been listening to music instead of the news, he told her she really should be listening to Five Live - it's very informative.
Richard Jackson is editor of Five Live Breakfast
- Vicky Taylor
- 10 Aug 06, 11:20 AM
A correspondent to the debate on the doctored photographs asks an interesting question about how the 大象传媒 is countering images from the public showing 'posed or inaccurate images'.
We now receive around 300 images a week to our . Most of these are interesting snaps taken of people鈥檚 families, holidays or lives in general. A fair proportion on a busy week are from news events, ie from Lebanon, or Britain during the heatwave.
Of course, we are aware that some people will use this system to try and hoax us, to send something which is not quite as it seems. It鈥檚 something we are on the look out for as we go through the images, and to date we鈥檝e not published anything which has been problematic. But that doesn鈥檛 make us complacent. You do get a second sense with these images, and the team which are looking at them are doing so day in day out.
You can obviously follow all the usual journalistic paths; you can email or ring the photographer back and check are they were they say they are, does their number appear to be the code of the area they say, it is their photograph. If you get multiple photographs of the same image you would think that maybe they have been picked up from an agency or sharing site and don鈥檛 belong to the person sending them.
If they appear 'photoshopped', or almost too good, you would double check.
Some people take grabs off a television - these you can spot. You can do a quick technical check to see when the image was taken and with what device. You can compare with other photos from the same area, from TV images you may have of the place, you can check other photo agency wires to see if the image crops up elsewhere.
Most genuine emailers will add text, a plausible story, which can be checked out. You take care, and always use your professional judgement. No matter how pressing the need is to get that image up on the web or on the tv screen, the verification process must be gone through.
However I would say that the vast majority of people don鈥檛 want to hoax you, they want to get their image published and so share their story with the world, and that for our journalism and reflecting what is really going on in the world, can only be a good thing.
While I鈥檓 here... I wanted to add a note about the sheer volume of comments we鈥檝e received on the crisis in Lebanon.
Since it began the Have Your Say debates have received well over 100,000 comments - and had 3.5 million page impressions. It has been consistently the only story people want to talk about or read people鈥檚 views on. On one day - 26 July - we received over 6,000 emails.
But that of course means that many people who do send their views may not get them published. There is no agenda here. On massive stories like this we do try to pick a range of views expressed differently - it would be no good if every one said more or less the same thing in the same way. We do try and pick comments from people actually living through or with direct experience of the event - on either side.
We know how frustrating it can be not to get a view which is held very deeply on the pages, but I can assure all those in this position, we are working flat out to get through as many as we can. Thank you all for your contributions.
Vicky Taylor is editor of Interactivity
Among the audience comments to the 大象传媒 in the past 24 hours were many on coverage of the Middle East crisis, with one person complaining that the 大象传媒 is not devoting enough airtime to the story.
Also, some people remarked on coverage of the verdict in - with at least one person saying that the story should not have led any of the news bulletins.
We also received the following comment in an email:
I no longer see the need for news. Up until now I believed that news reporting had some effect on the perpetrators of violence - I'm afraid those days are gone.
The Telegraph: Commentary on Newsnight's recent investigation into Arsenal football club. (
Press Gazette: Senior 大象传媒 journalists talk briefly about the current state of political reporting. ()
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