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All of life is a live event: how should journalism look?

By Paul Brannan. Originally published 18/02/11 by The BBC College of Journalism. This article is republished with permission.

Commentator Tomi Ahonen’s mobile industry statistics guide is always compelling reading - in fact, many of the numbers have found their way into Marc Settle’s excellent BBC College of Journalism course on mobile.

There’s one number in the blizzard of information that’s especially interesting - that, according to Nokia, the average person looks at their phone 150 times per day.

That’s a glance every six and-a-half minutes.

I’m guessing much of that activity is associated with SMS or other forms of instant messaging, but part of it will be to monitor Facebook’s newsfeed or Twitter’s continuous stream of what Google’s Eric Schmidt calls “newness”.

It’s why I’ve bored for England over the past couple of years about the need to present the flow of news from the BBC as a chronology as well as an editorially weighted, sifted and sorted set of headlines.

There’s drama in minute-by-minute information flux and no reason not to do both, if suitable filters can be added.

We already offer agency-style running updates for set-piece live event pages, but all of life is a live event and this kind of treatment should be our normal operating procedure.

The dip in, dip out behaviour seen in mobile use patterns needs a different news mix and a different metric to measure engagement.

When web stats are talked about, it’s rare for anyone to mention that up to half of unique users only visit a site once a week, that dwell times are scant and fewer than half a dozen pages are looked at.

With all the resources at our disposal, we could lead the way in a different kind of news delivery.

Paul Brannan is Editor, Emerging Platforms, BBC News.

 

Tags: 150, bbc, bbc college, bbc college of journalism, editor, emerging platforms, eric schmidt, instant messaging, paul brannan, permission commentator, sms, tomi ahonens, united kingdom, web stats,

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