PA set to launch listings data API through BBC Backstage

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 August 2008 at 13:03
Tags: BBC

The Press Association’s events listings database is to be made available for non-commercial use by web developers and will be released through the BBC’s web developer network.

PA is releasing an API (application programming interface) of its events listings through the BBC Backstage programme, a developer network that provides access to BBC and some third-party content to a community of web developers.

The plan was first revealed by BBC Backstage producer Ian Forrester at the Mashed08 conference in June, and is set to go live this week.

Forrester said publishing APIs through BBC Backstage gives third-party data providers like PA access to the projects’s existing community of developers, which he has been actively fostering for several years.

“They saw the Backstage as being not just about releasing APIs but also the engagement with the community,” Forrester told Press Gazette.

“That’s why they - rather than set up their own Backstage-ish project - wanted to work with us.”

The news agency hopes that users of the data will provide new ideas about how to use it and how listings are stored.

The PA database contains listings of events in cinema, art, theatre, literature and includes includes web links, venue details, times and prices. It is the same data that PA also supplies to newspapers, magazines and websites.

PA head of digital development Chris McCormack said the launch of a public, non-commercial version of its listings came about after the service was developed for use by some of its commerical clients. PA has long delivered its material to media clients using XML feeds, but these require the clients to recreate PA’s database on their own servers. By providing APIs, the agency can instead give customers structured access to its existing content databases.

The version available to developers through BBC Backstage will be strictly for non-commercial use by the BBC Backstage developer community, McCormack said.

“We have to safeguard our existing customers, so we won’t be allowing anyone to do anything commercial with them,” he said.

McCormack said PA has no immediate plans for launching further public APIs.

“We’re going to wait and see how this goes first,” he said. “There’s no strategy or plan to release our news or TV listings or anything after this.”

@DNA2008: Sky News to embed SkyCast video sharing tool

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 March 2008 at 09:21
Tags: Sky, Sky News, Sky.com, User-Generated Content, skynews, video

Sky News plans to embed a white-label version of Sky’s video sharing tool, SkyCast, into news pages on to encourage user submissions of video.

Sky News associate editor Simon Bucks noted the move in a panel on user-submitted content at the DNA conference in Brussels today.

Sky News already has a still photo sharing section on its web site called YourPhoto.

@DNA2008: CNN releases beta of new iReport UGC site

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 March 2008 at 08:53
Tags: CNN, Citizen journalism, citizenjournalism

CNN has released a beta version of iReport.com, the second phase of its user-generated content submission tool, iReport.

Unlike the iReport user-submission tool that the international news channel launched 18 months ago, the new site is largely community-modernated.

A full launch of the service is due later this month, CNN business development director Chris Press told the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels.

In its first 18 months, CNN’s existing iReport tool has received 100,000 reports, including video from the Virginia Tech shootings, the Burmese uprising and the Minneapolis bridge collapse, Press said.

But because all the content is vetted before being published on CNN.com or on CNN television, Press said, only about 10 per cent of iReport submissions are actually used on CNN.

“Nine out of 10 people were disappointed”, he said. The new site, however, will primarily be is designed to resolve that by creating a site linked to but clearly distinct from CNN’s editorial content.

Top UK news stories on Digg in 2007

Posted by James Ball on 10 January 2008 at 08:15
Tags: BBC, Digg, Guardian Unlimited, Journalism, Mail Online, Telegraph.co.uk, The Sun Online

The social bookmarking and news recommendation site Digg, which determines its front-page content by allowing its users to vote for (or “Digg”) links posted by other users, has gained a reputation for generating huge spikes in traffic to web sites that stike the Diggers’ fancy.

So what stories have the often-geeky Diggers chosen in 2007? Surprisingly, perhaps, every one of the top ten most-Dugg stories from the UK comes from a traditional news website. It’s a heady mix of sex, violence and astrophysics. Take a look for yourself:

(more…)

2 comments

Horrocks: Only 1 per cent of BBC audience contributes; UGC value apparent only when filtered

Posted by Martin Stabe on 9 January 2008 at 09:09
Tags: BBC, citizenjournalism

Head of BBC newsroom Peter Horrocks has argued that user generated has “brought a valuable additional aspect to our journalism”, but points out that only a tiny proportion of the audience contributes and the the real value of comments, user-generated content, and citizen journalism only becomes apparent when journalists can find the most valuable of these contributions.

On the BBC blog The Editors, Horrocks has posted the transcript of a speech that he gave to the Institute of Communication Studies in Leeds on the value of “citizen journalism”, a term which he uses interchangably with “user-generated content”.

“[T]he somewhat messianic and starry-eyed way in which public participation journalism is argued for needs some very careful consideration,” Horrocks argued. “And there are many different aspects of such journalism, with varying degrees of value.”

The BBC received between 10,000 to 20,000 e-mails or posts a day on its Have Your Say site — a figure that represents less than 1 per cent of users of the BBC News web site, Horrocks says. As a result, the BBC is having to carefully consider how to deal with this input from a relatively small minority.

Horrock’s long talk raises several very interesting and important points. A recurring theme, though, is that robust filtering — when journalists are able to sort the wheat from the chaff — is essential to maximising the editorial value of user contributions.

Following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Horrocks recounts, the BBC received many anti-Islamic messages on its Have Your Say forums. Horrocks says he believes these comments were far from representative of the overall audience views, that they had “very little” value and influenced the BBC’s coverage “hardly at all”.

“Buried amongst the comments however, rarely recommended by others, were insights from those who had met Benazir or knew her. And there were valuable eye witness comments from people who were at the scene in Rawalpindi,” he writes.

(more…)

2 comments

How the BBC’s ‘10 per cent time’ works

Posted by Martin Stabe on 8 January 2008 at 16:46
Tags: BBC

All of the designers, developers, project managers at BBC Audio and Music Interactive are allowed to spend 10 per cent of their time working on their own pet projects — anything they like as long as it is work-related and benefits the Beeb.

Inspired by Google’s famous “20 per cent time” principle, the system has already yielded one product launch: the iPhone-optimised BBC podcast downloads page.

Tristan Ferne explains how it works over on the BBC Radio Labs blog.

4 comments

Radio 4 programme maps its listeners’ locations

Posted by Martin Stabe on 2 January 2008 at 16:38
Tags: BBC, Google Maps

BBC Radio 4’s iPM has published its Google Map showing the locations of its listeners.

More than 22,000 listeners e-mailed their postcodes to the programme, and a backlog soon developed, forcing presenter Eddie Mair to publish a blog post explaining why individual listeners’ locations had not yet appeared on the map.

As BBC blogging expert Robin Hamman points out on his personal blog, Cybersoc.com, the resulting map highlights the problem of what he calls the “’send it to us’ approach to audience engagement” — it’s not very scalable. The enormous volume of emails were overwhelming.

But Hamman also points out that the the map — with its pushpins spread across Europe and other parts of the world — also shows how the Internet is expanding the BBC radio station’s reach globally.

iPhone podcast service is first fruit of BBC ‘10% time’

Posted by Paul McNally on 15 November 2007 at 11:01
Tags: BBC, iPhone

The BBC has made all of its podcasts available to download wirelessly using Apple’s new iPhone and iPod Touch.

The project is the first to be completed by the BBC’s Future Media and Technology (audio and music) department using “10 per cent time”, a working practice implemented by its new head, James Cridland.

The idea, borrowed from Google’s “20 per cent time”, dictates that every employee should be allowed to spend a fraction of their working week away from their normal job, developing new ideas and working on different projects.

The iPhone service was the brainchild of two web developers in the BBC’s future media and technology department, Chris Johnson and Simon Cross, who has more details on the BBC Radio Labs blog.

@Society of Editors - Simon Bucks: Grow membership in broadcast and online

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2007 at 11:52
Tags: Sky, Sky News, Sky.com, Society of Editors, Society of Editors, skynews

The new president of the Society of Editors, Sky News associate editor for online, Simon Bucks, has delivered his inaugural address, the last event of the conference.

Bucks, who earlier this year publically recanted his skepticism about the value of interactive journalism, says online has “most of the fun of television, although you don’t have to dress up for it.”

“I’m a fan of news on every platform, not least print,” he stresses (before taking a quote from Wired magazine just a bit out of context when he says: “newspapers are silent, highly portable, require neither power source nor arcane commands, and don’t crash or get infected”).

Bucks says he wants is presidency to be marked by growth in membership, particularly in broadcast and online.

If you need to justify your Society subs, Bucks says, just point to the successful campaign against the Freedom of Information and coroners’ courts changes, which the Society won. It also had an important role in fighting the IRB’s coverage of the Rugby World Cup.

He warns that the next media freedom threat in the coming year might be the European Commission’s efforts to regulate online video. The directive on audiovisual services, formerly Television Without Frontiers, would make any linear TV offering over IP subject to regulation. Neither Ofcom or the Culture minister are seeking to regulate the web, but Tony Blair had before leaving office, suggested that convergence could mean a uniform system of media regulation.

Expect a session on that next year.

@Society of Editors - Football economics coming to online journalism salaries?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2007 at 11:14
Tags: Guardian Media Group, Mail on Sunday, Sky, Sky News, Sky.com, Society of Editors, Society of Editors, Telegraph Media Group, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, telegraph

The final session of the conference is “The Future is ours: 2020 Vision”, which is billed as “lifting the covers on editors’ crystal balls”.

Appropriately, the panel will be chaired by Martin Stanford, presenter of Sky.com News, the rolling news channel’s interactive programme which covers the most popular stories and debates on the web. He reveals the the Madeleine McCann story has constantly lead Sky news traffic, regardless of what else is going on. Meanwhile, the revelation that the home secretary smoked cannabis, which was a massive story everywhere else, “scored an absolute zero”.

Anne Spackman, editor-in-chief of Times Online, says the paper has been digitising its archive, which will add 20 million items to its website, which already has 750,000 “bits of content” at any one time. It is noticable how litttle the publication has changed over the first 200 years, she says, but the pace of change has increased dramatically.

Her most startling prediction for the future is the rise of football economics in journalism. Spackman describes a “Drogba effect” where pay in journalism will be greatly skewed towards stars who are able to bring in a lot of traffic online.

Spackman repeats her comments from last week about the type of journalists she is seeking to recruit for Times Online: “The people who are by far the most valuable are those who combine journalism skills with real technical skill.”

Her prediction for 2020 reflects her view that many people with these attributes are currently men: “I think this will be an industry rather more full of men than it is now.”

Mark Dodson, chief executive of GMG Regional Media, which includes the host Manchester Evening News, says things have changed dramatically in this sector. Cover prices were static for years, and companies relentlessly measured themselves against the semi-annual ABC figures. That has all changed recently, with the introduction of part-free distribution and new online products.

“Video will be a key aspect of every web site we produce,” Dodson says.

Will Lewis, editor-in-chief of the Telegraph Group, outlines the trends he expects in the next few years:

1. Localisation - Good news for the regional press, because there will be greater focus on customising news by location.
2. Personalisation - Mobile and other personal gateways will become the preferred medium tailored to the individuals
3. Enablers - Rather than handing down pearls of wisdom, and will provide practical help and user-generated
4. Double media - Video and text will not be enough. They want to read as the watch.
5. Customer obsessiveness - It is no longer a secret what our readers actually want. We will sell more papers where people now shop. “Our customers will be as much outside the UK as within it,” he concludes.