Today we had the privilege of meeting Amanda Farnsworth, and Bella Hurrell, the editor and assistant editor of visual journalism at the BBC. They gave us a tour of their new, amazing, newsroom. Here’s the overhead map:
Farnsworth told us the BBC will be merging more of their products now that their national elections are over. She said it is already happening in video “with a vengeance. You can see even at the technical level TV and the web are coming together. We are trying to make that happen everyday.”
Visual journalism at the BBC is staffed by TV graphics personnel, editors, online designers, developers and coders. They’re faced with eternal challenges and goals of standing out distinctively, being lively and modern and creating understanding.
Here’s a glimpse of the newsroom from what would be the top-left corner of that graphic above:
There’s a challenge the BBC has that you don’t see framed the same way at home. Everyone in the UK pays 145 pounds annually and gets the eight channels, radio and on demand. That drives a lot of programming, Farnsworth said.
“We have to produce content that appeals to everyone. We have to produce content that does appeal to a narrow group.”
One of three identical control rooms the newsroom can use:
Farnsworth showed us a few apps they’ve developed, and then discussed how they’ve used those to create web and television packages. They have some called “personal relevance calculators,” like the “What class are you?” app. They put a reporter on the street and stood up passersby, asking questions from the app which were derived by sociologists work. The data then tried to help the audience determine where they fit in the social strata.
Hurrell showed us the video. “For us what was important is that it worked across (media) platforms.”
And of course all of that is shareable, linkable.
“We think of something that tells a story that’s reusable. That’s where the personal relevance comes back into play. How much property do you have? What’s your health like? How much money do you make compared to big sports stars?
Farnsworth showed us their green screen room and the interactivity they’ve created from it. They put a reporter in there for a piece on “How to put a human on Mars.”
The Mars model was made by a TV 3D designer and the video was a 3D virtual reality design. Farnsworth said that’s something they’re looking to do more of in the future.
She showed us another video of an interactive video using TouchCast — which I have and love and should actually use — that helped tell the Deepwater Horizon story. This was an interactive video, using the TouchCast technology that lets you manipulate things within the video rather than clicking items outside of the video box.
Farnsworth says they’ve done a great deal of experimentation with that sort of thing, but they aren’t very successful. (Yet, I’d say.)
“They’re not very popular because, I think, people don’t know what to do with it, but we want to lead the way.”
Aside: Do you know what I hear from media entities everywhere I go? (No matter what country I’m in … ) “We’re behind in that.” Daily Mirror and BBC would each tell you, for example, that they were late into jumping into the social media pool. Farnsworth essentially told us that today. But now, here, the Beeb is saying they want to lead the way. When a humongous property like the BBC, or some other national/global property, decides to make the imprint, they’re going to dictate usability terms, rather than the users doing it from bottom up. This is going to be fascinating.
One of the boards they use to observe realtime status updates on stories. It is like air traffic control:
She talked about some ISIS projects they’ve built with an in-screen graphic overlay that promotes interaction. This is about “putting users in control versus watching, giving users choices.”
The BBC was a big part of this incredible, incredible, Bob Dylan project. You can’t embed it, and I can’t do it justice, but go watch this presentation by Dylan and Interlude.
That’s an amazing promotional, entertainment tool. But it isn’t all fun and games. The BBC, of course, still does the heavy lifting of traditional journalism and the even heavier lifting of data journalism. Hurrell said they’re crunching huge sets of data, often down the postal code level. She said they’re also doing one global data project each month. One of their recent projects had to do with tracking global jihadist attacks.
And all of this has to be done with an eye toward designing across platforms. Which device for this? Which device for that? Here’s the note that makes you stand up in take note. On the weekends, the majority of the BBC’s consumption takes place on mobile devices. That’s a trend that started in 2013.
An overhead view of a portion of the BBC newsroom:
Then Hurrell talked about #BBCGoFigure, which was one of my favorite things about the meeting — and there was plenty to love. But this is a social first infographic strand, atomized data journalism with just two data points. This is a daily infographic. You can see examples of it here. Why everyone isn’t doing this escapes me.
The plan with social media, Farnsworth said, is that you go to the best place. (This varies by time and circumstance.) The best social media, she says, is one that engenders conversation. (See the #BBCGoFigure note above.)
“During the campaign,” Farnsworth said, “we did a lot more social media because we could see how important it has become.”
And this impacted their TV work. They used similar color palettes for the web and television, and put movable, shareable policy cards into action to help explain the political parties during election season. The interactive cards looked the same as the ones you could see on broadcast.
Then there was election night. It comes once every five years in the U.K., so the BBC pulls out all of the toys. They shot Downing Street and then put it up on their green screen for wonderfully immersive segments on explaining the election results. Here’s a short clip:
Here’s another one from “inside” the House of Commons:
The BBC is a great trip. They had to get back to work, but I want to see the entire operation. You get the sense that this is, perhaps, what a modern newsroom should feel like. And you wonder how many of them there are. Not nearly enough.
