Out of Touch or Moral Guardian?

Chris Riley has come up with a great idea for tracking exactly how in touch the BBC website is with its readers. His BBC Touch site compares the top ten headlines on the BBC News front page against their popularity - the news that was actually read.

This brief sample shows that we’re a bit more shallow and materialistic than the beeb would hope we were. We’re also not nearly as interested in cricket as they think (though the recent news from Australia would suggest we’re right to pretend it doesn’t exist ;)) The left column shows the priority the BBC gave the story and the right column shows the most popular stories.

bbcnews

Obviously, the BBC shouldn’t therefore send half of its Middle-East staff to Hollywood as a result. We employ the BBC to educate us, broaden our horizons and inform us about important events.

There are interesting and perhaps disconcerting implications for social media projects here, though. If the news agenda was left to us, would there be any stories about people dying in far-off countries? It’s hard to say, though these sorts of studies make the prospects look bleak.

(via Jeff Jarvis)

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25 November 2006
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5 Comments

Stephen Downes

25/Nov/2006

As I comment on Jarvis’s post, the categorizations are so bad they make any conclusion useless. Look at the list you saw: we have ‘cruise holmes’, ‘cruise’ and ‘tom and katie’ as three separate categories. Which is then interpreted as the BBC missing three separate topics people are interested in. Meanwhile, on the BBC side, we have ‘england’, ‘cricket’ and ‘pakistan’ as three separate topics, not one story about a home.

I would also ask, why the focus on the BBC? Have you seen how the top stories on Digg compare to, say, the top stories on CNN or the NY Times?

Ian Delaney

25/Nov/2006

Thanks for the comment, Stephen.

The focus is on the BBC because Chris has been good enough to do the analysis. Personally, I am interested because I’m British. Insight into US media producers is more than welcome. though.

I assumed ‘Cruise’, ‘Cruise Holmes’ and ‘Tom and Katie’ refer to three different stories on different days. i.e. They are stories, not categories of story.

Bob Boydston

26/Nov/2006

From what is presented, each “popularity point” is equal. What about a breakdown on what the interests are of each of the “readers?” A weighted statistic may show that the true “guardians” are none other than all of us! :)

Ian Delaney

26/Nov/2006

Trouble is, as far as my own experience is concerned, is that tracking data is really poor. I also think there’s some very valid privacy concerns around this.

That said, I would not be surprised if the BBC had access to the best that’s available when it comes to that sort of data.

Chris Riley

04/Dec/2006

Hi, thanks for blogging about BBC Touch. To answer Stephen’s point, the cateogorisation is simply down to the Yahoo Content Analysis API I use to extract keywords from the headlines. I’ve not done any kind of manual analysis into this, its all automatic. Hence breaking it down further by reader would be tricky too, since that data isn’t readily available in a machine readable form.

Hope that helps, it really was a quick “idea - execute” project, so will have its flaws!


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