How BBC Outside Source is forging a new, digital style of live video news

If Sepp Blatter wanted his resignation announcement to throw anglophone TV newsrooms into a spin he couldn't have timed it much better.

The FIFA president took to the stage in Zurich at 18:45 local time, fifteen minutes before the traditional six o'clock news slot in the UK and before the lunch time slot in New York.

On the BBC World News channel this coincided, somewhat serendipitously, with the last few minutes of Sportsday, before Ros Atkins and his BBC Outside Source team had to ditch their planned half-hour programme to cover the story as it broke.

Outside Source is built to open up the BBC news machine for all to see, thriving in a breaking news situation and set up to combine the best the BBC has to offer with the best from social media and other sources to give added context to stories.

Using the specially made touch screen, Atkins picked out breaking newswire reports from Reuters; a video of Blatter's speech; tweets from BBC correspondent Richard Conway and The Independent; a map of the #seppblatter hashtag spreading across Twitter; interviews with Conway and FA chairman Greg Dyke; as well as context and reaction from across social media throughout the half-hour programme before handing over to the main news studio.

"These are all things almost any programme would do," Atkins told Journalism.co.uk, but Outside Source needed to run "two parallel production operations" to think about Atkins' live coverage and what would be pulled on to the vast touchscreen that forms the centrepiece of much of the programme.


Hover over the image to see Ros's explanation of the touch screen buttons

"The challenge to this story was that it became a huge story very suddenly," Atkins continued, "and there was a lot of noise around it but quite a limited amount of information."

Quickly finding the tweets and newswire copy that added to the story – praise for the journalists behind the FIFA corruption allegations, a snide comment from Gary Lineker – became crucial for the production team, tweets which Atkins could then display on-screen.

"The advantage of the Outside Source screen is you can show developments better," he said. "So we can show things that come in text form in a more visual manner for the viewer, as opposed to traditional formats where you read the copy out, but you can't show it.

"It's an advantage but also a more complicated production effort and we're still learning the potential of the screen and the workflows in place that can maximise what we can do."

Outside Source started as a radio show in 2013 before moving to the BBC World News channel last year. This week, the programme moved to the BBC News channel for the first time, with a primetime, hour-long show at nine o'clock to give some in-depth analysis to the stories of the day, but in a way that engages the modern, digital viewer.

"We were looking online at how people consume the news, and they don't consume the news in the same linear way as they do in a broadcast medium," Atkins said of the thinking behind Outside Source.

I would rather, in those first couple of hours when a story is very unclear, spend time sharing with our viewers clear claims coming in from different sources instead of speculatingRos Atkins, BBC Outside Source

"They also take lots of relevant and current information from a whole range of sources rather than going to one source – whether it's the BBC or any other – and making that their own place to get information about the world."

This is common knowledge in the industry now, but television news is still very much a one-way format, involving minimal engagement with or acknowledgement of the context in which viewers might be watching.

"Sometimes on rolling news or breaking news, when there's not a lot of information, we fill it with speculation," he said, raising the 2014 shootings at Parliament Hill in Ottawa as a prime example.

"I would rather, in those first couple of hours when a story is very unclear, spend time sharing with our viewers clear claims coming in from different sources instead of speculating around bigger issues with questions that we can't possibly answer."

The BBC's UGC Hub are "masters" in verification techniques regarding claims from social media, but as more and more people are 'second-screening' the news by following social media chat on a mobile device, unverified claims have to be acknowledged, said Atkins, if just to clarify what information is and is not confirmed.

"I think we have to be realistic about how some people consume news and I don't think we can step outside the media environment in which we live.

"So for me I would rather acknowledge that by saying 'here's one reputable source saying X, here's another reputable source saying Y. And at the moment we're not able to tell you which one is correct but we're working on it.'"

TV news isn't all live though. Outside Source's nine o'clock programme is the full hour show developed across the day and aims to give a detailed overview of the most important stories from around the world.

Blatter's resignation was still the lead story yesterday, but by nine o'clock the team had gathered short reaction pieces from correspondents at BBC Arabic, BBC Russia and BBC Afrique – one benefit of language desks "with the kind of contacts you can only dream of".

The show covered global news, sport and business stories that might not make it to the main news channel but that may be discussed heavily on social media.

The capsizing of a boat on the Yangtze River, a Boko Haram attack in Nigeria, the lowering of interest rates in India, airport security failures in the US and the women's World Cup in Canada sits comfortably alongside UK news like the death of politician Charles Kennedy and a rollercoaster accident at the Alton Towers theme park.

"I think we're pretty good at getting the stories that other broadcasters, other news organisations operating in TV in the digital space aren't getting to," Outside Source editor Tim Awford told Journalism.co.uk.

"That's a really important part of what we're trying to do. It's how we are approaching stories as transparently as possible and trying to take away the artifice and the cliches that have inevitably grown up around television. That's a daily challenge."


Inside the BBC Outside Source gallery. Image by Journalism.co.uk

Outside Source is not alone in trying to break down the structures of television to deliver broadcast news in the digital age. Al-Jazeera's The Stream arguably goes further in bringing in sources from around the world to comment on relevant stories, and in 2013 launched its own app to involve viewers directly.

But Outside Source is an experiment in harnessing the power of the BBC to better tell those stories, as well as speaking to viewers in a different manner

"Part of what we're trying to do is be across all of the very best bits of original journalism," continued Awford, "all of those different language services that all of our newsgathering colleagues are producing. And then go out and try to seek out the things on top of that which people haven't thought of yet."

Correspondents from around Broadcasting House played a role in the production and by the time the hour is almost up more FIFA news has broken, as Reuters and ABC report the FBI is investigating Sepp Blatter in line with the rest of the corruption charges.

And feedback from UK viewers on Outside Source's switch to the main news channel has so far been positive.

"The way people consume news has changed so stories come in different forms, often smaller forms," Atkins said, "and I think this format is maybe closer to how they're consuming news on their phone, tablet or PC. So it feels like a reasonable fit with the rest of their lives."

The way we're making broadcast news for online is only really at the very beginning of its evolutionRos Atkins, BBC Outside Source

He still sees a lot of room for improvement in terms of live coverage though as "there are better ways to be integrating live feeds with social media and collated content that all the big media operators can improve on".

"At the moment it still feels like [as a viewer] I need to have a couple of windows open to do that properly.

"Maybe we need to think about, on occasions, producing broadcasts that are bespoke for the online environment rather than TV being carried online.

"Sometimes it works but there are definitely occasions when it doesn't. When I look at some of the big players online like Vice and the Huffington Post I think they've really laid down a serious challenge in lots of different ways.

"But the way we're making broadcast news for online is only really at the very beginning of its evolution and there's a lot of progress we could make there."

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