The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss did this a while ago – here’s my version.
Good points:
- Cleaner, fresher, brighter, wider (is the orange ‘O’ in the new logo supposed to be the sun rising over the horizon? A number ‘10′ on its side for the politics element?)
- Twitter feed – typically 2 per day, daily highlight and preview of following day.
- New presenter Evan Davis’ has moved his old Evanomics blog over to Today
- Daily video review is nice – hope this isn’t something that gets dropped after a few weeks.
- Acknowledges rest of internet with links out to blogs etc.
Not so good:
And if you’ve got an opinion on that story, why not keep it to yourself?
David Mitchell, comedian
- Old forum scrapped amidst a deluge of protest. Repeat of much copied cock-ups across bbc.co.uk since start of decade (5 Live, Radio 2, 606, Where I Live et al). Still, at least The Archers is still going strong (24 hours a day, post-moderated). In hindsight, I can’t help but think things would have been much better if BBC hadn’t bothered with communities at all, or had taken a risk early on when there was rather less heat and light, perhaps experimenting with a loosening of opening hours (what else on the internet has opening hours, apart from the Companies House webcheck?) and moderation restraints – maybe conducted some sort of legal test case to establish where the responsibilities lay on take-down notices/libellous/defamatory comments. Of course Facebook didn’t exist back then, which is what sensible producers are now using. Have Your Say still persists but is widely derided as a right-wing viper’s nest, despite being technologically sound.
I do have a theory about all this actually. You might like to call it a
TV and Radio online community lifecycle. Or you might not.
- Community launches, small number of users. Great excitement and happiness. Production team pat selves on back at New Dawn in interactivity.
- More people join, gathers momentum, broadcaster notices, promoted widely.
- Even more people. Software starts to creak a bit. Posting restrictions introduced, prove unpopular. Someone insists on replying to every blog post in an identical fashion – but doesn’t break any rules so can’t be removed.
- Database and server utterly stuffed. Production team redo the stylesheets to try to appease them, doesn’t work. Founder users angry. Setup rival Facebook groups. Nasty comment left about a presenter, who reads it during vanity Google search. Someone from MediaGuardian logs on by accident and writes a story about it (two weeks later, just when the original fuss has died down.)
- Broadcaster announces community to be closed.
Anyway, continuing the ‘Could do better’ list:
- Twitter feed would be improved if they followed the Channel Four News format and provided a few more updates of prospects during am/pm meetings.
- Daily video review presumably shot on mobile phone, sound quality dreadful. Is it really that hard to find something with an external microphone? Recorded on a high-end phone presumably. Alternatively, why not film in it the cubicle in front of the mixing desk with the studio visible through the glass in the background. Much quieter. Would be nice occasionally to get editor to sit with presenter and them to chat for a few minutes, explain some of the decisions, or the two presenters together. Don’t think I’ve seen Humphrys do one yet. Humphrys’ video this morning was one of the funniest yet – and its nice to see him given a bit of room elsewhere on the network in On the Ropes, which I highly recommend.
- Clearly there is less content than there was before, but that was always going to be the case.
- Still think Thought for the Day should be scrapped or at least broadened to encompass more than religion. Wonder if it’ll happen in my lifetime.
Verdict:
- Best they could have done with resources they have (left). Site will need minimal updates and is still useful. Pity Today is BBC’s flagship news programme yet forced to exist on pathetically small budget. Yes, I know radio is cheaper to do than television, but that doesn’t mean the former has to be run into the ground to fund endless talent contests (that’s a clever double meaning btw, referring to both reality shows and the salaries paid to TV presenters.)
- The programme itself? 5 years ago I wouldn’t imagined listening to Today for five minutes – nowadays its a daily thing (Sundays I turn to the World Service or WRN) I’m frequently there for two and a half-hours. (Still not quite sure about the final half hour on weekdays – perhaps I’ve had enough continuous news by then, or maybe its because of the items they choose to run.) And interactivity on air is kept to an absolute minimum (i.e. nil) – there was a brief foray with reading the occasional email, which concerned me, but fortunately this seems to have based. Long live Today the way it is now.
