BBC WHYS: Day 10

DAY 10

BBC WHYS 16th March ’07

Different day today as I started earlier and I went off to a different place in order to work with Richard in White City… gosh it’s so posh! The hall and reception look like the one of a luxury hotel and the restaurant is amazing… anyway… I’m already waffling about it all!!!!
First thing in the morning was picking up a story and log the first post of the day on the blog. In The Times there was an interesting article about the use of the swastika as a Nazi symbol in order to protest against what it actually represents. I thought it could make a nice topic as, in the past few days, we have been talking about freedom of speech and expression in arts and university. I’ve seen this as a continuation on the topic as freedom of expression in the commercial environment.
Anyway at about 11.30 we had a meeting over the phone with Bush House where it has been decided to talk about the US Marine accused of having killed unarmed civilians and Elton John story: in Tobago a vocar doesn’t want him to sing because of the risk to spread homosexuality.
In the meantime, in White City, I had a look at Elvis in order to search for a picture of the singer to add to our post.
Elvis is the system/database that the whole BBC used to collect and research still pictures. What really surprised me is that limited quantities of pictures available for each topic. I browsed the system for a bit and typed in names such as Kate Moss and Britney Spears thinking to have a huge quantity of material, as they are at the top of the ‘news’ every single day. Instead the system came out with barely 60 pictures for each celebrity.
I would have thought that the database was much wider but then Richard explained to me that still pictures are the ones that carry the most strict copyrights. In fact, the system shows this and indicates what kind of pictures it is possible to use for news pages, other pages or pictures that can’t be used at all.
Taking the opportunity given, Richard explained the wider use of pictures on the BBC News website: their dimension, the reasons why they are used or not, why some of them are bigger than others, etc.
The same thing happened with the explanation of posts: why some of them are represented in simple blue link on the right side of the page (i.e. low page impression, not responded to, etc.) and why other are nicely structured with bold fonts and accompanied by pictures.
We analysed also how to write posts on the website, i.e. talking point.
The system the BBC uses to manage its pages is called CPS, and it is there that all the online content take shape (this same content can also be used for key-fax?). for the same reason – I suppose!- it is very important to double-check and have a very good communication with other departments, as Richard showed me during the day visiting another office where they also held another daily meeting in order to discuss the top stories to cover.
Other duty of the day was moderating comments. I had the idea that the BBC is very honest and open about it. In fact there are no restrictions in what to publish, almost everything is approved. The only exceptions are junk, spam, and senders’ personal information (i.e. addresses and phone numbers). To my personal sadness, the most spam I noticed was coming from Italy… WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU ITALIAN SPAMMER? You are ruining our reputation… Sigh!
My day finished much earlier than the usual shift and I was so glad about it because it’s been a wonderful day. So, off I went towards Oxford circus, only to find out that the tickets for Buckcherry are sold-out… Double Sigh!

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