³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

I'm not sure I can handle the pressure. Suddenly, Washington has gone crazy for .

It seems that to occupy any position at all on the press or political landscape in this town, one must be "all thumbs"; constantly tapping out text messages from the mobile to let everyone you know (and many you don't) exactly what you're doing at any given moment.

Every day there's an article about another media luminary or administration official taking up "tweeting"; just this morning, the has a story all about the members of Congress sending text tweets from inside the chamber during Barack Obama's speech to a joint session.

Now, I'm as tech-savvy as the next guy, and I completely get the way in which social networks like Twitter are changing the way information is shared around the world (remember how that great photo of the plane in the Hudson rocketed around the globe via Twitter?).

It's just that I'm not sure I really care to know in real time what the anchor of Meet the Press is having for breakfast, or just what the House chamber podium looks like from the seat of the junior Senator from Arkansas. And I'm sure that no one, not even my wife and kids (perhaps especially my wife and kids), are desperate to know what I'm doing all day long, in bursts 140 characters long.

So, don't look for tweets from me anytime soon. But if you must know, my lemon-poppyseed muffin this morning was delicious.

"How do you choose what to put in the news?" is the question I'm most frequently asked about my job.

It's also the most difficult to answer. Letters on this subject received by Feedback on Radio 4 prompted the programme to dispatch one of its reporters to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Newsroom at Television Centre in west London to find out more:

My own view is that the choice of stories and the order in which they are presented is based on a number of factors, which inevitably, overlap: how significant does the story feel? How interested is our audience likely to be? How new is the story? What is the context? (Not just in terms of what else is going on but also, have we done variations on this story recently?)

These considerations are combined with something more difficult to define - a journalistic instinct perhaps - in the decision-making process.

On the Six O'Clock News on Radio 4 we aim, to mangle a phrase from the New York Times, to provide all the news you need to hear. By the end of the bulletin, we want listeners to feel they know about the important events that have happened that day in the UK and around the world, and why they happened.

Fortunately, our audience is rarely shy in letting us know if that is what we have achieved.

I've just watched the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s on my laptop, catching up as I do at the weekends with bits of the output I haven't been able see during the week. (In fact I saw the link to it on , another subject handled by Newswatch this week).

One of issues mentioned by Ray Snoddy was the number of audience comments asking why the website's top story on Monday 16 February was about the at Cowley, whilst the smaller story just underneath was the .

Some have taken that as proof we are always keener to report and highlight the bad news. In fact we had a detailed editorial discussion about this on Monday and I believe we made the right choice on journalistic grounds, though I can fully see the argument both ways.

The jobs being created by KFC are over a three to five-year period, the jobs being lost at Cowley were immediate and entailed stories of human pain and shock. The wider story of the car industry, and the political debate surrounding it, was deemed by us to be more newsworthy at this moment than the also interesting phenomenon of "value" food chains doing pretty well in the recession (McDonalds has also had a good story to tell recently).

In the end we had to make a judgement call, but it's never just a case of us deciding to put the "bad news" first.

"I have been making myself sick since I was 13, I am now 17...it controls my life and I can't stop. I don't want help. It's my life."

You have to be a very hard hearted editor not to be deeply moved by the Radio 1 audience's struggle with eating disorders and body image. No-one who has any contact with teenagers or early 20-somethings can fail to understand how large this looms as an issue: it destroys lives - and frankly, it doesn't get much news coverage.

The number of young people being admitted to hospitals for problems related to Anorexia has gone up 80% in 10 years, according to NHS figures for England. Three times as many 12-year-olds are now .

Newsbeat spoke to Heather Youell who lives in Northampton. She's now 22 and her problems started when she was 15: she cut out breakfast, then lunch, then dinner. She collapsed while out jogging and doctors told her she had just days to live. She's better now but no thanks, she says, to her GP surgery. Their advice was simple: "you should eat more". In hospital, nurses discussed their diets while trying to get her to eat.

"We thought it was time the prime minister was asked about this, so our politics reporter Dave Howard put him on the spot at his monthly press conference. Doesn't late diagnosis put lives at risk? Gordon Brown agreed: "I think the more the Health Service can do to help particularly teenage girls the better. I assure you that's one of the issues Alan Johnson is looking at very seriously in his health service plan."

We contacted Susan Ringwood, from the eating disorders charity, Beat, who said: "What Gordon Brown said to Newsbeat today was the first time a prime minister has ever made a statement about eating disorders."

So far, so good, but then - suspicion from the charity: it has been pleading with the government to find out more about eating disorders, particularly simple facts like, how many people in the UK suffer? They think the Department of Health is rather less keen on doing the hard work on this than the prime minister might suggest, and claim that anorexia - and similar eating disorders - cause more deaths in young people than any other medical condition.

Our text response after the story might be persuasive. Emily - who's 17 - went from being a nine stone (57kg), 5ft 9in to just five stone (31kg). And again, as with so many of our stories on Radio 1, it's not just the girls who suffer. We heard about one young man who wanted to be a male model: his quest for the body beautiful nearly killed him - at one point, he was given three days to live.

And to be fair - there are people who blame the media too. Helen in Cumbria spoke for many others when she tapped out this text to us: "The problem is down to the media. Girls being airbrushed and promoting size zero is becoming more and more acceptable. We need to stop promoting this image of a perfect body which is unachievable."

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News website was temporarily affected by technical problems this lunchtime which meant users in the UK were unable to get onto the site for about 20 minutes as a result of problems with our London servers. We're sorry for this, the site is accessible again now and we are looking into exactly what happened and why as urgently as we can.

UPDATE, 05:40PM: We found out what the problem was caused by - it was faulty code on a new deployment by the technical team. This has now been fixed. Sorry again to anyone who tried unsuccessfully to get onto the site earlier today.

Yesterday, picked up on an internal e-mail I sent to ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News TV presenters asking them to avoid using the phrase "as you can see on your screens" when pointing audiences to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News website. I asked them if they would please spell out URLs, e-mail addresses and phone numbers, pointing out that a significant number of blind people use television news. The phrase "as you can see" excludes people with visual impairments, and means they can't get the information they might want. This is discourteous, and we can do better than that.

Commentators, and one reported "³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ insider", have said: "This is political correctness gone mad." It is not. This issue is not about avoiding causing offence. It's about information and how to access it.

Eleven million adults are considered to have a disability in the UK which affects their everyday life, and this group make up 19% of the working population and an even higher proportion of our audience. For instance 21% of the audience to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News at Six on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One is considered to have a disability. Surely it's not political correctness to consider whether the content we're producing is suitably accessible and understandable?

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ has a commitment to help people with disabilities use our services. There are various pages on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ site which give information about how it addresses this - for instance bbc.co.uk/accessibility which helps arm audiences with tools which enable them to make the most of the web. There's also the Ouch! website - which reflects the lives and experiences of disabled people with articles, blogs, and an active messageboard.

I'd be interested in hearing from you on what more ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News could do to makes its services more accessible to all and also about the range of stories we cover.

We've made a change to the "Most read" and "Most watched" headline lists which appear on all News website story pages and the front page.

As of yesterday we've increased the number of most read and most viewed headlines visible in this list from five to 10.

These headlines are themselves a popular and well-used feature. They are, in effect, your agenda, the things which News website users actually find most important and interesting at any given moment, as revealed by the .

I sometimes get asked whether this feature dictates our news agenda - whether it affects the front page running order which represents our editorial view of what's most important and interesting through the day.

The answer is it that it does inform what we do - but it's just one of many criteria our front page editors will be thinking about and discussing with other ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News editors across our TV and radio outlets as they order the stories of the day, along with overall significance, interest and news value.

The journalists writing for the site keep a close eye on the ever-changing "most popular" list because it can be a good place to spot emerging interest in stories which we can then develop, and it can also help us assess how successful we've been at highlighting and headlining what we see as the key stories of the day.

The change we've just made is an experiment to see if we can measure the relative importance of this feature in increasing your engagement with a wider array of stories, and potentially increasing the amount of your precious time you spend reading and watching things on the site.

We'll be monitoring the effects over the next few days and will assess them next week. I'll let you know what we find out.

I'm writing this from the Trafford shopping centre in Manchester where we're in the middle of a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ financial roadshow which we're calling Money Matters.

We've assembled a large team of independent financial advisors and together with the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s own team of personal finance and business experts we're offering advice and finding out what's most important to people now we've entered what could be a steep recession.

Already we've been broadcasting live on Breakfast, the News Channel, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳2's Working Lunch and Radios 4 / 5live as well as local and regional radio and television. You can see a lot of what's being generated on our which has been constructed specially for today.

Of course the range of problems and issues people have is wide but what's struck me is that all day the longest queue has been for "savings and investment" advice.

Across the age range people are most anxious about what to do with the money they have. That's both in terms of getting a return for it, and, even more importantly for many, keeping it safe.

Of course, the answer is not straightforward and a lot depends on whether we're heading for a long period of deflation, or conversely high inflation in a couple of years time. You can find economists who passionately hold each of those points of view (there's a surprise).

Please do have a look at the site and enter our . I got 8/10 right which isn't great for the business and economics editor.

Yesterday the Omagh families Prime Minister Gordon Brown at No 10 to discuss the outcome of an inquiry into Panorama's revelations that GCHQ were recording mobile phone exchanges between the Omagh bombers on the day of the attack.

The report by the Intelligence Services Commissioner Sir Peter Gibson had been by Mr Brown and was published last month.

Panorama's September 2008 programme, , disclosed that GCHQ had monitored up to five mobile phones used by some members of the bomb gang during the 100 minute bomb run from the Irish Republic to Omagh, but that the detectives trying to identify the bombers were never told this, even though they were desperate for leads.

None of the perpetrators have been convicted of the bombing, which killed 29 people, two unborn babies and injured 250 people on 15 August 1998, despite promises from the-then Prime Minister Tony Blair that no stone would be left unturned in the hunt to bring the culprits to justice.

However, although appearing to confirm many aspects of the programme, Sir Peter avoided holding any branch of the intelligence services to account for the fact that the detectives were never told that intercepts existed and that the telephone numbers of some of the bombers were known.

Sir Peter also criticised Panorama for making "allegations" that the bombing could have been prevented.

In fact the programme made no such allegation. Rather, we asked whether the bombing could have been prevented - a question we now consider even more justified by Sir Peter's failure to challenge our central claim: that GCHQ was listening to the mobiles of some of the bombers while the bomb was being driven to Omagh.

The Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward told Parliament Sir Peter's review was "exhaustive" and "comprehensive".

Today Panorama publishes a to Sir Peter's criticisms of Panorama and highlights the many questions we say it it fails to answer. Readers can judge for themselves whether they consider Mr Woodward's comments are merited.

Even to this day detectives have never been officially told about the phone monitoring.

The families say they want to know why neither Sir Peter nor the Northern Ireland Secretary have had anything to say about the GCHQ policy in place in 1998 that appears to have prevented even one telephone number being passed to detectives to get them going even though 29 people lay dead.

Sir Peter comments only on the "cautious way" Special Branch shared intelligence with the CID.

He just says it was not part of his remit to investigate the reasons for their "caution" but he "does not doubt" there were "good operational reasons" for it.

Sir Peter says the Branch could have asked GCHQ for "material that might have existed" to disseminate to the CID, but that "the record shows no such request was made".

The Omagh relatives consider this to be his single most extraordinary comment.

They ask if any reasonable person would seriously consider that the entire intelligence gathering apparatus of Northern Ireland would need to be specifically asked to collect intelligence to help identify those responsible for the single worst atrocity of the Northern Ireland conflict?

While Mr Woodward thinks Sir Peter's work was "exhaustive", some senior officers John Ware has spoken to beg to differ: "Gibson has surface skated" said one, adding that he had been "appointed to close the curtain on Omagh".

You can read and make your own mind up.

Sandy Smith is editor of Panorama.

It's a depressingly familiar scene. Police at a family's doorstep; a woman inside, tearful, bloodied and bruised; the officers were called because she was being attacked by her partner - now she won't, or can't, take the matter further and press charges.

Shocking - but perhaps not surprising. We know it happens often. But what if the victim in such a case was a man - a young man?

New statistics suggest that men in their early 20s are MORE likely to be abused by their partner than women the same age. It's not a subject that's much talked about. On , we're changing that.

The official definition of partner abuse includes non-physical forms like emotional bullying as well as physical force. But men in this age range have been on the receiving end of all forms, including sometimes severe violence.

Across most age ranges more women are abused than men. But analysis of the latest figures from the Home Office shows the problem is more evenly spread between the sexes in the early stages of a young relationship

So why are men in this age at such risk? Are 20-something women becoming more aggressive? Are men less able to defend themselves? And is this a taboo that's now being talked about for the first time?

Our journalism started with a on Radio 1 from our special reporter Jim Reed. 5Live's phone-in with Nicky Campbell picked up the story also.

Mark Brooks from the men's health charity Mankind reckons the issue of male domestic abuse is often ignored by the government, social services and the police. There simply isn't enough help available for men, he says.

Reporting the crime carries risks too. Some men clearly feel that telling police can lead to the finger of blame being pointed at them. One, who wants to stay anonymous, texted us to say "ex girlfriend pushed me down the stairs ,i called the police and they locked me up for three hours and made me walk home with dislocated toes cos they did not believe me". Others say they were threatened with assault charges - even though they were the victim.

The response from the Radio 1 audience appears to fit the stats, too: "She knocked me to the ground and then started punching, kicking and biting me." Another one told us: "My ex broke my arm with a metal pole ... when the police came round, I ended up being arrested."

And perhaps most movingly: "My dad was stabbed to death by his girlfriend in a drunken unprovoked attack. She had been attacking him randomly for months. He would never talk to us about it but we knew she had a violent temper. He was a wonderful dad and we miss him every day. More should be done to encourage men to report domestic abuse."

Covering this subject has provoked a flood of stories and experiences - and from many a desire for something to be done to help young male victims. We're now following this up with a full length documentary - coming soon on 1Xtra.

Rod McKenzie is editor of Newsbeat and 1Xtra News.

We have "constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world". That was the of Friday's by the House of Lords Constitution Committee, "Surveillance: Citizens and the State".

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ special correspondent Richard Bilton has been taking a journey through our surveillance society for a new ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳2 series called "Who's Watching You?", which will be broadcast this spring. He's been meeting both the watchers and the watched.

Cheaper and more advanced technology has prompted a massive expansion in surveillance - not just through CCTV, listening devices, tracking, but also through all the personal data that's collected on every one of us.

As the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas says, we leave an "electronic footprint" behind us almost wherever we go - with every click of the mouse, every phone call, every time we use a credit card. And that information just grows and grows, allowing a more and more detailed and intrusive picture to be constructed of how we each live our lives.

The paradox is that there is a great deal of support for things like CCTV. We all benefit from better crime detection and from easier and cheaper services. But we know surprisingly little about the depth and breadth of modern surveillance, or about the potential problems when things go wrong.

Wherever we went, we were told: "If you've got nothing to hide, then you've got nothing to fear." But when we looked further, we found people who had suffered from the loss of personal data, and ordinary people who are watched every minute of the day at work and even at home.

Pressure groups like , and have long warned of the dangers to personal privacy. But even the word privacy is hard to define and hard to relate to.

What we have found throughout making the series, almost whatever the type of surveillance, is that regulation is all too often an after-thought and sometimes non-existent.

Take CCTV for example. The Lords committee's report makes clear that "there are few restrictions on the use of public area CCTV cameras in the UK".

The government has already announced consultations on creating a new "super-database" to record the fact (but not the content) of every email, phone call and internet use, and also on the use of covert surveillance by local authorities; and it is due to reveal how it will come into line with a recent European Court of Human Rights ruling that our present DNA database has been in breach of the right to privacy.

"Who's Watching You?" will examine how surveillance is now becoming all pervasive but how little we understand it.

Mike Rudin is series producer of Who's Watching You? and The Conspiracy Files.

As I commented on this blog yesterday, like many other commuters I too have had to endure this week's . While we can't improve the British weather, we have now done everything we can to improve your ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ weather website.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Weather has always used developments in technology to improve the quality of its output, dovetailing improvements in forecasting techniques with new and emerging broadcast platforms.

On my first day at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Weather Centre the output was focused mainly on forecasts on television. Today the Weather Centre is a fully multi-media operation with over 100 broadcasts a day, presented by a weather team of 22, on TV, radio, online and the red button.

It wasn't until 1998 that the first version of the weather website went live, and it was a very different looking site from the version that is available from today. We have had a couple of site refreshes over the last decade but nothing on the scale of today's offering.

Firstly, we have made changes to the technology driving the website which will mean that we can support the service far more effectively, 24 hours a day. Technology has developed to such an extent that what was thought cutting edge five years ago is in fact old technology today. We have improved the infrastructure and streamlined our processes, which will mean more and faster updates throughout the day.

Secondly, we have been asking you what you would like, and having reviewed that feedback, we have been able to provide what we believe to be a world class weather website. Through the site we will deliver the latest and most comprehensive forecast available for wherever you want, whenever you want it, all in one place.

So I guess you are asking what has changed?

The two biggest changes are the structure of the site and the visual design. All of our forecast information is now organised by location rather than by type of data. Once you have searched for your location you will find everything you need on one page, a one-stop shop for wherever you choose to be. The visual design now follows the broadcast design, so the colour of the pages reflects the weather forecast for the location you are looking at.

Today's forecasts for UK locations on the weather site are no longer depicted by one summary symbol. Today is now covered by a three-hourly breakdown to show more clearly how the weather will change over the 24 hours to come. We have also increased the frequency with which we receive forecasts from the Met Office.

Each location page displays the accompanying weather map, but you can also navigate to other map areas without leaving your page. This means you can choose a different or wider area map if you prefer.

Our forecast information is displayed in individual modules on a page, and these can be expanded or collapsed depending on whether you are interested in the information or not. We are also making the video we produce more accessible by embedding it on our pages, still presented by your familiar ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ broadcast meteorologists and updated throughout the day.

Our website is now wider. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ has received feedback from you about making the best use of available screen space. We're confident that now is the right time to use the extra space to improve the site. The flatter structure of the site will make it easier to navigate.

The process will be completed over the coming months as we migrate a number of pages from the old site to the new. We will also be looking at how we can develop new ways of getting our weather content online and available whenever you want it.

UPDATE 1415: Earlier today we launched the new ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Weather website. Unfortunately shortly after midday we experienced major technical issues. As a result we've had to roll back to the old weather site.

We are urgently trying to understand what happened and hope to be in a position to clarify the situation later today.

The old version of the site will continue to be updated as normal so you can still access the very latest forecast from the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Weather team. Apologies if you've come to view the new site, but we are doing our best to resolve the issues and hope to unveil the new site shortly.

Richard Chapman is editorial manager of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Weather.

Like many commuters I spent the first part of Monday morning standing at the station despite the warnings, believing that a miracle might happen and my train might still arrive to take me on the daily trip to London.

Watching the weather output and talking to colleagues who made it into the office, it was clear that we were experiencing an unusual event. Despite the statements that it was the worst snowfall in south-east England for 18 years, it was not until this morning that I realised the magnitude of snow that had fallen.

On my journey from the Kent coast the amount of snow lying just increased and got deeper up until the point where the tracks were not visible on the lines that had not been cleared.

Yesterday many comparisons were made with other European countries, who despite their prolonged winters and heavy snowfall continue to run their public transport and go to work. I assume that if we too experienced these extreme conditions regularly they would become the "norm" and we would cope far better.

The forecasts from the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Weather Centre at the end of last week contained early mentions of the potential for snowfall this week. Special graphics were commissioned as "attention getters" to make sure that the potential for snow was presented clearly. As the forecast became more certain across the weekend, the graphics were used extensively as the extent of the snowfall became evident.

The Weather Centre today is a hive of activity, with everyone feeling the effects of the busy day yesterday. Ice is still a potential problem in many areas as snow melts during the day and freezes overnight (temperatures in some rural areas fell to -8C last night).

On top of this we are watching the forecast closely. I spoke to Matt Taylor, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ broadcast meteorologist, earlier about the outlook. He said that the wintry weather would last until the weekend and some parts of the country would see further snowfall leading to disruption.

It is definitely worth keeping in touch with the forecast on television, radio and online, as we have clearly not seen the end to this particular spell of cold weather yet.

Richard Chapman is editorial manager of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Weather.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News audiences with reporting the news in record numbers on Monday.

Over 35,000 people sent us and of the across much of the UK. This was a record both for the sheer number of pictures and almost certainly for the size of the audience response to a news event in the UK.

As well as sending us your pictures, audiences watched and read a lot of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News.

About 8.2 million unique users came to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News website, of whom 5.1 million were from the UK - also a record. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News channel, no doubt boosted by huge numbers of people taking an enforced day off work, had a peak audience of 557,000, compared with Sky's peak of 300,000. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News channel's average share across the day was 1.82 per cent, compared with Sky's 0.90 per cent. And there were 195,000 plays of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News channel live on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ website.

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳1 news programmes were also avidly watched. Breakfast's audience was 1.8 million, a share of 38%; the News at One scored a huge 5.1 million and a share of 44 per cent; the Six ranked even higher with 7.1 million (30 per cent share) and the Ten reached the heights of 7.4 million (32 per cent share).

Whenever there has been a big news story like this we assess it afterwards and see what we can learn from it. Do please let us know what you thought of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s information service across news (national and regional) and weather.

Your pictures and video certainly made it clear that people were having a lot of fun out there.

Lastly, I'd like to pay tribute to our reporters and TV crews who have been out in the cold and snow for hours on end.

Peter Horrocks is head of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Newsroom.

I was sitting at my desk the other day when one of the producers pointed out that the alcohol figures we'd been expecting had just been released.

I looked up at my screen, anticipating a sharp spike in the number of people who'd died because of alcohol abuse. Stands to reason, I thought: recession, people losing their jobs, drinking to console themselves - the numbers are bound to be up.

But they weren't, in fact . Stands to reason, I thought: recession, people have less money in their pockets, can't afford alcohol.

Then I saw that the figures related to 2007 and I thought, stands to reason: the numbers were fairly stable, because they covered a period before the full-blown recession took hold.

However, there is another explanation - that the figures had nothing to do with the downturn. When a story as big as the economic crisis takes hold, there's a tendency to see nearly every other story within its context. But human behaviour, and by extension news, is driven by a myriad of motivations. There's a danger that we all start to view the world through too simplistic a prism.

Dominic Ball is editor of the Radio 4 Six O'Clock News.