Reboot bbc.co.uk

Building my rebooted:bbc.co.uk homepage - #8: Blending the News

Martin Belam

I thought I would take the time to define a bit more about the eight elements on my hypothetical reboot:bbc.co.uk competition entry, starting with my unified approach to carrying news and sport headlines.

For as long as the BBC homepage has carried news and sport headlines, it has simply displayed the most important couple of stories from each of these sections of bbc.co.uk. I always felt that the page could do a bit more than that, and wanted to try 'blending' some of the BBC feeds together.

My idea was to replace the segregated News and Sport boxes with a more generic headlines section that featured maybe between six and eight headlines. The content would be made up of a blend of several of the BBC's news and sport indexes. The default might be:

• Top two stories from the BBC News homepage
• Top story from the BBC News UK index
• Top story from the BBC News Entertainment section
• Top two stories from the BBC Sport homepage
• Top story from the BBC Sport Football index

I reckon that including stories from the Entertainment index would give the page more of the lighter magazine feel it seems to have, as opposed to the 'hard news' feel of the BBC News homepage itself, and always ensuring there was at least one football story in the headlines box would adequately reflect the national obsession (and mine) with the sport.

The advantage of being able to mix'n'match the feeds would also be the ability to reflect seasonal events. So, for example, during the build-up to Wimbledon you could start including the top story about Tennis on the page, or in the run-up to an event like local elections in the UK you could add more political stories into the mix.

Mind you, for this to work well, you'd have to be pretty cute with the way the system progressively de-duped the headlines, otherwise a hypothetical story about 'an international celebrity footballer sustaining a serious injury whilst making a movie in the UK' could end up filling nearly all of the slots ;-)

In the end, I think that during user-testing most users would have struggled to distinguish where the sport headlines were if they were not sign-posted, so in my "coloured in" wireframe mock-up I have restored the BBC News and BBC Sport branding.

That can become problematic however. In fact - on Monday night I tried to put together what it would look like - and realised I probably needed to put more thought into this - or at least more logic in keeping sport and news apart. Theo Walcott's call up to the England World Cup squad made the BBC News UK index homepage and put an unwelcome BBC Sport cat amongst my BBC News headline pigeons.

The Google News homepage is probably the most high profile example of building a news headlines site out of computer algorithms. Myself, as a service, I think it is great for hunting down worldwide coverage on specific news stories by using the search, but I'd rather, in the end, that my news overview be put together by people who understand their audience and the wider issues behind stories.

That hasn't stopped some of the backstage.bbc.co.uk prototypes testing out ways of using machines to editorially select content - I particularly like Davy Mitchell's Mood News and Mood News - Good News prototypes. Perhaps a BBC 2.0 homepage would have a big interactive slider on it so users could choose whether they wanted good news or bad news from the BBC that day?

In fact, would a BBC 2.0 homepage restrict itself to just news stories from BBC News anyway? Some BBC News stories have featured a panel of related external links from alternative news sources, called 'BBC Newstracker'. I wondered if there would be some entries that take this idea a step further - using user-generated news sources like Wikinews, or user annotated sources like NowPublic.com alongside BBC content - and I see Daz's BBC Fluid entry has something of that ilk, with the inclusion of a "Citizen Journalism" panel on the re-designed page

• 11 May 2006 14:37