He made an important point about news and blogging which ended up being slightly misrepresented in our discussions at BeebCamp.

So I’ve reproduced the email here with his permission and have posted it on my blog as well:

Hi Daniel.

I signed up to Beebcamp but unfortunately couldn’t make it yesterday [now, last Tuesday]. Was just skimming through the notes at rooreynolds.com and alighted on the line from your bit about Sport’s live text commentary and the fact news doesn’t do them. In fact we do run such pages, modelled on the Sport approach, with the most recent last Friday for “Downturn day”, though the series done for the US presidential debates are probably better examples. They’re also done weekly for prime minister’s questions. The next big one is planned for US election night next week. Some links below. They’re obviously not blogs in the true sense, and are quite labour intensive, but are popular and now a significant part of our coverage, when the event is right, although we’re still feeling our way with them.

Regards,
Chris

McCain v Obama: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7658160.stm

PMQs 29 Oct: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7697280.stm

Downturn day: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7687142.stm

As I replied to Chris, I’m not sure if I said news doesn’t do any form of liveblogging. If I did, I was thinking of the sort of liveblogging that you can do with software like CoverItLive. The informal nature of the conference meant that sometimes people brought different ideas of what blogging is to the table (though this in itself was interesting).

I didn’t mean to under-acknowledge some of the stuff Chris has kindly pointed to above.

The point about repeats is perhaps less true than we realise. People watch repeats because they’re on at the moment. If they trust the voice of a ‘channel’, they may watch a repeat because it’s on, or even because of other better reasons – to revisit events that have bearing or reflect on topical things or to observe interesting parrallels between different works of art.

VOD is important, and will probably become the major mode of TV consumption, but I think there will always be a need for a continuous feed of curated content. At the moment, we lack the structures to do this well – there’s not enough content on the few channels we have to have meaningful curated continuous streams, we need cross network (and I’m including youtube here as a network), players that can be guided by reputation, voting, or curation streams, and access archive material. The guidance streams need to be democratic and user controlled.

If we get these systems in place, reputation will be more important not less, and there will still be a role for BBC curators, commentators and journalists if they provide significant value.

I like the Social Viewing ideas. It’s an extension to the coming in to work and having the “did you see…last night” conversations. That’s why Big Brother and The Apprentice work so well. Even a simpler thing of just being able to see what my friends are watching right now, last.fm for TV would add so much. If I knew that 3/4 of my friends were watching something now, I’d turn it on whatever it was.

The live blogging of cricket works really well. It’s actually really entertaining as much as it is informative. I often have that on as I’m watching/listening to the game. My Dad used to do this in the olden days with Test Match Special on the radio to get the commentary of the game on TV. It works less well when they do it in football as the game happens too quickly, so they have to focus on the key facts, informative, but dull.

Journalists using twitter or blogs about a story they’re covering may not add much to the actual mechanics of the story, but I think it would enhance their credibility and reliability from an audience perspective. People are so guarded about what is real and what’s spin or propaganda. Blogging or using Twitter as they were investigating the story would add to the perceived reliability of the final published story.