BBC Transformation

Process into New Media

Prepared by: Mohammed Alragawi05/03/23

• Founded in 1 January 1927.• Founder: John Reith• Revenue: £5.166 billion (2013)• No of employees: 20,951 (2014)• Broadcasts in 28 languages.

• Interactivity• Digitality• Time-Space Independency

Why to change?

“this goes beyond the question of whether your company or brand "should have a website" or a "blog", but whether it is important for you to be part of the web of signification that creates the worlds that we live in” Heaton (2008)

BBC Transformation Process into New Media

• BBC Call for Change• BBC News’ Head of Development Simon Andrewes said

“We have a particular decline among the more down-market audiences and particularly our younger audiences, and it’s the younger audience in particular which you sense are leaving television altogether. They’re just not that interested in TV”.

• ‘Technology is anything invented after you’re born; for young people it’s natural’. Fetishizing it may only draw attention to just how uncool and desperate the newly wired news executive is” (Norman Lewis, 2008).

BBC News Bombing 7/7• social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook,

MySpace, Tumblr and Twitter, started being used at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News during the July 7, 2005 London bombing attacks, commonly called “7/7” (Newman, 2009).

• 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks• 2009 Iranian elections• 2011 Arab Spring

The birth of BBC Future Media and Technology (FM&T)

• FM&T is the BBC group which provides innovative leadership in the fields of future media, technology and media management. It has responsibility to deploy finite, shared resources (technology teams, investment, archive repositories etc.) to the maximum benefit of the whole BBC and successfully deliver technology projects & programs.

• 5 Principles:• Find - create the best navigation be that brands, portals, or metadata.• Play - create the best gateways for example iPlayer and BBC Archive Trial.• Share - create enhanced user engagement• Enable - the BBC to meet its creative demands• Transform - transforming the BBC through production modernization,

enhancing media management processes and, ultimately, the delivery of its audience-facing ambitions.

BBC New Media Timeline• 4 November 1997– BBC News Online, a web-based news service, begins to expand

and become more popular.• December 1997 – BBC Online, BBC's web presence, officially launched.• BBC WebWise is the BBC's guide to the internet for computer beginners. Created in

1998.• 20 May 1999– The BBC's digital teletext service starts.• 1 June 1999– BBC Knowledge starts broadcasting on digital services.• September 1999 - BBC Red Button service was launched as BBC Text. It was

relaunched in November 2001 under the BBCi brand and operated under this name until late 2008, when it was rebranded as BBC Red Button.

• 21 February 2007 - BBC World Service Tweeter page was launched.• 25 December 2007– BBC iPlayer, an online service for watching previously aired

shows is launched.• 15th June, 2008, complete transformation of the BBC Multimedia newsroom.• 16 February 2016– BBC Three Channel closes and becomes an online-only

channel.

BBC Data-Net-Content Management

As Kevin Bakhurst (2011), deputy head of the BBC Newsroom, highlighted in his talk at the International Broadcasting Convention that social media currently has three key, highly valuable roles in our journalism:• Newsgathering - it helps us gather more, and sometimes better, material; we can find a wider ranges of voices, ideas and eyewitnesses quickly.• Audience engagement - how we listen to and talk to our audiences, and allowing us to speak to different audiences.• A platform for our content - it's a way of us getting our journalism out there, in short form or as a tool to take people to our journalism on the website, TV or radio. It allows us to engage different and younger audiences.

BBC Data-Net-Content Management

• Data management (Prophetization and analysis of the user)

• In its annual report for 2008-2009, the BBC reported that its television overall reach among the 16 to 34 years old audience has fallen by over 7 percent between 2003 and 2008, from 82.6 percent to 75.4 percent. The data provided by the BBC also showed the amount of BBC television viewing by teenagers have fallen from 39 minutes a day in 2003 to 24 minutes a day in 2008, a decline of nearly 40 percent in a five year period.

• The Future Media and Technology division have a range of strategies for, as they say: ‘keeping the BBC relevant in the digital world’

• FM&T see it as the ‘4th screen’, after cinema, television and internet. It is, as they say, ‘personal, local and immediate’, with the widest possible reach for keeping people connected, not least to the BBC, and to ‘essential information’

Content Management: User Generated Content (UGC)

• BBC News appears to believe it can only now survive if it does the people’s bidding and adopts their modes of speec, (Fenton, 2010).

• In November 2006, the BBC News Channel launched the weekly half-hour Your News, the first news program to be entirely based on emails and views sent in by audience.

BBC News Accounts on social media

• BBC Genome Project• The BBC Genome Project is a digitized

searchable database of program listings from the Radio Times from the first issue in 1923, to 2009 (BBC, 2014).

• In April 2006 the BBC gave the public access to Infax the BBC's program database. Infax contained around 900,000 entries.

• in December 2007. The front page of the website is still available but in 2012 it was later replaced by the database Fabric but is only for internal use within the BBC.

BBC News Online•BBC News Online is the website of BBC News.The website is the most frequently accessed news website in the United Kingdom, and forms a major part of BBC Online (bbc.co.uk), which records around 40 million unique users a week (around 60 to 70% of visitors are from the UK) (Jemima Kiss, 2007).

• BBC iPlayer is an internet streaming catchup television and radio service for people in the United Kingdom. The service is available on a wide range of devices, including mobile phones and tablets, personal computers, and smart televisions.

• From October 2014, the BBC extended the program availability for programs on iPlayer from 7 days to 30 days. However, due to legal reasons, most news bulletins are only available for 24 hours after initial broadcast (Watt, Dan Taylor, 2014).

• BBC Red Button is a branding used for digital interactive television services provided by the BBC, and broadcast in the United Kingdom. The service was launched in September 1999 as BBC Text. It was relaunched in November 2001 under the BBCi brand and operated under this name until late 2008, when it was rebranded as BBC Red Button. The "red button" name refers to the common interface on remote controls for digital televisions and set-top boxes, a red push-button which launches digital teletext services.

• BBC WebWise is the BBC's guide to the internet for computer beginners. Created in 1998, it consists of a series of articles and videos as well as a computing course.

• By December 1999 it consisted of articles, columns, a blog, message boards and a Q&A section.

• It was completely redesigned and relaunched in September 2010, with articles on a variety of computer-related subjects written by well-known technology writers.

• BBC Three is a British over-the-top internet television service operated by the BBC, which launched on 16 February 2016.

• It is a replacement for the linear BBC Three television channel, which was discontinued the same day. The service produces and streams television and web series aimed at the demographic of 16–34 year-olds, with a particular focus on comedy and documentary programs (Walker, 2016).

Critical Issues: accuracy and credibility

• Roberto Coloma, Bureau Chief, Agency France Press (AFP) Singapore claimed that the main risk of using social media for news gathering is accuracy. As for news distribution, you lose control over your information with each layer of transmission, as people condense, distort, interpret and comment on variations of the original report.”

• David Millikin, Editor in Chief, Agence France Presse (AFP) North America said that in news gathering, it is difficult verifying the origin of the source material.

• Meanwhile Richard Sambrook, former Director of Global News at the BBC said social media should not make us forget the value of journalistic credibility - the value of trusting someone to bear witness to an event. “Bearing witness is a journalist’s job. This is something technology cannot provide.”

• BBC on Viber and WhatsApp• On WhatsApp, the BBC is rolling out

“Young, Angry and Connected,” stories about young Africans who feel marginalized but are using platforms like WhatsApp and social media to get their voices heard. Three-minute-long video clips will be pushed out daily over the course of a week starting March 7. The footage will be available online in its entirety at the end of the week.

Conclusion• The BBC News was responding to the technological change

effectively especially with its creation of the huge BBC Future Media & Technology division in order to cope and keep BBC News more relevant to the digital world.

• • Social media has enabled BBC News to promote the idea of a

public sphere. And make the world looks free by hearing new and different voices from young small groups.

•  • Social media challenges journalism in providing more tools and

means for news gathering and distribution. Journalism is highly effected by social media and possibly transformed and still transforming.