Social Media at BBC News

The Re-Making of Crisis Reporting

Valerie Belair-Gagnon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317585008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Since the emergence of social media in the journalistic landscape, the BBC has sought to produce reporting more connected to its audience while retaining its authority as a public broadcaster in crisis reporting. Using empirical analysis of crisis news production at the BBC, this book shows that the emergence of social media at the BBC and the need to manage this kind of material led to a new media logic in which tech-savvy journalists take on a new centrality in the newsroom. In this changed context, the politico-economic and socio-cultural logic have led to a more connected newsroom involving this new breed of journalists and BBC audience. This examination of news production events shows that in the midst of transformations in journalistic practices and norms, including newsgathering, sourcing, distribution and impartiality, the BBC has reasserted its authority as a public broadcaster.

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1
“Auntie” Takes On Social Media

The tweeting of the ‘death’ of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has provoked considerable and understandable debate about how mainstream media use Twitter. Those erroneous reports—on Twitter and elsewhere—raise important questions about how to correct information and whether to apologise and explain, as NPR does here. Should incorrect tweets be deleted? It’s a question that crosses over to core editorial issues, like fact checking and sourcing. This debate is just the latest of several which, together, chart Twitter’s inexorable evolution from a channel for casual conversation to a mainstream media platform.

(Matthew Eltringham, 2011)

The Emergence of Social Media at BBC News¹

On 27 October 2004, Richard Sambrook, then BBC Director of Global News, spoke in New York at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. In a talk entitled “Holding on to Objectivity”, Sambrook suggested ways to promote objectivity in journalism in the 21st century.² He found that managing relationships with audiences is an essential part of the news organisation’s service to the public. Thinking about the relationship between audience relations and technologies was nothing new at the time. In the early 2000s, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s book, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and What the People Should Expect,³ and Dan Gilmor’s book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People, were widely discussed internally at the BBC.

In his October 2004 speech, Sambrook pointed to the BBC’s launch of News Watch on the BBC 24-hour news channel, where viewers could discuss BBC news coverage. The BBC had also launched a new website, also called News Watch, to explain editorial processes and policies to audiences. In his speech, Sambrook distinguished bloggers from journalists. He said that bloggers provide an extra source of information to journalists, but that they do not pretend to embody the principle of objectivity that is essential for BBC journalists. He added that the BBC possesses the resources to test, filter, and validate information. This speech reveals a change in the BBC’s culture of journalism, with journalists’ new, open attitude toward emerging media. Sambrook added that bloggers contribute to mainstream journalism by providing content and by examining content produced by others. He declared that new media would be integrated into BBC journalism, insofar as BBC journalists practiced transparency, remained independent, and followed an evidence-based journalism. Sambrook’s speech raises a question: What are the institutional, politico-economic, socio-technological, and cultural transformations at the BBC that set the stage for changes in BBC journalism since 7/7? This chapter explores this social dynamic by discussing how journalists have used social media at the BBC in global crisis reporting.⁴

To have a better understanding of the BBC transformation, the current chapter reviews how journalists have used social media in crisis reporting since 7/7 and how journalists have used crisis events to reaffirm traditional journalistic norms and practices. I focus on the link between the materiality of technologies and the transformations of journalistic norms and practices in the context of the BBC. I argue that the impact of social media on journalism needs to be understood in relation to political changes occurring at the BBC and the industry. This chapter studies the BBC’s struggle to understand and manage social media from the perspective of crisis reporting, journalistic conventions, and the BBC in a period of political, economic, cultural, and institutional shift. The BBC’s reimagination of social media is part of a large-scale BBC project to become closer to its audiences.

The BBC and Audience Participation

Audience involvement in journalism has a history that predates the emergence of social media. Audience material contributed to news coverage long before the emergence of online news and social media. The popular radical press in England in the late 18th century and mid-19th century comprised elements of citizen journalism partly because of its activist stances and audience contribution to reportages (Curran and Seaton, 2003). In the 1740s, American citizens distributed political pamphlets in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The practice of these pamphleteers was elevated in 1776 by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, of which approximately 150,000 copies were printed and distributed. On both sides of the Atlantic, pamphleteers demonstrated that audiences could play an active role in news production (Schudson, 2003, 73). In the 1920s, free radio stations, or pirate radio, involved community activists who broadcasted offshore in parts of Europe and the UK. On 22 November 1963, Abraham Zapruder documented the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy using his Bell & Howell camera; he later sold the print and film rights for $200,000 to Life Magazine (Allan, 2013, 68; Belair-Gagnon and Anderson, 2014; Boaden, 2008; Woodward, 2003). On 3 March 1991, from the balcony of his apartment, George Holliday filmed Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers, creating a recording using his Sony Handycam. The pricing and popularity of these devices prompted the creation of television programmes such as America’s Funniest Home Videos. Following these events, new digital platforms in this emergent communication field transformed journalism practices and norms (Allan, 2007).⁵ For instance, the BBC took initiatives to involve the community in its reporting before the emergence of social media in its journalism (Sambrook, 2005).

The BBC has been a player in online journalism since the early 1990s. In 2001, Digital Storytelling was a flagship project taking digital media production tools into communities in the United Kingdom. Since digital storytelling projects started, the BBC has trained hundreds of citizens across the country to shoot and edit their multimedia packages for broadcast in BBC outputs (Wardle and Williams, 2008). People told their stories and learned the craft of journalism, and people’s stories were produced in short programmes and broadcasted on BBC News or other programmes (Sambrook, 2005). In 2003, Argyll and Bute Council on the West Coast of Scotland started Digital Communities, a Scottish Executive project. Every household in the North Argyll Islands received a personal computer and a narrowband web connection. BBC Scotland launched Island Blogging with the community of the island. In November 2003, the BBC’s Action Network launched a website to help citizens become more involved in their community. Citizens exchanged concerns and organised campaigns on the website. In addition, the BBC provided guides on how to negotiate civic life, briefings, and a database of organisations (Sambrook, 2005).

Audience participation has been part of the BBC since its creation. Yet BBC journalists trace the emergence of social media to the increase in accumulation of audience material and user-generated content, as well as journalistic and citizens’ uses of this material in reporting events. Journalists also associate the emergence of social media with an institutional response to the availability of these media following the Asian tsunami in 2004 (Eltringham, 2010).⁶ At that time, the main sources of citizen material were e-mail and mobile phones: Citizens took pictures on their mobile phones and used the e-mail function on these devices to send photos to the BBC.⁷ This confluence of technologies (camera and e-mail) turned a trickle of citizen material into a torrent.

The 2004 Asian Tsunami: The Rise of UGC in Journalism

On Boxing Day 2004, a powerful earthquake (9.3 on the Richter scale) in the Indian Ocean created a tsunami that affected several countries. What is referred to as the South Asian Tsunami, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, or the Boxing Day Tsunami devastated parts of Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka; it also caused damage as far away as East Africa. The countries that suffered casualties and damages included Australia, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mauritius, Myanmar, Oman, L’île de la Réunion, Seychelles, Singapore, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tanzania, the Maldives, and Yemen. In the hours and days that followed, the BBC received thousands of unsolicited videos, mobile phone pictures, and eyewitness accounts of the events from individuals in affected areas.

The tsunami marks the emergence of social media (recognised as audience material and user-generated content at the time) in BBC journalism. During this event, the accumulation of user-generated content in traditional journalism increased exponentially and the line between audience and journalism became less distinct. The confluence of new technologies and the ability of the audience and the news organisation to create new meanings around news production triggered these drastic changes in journalism. Individuals in places affected by the tsunami initially did not realise the scale of the event; meanwhile, because of user-generated content sent in from affected areas, faraway audiences in distant places knew that the tsunami had hit many countries in the Indian Ocean. For example, information on the tsunami in Sri Lanka reached Western media outlets before any news reached the population settled in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Phone calls from ordinary citizens who witnessed the events reached the Agence France Presse (AFP) and Lanka Business Online journalists. Lanka Business Online broke the story online at 3:34 a.m. and the AFP sent the news agency dispatch at 3:46 a.m. UTC (Samarajiva, 2005, 734–735). Other major news organisations faced similar challenges.

The Asian tsunami was a turning point for crisis reporting (Gilmor, 2005; Allan and Thorsen, 2010). Thomas H. Glocer, at the time the Chief Executive Officer of Thomson Reuters, said that on the day of the main event, none of Reuters’s 2,300 journalists or 1,000 stringers were at the site of the events: “For the first 24 hours”, he said, “the best and only photographs came from tourists armed with telephones, digital cameras and camcorders. If you didn’t have those pictures, you weren’t on the story” (Glocer quoted in Cooper, 2011, 6). In other words, stories were becoming more focused on people’s lives as newsrooms opened up their doors (Beckett, 2008).⁸

During the news coverage of the events, citizens contributed to journalism with firsthand reports (Allan et al., 2007, 376). This material was mainly sent via e-mail and mobile phones to relatives and then sent to news organisations. Technorati.com, a blog-monitoring tool, registered about 55,000 tsunami-related blogs on the first three days following the events. 10,000 more blogs followed (Allan et al., 2007). At the time, Facebook was restricted to university students and Twitter did not yet exist. Witnesses sent in material to the BBC by peer-to-peer methods, especially e-mail, and via the BBC website message board. Kevin Bakhurst, former Controller of BBC News Channel, said:

The power of the Internet and email was demonstrated for the first time [with the tsunami] … The BBC website suddenly became a major source of information where people were trying to find out about friends and relatives. It became a public service in that way, but also just in terms of us getting in contact with people telling their stories … it became a real source as well.

(Bakhurst cited in Cooper, 2011, 18)

The BBC had received thousands of eyewitness accounts from audience members telling their stories about the tsunami. By the end of the first week following the tsunami, BBC News Online had received about 50,000 e-mails. Hannah Howard, BBC’s spokesperson, divided e-mails into four main categories: “People from the UK trying to get information on friends and family in South East Asia; people in Asia e-mailing in to say they were safe; people sharing their stories and experiences; and appeals for help” (Allan et al., 2007, 378). The BBC website message board recorded approximately 400,000 visitors during that same time period (Allan et al., 2007, 378). Many people wrote comments on the BBC website message board and, as a result, some were able to be reunited with their friends and loved ones. For example, an audience member with the online username Pip wrote, “Our thanks to the BBC for getting us news of Harish Sankaran. He’s alive and well and back with us” (BBC, 2005b).

At the time of the tsunami, digital technologies—including the Internet, specifically e-mail and blogs, digital cameras, and camera phones—had evolved insofar as audiences at the scene of the events were able to share in real time eyewitness accounts with professional journalists. At the same time, the availability of social media and the ability of audiences to contribute to news production transformed the journalistic content and technique. Journalists were getting closer geographically and subject-wise to the communities that they were talking to (Beckett, 2008). In that sense, the South Asian tsunami marked a transformative moment in BBC crisis reporting. At the BBC, audiences contributed more to news production of crisis events, although not as journalists’ equals. On the BBC website, editors allocated specific spaces for citizens who had witnessed the event and sent in video and pictures. The tsunami created a precedent in BBC journalism. From the perspective of the BBC, the tsunami signalled the need to manage this kind of material.

Following the tsunami, in March 2005, Director General of BBC Mark Thompson spoke to BBC staff about the Corporation’s transformations. Thompson said, “we plan £32 million of new money to help New Media develop platforms and navigation to support not just existing digital streams but news on demand and two-way applications: new ways for the public to enjoy, interact with and contribute to BBC content” (Thompson, 2005). The BBC General Manager’s speech emphasised that senior managers were planning to invest in new media platforms following a trend dating back to the 1990s. In the 1990s, the BBC was becoming a major international player and vanguard of new technologies, such as through its partnership with the publisher Pearson (Barnett and Curry, 1994, 222). Thompson’s speech also suggested that the BBC would make user-generated content a key part of this development. The BBC UGC Hub thus has origins that predate 7/7; it is part of a larger institutional effort to push the public broadcaster to be leader in new media in the United Kingdom.

The London Bombing Attacks

At the BBC, on 7 July 2005, another breaking news story confirmed the growing significance of user-generated content in BBC journalism: the London bombing attacks. Ordinary citizens’ eyewitness accounts had already proven significant for global audiences, such as during the 11 September 2001 terrorists attacks (Allan 2013; Andén-Papadopoulos, 2013, 2). The key challenge for the BBC during these events was to make sense of citizen engagement in BBC traditional journalism.

In July 2005, half a year into the user-generated content pilot project, social media played a more critical role in the coverage of a disaster much closer to home than the Asian tsunami. In early July 2005, several BBC journalists, including Vicky Taylor and Matthew Eltringham, were sitting in the BBC News website newsroom discussing what to do with audience material and managing a user-generated content pilot project not yet institutionalised as the “UGC Hub”.⁹ That team was part of the News Interactive section of the newsroom, located five floors above the multimedia newsroom in the Television Centre in White City, West London.

At the time, the proposition to set up a UGC Hub had “met with some scepticism from senior quarters in BBC News and very nearly did not happen” (Eltringham, 2010). The BBC was not sure how it would affect its journalism or ideals, including accuracy, impartiality, and objectivity¹⁰ (Douglas, 2006). Only a handful of journalists at the BBC used social media, most of them early technological adopters, including editors writing on the BBC’s “The Editors” blog.

On 7 July 2005, BBC senior managers saw the idea of a UGC Hub in a new light: During the London bombing attacks, the small BBC News Interactive team, located on the 7th floor of the BBC Television Centre, played a critical role in managing user-generated content. As in the case of the Asian tsunami, the events of 7/7 showed the increasing importance ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Selected Social Media
• Timeline
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Crossing the Rubicon
• 1 “Auntie” Takes On Social Media
• 2 Tweet or Be Sacked!
• 3 A New Order
• 4 New Structures, New Actors in the Newsrooms
• 5 The Connected Newsroom
• Conclusion: Global Crises, Local Responses
• Appendix: Unpacking Social Networking
• Bibliography
• Index