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Welcome to the latest Media Agenda Talk. Good to see so many of you continuing to come. First, a little notice to those of you who are coming on the media history walk after this. Can you make sure you stay behind because at 6:15 in here, we're going to sort out the groups, then we're going to go on a lovely walk around local media history sites. And I feel a little bit like a piece of media history tonight, partly because one of the lovely things I did in my career before coming to the LSE was to work at the BBC for 10 years. When was it? The 90s? The 90s. And I worked in television. We used to call it television then television news and current affairs. It's now called visual journalism. And in a sense you kind of think, well, television, visual journalism. What could be more quaint? The idea of, you know, this screen, somebody makes stuff and you can't swipe the television screen, can you? But in fact, television news, television visual journalism is incredibly popular, still incredibly resilient, and it's still the way that most people get most of their news, not just in Britain, but internationally. But of course, it's also changing partly what's happening inside the box, as it were, but also in terms of how people relate and watch that TV news. We're very lucky tonight that we've got Amanda Farnsworth, who, dare I say, is also somebody who's got some media history to her. She's somebody who's got tremendous experience at the BBC of editing their flagship news programs. She had a lot of fun recently being involved with the BBC's Olympic coverage and is currently, as I say, head of BBC visual journalism. She is going to take you when we get rid of the Java Update. Skip this version.
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Remind me later.
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Not so. Thank you, Nick. Thanks a lot, Nick. So Amanda's going to take you on a tour of BBC visual journalism. What it does, the variety of it, and a lot of new stuff that's. That's happening. So I'll let Amanda get on with it and at the end of it, you can ask her questions about the BBC's visual journalism or perhaps even wider issues around the BBC. Can I just ask before we start, how many people have actually consumed any BBC visual journalism? Yeah, you've got a lot of customers out there, Amanda. The other thing I want to remind you that if you are doing Twitter tonight, The hashtag is PolisBBC. Okay, thanks very much, Amanda.
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Thanks very much, Charlie. Thanks for having me here and thank you all for coming. You know, you always get this Kind of little bit of you which goes, will anyone turn up? But here you are. And the second weird thing, apart from the fact that you've all turned up, is that 30 years ago. Yes. When Charlie said tremendous history in the BBC, what he meant was, I'm quite old, actually. And 30 years ago I was sitting where you were, because I am in fact an alumni, as they call them. This was where I went to university and I used to have my psychology lectures in here. And all I can say is I didn't end up doing a degree in psychology. And I hope that my little tour around visual journalism at the BBC is a bit more interesting than most of the lectures I consumed in this room. I'm sure it's much better than it was then, but I think visual journalism was one of those. It's one of those new catchphrases that has sort of come into the ether in the last few years. And, you know, in my previous life, I've done jobs like, as Charlie said, I was editor of the six o' clock television news or our flagship news bulletin. I was deputy editor of Newsnight, which is our late night current affairs show. I was bureau Chief in Washington D.C. in the 90s. And whenever anyone in those days used to say, oh, no, Amanda, what do you do? And I could say, well, I'm, you know, and they'll understand. And now they go, what do you do, Amanda? And I go, I'm the head of visual journalism at BBC News. And they go, what's that? So I thought I'd better just start with a kind of, a little bit of a definition, because in true BBC style, visual journalism at the BBC isn't actually what visual journalism outside the BBC is either. Stay with me. So normally, I think if you were to Google visual journalism, you would find a lot of references to online, kind of online multimedia, high end, interactive kind of stuff. And indeed we do do that, but not exactly uniquely, but possibly uniquely and very probably. We are, as they say, first movers in the market because we're a broadcasting organization, we're not a newspaper. We don't come from a print background. We want to make our television, particularly our television assets, but also some of our radio assets come together with our online journalists and developers and designers and create what we call visual journalism. So if I look at my team, I'll just explain who works for me. All the television graphic designers work for me. So the people that do all those graphics that pop up in those screens next to Hugh Edwards or within our reports on the news Programs or Newsnight, they all work for me. But in addition, I've got a team of online journalists who do the journalism around that multimedia interactive stuff that you see online. And we've also got a chunk of developers who write the code that make things work, and designers for the online environment as opposed to the tele environment. So I guess you all kind of, a lot of you will have a tablet. And if I was to ask the question, what is tablet? Is that a television or. Or is it a kind of computer? And the answer is, well, it's kind of both really. And I think we are in that place and we want to really work at that place where platforms are converging and platforms are coming together. And really it's not so much about how you're consuming content, it's about what you want to do with it. And it's about not the platform, but about the content itself. So that's a little introduction. I'm going to now hopefully give you quite a lot of stuff which is like moving and on and video LED rather than a lot of stats and graphs. But you can ask me about stats and graphs and things later too, if you like. So, to kind of kick off. To kick off. To kick off. Here's what I say when people ask me, I told you what it really is. It's bringing television and online together and kind of innovating in that new space. But we want to do that. To what end? To use our skill and creativity to engage and inform our audiences on the biggest and most significant stories. Not the whole kind of run of the mill stuff. No one has enough money to do the kind of run of the mill stuff, but on the big breaking stories and on the big set piece events and provide really kind of personalized, shareable visual explanations for things. We've got this newsroom. This doesn't look very good, but bear with me. We've got this newsroom now where we have put all our online journalists, almost all, certainly all the people who are working on the daily news, our online journalists, our graphic designers, our picture editors, the people who work for television, the people that work for radio, all coming together in, I think it's Europe's biggest newsroom. And this is a truly multimedia newsroom where we all share resources and we share ideas. I wouldn't say we're kind of 100% perfect, all kind of working across platforms seamlessly, but we've made a really big start by bringing all our mediums together into one place. And here's a gratuitous bit of telly which you may or may not have seen. This is one of the most bizarre and wonderful moments in broadcasting history. In my view. It's when the Queen, she who I actually, I do adore the Queen. I've got to tell you, she came to Broadcasting House and I think there was a fair amount in the press about Queen goes into, you know, lefty hot house. But in fact the Queen went into a place where I don't think she's ever, in fact, I know because I do lot of royal events and royal coverage myself. I don't think she's ever quite experienced what she experienced that morning with people literally jumping over their desks to get anywhere near her. And so this is the moment as it was captured live on air by the BBC News Channel. Oh no, go back. Hang on. Finger trouble. Here we go. Now we are completely impartial at the BBC and balanced in our reporting, as I think that showed. But the only 10 link I can give you is to just say that there were the online, the people, the journalists for the web and telly and radio were equally as crazy trying to get somewhere near the Queen. So we are a truly multi platform multimedia newsroom. Slightly more seriously, I think what visual journalism can do. So as I say, it's that graphic, very visual content could be moving, could be static. But what it can do is help us meet three of the real challenges that our audience gives us. And they're these three things. How to be distinctive. You know, if you look at the kind of agenda, the news agenda followed by most mainstream media, it's pretty similar. If you compare us with Sky News or ITN News on the television, or you look at the Daily Telegraph website or the Guardian website, you know, there'll be a few differences. But we all, you know, we follow a kind of news agenda. So if we've got all got the same kind of agenda, how does the BBC actually sort of stand out and be distinctive in that market? And I think actually our visual journalism is one of the ways that we can meet that challenge. Secondly, the BBC is often seen as a really, and this is true, we're a trustworthy, impartial, balanced news reporting organization with a great history. We have great expertise in analysis and we really care about what we do, I care passionately about what we do. But sometimes we can be seen to be sometimes a little bit old fashioned in how we approach things. No one kind of often says the BBC is at the cutting edge, although of course there's plenty of history to show that we are iplayer, if any of you are using iPlayer as a BBC product. But I think our visual journalism can help us reinforce that message that actually we are really modern and lively. And then thirdly, you know, they say a picture tells a thousand words. Well, just that basic understanding, that kind of easy way of just going, yeah, I get that because I can see it visually, rather than having to listen to lots of words that tell me something about it. So these are the three audience challenges. I've sort of framed some of the examples. I'm going to show you around those three challenges. So, first of all, distinctiveness, how to stand out in the market. Now, I know quite a few of you will probably not be British or English. You'll probably come from overseas to study here. It was certainly true in my day. Well, you'll probably have found out already that we are completely still obsessed with class in this country. And therefore, to tap into that vein of interest, we invented what we called the Great British Class calculator, in conjunction with several universities and also a lot of sort of geeky people in the BBC who crunch numbers and stuff. And this particular, I'm going to go and show you it, because I don't know how many of you actually took the test or not, but it got 6.9 million page views, which is phenomenally big. It was shared 50 times for every thousand page views. It's the most shareable thing we've ever done. And an average of people clicked 8 times per page view. So those are really stonking figures. So let's just take a look at it. How does that look? Just about get the size of it. So this is so in conjunction with something called BBC Labs and several universities, 161,000 people were surveyed and asked to tell the researchers about their lives. And from that they constructed six classes. We've really had working class, middle class and upper class in this country. But they decided, no, no, that's not sophisticated enough. We need six classes now. So what you do is you take your test and this was something that worked on desktop, on mobile and on tablet, and you just fill in, you know, what's your household income?
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Click.
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Do I rent or own? I own. And do I have any savings? I have some savings. Go to next. And these are about the people that I work, that I socialize with. So I socialise with Charlie and with my niece and with someone I met on the bus and say sex tree. Okay. That's my kind of group of social pals. And of course I listen to huge amounts of hips hip hop music. So I'll post that. I do actually love sports. I'm a West Ham fan, so that bit's true. Let's see what I end up as. I'm a technical middle class. I mix socially with people similar to myself and I work in a research, science or technical field. That's not actually not. And I enjoy going to the gym and using social media. That's not. Don't run off. I, I do, I do. I've got a Twitter account and everything. So anyway, so this is kind of the kind of thing that we do to stand out in the market. You could write a very worthy article about this, but we didn't. We used a calculator. And what you could do at the end of it is share your result. And that's what was really kind of, as you say in the social media world, sticky about it. People would share it and then share it and share it and share it and then do it again and be more truthful next time and share it again. And that's what really kind of worked and made it kind of stand out, if you like, in the market. Let's go back. So that's one thing that we've done and what we can do because we kind of obviously have television channels as well, is we can kind of blur the distinction between online it being an online thing and being a tele thing. So we gave it to one of our media correspondents and he took it out in Covent Garden, so far from here. And this is a report that appeared on all of the bulletins on television that day and also on the news channel and there were various versions done for other radio outlets. So let's take a look at this and see how that worked in a television environment. I can assure you there's real academic bottom behind this survey, but you can have some fun with it. And that is what happened to the page views online juxtaposition. Just as our bulletins were going out. So as the package went out on the 1 o' clock news, the 6 o' clock news and the 10 o' clock news, you see that huge spike and that is the power of cross platform. And because we are paid for by everyone who has a license fee, it's really important to us that our content gets to as many people as possible. And that's why it matters. We don't just do projects which are about calculators, but we do have quite a few calculators. We've got a fuel calculator for example, when our budget comes out and the government decides what they're going to spend money on, you can put all your details in and find out whether you're better or worse off. But we also do quite a lot of things that just are very personable and shareable. So down on the bottom right actually is a piece we did for the many language services that the BBC runs. This one was in Russian and it was about what Olympic athlete are you? So you could put in your kind of details and discover you were a Chinese swimmer. Sadly, not me, I was not a Chinese swimmer. Neither was I at the other end of the scale. And a weightlifter, but I think I was a three day eventer, which I think is alright. As long as you're not the horse obviously. You could also put in your date of birth to the other this populator here and find out whether you were, what number baby you were in human history. And I'm around three and a half million. Just so you know. So these sort of personal relevance projects are hugely popular and okay, they, they probably appeal to a particular kind of section of the audience more than others. And if we were only doing the stuff which kind of is fun but also quite meaningful. It's quite interesting to know how your, the price of fuel you're paying compares with the price of fuel that other people are paying either in this country or other countries. And to find out which baby you are is really important to understand how many people there are in the world and the rate of change and the growth and population. So there's always a serious side to it. But if we were only doing these things, you think, hang on, maybe we haven't got the balance right, but we do a lot of even more serious things than this. But on the actual shareable nature, I think that's the thing that makes these calculators so kind of compelling. So on the field calculator, you can say I pay X amount more than average to fill up with Olympic athletes. You can say I am Paloma Schmidt. I think she was. I don't know what Paloma did actually. Or you can share your class, etc. And that is really popular. Second, audience challenge is about modernity. So it's sort of like helping people to realize the BBC is a pretty cutting edge broadcasting organization. And one of the things that we have in the BBC in our new building, a new broadcasting house, is a virtual reality studio. Don't know how many of you have ever experienced that, but it's basically a big green room. It can be just a big green wall or it can be a big green curtain in years gone by. But we've now got a big green room with cameras in it. And onto the greenness you can project anything you like. So you can put a correspondent on Mars. You can put a correspondent on the sea floor, which is where our science editor, David Shookman is in this picture. And we use it to kind of tell stories in a more visual and engaging way. People kind of look at David Shipman on the sea floor and go, blimey, you know, what's that then? And engage with it in a way that they don't in, you know, more traditional storytelling techniques. Sometimes it's a way of kind of waking the viewer up, if you like. And we thought, how can we use that? It's essentially a television, linear TV asset, and put it online and use it in a different way. And the way that we started exploring with is to put kind of video hotspots on the actual online version of the television experience. And you can interact with them and find out more. And so let's have a look at that, see how it's working. Okay, so I'm seeing a bit more information about what a deep sea vent is. That's what this whole experience is about. These big vents that are on the sea floor and they're kind of near where the Earth's various plates meet. And they're very rich in minerals and they're rich in kind of unique sea life and stuff. So I learn a bit more about that. And then when I close the window, hopefully I should go back to the lovely David telling me what's what. It's one of the things I know the industry is really keen to kind of get right and explore the interactivity of video. And so there we are, the BBC. We've already started doing it, but we're not always doing it on our own. We've got several partners that we do it with as well. Just to show you, whilst I've got it here, this was another wonderful multimedia project we did, bringing television and the web together. It's called how to Put a Human on Mars. We work with Imperial College on this, who have done a lot of work about what it would actually take to travel to Mars. And we've used WebGL Web Graphics Library, which is used in some Hollywood movie, to allow us to. In a news environment. I don't think it's been done in a news environment before. Manipulate various 3D objects like Mars or like the spacecraft that was that we designed according to the Imperial College spec. So you can kind of see it from lots of different angles, but also a lot of video that we made specially, including some in our virtual reality studio to kind of imagine what the trip would be like. So just listen to a few seconds of this. And this is a start up company that we work with called Wire Wax and they make a particular kind of interactive video where they put interactive tags on the video and you can click on them and things happen. But it's far more sophisticated than what we've started to experiment with in house. And you can actually click on a video and get to another video which we haven't yet managed to do. So let's have a look at that. And this was a piece we did. I brought with me the latest, the very latest. No one outside the BBC has actually seen this before because we only did it in the last week or two. And this is absolutely pilot, it's not even on our website yet. But another kind of start up company we're working with is called Touchcast and they are doing again kind of interactive video, but in a very different way. They have an iPad app. In fact, it's a publicly available iPad app. Some of you may or may not have used it and essentially you kind of program in the events that you want to happen before you start speaking. And then as you speak you press a button and the various applications open and they may be a map, they may be a webpage. Eventually they will be video and audio and various other things as well. We did a bit of post production on this one because the iPad app at the moment doesn't. You can't get video into it. So we had to take it into a desktop environment, put video into it. But this is how it will, this is how it would look. And we're just experimenting with the Touchcast people about, you know, does this work? Is this good for us? Who would want to use it? How could we use it on what kinds of stories? Right now it's not going to do it. I'll describe what it does. So Rory was at a big Berlin tech show and that's where they launched the Samsung mobile phone watch thing and various other products. And he used the Touchcast to basically, basically kind of have a much more interactive speaking experience with the viewers. The first thing he does is say, hey, you can look at my blog. You can click on his blog, that's that kind of big pointy finger in the corner and you can read his blog. And if you click on his blog, then he just kind of becomes a little kind of thing in the corner and keeps speaking whilst you look at his blog. But if you interact with the blog, it stops. Pauses him until you stopped interacting with the blog. And then you can go back and pick up where you were with him. And so it's kind of like, you know, it's not dissimilar to the Deepwater Horizon idea, it's not dissimilar in some ways to the other interactive video that I've shown you, but it is a new kind of sense of how to do it. It means that the correspondent is still very much at the heart and centre of the piece, communicating with the audience, not looking down all the time, and being very interactive and less formal. And, you know, here we are at the BBC doing all these kinds of experiments. Sorry I couldn't show you that I would love to have done. There we go. This is more like the old BBC. This is something that actually is quite cutting edge. But we called it Project 50P because it literally cost 50P to do. We nearly went to war with Syria, as you probably know, not very long ago. And we wanted to have a kind of very quick way of having a sort of interactive tool that the correspondents could use to sort of explain any military action. So, you know, where warships were sailing from, where bombing runs were being done and what the targets were. These are the sorts of things that we've done before with like, very expensive and quite complicated pieces of kit. But we needed something that would be ready very quickly. And so what we did was take an Android app and just sort of break it out and write a bit of new code in it. And then we put it back in the tablet, the Android tablet we bought. And then the correspondent could literally be sitting next to a print presenter in a studio and just press a button and things would happen that he pre programmed or she pre programmed to happen. So, you know, you could tell the story of the first wave of bombings, for example, and all these graphics would appear on all the big screens that you see in our studios all the time. So another way of kind of blurring that distinction between online and the web and tele. Here's something that's absolutely, absolutely online, but working on the television. And finally, that final audience challenge understanding. So if I told you that dark blue is bad and light blue is good, then you immediately get that one end of this graphic is a good place to be and the other end of this graphic is a bad place to be. And what this graphic is about is how the age of police officers under 26 in each of the police forces in this country. And dark blue is basically, they're hardly recruiting anyone under 26 and light blue is, you know, all the youngsters are flocking there. So essentially, I'm afraid Cleveland's at the bottom. So if you are a burglar in Cleveland, you are more likely to win the chase post the evil deed being done. And I think, you know, these are the sorts of graphics which you're probably all used to looking at, which just as you know, you can just look at it and you get it very, very quickly. It's a way of just visualizing data in a user friendly way. There are many, many different ways of doing it, but you kind of get it in a way that, you know, you wouldn't get it so quickly otherwise. And we reinforce that kind of cross platform nature of what we do through branding. So you'll see the same kind of Baroness Thatcher's funeral branding online and on television. But if I just talk about the fact that we also now have to design very much for all the different kind of versions, all the different devices that you might be watching on. And this is just a graphic for which shows on the left hand side here, that's what you get if you've got a really old fashioned phone. I'm sure none of you have those. You get a bit more when you get to a smartphone, a bit more when you get to tablet, and then the full Monty when you get to desktop. But it's really important for us now to design specifically not just for desktop. And our basic offer is always desktop and mobile these days. That's because although our news audience kind of has stayed pretty, you know, solid throughout the years, this is what's happening at weekends and now actually happening during the week, which is the people coming to the news site on mobile is overtaking the number of people coming on desktop. And that's quite a recent phenomenon. It's really only in the last year or two, it's happened more, much more quickly than we thought. But it means that if you're doing fancy graphics and fancy motion graphics and video and all this stuff, which we thought a few years ago would be primarily just for people on desktop, I know I do use my mobile phone like a desktop all the time. I want all the graphics. I watch loads of video, I watch lots of live video. And we found that during the Olympics that that phenomenon really took hold in this country. So it's no good just being, oh, you know, 50% of our audience can see it because they're looking on a desktop. We've got to be there where people want it. And all those different devices, it makes design a lot more complicated than it was. But let's have just another word about data. Going back to data so you can get these kind of basic visualizations. And this is just, you know, it's a map. It tells you about the percentage of the, of the population who paid a bribe across the world. This was incredibly popular, got nearly a million hits. But it's basically taking some data and saying, let's show it on a map or let's show it in some way. The next stage, I mean, having used that data, you know, you've got to make sure it's good data, you've got to make sure it's, you know, sourced well, etc. Etc. But the next stage is to take two sets of data and bring them together and find out something new you didn't know before. So in this case in USA Today, they took the pollution readings from every pollution monitoring device that the EPA had set up. They plotted them against every primary and secondary school or high school, as they say, and then every parent could look up what the pollution level was near little Johnny's school. It went down very well amongst the parents and they won lots of awards for it. But they found out something genuinely new by bringing two sets of data together. And that's where I want the BBC to go with its data journalism. Not just visualization, but finding out new things. We've got a couple of projects in the pipeline that I really hope will show that we can do that in the coming months. Okay, I'm about to winding up now. I want to say that data can be fun and I want to say that visual journalism can be fun. So I'll just hopefully play you this and all will be revealed in a minute. That was a program that was on just a few months ago and it was the top rating program on BBC2, even more than Top Gear, which is incredibly popular. Got nearly 5 million people watching it. But what is the link with data? I hear you say, fear not. So the Horizon people had no money for their website and said, can you do something for us? We're gathering all this data. We've put GPS's on, you know, every cat in this village near Guildford and we've got cat cams on 50 cats. And we want to kind of, you know, we can get so much into an hour of television, but what can we do with all the rest of the stuff. Cat love. Am I. You came to the right place. I said so. We devoted a huge amount of resources to this and we created this website. And look, there is a kind of, you know, a beauty to this website. Each of these are the real cats drawn by one of our online designers. And you click on a cat and you can learn more about the cat. So hang on a minute. Let me go. Okay, so we're up here, right? I am going to click on Orlando. Here's my favorite. When I click on Orlando, I get all that data that was around his neck. This is Orlando's journey. That's his territory. And I get a little pen portrait of him. He was, he used to be a feral cat in Hong Kong. He refuses cat food and survives the by hunting wildlife. Now anyone who knows. So, okay, that's all I want to talk about about the data. Like, wow, you know, you've just got all this data and you can map it and it looks great. Okay. And we've got lots of fancy facts about Orlando and how many. How many poor paw prints he made and everything else. But the most interesting thing that happened to Orlando is anyone who owns a cat will know this, that if they eat things, that isn't cat food. Not always Ways is it a very good idea. Thank you very much.