March 2009 Archives

The British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) is using the New Media to help get out it's Old Media messages.

The BBC's new mobile homepage launched in March with the results of months of work on customization that will bring the service in line with the main BBC site, bbc.co.uk.

Users can chose to shrink or expand sections according to their interest across the BBC's news, sport, entertainment and business coverage, and i-Player for radio and TV, schedule information and weather forecasts also accessible.

The site is optimized for most commonly used mobile handsets and smart-phones, but also for the range of different networks that provide differing signal quality; the challenge was to produce a error-free i-Player service even on the slowest network.

Customization options include location, which means the site will automatically show weather and news for the user's local area.

Richard Titus, BBC future media controller for audio & music and mobile, said the BBC mobile site has seen growth of 30 % in the past two quarters and shows no sign of slowing down.

"Part of the BBC's public purpose is to encourage digital curiosity and media literacy, and those are important themes," he said. "But we have to recognize that everyone has their adoption curve."

He said the BBC's mobile site does historically tend to be used more by older males and by under 25s, but that  this redesign was "a real opportunity to deepen engagement".

"It was the same with the web ten years ago - guys in their late 30s and younger users with disposable incomes. But as the technology has progressed it has brought people with it and we're now seeing exponential growth of mobile, especially smart-phones."

"People my age are very focused on the privacy aspects but for a 19 or 20 year old, everything they do is an open book."

BBC recognizes that if they want to survive in the age of Media 2.0, they better use this New Media to their advantage.

The recent demise of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, after a 150 years of publishing was a shock to the old media. Two west coast papers the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are potentially facing the same fate.

We know that the new media - the Huffington Post for example - chuckle with glee at such events, bragging that as the new media, they saw this coming and are leading the way to a promised land of citizen journalism with unlimited free information at the click of a mouse.

Let's stop and consider the merits of this claim. Most newspapers today are becoming the 'new media' as they develop their blog capacity, send journalist out to cover stories with video cameras to capture stories and upload them to their newspaper websites. Newspapers across the country are buying radio and TV air time to advertise their websites as the "go to" place for up-to-date i-news.

Newspaper journalists and columnists now write 'new media' blogs, in addition to their 'old media' stories because blogs are seen by their editors as powerful tools to obtain news content, as it is developing, to help them stay ahead of the curve.

Some folks feel the 'old media' provides more accurate information and a degree of accountability to their editors, publishers and shareholders. The 'New 2.0 Media' are accountable to no one but themselves.

This may indicate that consumers are not so much concerned with the medium as they are with the content. If 'old media' can provide current information in the 'new media' format, they may be on the road to survival.

What you get from trained journalists, over amateur bloggers, is assurance of quality and accountability.

Arguments can be made by bloggers about individuals citizens having the resources to generate the quantity and quality of news to which citizens are accustomed. 'Old news' is hard to gather and is expensive. Journalists are empowered to write without fear because their employers defend their right to do so. Bloggers do not have these same protections.