It’s now 3 weeks since the BBC announced 360 online staff were to lose their jobs as part of a 25% cut to the online budget. It’s a sad but unsurprising part of a number of cuts which John Naughton summarises as: “It’s not television”, a sign that “The past has won” in the internal battle between those who saw consumers as passive vessels for TV content, and those who credited them with some creativity.

Dee Harvey likewise poses the question: “In the same way that openness is written into the design of the Internet, could it be that closedness is written into the very concept of the BBC?”

If it is, I don’t think it can remain that way for ever. Those who have been part of the BBC’s work online will feel rightly proud of what has been achieved since the corporation went online in 1997. Here are just 3 ways that the corporation has helped to define online journalism as we know it – please add others that spring to mind:

1. Web writing style

The BBC’s way of writing for the web has always been a template for good web writing, not least because of the BBC’s experience with having to meet similar challenges with Ceefax – the two shared a content management system and journalists writing for the website would see the first few pars of their content cross-published on Ceefax too.

Even now it is difficult to find an online publisher who writes better for the web.

2. Editors blogs

Thanks to the likes of Robin Hamman, Martin Belam, Jem Stone and Tom Coates – to name just a few – when the BBC did begin to adopt blogs (it was not an early adopter) it did so with a spirit that other news organisations lacked.

In particular, the Editors’ Blogs demonstrated a desire for transparency that many other news organisations have yet to repeat, while the likes of Robert Peston, Kevin Anderson and Rory Cellan-Jones have played a key role in showing skeptical journalists how engaging with the former audience on blogs can form a key part of the newsgathering process.

Unfortunately, many of those innovators later left the BBC, and the earlier experimentation was replaced with due process.

3. Backstage

While so many sing and dance about the APIs of The Guardian and The New York Times, Ian Forrester’s BBC Backstage project was well ahead of the game when it opened up the corporation’s API and started hosting hack days and meetups way back in 2005.

Backstage closed at the end of last year, just as the rest of the UK’s media were starting to catch up. You can read an e-book on its history here.

What else?

I’m sure you can add others – the iPlayer and their on-demand team; Special Reports; the UGC hub (the biggest in the world as far as I know); and even their continually evolving approach to linking (still not ideal, but at least they think about it) are just some that spring to mind. What parts of BBC Online have influenced or inspired you?

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I was privileged to be asked to speak at the BBC’s Future of Journalism conference last week. A largely internal event organised by the BBC College of Journalism, the event had little outside publicity and consequently very few people from outside the corporation attending. This was a shame, as not only were there some fascinating contributions from speakers both inside and outside of the BBC, but it also meant no one could contribute to the discussion via email unless they were watching the intranet video stream.

I had hoped to liveblog it, but the wifi signal was too weak – instead you can find some coverage from the time on my Twitter account and those of Daniel Bennett and Jon Jacob. Below are some of the reflections from the first day’s events.

Tagging

I arrived too late to catch the first panel on Multiplatform Reporting from the Field – but you can find a roundup on Charlie Beckett’s blog.

Instead, I went straight into the panel on ‘The Newsroom of the Future‘, where I spoke about the News Diamond model. This was reasonably well received, with one particularly interesting question which I’ve blogged about separately.

Fellow panelist BBC Head of Editorial Development, Multimedia Journalism, Pete Clifton spoke about the changes the BBC newsrooms have been through (from platform-based to programme-based) and those they can expect. In addition to a planned move to a new content management system, Pete was clearly concerned about how the BBC had fallen behind in the search engine optimisation stakes, and talked of a future emphasis on tagging and metadata. He showed an overview of the metadata on New York Times stories – dozens of categories ranging from byline and title through to location, organisations, and image size (clearly much of it automated).

Blogging and the BBC – having it both ways

Robert Peston was clearly the star guest in the panel on blogging. Joined by Paul Fletcher, Giles Wilson and Alex Trickett, this was an all-BBC affair.

Giles Wilson emphasised the value of blogs in making the BBC accountable and transparent, and listed 7 ‘golden rules’ of blogging: having a single author; being authentic; responding to comments; being impartial; obeying the laws of the blogosphere; not expecting blogs to do everything; and providing support for blogging.

Peston was a great champion of blogging, claiming that his blog (which, it appears, began as an internal email) was “the cornerstone” of everything that he did – although this didn’t stop him holding back publishing stories online until the same time as, or just after, they were broadcast.

But then he did a strange thing: he claimed his blog wasn’t really a blog on the basis that he only published solid news, and no opinion or rumour.

Clearly there remains some suspicion of blogs in the BBC. The corporation, it appears, don’t call their blogs ‘blogs’ because of a belief that the audience don’t like the term (although as Jason Cobb pointed out in a tweet, “BBC radio loves to promote blogs (5Live) – why does TV shy away from the dirty B word?”). At the same time, they are clearly designed to look like blogs for those who know what they are. It seems they want to have it both ways.

Further, while the BBC innovated in journalism blogging in the days when individuals such as Nick Robinson and Robert Peston could start up a blog, now staff have to gain the approval of a social media panel before they can start a blog. 

And clearly, that need for impartiality, and a very palpable fear that something said on a BBC blog will be used against them by the press, are real handicaps in the ability of the BBC to join the conversation. Alex Trickett of BBC Sport spoke of his envy of blogs who don’t have the constraints of “the BBC way”. “We are still quite corporate.”

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Here’s another one for that book I’m working on – I’m trying to think: what have been the most significant events in the history of journalism blogging?

Here’s what I have so far (thanks Mark Jones and Nigel Barlow):

• 1998: The Drudge Report breaks the Monica Lewinsky story. While Drudge denies the site is a blog, it demonstrated how the nimbleness of an online operation could scoop the mainstream media.
• 2001: September 11 attacks: while news websites collapse under the global demand, a network of blogs pass on news and lists of survivors
• 2002: Trent Lott forced to resign after apparently pro-segregationist statements made at an event and initially ignored by mainstream media, were picked up and fleshed out by bloggers
• 2003: Invasion of Iraq: Salam Pax, the ‘Baghdad Blogger’, posts updates from the city as it is bombed, providing a particular contrast to war reporters ‘embedded’ with the armed forces and demonstrating the importance of non-journalist bloggers
• 2003: Christopher Allbritton raises $15,000 through his blog Back-to-Iraq 3.0, to send him to report independently from the war, demonstrating the ability of blogs to financially support independent journalism (called the ‘tip-jar model’).
• 2004: Rathergate/Memogate: CBS’ 60 Minutes broadcast a story about George W. Bush’s National Guard service, and within minutes a section of the blogosphere mobilises to discredit the documents on which it is based. Dan Rather eventually resigns as a result.
• 2004: Asian Tsunami: more blogs mobilise around a disaster, of particular significance for video blogging
• 2005: July 7 Bombings, London: mobile phone image of passengers walking along Tube tunnel posted on MoBlog (although was first sent to The Sun), and goes global from there. A significant moment in moblogging.
• 2006: The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service cites the blog run by the New Orleans Times Picayune during Hurricane Katrina. The flexibility of blogs during a disaster which stopped printing presses and delivery trucks was driven home (h/t Bob Stepno).
• 2007: Talking Points Memo blog breaks story of US attorneys being fired across the country, demonstrating the power of involving readers in an investigation, and carrying it out in public (h/t Albert in the comments).
• 2007: Dave Winer wins his $2,000 bet (made in 2002) that blogs will rank higher than the New York Times for the top 5 news stories of 2007 (h/t Bob Stepno), demonstrating the importance of blogging in news distribution.
• 2007: Myanmar protests: the clampdown that followed democratic protests in the country was seen around the world thanks to blogging, moblogging, and social networking sites. Journalists were not allowed in the country. Even after the government cut off the internet, bloggers located outside the country continued to post material. (h/t Sandra Fish in comments)
• 2008: Peter Hain resigns over donations revealed by UK political blogger Guido Fawkes, who in 2006 broke a story on an affair by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott which he claimed lobby correspondents were sitting on
• 2008: Chinese Earthquake: a key moment for microblogging, as news of the earthquake spreads on Twitter (and Chinese IM service QQ) quicker than any official channels.
• 2008: Collapse of Northern Rock: BBC correspondent Robert Peston breaks one of the biggest stories of the year – not on TV, but on his blog.

What have I missed? This is a horribly Anglo-American list, too, so I’d particularly welcome similar moments from other countries.

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