大象传媒

The Editors

Interactive News (archive)

Peter Barron

Redesign Newsnight's website


In recent months the Newsnight website has been growing like . , blog, forum etc. And as result of this rapid organic growth it's become a bit unruly.

Newsnight logoSome of you aren't impressed. Ian Mc sent us this - "I don't think I've seen such a mess of a home page since... well, I don't know when... Web designers should ALWAYS remember: just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should be done."

Stung by that challenge we've resolved to enter a period of rationalisation.

Let us know what you love and hate, what you visit all the time, what you never visit but are glad is there. Some of you have said - is your forum a forum or is it a blog, and vice versa? Does it matter what it is? Tell us what would make it better.

Is there simply too much stuff? Website design fashion seems these days to be heading towards the minimal, personally I like the excitement of having loads to explore. What do you reckon?

Do you want to read long articles, view video, download podcasts or talk to each other? If there was a Newsnight Club, with all sorts of low cost freebies, would you join? And are there features we should quietly put out of their misery? In our office the cry of "Kill " has gone up. Should we?

The pruning shears are in your hands.

Peter Barron is editor of Newsnight

Steve Herrmann

Managing demand


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

Vicky Taylor

Your contributions


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’s 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’s something we are on the look out for as we go through the images, and to date we’ve not published anything which has been problematic. But that doesn’t 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’t 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’t 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’m here... I wanted to add a note about the sheer volume of comments we’ve 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’s 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.

Steve Herrmann

Trusting photos


As with any conflict, photographers are at the heart of the propaganda war - with both sides attempting to use the power of the camera to their own ends.

that it has withdrawn all the pictures taken by Adnan Hajj (one of its stringers in Lebanon), following his use of Photoshop to manipulate two images, has meant all of us need to understand the processes by which these pictures are obtained and used.

I asked the 大象传媒 News website's picture editor, Phil Coomes, to explain some of the background to the images we can easily take for granted.

    "At the 大象传媒 News website we rely on a number of international news agencies to provide us with the majority of our still images. Trusted and well established names such as the Associated Press and Agence France Press sit beside new players in the game such as Getty News Images.
    "All of these companies have their own staff photographers who work alongside local freelancers around the world - forwarding their pictures to an editor who will then send it on to their subscribers.
    "At the 大象传媒 we receive over 5,000 pictures per day on the picture wire service; ten years ago it would have been less than 500. News websites need vast quantities of pictures and often in real-time - the days of a photographer providing the one defining image for a newspaper front page are long gone.
    "All the pictures we use are checked for any obvious editing - the easiest to spot being cloning of parts of the image (which appeared to be what happened in this example).
    "Today a photographer working in the field is under more pressure than ever, especially in a combat zone. He or she no longer has to just take the pictures, not to mention ensure they are in the right place to begin with, but they also have to edit, caption and transmit them.
    "For this and other reasons photographers often work together, so at any major event you will usually have a number of sources to compare against each other - giving a good indication as to the basic truth of the picture.
    "The are interesting, in that there are many ways to interpret the images. The basic truth is undeniable, but with so many photographers all shooting the same event, and filing many alternative pictures to their agencies, the sequence of events is hard to pin down.
    "To some extent the presence of a camera will alter the event, but it’s up to those on the ground to work around this and present us with an objective a view as possible.
    "Digital photography has altered the landscape of photojournalism like nothing before it, placing the photographers in total control of their output. All the news agencies have photo ethics policies, many of which are rooted in the days of film. The standard line is that photographers are allowed to use photo manipulation to reproduce that which they could do in the darkroom with conventional film.
    "This usually means, colour balance, '', cropping, touching up any marks from dust on the sensor and perhaps a little sharpening. If we are honest though, an accomplished darkroom technician could do almost anything and there are many historical examples of people being airbrushed from pictures.
    "All this sounds fine until you look at the reality - .
    "By definition a photograph is a crop of reality, it’s what the photojournalist feels is important. But it doesn't equate to the whole truth, and perhaps we just need to accept that."

UPDATE (from Steve Herrmann): I should have said at the start - we didn't use the Reuters picture on the 大象传媒 News website.

But we have had some emails about another picture we used yesterday of a Lebanese woman in front of damaged buildings. We got the picture from AP and it was dated last Saturday but a reader pointed out it bore a resemblance to another picture - which we hadn't run - attributed to Reuters and dating from July.

It wasn't the same image, but conceivably could have been the same place and time. We weren't in a position to get to the bottom of this immediately ourselves so we decided to update the picture with a different, more recent image. But not before it was picked up by at least .

Steve Herrmann is editor of the

Mark Barlex

Vinegar with that?


Update. Update.

storyfix_logo.jpgSTORYFix is now available as a news take-away video podcast (vodcast?). Get it , or, excitingly, from itself, although it's yet to displace Ricky Gervais - or Newsnight, for that matter - at or near the top of the Apple hit parade.

It's the same content, brought to you in a different way. Let me know what you think.

Mark Barlex is responsible for STORYfix

Fran Unsworth

Environmental changes


You would have had to have been in hibernation for the past few years to have missed the ascent of the environment up the news agenda. We have been suffering a heat wave this week that many people have found unpleasant, the south east is crippled with drought and the UK apparently now produces award-winning wine because we can grow vines successfully in this country.

Many are questioning whether climate change is responsible for all this; others argue these events are cyclical.

There is a huge responsibility on us to be a trusted and reliable source of information. But to report the subject properly we have to look not only at the science, but also the impact of environmental issues on economics, business and politics. Like all journalistic organisations we tend to have difficulty doing joined-up reporting.

Roger Harrabin, on the Ten O'Clock News setThat's why we have decided to appoint an environment analyst to try to pull together some of these threads. Roger Harrabin has covered the environment for two decades, largely for radio where he has reported the story as it appears through energy, transport, housing and politics.

In his new post he will spread this approach across a wider range of 大象传媒 outlets offering original stories and new perspectives, and tackling such subjects as...

• What is a safe level of climate change?
• Can technology provide the solution?
• How much would we need to spend to stabilise the world's climate?
• Can we adapt to climate change?

Hopefully through his work (such as this report on last night's Ten O'Clock News), audiences will be armed with more information to help better understand controversial and complex issues surrounding the subject.

Fran Unsworth is head of Newsgathering

Paul Brannan

In the buffer


The language of conflict has always given birth to euphemisms – collateral damage, kinetic targeting and ethnic cleansing are among the more recent entries to the argot of the times.

George Orwell covered this ground in Politics and the English Language back in 1945. He wrote: "“Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.

“Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers."

Orwell saw this retreat into euphemism as a consequence of political expediency by those seeking to defend the indefensible. Such phraseology was needed by those who wanted to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

A more recent commentator, Keith Woods of the Poynter Institute, cautioned against adopting the language of the military in reporting on war. “Language has always had a power that tilts towards those who define the terms,” he observed.

And my colleague Jon Williams has also written of the sensitivities of language, specifically the words used to describe the recent taking of the two Israeli soldiers.

The weight of history and its years of tit-for-tat reprisals in the region would lead many people to take issue with Orwell’s conclusion about language. Some would insist that Israel’s actions in southern Lebanon were entirely defensible. But when, in a recent report, we mentioned the proposal for a “buffer zone” between Israel and Lebanon as part of a wider ceasefire plan it prompted one viewer to write and complain.

"'Buffer zone' is a propaganda term used by the Israeli government. It should not be simply repeated by a news organisation.”

Such a description would be mendacious to many Lebanese. For them it’s a straightforward invasion and occupation of their territory.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the conflict, using the Israeli terminology - “buffer zone” - without ascribing it to them would make it appear that we accept the view of it as a purely defensive measure designed to protect Israel from aggression. Not using the term could also make us appear partial, or that we believed the argument that it is nothing to do with self-defence.

So, for future instances, I’ve asked the web team simply to make clear that the expression is one Israel has given to it.

Paul Brannan is deputy editor of the

Adam Curtis

Graphic images


News developments in the Middle East routinely attract the attention of vigorous lobby groups on both sides. The conflict that has erupted so suddenly in Lebanon is no exception.

We are accused of all sorts of twists and spins, such as: "Why do we say that Lebanese have 'died', but that Israelis have 'been killed'?" Or: "Why do you focus on the suffering of Israelis when the Lebanese are suffering in greater numbers?" Or: "Why do you paint the Lebanese as victims when it's their failure to disarm Hezbollah that lies at the root of the trouble?" Or: "Why don't you state openly that the Israeli bombing/Hezbollah rocket attacks are war crimes?"

Readers with strong views about the rights and wrongs of the conflict sometimes read into our coverage a bias or prejudice that is not there. The accusations come from both sides.

The truth is that, in maintaining 24-hour a day coverage of a complex, fast-moving story such as this - constantly updating and reshaping our reports - it is a huge challenge to ensure that we are maintaining absolute balance and impartiality. Undoubtedly, there are times when we don't get it quite right. But we do pay attention to feedback, and we do make adjustments when it seems right to do so.

One of the most difficult issues surrounds the pictures that we use to illustrate our news stories. We come under pressure from some quarters to publish photographs that reflect the full horror of the casualties being inflicted. Such images certainly exist and are freely available on a number of websites.

Our job, as we see it, is to make a judgement about what our audience is likely to feel is appropriate. On the one hand, we do not believe in sanitising the news. On the other, we believe we have the ability, through our reporting, to convey the horror of events without shocking and possibly outraging our readers by showing gruesome images of mutilated corpses.

On occasions we are aware that we come close to crossing the line as to what is acceptable. In such circumstances, we may, like our colleagues in television, adopt the policy of warning our readers that the images they are about to see are likely to be distressing.

But what if the available images of casualties on one side are more harrowing than those on the other? And should we publish more pictures of Lebanese casualties because there are more of them?

In practice, we look at the agency pictures available at any one time and publish a selection that we feel reflects reality. We have no agenda other than to give our readers as accurate a sense as we can of what is happening on the ground.

In doing so, we take note of the 大象传媒 guideline on impartiality, which says in part: "It requires us to be fair and open minded when examining the evidence and weighing all the material facts, as well as being objective and even handed in our approach to a subject. It does not require the representation of every argument or facet of every argument on every occasion or an equal division of time for each view."

Adam Curtis is world editor of the

Adrian Van-Klaveren

Restructuring the 大象传媒


So we at the 大象传媒 have had one of those “organisational moments”, making substantial changes to how we run ourselves.

大象传媒 included an emphasis on 大象传媒 Journalism as one of the main planks of what the 大象传媒 does – alongside Audio & Music and 大象传媒 Vision. The idea at the heart of 大象传媒 Journalism builds on what we’ve been doing over the last few years. We’ve worked hard to create stronger links between the 大象传媒’s journalistic output, locally, nationally and internationally. Sport now joins the mix as well.

Our aim is to ensure we fully achieve our mission of delivering the world’s best journalism and that what we do is available to as many people as possible across all appropriate platforms.

Of course this only really matters if it makes a difference to audiences. I think it will. It should help us be more ambitious in what we do across the big themes of our time – climate change, energy supply, China, global security and many more.

When all of the 大象传媒’s journalists work together we can give audiences an unrivalled insight into major issues. The expertise of the World Service, the innovation of our interactive teams, the grass roots understanding from our teams across the UK can all combine to strengthen our coverage of subjects ranging from immigration to the environment.

Of course it’s happened in the past but we know we can and should do more.

Secondly it’s vital that all areas of the 大象传媒’s journalism work together as we adapt to the changing technological world. Finding the right ways of offering content and the best technology to support that content needs to be thought about across the 大象传媒 – not just in individual areas.

What we provide in terms of news services to mobiles for example is likely to cuts across boundaries of local, national and international.

In a world where greater personalisation will be one of the key themes, audiences will be in control rather than our traditional boundaries and demarcations. There will be people who regularly want a diet of news which ranges from the local to the global and we need to make sure our way of doing things supports, rather than gets in the way of, providing this.

Journalism is at the heart of why the 大象传媒 exists. The changes to the organisation reflect this and I think can only encourage anyone who wants the 大象传媒 to continue to offer the best in on-the-spot reporting, analysis and explanation, robust interviewing and original story finding.

Adrian Van-Klaveren is deputy director of 大象传媒 News

Vicky Taylor

No offence


Words, as any journalist knows, can be loaded. One which has cropped up and led to lots of conversations in some blogs is "dhimmi". It's not a very well-known word (it's not in the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance), but it is one which raises passions.

"Dhimmi" refers historically to non-Muslims living in Islamic states whose religion was tolerated as long as they accepted the supremacy of the Islamic state. It is now used, sometimes in the word "dhimmitude", to mean "situations where non-Muslims in the West are allegedly championing Islamic causes above others" ().

Recently in our Have Your Say discussions, "dhimmi" has been used in a context which breaches our , specifically that posts should not be abusive, offensive or provocative. Some users have tried to register with names using variations of "dhimmi", again sometimes in an offensive way. When we spotted this trend, we put the word "dhimmi" on our automated list of blocked words, mostly swearing and racially offensive terms. That meant that any reference to "dhimmi" would mean the posting was automatically deleted. (Having a blocked list means it's possible to filter out abuse and ensure comments do not break any laws - especially useful since our debates get several thousand messages each day.)

On reflection, though, it's clear that the word "dhimmi" can be used in the modern sense in a non-abusive way, so we've decided that it should not now be blocked. The list of blocked words is a moving object - words and meanings do change from time to time - so we'll monitor how the debate goes.

Getting the balance right between freedom of speech and removing offensive content can be difficult at times. We do have our rules, which we enforce, because we want the debates on our site to reflect intelligent, informed and legally expressed opinions. But we're not interested in stopping discussion - that, after all, is the point.

Vicky Taylor is editor of Interactivity.

Vicky Taylor

Webcasting Putin


It has been quite an experience.

At the rehearsal the day before the interactive webcast with President Putin there were about 50 Russian officials in the hastily-made (but state of the art) studio, all giving their view on who should sit where. That was probably what you would expect inside the Kremlin.

What has been different is the apparent keenness to take on . There have been no no-go areas. No asking to see any script or enquiries (gently or not so gently) asking what we were going to pick as our main questions. The main issues of contention was should Bridget Kendall (our presenter) sit next to the President. In the end she did.

Arriving at the Kremlin today though, our initial entry was delayed as we weren’t all in one group as the form suggested we would be, and any bags we were carrying had to be decanted and anything you needed taken in by hand. A bit tricky when you are carrying technical equipment. Still it gave the whole proceeding an edge.

President Putin, during the webcastThe President arrived exactly one minute late and didn’t stop for the next two hours and fifteen minutes (watch it here) - an extra half hour suddenly found in his diary. It was a marathon performance by any standards - every one of our 12 questions on a vast range of topics from North Korea, relations with George Bush to the problems with getting visas to travel to Russia, was asked.

The one topic which has been preoccupying the Russian press - about why he kissed a young boy on the tummy during a visit to Red Square - also got put. He picked a couple of questions himself; poverty, pension and the military were his choices. We even got the impression the President enjoyed answering them all.

Vicky Taylor is editor of interactivity.

Steve Herrmann

Questions for Putin


Preparations are under way for a webcast we are doing in the Kremlin with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, tomorrow, eight days before the opening of the G8 summit in St Petersburg.

Former Moscow correspondent Bridget Kendall will be selecting questions from the hundreds sent in so far by readers - and .

Last time we did a webcast with the Russian leader, , the hot topics were the US missile defence shield and the conflict in Chechnya. This time readers are more worried about nuclear proliferation, Iran and North Korea. Chechnya has slipped down their list of priorities, while questions about xenophobia in Russia, and how Mr Putin plans to tackle it, are now near the top.

Some readers have gone for less serious matters. Which country does Mr Putin tip to win the World Cup? Is there a chance his dog will have puppies, and will they be up for adoption? The Russian leader is going to choose a handful of questions himself. It will be interesting to see which ones he selects.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the

Paul Brannan

Wartime reporting


We've long since ceased to be amazed at the near real-time delivery of news.

And modern life has been conducted in the full gaze of the media for such a long time it's become routine. So it's difficult to imagine what it must have been like before TV and radio took hold of our collective consciousness and shaped our world.

As on the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme it set me wondering how modern media coverage might have affected the tide of events.

July 1, 1916, was the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army - 54,470 casualties, 19,240 of them deaths. Whole battalions were wiped out in less than half a day. "Pals" units - men from the same town who enlisted together - suffered catastrophic losses.

Had that been fed back immediately to the British public - for all the patriotic fervour of the time - how might public opinion have been affected? Would politicians of the day have been able to sustain the offensive? Would Haig have been relieved of his command?

By the time the Somme slaughter came to an end the Allies had advanced only five miles, the British had suffered 420,000 casualties, the French 195,000 and the Germans around 650,000.

It's fanciful to speculate on whether the war might have been brought to a swift conclusion if the peoples on all sides had known the true horror of what was happening. But it does bring into sharp focus the crucial role of the media in helping to create an informed and functioning democracy.

Paul Brannan is deputy editor of the

Vicky Taylor

Somme memories


About a week ago, when we first asked people if they had family relatives who had fought in the Somme, we were surprised to get over 50 e-mails back within an hour. Now has just under 500 contributions, many of course with moving, heroic tales of how young lives were lost. Photographs too - obviously carefully kept in a cupboard over the years, now in the computer age, scanned and shared with thousands.

News 24 and the Six O'Clock News have been reporting from France and asking for people's memories. This is one of the responses, which came from a 16-year-old boy:

"I've been watching your series on The Somme with fascination, as I have just been on a school trip with other Year 11s to visit the whole Western Front. It was an amazing experience, once in a lifetime, and totally unexpectedly I found I had an ancestor who had died on the Somme, and who is commemorated on the Thiepval memorial. The experience was totally awe-inspiring, and moved me to researching my great-great-great-great- uncle's history."

I read this after spending an hour at a rather down-beat presentation about public participation in civic life and why Britain fares so badly compared to other European countries and the United States.

To find that so many people want to share something of an event which happened 90 years ago certainly helped me put some of those findings in perspective.

Vicky Taylor is editor of Interactivity.

Kevin Marsh

What does an editor do


So this is the editors' blog. But what do we mean by "editor"?

The first thing to note is that the person who edits a particular edition of a programme - what we call "the output editor" - is not necessarily "the Editor".

So what's the difference?

The set of the 大象传媒 One O'Clock NewsAs with all the best questions the honest answer is - it depends. On some programmes, there's less difference than on others - often the Editor will be the output editor on any particular day. But in broad terms, the output editor is responsible for one edition of a programme; the Editor for the programme, and the team, over time.

So what does being responsible "over time" mean ?

Every programme has a programme remit - a description of the programme, its key features and in particular the features that make it original and distinctive. Some are written down, though most programme remits are less formally set out and often agreed only verbally with Department Heads. That doesn't make them any less binding on the Editor. Recently, objectives dealing with aspects such as audience size and appreciation have supplemented or even superseded formal programme remits.

In addition to these, all Editors set themselves objectives when they get the job. The selection process demands detailed pitch which can include anything from changes in programme agenda and tone, to changes of presenters or personnel - or even what shouldn't be changed.

The tools the Editor has are limited. Money is one; you have to manage the programme budget - which includes the annual argument for more (you always end up with less) as well as making it all add up at the end of the financial year, having spent a proportion of it on things intended to achieve your objectives. Staff is another; you appoint - or supervise the appointment of - staff, appraise them, decide who does what on the programme, give them feedback and advise them on their performance.

A 大象传媒 Radio 4 studioThe other tools - the really powerful ones - are less easily defined. Influence... setting the programme weather... stalking the floor... hunting down inaccuracies... generating an atmosphere where originality can flourish... spotting flair and encouraging it... spotting bad habits and discouraging them... knowing whose case you need to be on, who you can cut a bit of slack. And dealing with The Talent - the presenters, the real power-mongers in the 大象传媒.

And Editors will have influence over programme decisions, though different Editors have different approaches. Clearly, as Editor you have to make the calls on the big, risky stories. And you have to have the means in place to make sure you know all you need to know before making those big calls; and the nous to know when someone on an even higher grade than yourself should be aware of the risks you're about to take on the 大象传媒's behalf.

But you can't - and shouldn't - make every decision. Though you do have to be prepared to take the rap for decisions made in your absence or ignorance, even if you'd have made a different one based on the same facts. There are two phrases no Editor should ever use outside the programme. "It wasn't my fault" is one. "I didn't know" is the other. Both might be true in fact, but never can be in spirit; and anyway, the skill of the Editor lies in making sure they never are in any sense. It is your fault and you did know. Live with it.

And output editors? In the broadest sense, output editors are responsible for everything that happens on their watch. Which may be anything from a day to a couple of hours. They don't work in a vacuum, though - indeed, it's the Editor's job to make sure they don't. If the programme Editor has done the job properly, output editors will know as clearly as possible the direction they should be taking each edition of the programme.

They'll express that direction by a number of means; they'll choose the lead story and the running order... choose the guests... and the way stories are treated. They'll also be responsible for getting the best out of the team that day; running meetings and discussions creatively... chasing progress and keeping the story in sight. They'll stamp on inaccuracies and keep a mental note of fairness and balance; they'll brief reporters and presenters and give feedback after the programme.

Journalists working in the 大象传媒 News 24 galleryThey'll also know when to involve the Editor. Some output editors prefer to avoid discussing anything with the Editor until after transmission; others like to feel they've thrashed out their ideas - and their problems - beforehand. In all cases, though, having antennae for the possible consequences of decisions - consequences that may go way beyond a single edition of the programme - is a key requirement of both output editor and Editor. The first has to know when to consult, the second has to learn how to spot the signs that an apparently straightforward decision might turn out to be anything but.

Which leads to the final responsibility of the Editor; accountability. While the output editor will deal with the small rows around a particular programme - and some are inevitable - it is the Editor who has to explain why decisions were made or how - in spite of evidence to the contrary - the programme did uphold the highest standards and values.

Or if it didn't, apologise.

Kevin Marsh is editor of the 大象传媒 College of Journalism

Steve Herrmann

Who's reading what


We’ve had our “” of most popular stories on the site for a couple of weeks now. No major surprises so far, though the up-to-the-minute rankings have proved slightly addictive to some of our journalists (and me).

What have we learnt so far and has it changed what we do?

So far, it’s confirmed some things we already knew - that stories about sex, space, technology, showbiz, the environment or animals (or, better, a combination of any of the above) somehow always gets a lot of attention from our readers and viewers. There are also the perennially popular sub-categories, like .

But, as we also knew, the main headlines each day get well read too. So in the past week the most popular stories have included , the , the - and of course, the .

It hasn’t all been predictable – there was the day when the third most popular story was a long series of thoughtful on the future of the world’s cities (not an obvious headline grabber) - or the morning when the most popular video on the site was the full-length version of Gordon Brown’s Mansion House speech.

All this extra data can help inform our thinking – if we see there’s major interest in a story we might look at whether it’s worth following up with a further angle or more information.

We also get clues about what makes for effective signposting and promotion of stories.

But In the end we can’t let it get in the way of the editorial job we are here to do, which is to report on what we judge to be the most important and interesting news around the world, drawing on all the resources we can muster.

I think it just makes it easier for us - and you - to see what the audience's perspective is on it all.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the

Helen Boaden

Welcome


Welcome to The Editors, a new blog written by editors from across the range of 大象传媒 News outlets - TV, radio and interactive - about their issues, dilemmas, and highs (and lows) they face in doing their jobs. From to Newsnight, via everything from Radio One Newsbeat to the , we hope all areas of 大象传媒 News will be represented here.

We are committed to being impartial, fair and accurate - these are the qualities which 大象传媒 News is rightly expected to uphold. But we also want to be open and accountable, and while this is nothing new (my colleagues and I are quite used to appearing on on News 24 and Feedback on Radio 4), we are hoping this blog will be a fresh way of having a direct conversation with you, our audiences.

But of course the real strength of blogs is that they can be a conversation - which is where you come in. Tell us your views, either by adding your comments at the bottom of individual entries, or by e-mailing us directly. We want to know what you think.

Helen Boaden is director of 大象传媒 News

Adrian Van-Klaveren

Schooling journalists


The educational background of journalists has been much discussed over the last few days - with the survey (read it ) of top journalists suggesting a significant bias in their education towards private schools and certain universities, above all Cambridge and Oxford (including me).

Others have tried to follow this up and today's Media Guardian reflects disappointment that we have been unable to provide figures about the educational background of all our journalists. It carries of the Times Education Supplement which claims that "while the recruitment process remains so informal, untransparent and unmonitored, it will be open to abuse".

I think this criticism is taking things too far. There is always a decision about how much monitoring to do. Our recruitment process is actually pretty closely monitored - for example we look carefully at issues of gender, disability and the progress of ethnic minority candidates. We have never felt it appropriate to monitor specifically for educational background and, given we recruit several hundred people a year, it would be a significant undertaking.

But what we try to do in our recruitment is to attract a diverse range of candidates and to build teams with a broad range of knowledge, experience and skills. Educational background is part of this diversity but so are many other factors - age, class, where people come from, and their passions and interests to name just a few. Ultimately it's about achieving the best mix of people to be able to make the best output - that does mean understanding our audiences and challenging stereotypes and preconceptions.

There are things we have done such as removing the informality from our work experience system and making much more information about audiences available to everyone. There is much more that we can and should do. But I'm not convinced that simply adding up whether people went to university and, if so, which one is going to take us a great deal further towards serving our audiences better.

Adrian Van-Klaveren is deputy director, 大象传媒 News

Steve Herrmann

Just five words - no more


A lot of Americans like our News website. I was reminded of this on Monday night - by a lot of Americans - at the Webby awards in New York.

We were there to receive, for the second consecutive year, . A tough assignment, but someone had to go.

The ceremonies for the Webby awards - often dubbed the online Oscars (to the annoyance of the actual, ) have a reputation for being unstuffy and a bit wacky (some pictures ). Last night's , one of the prize winners, who sang a song, then threw his guitar away and disappeared. Damon Albarn's got a prize and in puppet form they did a comedy routine on behalf of their human creators.

A cameraphone picture taken at the ceremony told us globalisation meant the world really is flat, , and recounted as one of the internet's founding fathers. He also delivered his acceptance speech in binary code. Decoded, it apparently said the future of the internet belongs to “digital objects and handles”. Peter Sharples of our live site team was one of our party at the bash and was able helpfully to explain what this meant to us in between speeches.

It made a lot of sense at the time.

Beyond that I recollect being interviewed by Guto Harri, making the obligatory five-word-only acceptance speech - "'We did it again, THANKYOU" (read the rest ) - going to the after-show party, then the airport after three hours’ sleep.

Main impression though: What we do is hugely respected by a group of the most influential people working on the web - and it was fantastic to witness that in person.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the

Steve Herrmann

A new guru


I’m pleased to announce I’ve just been officially promoted to the status of Guru.

You may not have heard about this elsewhere, but on of the newspaper editor’s conference which I spoke at in Moscow this week, . Now I didn’t want to quibble publicly but I have a feeling that those in the department who know more than me about interactivity might be a bit bemused at this, outraged even. So, apologies to them for my sudden elevation.

But I must say it’s quite a cool title.

What else did I learn from the conference? There was an impressive and varied cast list, ranging from Vladimir Putin to Google News, so here are some snippets:

• President Putin emphatically did not agree with the conference’s view that freedom of the press in Russia leaves a lot to be desired. You can read his response . You can see from his expression he wasn’t impressed.

• Most major newspapers are now extremely serious about their websites and digital services. From what was arguably a slow start by many, they are now taking notes from us and others who got ahead early. My feeling is we’re still among the leaders in many areas – particularly AV and breaking news, where I think it will take them longer to catch up. But we can’t be complacent.

• “Convergence” was a much-used word. Listening to people like the Washington Post describe their plans, it struck me that they are almost a mirror image of ours. As a broadcaster we do audio and video like no-one else and have added what I think once called “a rampaging global online newspaper” only recently. The papers, on the other hand, already have global brands for their text services and are now busy getting to grips with AV. But for all of us, one of the keys to survival will be how good we are at integrating the old and new bits of our operations, changing the culture of our organisations and providing a seamless offering to users

• Starting each day early with a working “editor’s breakfast” and ending it with a networking event fuelled by free vodka makes for a rather punishing schedule

• Google News don’t want to be editors, or publishers. In an attempt (only partly successful) to allay the fears of the assembled editors, they described themselves as computer scientists and said their main interest was to get people OFF their site as quickly as possible, to the news sources they list. Product manager Nathan Stoll (who looked alarmingly young to me) said their aim was to work with news organisations, to give people greater diversity of information and “to make readers passionate about news”.

• News agencies hope to have a guaranteed future in the changing media world, because, according to AFP’s Pierre Louette, “content is king, and we deliver it”.

• Microsoft have developed new software which they say will make newspapers (and text in general) easier and more fun to read online. They’ve developed something called “Times Reader” with the New York Times which eliminates scrolling, adapts to fit to any screen size and has clearer fonts. Bill Hill, head of advanced reading technologies at Microsoft, delivered his speech in , which I thought made it doubly impressive. You can read about it .

Aside from the guru designation, how did my speech go down? Well I managed to answer one questioner who quizzed me in French, which was a bit of a personal triumph, but that aside, the gist was that 大象传媒 News is doing more with interactivity than most other major news organisations, particularly when it comes to integrating it usefully into our journalism, which for me is the acid test.

But they also got the message that to do this well needs resources and commitment.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the

Paul Brannan

Ticking along nicely


After a gestation period akin to that of an elephant, the News website has rolled out a new version of its popular desktop ticker.

Operating system changes saw the old one run into the sand, bedevilled by gremlins which meant it became increasingly high maintenance.

The latest version to come out of the hangar replaces the former breaking news desktop alert and updates the sport version while retaining the sheepskin-clad character. Quite remarkable.

The shiny new application was developed with an external firm called Skinkers and offers a greater range of personalisation.

A graphic of the 大象传媒 News websiteThere are up to 300 content options with variable speed scrolling for headlines from a range of categories including health, science, technology and entertainment.Click on a headline and you get a four-paragraph summary of the story. If you want more detail another click takes you to the full-blown web version. It also triggers desktop alerts about forthcoming TV and radio current affairs programme.

So far, we haven't made too much of a song and dance about it because we're a cautious lot and want to see how it beds in.

But if you want to join the pioneers and offer feedback to product manager Anthony Sullivan, the application is just .

This being the 大象传媒 you may have some permissions issues about downloading software to your machine, but don't be put off.

Because we wanted this up and running before the World Cup we weren't able to bring out a Macintosh version, but that has been pencilled in for later in the year.

And Anthony is already looking at expanding personalisation with things like keyword alerts and five-day weather forecasts. If there are any things you'd like to see then do let him know.

Paul Brannan is deputy editor of the 大象传媒 News website

Adrian Van-Klaveren

Why have a sports editor?


There's an advert in this morning's Guardian for a sports editor for the 大象传媒. We see this as a very high profile on-air role similar to that of political editor or business editor. It'll be someone who works for both 大象传媒 News and 大象传媒 Sport and appears on TV, radio and the web.

sports.jpgBut why create such a job and why now?

The work we've done on both sport and journalism as part of Creative Future has highlighted how important sports news is to a large part of our audience. True, there are some who are completely uninterested but there are many for whom what is going on in the world of sport is a key part of their lives.

This group includes large numbers of younger people (especially men) who 大象传媒 News often struggles to reach. Sports journalism which can offer real authority, expertise and insight is seen by them as a key part of what we need to offer in the future. We already have some outstanding sports correspondents and reporters but we hope this new role will give our sports news coverage even more weight and impact.

We are of course not alone in this. The newspapers have all expanded their sports news coverage dramatically over the past few years. There is a wealth of information about sport available on the web - often tailored to people's particular passions. But we believe that appointing a 大象传媒 Sports Editor will help us achieve our aim of offering the best sports journalism available anywhere.

The 大象传媒 can offer sports news at the local, regional, national and international level and we can reach everyone from the impassioned fan to the person who wants to know the headlines of what's going on in the major events. Appointing a Sports Editor of the highest calibre should give us the opportunity to claim another huge competitive advantage.

Adrian Van Klaveren is deputy director, 大象传媒 News

Robin Britten

Keep it simple


Do we editors take too much for granted of you our listeners? Are we all a little too full of our own supposed knowledge? Maybe we are. Certainly sometimes our very own experts in the field, our correspondents, think that. What do you think?

Radio Five Live logoThis week on 5 Live we decided to try to get as comprehensive a picture as possible of life on the ground for the million-plus Palestinians living in the Gaza strip. They are literally running out of money. Israel and the international community have been withholding money from their newly elected Palestinian Authority until the majority Hamas party publicly recognises Israel's right to exist. Tens of thousand of people in Gaza work for the authority. So, no money, collapsing economy and civil order. Chaos.

Complicated, huh? Well, our two correspondents, Alan Johnson and James Reynolds worked wonders. They found desperate housewives selling gold heirlooms to raise much needed cash. They visited drug-starved hospitals. They talked to farmers and young people.

They got closer and closer to painting a real comprehensive picture. But what was the question they liked most? Not some arcane sub-note about the minutiae of Hamas. No ...

"Tell us exactly where is Gaza? How big is it". That was the question they liked most.

Do we sometimes get too complicated for our own good ... And yours?

Robin Britten is planning editor, Radio Five Live

Host

Reporting from Baghdad

  • Host
  • 30 May 06, 03:33 PM

John Simpson, the 大象传媒's world affairs editor, looked into the state of journalism in Iraq on Tuesday's Today programme.

"The deaths of a CBS camera crew in Baghdad were a terrible reminder of how dangerous reporting here can be... but it still isn't too dangerous to operate here, if you're sensible, careful and lucky... It's still perfectly possible to get out into the streets and film most days. And please don't take any notice of that ignorant stuff about western journalists huddling in the safety of the Green Zone"

Listen to the piece in full here.

Steve Herrmann

Earthquake eyewitnesses


It’s been a busy weekend for the online news desk as they responded to the news early on Saturday of a major earthquake striking Java in Indonesia.

In the first stages of a story like this there’s a tried and tested list of things to do: send out a breaking news alert and publish a few paragraphs which can be built up as more quotes and details come in from the 大象传媒’s correspondents. We’ll look for the best pictures, commission maps from our graphics team and stream the 大象传媒’s rolling TV news coverage on the website.

But there’s another staple element in covering any breaking story on the site, which is to ask our readers for their eyewitness accounts. On Saturday we put an email feedback form on the main story straight away and within an hour or so of checking responses, ringing them back and interviewing people, we had a series of first-hand accounts on the site from readers in the area. The contacts we make via these emails are shared with radio and TV news who follow up with their own interviews.

It’s become almost routine for us to expect such reports but sometimes it’s these accounts, above all, which bring home the reality of the situation for those caught up in it.

“We'll be too afraid to sleep tonight,” who contacted us from Yogyakarta, “It's going to be a real mess. We're just happy to be alive.”

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