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Archives for March 2009

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News radar

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Steve Herrmann Steve Herrmann | 15:30 UK time, Tuesday, 31 March 2009

Would you want to see which stories we are publishing, in chronological order, as soon as they are published, but without any prioritisation of the most urgent or important?

Screengrab news radar

We have just such a list . Our developers have been working on it, and we're interested to know what you make of it. This is a test version, so there may still be a few loose ends - for example it doesn't appear perfectly in Internet Explorer 6.

The point is that it shows all the latest stories published anywhere on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News site, both new stories and updates to existing ones. How useful is this in its current form? Would you use it? We'd be keen to hear what you think.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the .

Obama's Afghanistan strategy

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Alistair Burnett Alistair Burnett | 17:04 UK time, Friday, 27 March 2009

President Obama his long-awaited new strategy for trying to stabilise Afghanistan and Pakistan and to defeat the violent Islamists of al-Qaeda and their Afghan and Pakistani Taleban allies.

This review actually began last year under President Bush by the Defence Secretary Bob Gates working with General David Petraeus, who was credited with reducing violence in Baghdad and Sunni areas of Iraq. Both these men have stayed on under Mr Obama.

The World TonightOn The World Tonight, we have tracked this story closely - both when there has been a significant news development, and also in several special programmes.

We returned to look at the review on last Friday's programme, asking what the new policy was likely to look like towards both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It'll be interesting to see how much of our experts' advice and predictions are included in the new strategy, and of course to see whether it will succeed - though we probably won't be able to assess that for some time to come.

However, that will require patience - something we journalists are not renowned for.

On another note, our presenter Robin Lustig is now able to put audio excepts from The World Tonight on his blog, and I'd be interested to know whether readers of this blog and his blog find this a useful innovation.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

Jade Goody's death

Peter Horrocks Peter Horrocks | 17:15 UK time, Monday, 23 March 2009

While millions of you have followed our coverage of , some of you have contacted us to question the appropriateness of our carrying the story.

Jade GoodyJade Goody became a phenomenon, both in terms of the interest she inspired in the public and in the effect that her sad death had on awareness of cervical cancer. To make a legitimate news judgement about our coverage, we applied the same criteria as we usually use: should we report this, and if so, how? Knowing that there was a possibility that Jade would die soon, we talked about whether this was a story we would lead on in the absence of other significant news.

Obviously, this kind of discussion is academic until the event actually happens; the circumstances were that the early part of Sunday was relatively quiet - when, later, , many parts of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News output then led on that story.

We know that from the statistics that we have on a minute-by-minute basis from the news website that many more people visited than normally would on a Sunday - and the Jade Goody story was overwhelmingly the most popular story.

We also know that Jade was a very divisive figure and that by no means all of you were interested in the story: the reaction from 5 live's listeners, for example, has been very different to that of the Radio 1 audience. This highlights one of the challenges of producing news through a range of services for all of the UK population. While some of you have told us that you didn't like Jade Goody, or didn't want to hear news about her, we have to bear in mind those licence fee payers who have a strong level of interest and who expected us to provide measured coverage of her death.

Peter Horrocks is head of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Newsroom.

Fritzl trial and Austria

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Jamie Angus Jamie Angus | 15:55 UK time, Friday, 20 March 2009

One of the questions that may have occurred to you after following the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s coverage this week of the is how much the terrible story tells you about Austria and the people who live there.

World at One logoThe , which meant that figures like Fritzl were less likely to be challenged by the authorities, or denounced by those who suspected him.

, including the bleak work of Nobel Prizewinner Elfriede Jelinek, to explain what happened.

So given all this, I was quite surprised to hear the distinguished Anglo-Austrian journalist describe these theories as"totally over-the-top" on Wednesday's World at One. She told us that Austria was the most gossipy country she knows so the theories about a culture of silence were wide of the mark.

It's certainly true too that comparably . But it seems to me that the crimes of Fritzl are so monstrous, so far off the scale of what we've come to expect, that it may well be that they don't really tell us anything about anything.

That's an uncomfortable position for journalists whose natural inclination is try to determine the wider significance of any given event.

Jamie Angus is editor of The World At One.

iPM: Your News

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Joanna Carr Joanna Carr | 10:38 UK time, Friday, 20 March 2009

Maybe it's reckless to say so on this particular blog, but we at iPM - the programme that starts with its listeners - are hereby laying claim to a genuine, bona fide, no-money-back-guarantee first. This Saturday, iPM will broadcast a news bulletin made up entirely of your news. Not just your responses to our news, but actual ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ news based on you. Yes, you.

Each week, we ask listeners to send us a sentence of what's going on in their lives, and the results are alarming, enlightening, funny, and startling. Such as these:

I couldn't face seeing my mother, who has Alzheimer's disease, because I was scared.


My neighbour popped round yesterday to tell me he'd lost his three-and-a-half foot long, black and white snake, he thinks it escaped through the letterbox.


Near Milton Keynes I met Dr Johnson and David Garrick, who were walking to London; together we admired a shopping trolley in the canal.


iPMAnd, as so often at PM, we don't know when to stop. iPM always starts with its listeners, but this week the whole show is based on stories from the audience, investigated with the help of the Corporation's finest journalists. It will tackle everything from Spitfires and that missing snake, to ASBOs and Michael Palin in 3D. Your news, told by the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ allstars.

It's an experiment that we hope to learn a lot from, and we're keen to know what you make of it - so let us know!

New news. Who knew?

iPM is on Radio 4 on Saturdays at 0545, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer and the iPM podcast.

Joanna Carr is editor, PM, iPM and Broadcasting House.

Changes to our blogs

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Giles Wilson Giles Wilson | 09:28 UK time, Wednesday, 18 March 2009

Since we at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ started blogging in earnest in 2005, we have seen some incredible growth. Now tens of millions of our blog pages are being read every month, and our hope in ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News is that they add context and expert analysis to the big stories.

When we started blogging it felt important that our blogs should follow the style of other blogs at the time, and because we used a popular blogging program, that was easy to achieve. Since then styles have matured a bit, and this week the design for our pages is also changing.

The main thing you'll notice is that the columns are wider than before, meaning the width of the page now matches that of the main ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News website.

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The page headers are now also the same, meaning it's easier to find other content from across the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳. We hope that one effect of these changes is to make it obvious that our blogs are now a core part of what the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ website offers. Do let us know what you think about the new designs.

Incidentally, while talking about blogs, the deputy director of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News, Stephen Mitchell, discussed the proper role of blogging in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ with media commentator Stephen Glover on this week's Newswatch, which you can watch here.

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Update [27 March]: Thanks very much everyone for your thoughts on the changes. There are a few answers I can give.

1 - Isn't this just change for change's sake?
I don't think so. The entire ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ website has been changing over the past 12 to 18 months for a number of good reasons, andÌýwe think it's important that the design of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ blogs is consistent with the design of the rest of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online. Blogs are not a sideshow, they are now integral to a lot of what we are doing in News, and it's right that the design should reflect that.
Ìý
2 - Aren't the columns too wide?
Given the extra available space, we had a choice to make between a two-column layout and a three-column layout. We did some simple testing of three-column layouts and found a generally negative reaction - it seemed that people found the layout cluttered and harder to use. We do try to consider carefully these changes before we make them, but we hear what some of you have said about them being hard to read.
Ìý
3 - Why did you move the comment link?
Research told us that many blog readers were keen to see an indication of popularity at the top of each blog post, to help them decide if the blog entry was likely to be worth reading. We incorporated this feedback into our designs. But given what you've told us, and seeing how the redesign works in practice, we are going to investigate incorporating a second link at the end of each entry, meaning you could click through to comments after you've read the entry.
Ìý
4 - Why don't you paginate long lists of comments?
If we receive more than 500 comments on a post, we do start to paginate them then. Until that point, we believe that the majority of people would prefer to scroll though a list of comments, rather than click repeatedly to a new page.
Ìý
5 - Why have you moved the categories, calendar, etc, to the bottom of the page?
Very few people delve into the archive of a blog on a regular basis. We can tell this from the usage data we collect all the time. At the same time, it's important to many of our bloggers that they should be able to offer extra functionality - headlines from the News website, Twitter updates, etc. So we have separated our own navigation from the third-party content, which allows us to make more effective use of the right hand side. We did tests with users of the blogs to ask them if they could find the archives when they were at the bottom, and found that they could.

6 - Why can't I use all characters when leaving my comment?
This is obviously a problem and we are working to sort it out. It's worth saying that there is a number of improvements that we wish to make to the comment system across the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, and we're on to it.

7 - Why are blogs pre-moderated?
We are always reviewing how moderation works in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, but at the moment we have no plans to move away from pre-moderation for the majority of News blogs. For information, our aim is that the moderators should check all comments within an hour of receipt, although this can vary considerably depending on traffic. There have been no changes to moderation as part of the redesign.
Ìý
8. What about the other blogs which have not yet been widened?
Some blogs - Blether with Brian, for instance, and the Magazine Monitor - have not yet been widened. Our plan is for this to happen in the next few weeks.

Click's botnet experiment

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Mark Perrow Mark Perrow | 17:58 UK time, Friday, 13 March 2009

There's been quite a bit of discussion in the blogosphere over the past 24 hours about the Click botnet experiment. It was aired in news coverage and detailed on this site yesterday - you can see it , and you can see the full programme on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World News and the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News channel over the next few days.

Put simply, we posed as a customer, and bought a piece of software which gave us control of around the world.

We commanded them to send spam messages to our test addresses, and to stall a website by repeatedly requesting access. Not a working website, of course - in the real world, this technique is used to extort money from businesses that rely on the web for their very survival.

We alerted the PCs that they were liable to infection, gave them a place to go to for further advice, and destroyed the malware for good. It's all in the programme.

A lot of the debate has been about whether we did the right thing digging into the murky world of hackers and organised cybercrime. In seeking to demonstrate the threat, had we put ourselves in the position of those we wanted to expose?

That's always a good question. After all, we could have simply described what we believe happens and given some warning advice, couldn't we? We've done this in the past. So have many others...

But hacking has gone professional. Today, without you even knowing. It's a major growth area for organised crime: it's global, and very local to all of us who work, communicate and play on the world wide web.

So we felt that there was the strongest public interest in not just describing what malware can do, but actually showing it in action. A real demonstration of the power of today's botnets - to infect, disrupt and damage our digital lives - is the most powerful way to alert our audiences to the dangers that they face. It's a wake-up call to switch on that firewall and improve our security on the internet.

We think that what we did was a first for broadcast journalism. We were amazed by the ease of use of the botnet, and the power of its disruptive capacity.

No-one watching our programme could learn how to build a botnet or where to go to to buy one. But what is very clear is the level of threat - especially to home users who don't have the benefit of corporate-level security. (Our guide to PC protection is .) As the hackers continue their silent running, we thought it was our job to expose the mechanics of their hidden economy. Please watch the full show and see what you think.

Mark Perrow is executive producer, .

Newsround and bereavement

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Sinead Rocks | 16:05 UK time, Friday, 13 March 2009

The death of a loved one can be a life-changing experience and one that can be difficult to deal with at any age. For children - it is arguably even more harrowing.

When we first considered making a Newsround special on how children cope with bereavement, we immediately sought the advice of a clinical psychologist.

He backed up our suggestion that it can be even harder for young people to deal with because many children aren't as emotionally equipped to handle loss as adults.

Young people don't always know about support services and they can often give the impression of having "got over it" when in reality they are simply bottling up their emotions.

Using this guidance as a starting point and after consulting with a number of charities - we ran a short item on our programme asking children who have suffered bereavement and who would be willing to share their stories to get in touch.

We weren't sure if anyone would respond so were somewhat taken aback when lots of children contacted us.

The research stage of the project was tricky - we needed children and their guardians to understand what getting involved in the programme would mean.

We'd be asking about very personal issues and reminding children of difficult times with cameras and lights pointed at them. Not an easy ask.

Some children we spoke to were clearly still traumatised by their experiences so after long discussions with them and their families we ruled them out.

Our overriding objective was always to make a programme that could benefit children - not traumatise them further.

Which is how we ended up focusing on Joe, Bradley, Sarika and Katie. They range in age from eight to 11 and each of them has lost someone close to them.

Putting the programme together has been an intensely moving experience for the team. It's not easy listening to what these children have to say but each of them was adamant that by sharing their experiences - they felt they could help other children facing similar circumstances.

And actually, on balance, it's not at all depressing. There's definite uplift and inspiration in each of their tales and this is what we want our audience to hear.

We have put a considerable amount of work into covering bereavement responsibly with the overall intention of offering guidance and support on a subject that is rarely tackled or discussed in children's programmes.

Watch it if you can and let us know what you think.

UPDATE, 6 April: The programme has now been broadcast and you can watch it below:

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Sinead Rocks is editor of

Exploring the economic downturn

Alistair Burnett Alistair Burnett | 15:05 UK time, Friday, 13 March 2009

What if the economic system is really broken?

The World TonightThat's a question we'd been asking ourselves on The World Tonight over the past few months and we've now started airing in a series of reports by our economics correspondent, Jonty Bloom.

The idea for the series, which we've been running each Friday since 27 February, (you can listen here) came from discussions Jonty and I had been having over how to provide an original approach to covering the economic downturn story.

The purpose of programmes like The World Tonight, is both to report and analyse the news.

As the economic downturn has gathered pace in the past few months, though - with the succession of stories on rapidly deteriorating economic figures and indicators - it has become increasingly challenging for us to find new and original approaches to analysing what's happening.

As opposed to reporting the facts of the story on the day-to-day basis.

For sale sign in a shop windowOne theme that has struck me was the underlining assumption of the politicians, business people and economists we have been speaking to, that the economy would eventually recover and growth would resume. The common assumption seemed to be that the way banks work will need to change and financial regulation will be reformed, but the basic way the economy functions would not change.

But what if this recovery does not happen? What if the present economic system just doesn't work any more and it's more than a cyclical downturn?

Given the view of many economists that we don't know whether the stimulus measures being employed by the major economies at the moment will work, it seems a reasonable question.

We decided to focus on the British economy first and Jonty's been exploring three areas over the past three weeks...

• Whether the British need to wean themselves of their addiction to easy credit secured on the expectation of ever-increasing property values
• Given the problems in the financial sector, whether Britain needs to increase the share of manufacturing in the economy
• Whether a more balanced economy would result from personal wealth and opportunity being more evenly distributed

Next, we aim to look at what ideas for the future of the global economy are coming from other countries in the G20, such as India and South Africa; and we'll also be looking at what new thinking there is on whether a return to business as usual in the economy is sustainable given the current strain on the world's resources.

We'd be interested to know what you think.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of World Tonight

Third-party embedded video

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Steve Herrmann Steve Herrmann | 11:27 UK time, Thursday, 12 March 2009

Having launched embedded audio and video last year, we're now introducing a feature which will allow the content to be embedded on third-party sites.

The initial phase is starting with some Technology stories - you can see examples at , and the piece below, .

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We hope that this will be useful for those of you with blogs or other websites who wish to include our content. My colleague John O'Donovan has written a post about some of the issues and how the feature works at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Internet Blog.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the .

Ex-³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ journalist arrested in Iran

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Jon Williams Jon Williams | 08:47 UK time, Wednesday, 11 March 2009

Two weeks ago, we learned that a former colleague had been arrested in Iran. Roxana Saberi, an American citizen, whose father is Iranian, has reported from Tehran for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ as well as the US public broadcaster NPR and ABC. She was detained at the end of January - but there is much that remains unclear about the circumstances of Roxana's arrest.

Roxana SaberiRoxana, 31, has lived in Iran for the past six years. Before her arrest she was studying for a master's degree in Iranian studies and international relations, and was writing a book about Iran. Last night the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ joined other international broadcasters in calling for the Iranian authorities to if no charges are filed, we believe she should be released and given permission to return to the United States.

Roxana has many friends and colleagues around the world - all of us are deeply concerned about her well-being.

Jon Williams is the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World News Editor.

News ticker, most shared and most read

Steve Herrmann Steve Herrmann | 10:03 UK time, Tuesday, 10 March 2009

We're making a change soon to the of latest news headlines.

We've redesigned it to give more prominence to breaking news - as well as to latest headlines and to upcoming scheduled news events. You'll be able to stop or replay the ticker items and click straight through to video, as well as to stories.

The ticker has always carried breaking news, but we've had only one "level" for any headline that appears, so it's not very obvious when there's something we regard as more urgent or important which we want you to see. This will give us more options to signal why we are placing something in the ticker, and how important we think it is. .

While I'm here, can I update you on a couple of other small changes?

On the "Most read" story lists which appear on the right-hand side of every page, we've changed the "Most emailed" tab to "Most shared", so that it includes not only items shared by email, but also stories which have been bookmarked or recommended by you on other sites such as Facebook or Digg. The idea is to get a broader range of input to these recommendations.

We're also leaving the "Most read" list set at ten headlines, because it's clear that you are making use of these slightly longer lists, browsing through them and picking out stories of interest. As ever, we're keen to hear what you think about any or all of these changes.

Update 1308: For those watching carefully, you may have noticed that the new ticker has appeared - at the moment, it's on the UK edition front page only, we're working on the international edition front page now.

Update 1600: The new ticker is now successfully up and running on both editions of the site.

Update Thursday 1718: Thanks for your comments; I've posted a reply below.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the .

Cold weather and a new look online

Richard Chapman Richard Chapman | 12:30 UK time, Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Without wishing to fall into cliche mode February 2009 will always be remembered by the team as a month of two halves.

According to provisional Met Office figures, as a whole, this winter is expected to be the coldest in the UK since 1995/6. The low temperatures have also been accompanied at times by heavy snow.

Woodmansterne railway station, Coulsdon, Surrey on Monday 2 February 2009

Monday 2 February saw heavy overnight snowfall in south-east England, the heaviest snow in 18 years, causing trains and buses to be cancelled, and airports and schools to be closed.

Some parts of London saw up to 20cm (eight inches) of snow with the highest accumulations reported on the North Downs at 28cm (11 inches).

There was little comedy value for those of us who needed to get to work but with hundreds of schools closed many children enjoyed making snowmen as the thousands of .

The snowfall also raised the question of imperial units versus metric measurements. Our weather policy has not changed over the years and we continued to present the data in metric with conversions, in this case to inches, when significant.

Although, I have to say at times it did remind me of one of the most famous lines in comedy, from Hancock's Half Hour, The Blood Donor: "A pint, that's very nearly an armful," as we did our best to present the detail of the snow depths and offer conversions when the pictures really told the story well enough.

Aviemore recorded the lowest February temperature since 1986 (-18C) on the morning of the 9 February, Altnaharra in the Highlands was down to -15C and Aberdeen was -12C.

From the 15 February the weather turned much milder and we entered a far quieter period of weather. Temperatures peaked at 15.3C (59F) in Charlwood, Surrey on Friday 27 February, making it the warmest day of the year so far.

Of course, the weather itself was not the only major feature of February 2009 for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Weather team. As you may have noticed from my previous blogs on the subject we managed to plan the launch of our new look weather website just in time for the significant snowfall.

Screengrab of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Weather site

Although this produced major interest in the new site it also presented us with a problem. The traffic to the site was greater than we had ever experienced with a reported 500,000 users per hour. As a result the decision was taken to roll back to the old weather site until we were able to ensure we could cope with the increased traffic numbers.

It took a huge effort by the project team to ensure that we had the resilience to migrate everyone across to the new look site and during the last week in February users of the weather site were re-directed to the new version.

Some pages still need to be migrated over to the new design and this will happen over the next few months. So take a look around the new site and let us know what you think.

And for the outlook, the first week of March is seeing temperatures dipping back down below the seasonal average, as cold air floods across the UK. And with that comes a return to wintry weather.

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