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Can you sum up the project?

Newsbeat Explains is a mobile-first experiment aimed at younger audiences. It uses the concept of atomised news, which is self-contained pieces of information linked together.  These pieces, or atoms, make stories easier to understand and access. It tries to break away from the conventional way of presenting news in an article format. It gives our audiences a quick overview of the main, key events of the story and they can then choose which parts they want to expand to get more detailed information.

How was it created?

Newsbeat Explains is part of R&D's research on and is a joint collaboration between ,  and .

Some people skim stories and others want to dig deeper. Our aim is to develop new ideas for creating and delivering news stories to our diverse audience.  We think structured data and atomised content could enable truly personalised experiences with content adapting to context, preferences and devices. Newsbeat felt like a perfect fit as they specialise at explaining the news to a younger audience.

We've worked with journalists to understand how to create and present news stories in new, more personalised way.  This first effort is the result of several concepts developed by the R&D team. As with much research, we tested it with sample of our target audience. Changing it as we went along, based on their experiences and feedback.

How was it built?

The pilot uses ´óÏó´«Ã½ News production systems for Newsbeat journalists to create the content. We didn't want to impose new production workflows upon journalists. Instead we want understand how to harness the potential of existing systems. Identifying how production flows can become more efficient and enable new experiences.

Newsbeat Explains uses these ´óÏó´«Ã½ News tools to generate the list of stories on the index page. The same existing tools then populate the individual news story with mixed media content. 

What challenges did you face?

Editorially, it has been challenging. Choosing the content and then how much of it to expose at the overview and deeper level of each story was particularly tricky. How granular can an atom be before losing the ability to convey meaningful information? How do you write the story in a way that each of its 'components' could be reusable elsewhere? Those were some of the challenges we identified and explored during our research. 

We explored ways of writing a story where its 'components' aren't directly dependent on each other. This meant key elements of the story were reusable. 

On a more technical level, getting different production systems to work together at the same time was tough. But we pulled it off which was quite an achievement. Content like video is designed to work in certain ways. This pilot uses all different types of content, and presents them in ways that they are not designed to. We had to ensure this didn't affect their functionality.

Our research in to these new methods of delivering news is ongoing and Newsbeat Explains is not designed to find the solution to the challenge. But we hope it will pave the way to more radical propositions.

What do you hope to learn from it being on Taster?

By running a pilot on Taster we will be able to test our concept at a larger scale. Real audiences will be able to try it out over and over an extended period of time. We want to measure audiences' interest and get feedback to understand if people engage with this new format for news stories. 

With Newsbeat journalists writing the stories for this pilot, we can see how the process works from start to finish. A true test to see if we can create stories at a fast, newsroom pace.