TheAislingOne

In looking for the good aspects and bad aspects of various websites interactivity, I decided to examine both Irish and British websites, focusing on the BBC news website, news.bbc.co.uk, and the RTE website, www.rte.ie.

In this blog entry, I have examined news.bbc.co.uk to see how interactive they are and how they moderate their levels of interactivity.

On the BBC news website, its homepage, there are several things one could count as interactivity. There is an option for the reader to change the language of the website. In the sidebar to the left hand side, there are links to every area of news, including business, health, technology etc.

They also provide the reader with internal links to news specific to a country, or a region, such as Africa, Asia-Pacific and Middle East, providing the website visitor with more control over the type of news they read.

For someone looking for a more light-hearted or just a general interest news story, there is an “also in the news” link. The main news of the day is all accessible following links from the main page.

I noticed there weren’t many user polls or surveys, which I think would be another good way for journalists using the internet as a research tool to gauge public opinion on a particular topic.

There are also numerous links to video versions and even radio versions of the main news stories.

Towards the bottom of the news homepage there are linked symbols offering email news, mobile phone alerts, desktop alerts, news feeds and podcasts, all providing the user with interactivity.

There are a few different links to the “News watch” page, which is a page that allows users to comment and make complaints etc. about the website in general. You can report things like factual errors, spelling mistakes and technical problems and also leave general queries and comments.

As regards feeds and further interactivity, there is a link to news feeds at the top right hand corner of the page, easily located. There is also a really good interactive “Have Your Say” section, with links to it on both sides of the homepage. I will go into detail about the have your say section in the next entry where I will also look at moderation.

In the “Have Your Say section of the BBC news website, news.bbc.co.uk, the website provides questions to be addressed by members of the public on the various hot topics of the day/week. People then leave comments under the question asked expressing their views on the topic. Journalists may find the information contained in these opinion sections useful as a gauge to find out how a random intersection of the public feels about an issue, while bearing in mind that they’re all highly opinionated – and moderated. This is the link to the Have Your Say page: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/default.stm

At the top of the page, easily visible, is the notice saying that the Have Your Say section is “FULLY MODERATED”. Meaning despite outwardly seeming like an open forum for discussion, the comments section is controlled by a moderator. Also, it almost encourages moderation, as at the end of every single comment left there is a link to “Alert a Moderator”. This means anything a member of the public sees that they don’t like the sound of can be reported. Maybe not removed, but moderators would be alerted nonetheless.

There is an option to appeal a rejected comment, accessible from a link at the top of the Have Your Say page, labelled “Send us your feedback”. Once clicked on, you are led to a page where you can email comments in about the general workings of BBC news online. It recommends on that page that appealing comments should be done elsewhere and links you further to that. Would people really go to all this trouble to appeal a rejected comment??

The Have Your Say page is further moderated by the fact that you have to create a membership to leave a comment. You could still say pretty much what you like but at the risk of having your membership revoked. There are also a set of “House Rules” listed instructing people on what can and cannot be said/posted on the website.

On some other websites I looked at there were occasions where moderators have “recommended comments” that they highlight, which gives an out of context view of the public feedback to stories. There is also the ability there for the moderators to simply delete comments to sway a discussion in a different, preferred, direction. This type of moderation should not be allowed and I would guess there would be reaction from the public to this affect also.

I chose to focus mainly on www.rte.ie/news having looked at the BBC because they are both online publications that stem from television and radio rather than from print, so I had it in mind that there might be similarities.

The main page of the website is laid out very like the BBC news homepage, in that the sidebar contains the majority of the links to interactive sections, and the main news stories are all centred. However, immediately noticed is the RTE news poll that appears on the main homepage. You can vote instantaneously without membership and see the results of the poll straight away after you vote. It is a really good feature of interactivity. It also gives you the option to review all the previous online polls, a great and handy tool for journalists following up a story from a few days back.

At the bottom of the main page RTE offer Breaking News alerts to your mobile phone, similarly to the BBC.

A feature common to both BBC and RTE is the light-hearted news section, for users looking to distract themselves from the gravity of the headlines. On the RTE site, the section is labelled “Craic”. For anyone who is not Irish or doesn’t speak Irish, this section might not grab immediate attention.

The sidebar on www.rte.ie/news is a little less packed but a little better on the interactivity front than BBC, as is lists Webchats, Audio/Video, Email services, News feeds and text alerts as its services. For these to be in the sidebar rather than solely at the bottom of the page is good as it promotes interactivity.

The text alerts are simple to subscribe to and not all that costly. They list simple instructions on how to sign up and receive your interactive doses of news direct to your mobile phone.

There is an interesting and, I’ve found, very useful tool on the main news page of the RTE website, the Archive Calendar. This is where you can click on any date and get a full list of news stories from that date. For example, this is the link to the news stories from the 15^th of July: www.rte.ie/news/2008/0715/index.html.

The webchat section features people like Miriam O’Callaghan and Charlie Bird and they are online at predetermined times and people ask them questions. No doubt this is a form of interactivity but a discussion like that would definitely be highly moderated, given that the discussion centres around people in the public eye.

In the Contact Us section, also in the sidebar, email addresses for comments, feedback and general enquiries are provided. For all current affairs shows on RTE Radio and TV there are email addresses provided. People could use these as a place to make complaints, maybe prompting some sort of moderation or control by the producers of the website. Link: www.rte.ie/news/contacts.html.

The levels of moderation are different to the BBC as there are no message boards or anything similar to the “Have your say” section, which I think is an oversight on the part of RTE as I think people would be more inclined to visit the website if there was the option to get involved in some healthy debate. The Sky news website has an excellent example of a message board setup, something I think RTE would benefit from providing. http://blogs.news.sky.com/discussions is the link to this message board page. There are many categorised discussions taking part at once.

I think the BBC is unique in that there are no external links to any advertisers, or any other stories or other aspects of stories in other places. On the RTE website, at least there are external links that open new windows to advertising pages. But on BBC news there are only internal links to stories. Is not providing external links to people not giving them a chance to read the story in its fullest context, rather providing the context the BBC website producers have deemed correct and accurate?

On the RTE website, there are few external links, none in text, in fact there are barely even any internal links in-text, similarly to the BBC. They should maybe make it easier for people to get more information and stories in broader context by following the format of a website like Wikipedia, who provide links in text to pages that put the topic in a bigger context, thus giving better understanding of the topic overall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. is the link to an example of how Wikipedia put in-text links to good use. It would be useful for a story about a particular person to contain a link to other stories with that person as the main feature, I think. It would be useful to me anyway. And a feature like that would encourage people to return to the website and use it more.

Such a popular website, and with so much going on on its main homepage alone makes for a very interesting website. www.guardian.co.uk. For online journalists, it would be an excellent tool for sourcing even the most trivial news stories and information. For your average website user, it has endless amounts of news, human interest stories and it knows how to show them off.

In one sidebar alone, it boasts: Podcasts, cartoons, crosswords, the digital archive, email services, news quizzes, sudoku, talkboards, polls, most talked about stories, TV, video and weather. All linked internally. And most of them interactive and accessible for the user.

The Guardian website promotes comment and feedback and participation like no other. On its main page, in the centre column, unlike any other news website, they are actively asking people to take part in discussion and read the blogs of the websites writers based on the most commented upon ones. This, all on the homepage. They also dedicate a whole section to their various means of interactivity, toward the bottom of the homepage. It’s called News Direct to You, and it contains, all in one easily located place, printable versions of the documents, digital editions, digital archives, mobile services, email services, home delivery of the printed version, and RSS feeds.

Guardian online also provide a Dating facility, with 90,000 members registered, which shows how popular their extra facilities can be. They also have it featured on their main homepage, which is actually a lot longer a page than the other news sites I visited. They also feature, like a lot of sites, (RTE and BBC included) a Jobs section, advertising jobs available, (not just within the Guardian, but in general).

Overall I thought the Guardian website was a really great example of a news website for layout, accessibility, interest, interactivity, links, and content.

The main difference between online journalism and print journalism is that, in print, there is a set time when that edition goes to print and cannot be easily retracted or changed or updated. Whereas in online journalism, the news flow and the updates and the changes are constant. On the Guardian online, it generally reads at the top of the page “Updated Less than a Minute ago.” Which guarantees the reader that they are getting the most up too date news.

Journalists no longer have to wait until the following day to release their follow up stories, they can publish them online immediately, allowing the users better and more reliable, up-to-the-minute news. Journalists online can do what no other journalists can in that they can get feedback from their readers directly and respond to it if necessary.

Online journalism allows readers to personalise their reading experience. They can request sections they know will be of interest to them, rather than trawling through a printed publication to find what it is they’re looking for. (obviously not so if its something as clean cut as “sport” that they want, but more specifically, if they want stories just about tomorrow’s Wimbledon final, they can look that up exclusively.) Online these sorts of personalisation are possible, and make the online experience more enhanced than the print experience. Content interactivity and interpersonal interactivity are both features of online journalism that do not feature in print journalism at all.

While the possibilities for external linking to enhance the online reading experience are limitless, very few of the websites I visited have chosen to exploit the use of external links. Can you compare the use of external links to people who buy two or more newspapers and reading from them all? It serves the same purpose as would external links, that is, to put the individual stories into a wider context and hence give a fuller picture.

The only way participatory or public journalism can occur is through news websites. Citizen journalism is when people play an active role in collecting, analysing, reporting and disseminating news related information.

There are several ways in which journalism online has been able to span so far as to include members of the public. Contributors use websites such as www.youtube.com for personal broadcasting, participation can be the submission of video footage or camera phone pictures to news websites. Independent news websites also feature citizen journalism, sites like www.drudgereport.com. News websites dedicated to citizen journalism and freelance contributors like http://english.ohmynews.com/ are places members of the public can contribute and change online journalism into something accessible.

Ask anyone under 25, and they will tell you that they have an account with either www.myspace.com, www.facebook.com, or of course, the most popular one among Irish people, www.bebo.com. Such are the levels of interactivity on these websites that they are almost like having your own website, you can alter it to perfectly suit yourself. People use their social networking sites for advertising, promotion, bringing more attention to their cause etc. Radio stations use these sites to promote their shows and have a homepage where fans of their show can leave comments and feedback as well as talk online to the presenters of the show, or whatever guest on the show volunteers to chat online with the listeners. A similar thing happens with TV shows and other things.

Blogging is a predominant feature of these millions of social networking pages. Any person who has a bebo account can blog to their hearts content. Generally, one would not expect to read any hard-hitting traditional journalism in these blogs, rather the incoherent ramblings of a troubled teen. However the readers of these blogs may be influenced by them one way or another…can this be considered a form, however primitive, of journalism? NO would be my answer. Like I said, and I include my own bebo blog in this: they’re 99.9% of the time incoherent, full of opinion and biased to the core, regardless of the topic for discussion.

There has been a surge of “tribute pages” arising recently. When Katie French died, immediately a Bebo page was made in her honour, and there were thousands upon thousands of comments left in tribute to her life. These pages are created not only for the celebrities, but for normal people who have died whose friends are looking for an outlet for their grief. Personally, I think these pages can be terribly cringe-worthy at times and there are better ways to honour and remember people who died.

Social networks allow us to be in constant contact with a whole network of our friends and relations, where normally contact would be less frequent. They have become so popular that advertisers are paying big money to have ads on the login pages and at the top of each individual page. I think, with the lack of interest young people seem to have in news and current affairs, it might not do any harm to have links to pages where young people can easily access news headlines and they can access news that might be relevant to them. Or it might be an idea to be able to add a “news” application to their homepage. Afterall, you can adopt a virtual pet, why shouldn’t you be able to have a look at the days headlines?

…But what your website can do for you.

Access to the internet can provide us with so many great aids that we don’t get from any other type of media. Email alerts, for example. When you’re reading the Times and you fall upon and interesting article, your paper doesn’t email you to let you know where you might find other articles that interest you. But whatever website you’re on might. News websites which provide a subscription service can be very helpful and make sure you get the news on a daily basis. You can also, upon subscription, choose areas of interest particular to yourself and therefore be emailed things more to your interest, ie. If you were a sports fan, match results might be included, or if you were a health enthusiast, health stories would arrive in your inbox more frequently. There are a number of websites that provide such a service. www.washingtonpost.com, www.nytimes.com, and most other large news agencies.

On most websites, there is a toolbar towards the end of the page, usually, containing such things as “terms of use”, “contact us”, “advertise with us”, “jobs” and “complaints” links. These areas tend to be overlooked, certainly by me, for the more interesting features of the website. However, these links can be a very helpful place, I’ve discovered when researching to write a piece using online sources. You might find hidden information that you wouldn’t otherwise find in the main content of the web page.

Many big news sites also try to entice readers and visitors to their site by knowing what the people want as regards shopping, jobs, cars, houses etc. Lots of sites, mostly at the top of their website, while their links to things like sport, world news, domestic news etc. are all there, they also provide links for things like shopping, cars, employment websites etc. Often, the websites these links lead to are either owned by or sponsored by, or heavily advertised with by the original website. It’s like I’ll scratch you back if you scratch mine, they’re helping each other out. Are these outside links distracting from the purpose of the news website, however? Doubtful, I think, because if the people go to a site for news, get it, and get a link to something else they’re interested in, its probably likely that they’ll return to the original website.