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BBC News Online is the website of
BBC News
BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broad ...
, the division of the
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responsible for newsgathering and production. It is one of the most popular news websites, with 1.2 billion website visits in April 2021, as well as being used by 60% of the UK's internet users for news.
The website contains international news coverage, as well as British, entertainment, science, and political news. Many reports are accompanied by audio and video from the BBC's
television
Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...
and
radio
Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmi ...
news services, while the latest TV and radio bulletins are also available to view or listen to on the site together with other current affairs programmes.
BBC News Online is closely linked to its sister department website, that of
BBC Sport
BBC Sport is the sports division of the BBC, providing national sports coverage for BBC television, radio and online. The BBC holds the television and radio UK broadcasting rights to several sports, broadcasting the sport live or alongside flag ...
. Both sites follow similar layout and content options and respective journalists work alongside each other. Location information provided by users is also shared with the website of
BBC Weather
BBC Weather is the department of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) responsible for both the preparation and the broadcasting of weather forecasts.
On 6 February 2018, BBC Weather changed supplier from the government Met Office to Me ...
to provide local content.
From 1998 to 2001 the site was named best news website at the
BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards The British Academy of Film and Television Arts ( BAFTA) annually hosted the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards for multimedia entertainment between 1998 and 2003.
In 2003, BAFTA announced the award would be split into two separate ceremonies â ...
when the award category was withdrawn. It has previously won both the Judges' award and the People's Voice award for best news site at the annual
Webby Awards
The Webby Awards are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over two thousand industry experts and technology innovators. Categories includ ...
.
History
The website was launched on 4 November 1997, and was headed by founding editor,
Mike Smartt Mike Smartt OBE is a British journalist and broadcaster, and was the founder and editor-in-chief of BBC News Online, the BBC's Internet news service. With Project Director Bob Eggington, he led the team that launched the service in 1997, and held ...
, and Project Director Bob Eggington. The broader editorial team was brought together from within the BBC, from print journalism and from some online sites.
The BBC had previously created special websites marking the 1995
Budget, the
1996 Olympic Games
The 1996 Summer Olympics (officially the Games of the XXVI Olympiad, also known as Atlanta 1996 and commonly referred to as the Centennial Olympic Games) were an international multi-sport event held from July 19 to August 4, 1996, in Atlanta, ...
,
1997 general election, and the
death of Princess Diana
In the early hours of 31 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales died from injuries sustained earlier that day in a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, France. Dodi Fayed, Diana's partner, and Henri Paul, their chauffeur, were found d ...
in 1997, but nothing on the scale of the launch of the main site itself, which required the development of a completely new production system, for which a team, led by Matthew Karas, was specially hired.
The original design was created by a team, including Matt Jones, and was based on designs by Mike Bennett and design studio Sunbather. Sunbather worked with consultancy,
Lambie-Nairn
Superunion is a global brand and design consultancy, headquartered in London. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of WPP. Superunion was formed after five agencies merged in January 2018, and employs 500 people across 16 offices. , who looked after the overall brand, and has been redesigned several times mainly to match the visual style of BBC News television bulletins and to exploit increases in readers' typical screen resolutions. A major overhaul in 2003, primarily by Paul Sissons and Maire Flynn, coincided with a relaunch of the
BBC News Channel
BBC News (also known as the BBC News Channel) is a British free-to-air public broadcast television news channel for BBC News. It was launched as BBC News 24 on 9 November 1997 at 5:30 pm as part of the BBC's foray into digital domestic telev ...
(then BBC News 24) and featured a wider page design. The site launched a set of semi-official
RSS 0.91 syndication feeds in June 2003 and upgraded them to full feed RSS 2.0 in 2008. Each news index has its own RSS feed, including the in-depth sections.
In 2004 the BBC News website partnered with
Moreover Technologies
Moreover Technologies (generally known as "Moreover") is a provider of business intelligence, media monitoring and news aggregation products for enterprises, also offering free news feeds for consumers. Moreover was founded in 1998 by Nick Dent ...
, in a response to the 2003 Graf Report, to provide links from BBC articles to rival publishers. While the BBC does not censor or change results, the
algorithms
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
used tend to give greater weight to national and international sources over regional or local ones.
Mike Smartt, who became editor in chief in 2000, was later succeeded by
Pete Clifton
Pete Clifton is Editor-in-Chief at the Press Association (PA). Prior to the appointment he was Executive Producer for MSN in the UK and former Head of Editorial Development at BBC News.
Career
Clifton was previously the editor of Ceefax, and befo ...
who was subsequently promoted to Head of BBC News Interactive and replaced by the previous editor Steve Herrmann in 2005.
The BBC began providing real-time global user information in June 2006.
A restructuring of BBC News starting in 2007 saw the dissolution of the separate BBC News Interactive department; the editorial and management departments joined the new multimedia newsroom along with television and radio news within
BBC Television Centre
Television Centre (TVC) is a building complex in White City, West London, that was the headquarters of BBC Television between 1960 and 2013. After a refurbishment, the complex reopened in 2017 with three studios in use for TV production, opera ...
.
![BBC News](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/BBC_News_%282008%29.svg)
New features were gradually introduced, including the publicising of video content more prominently. From May 2007, the website began to offer a live video stream of BBC News 24, the rolling news channel now known as the BBC News channel. In line with the introduction of new features across
BBC Online
BBC Online, formerly known as BBCi, is the BBC's online service. It is a large network of websites including such high-profile sites as BBC News and BBC Sport, Sport, the on-demand video and radio services branded BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds, t ...
, including a new navigation bar, the site was updated in 2008 with wider centred page designs, larger images and an increased emphasis on audio and visual content.
Beginning on 30 April 2009, some published stories included in-text links, mostly to in-site profile articles on people, locations and organisations. The BBC announced on 19 November 2009 that it was to pay more attention to
search engine optimisation
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direc ...
by extending news headlines.
On 14 July 2010, the site was completely redesigned, with the vertical section headings moved to run horizontally near the top of the page. The new design, incorporating larger in-line videos within news articles and standardised font usage, was introduced as a first step to bringing the entire BBC website into line with its new style guidelines. It was met with mixed opinions;
Stephen Fry
Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director and writer. He first came to prominence in the 1980s as one half of the comic double act Fry and Laurie, alongside Hugh Laurie, with the two starring ...
stated his approval of the redesign, and the new design was praised for being "more attractive
ndgraphically stronger".
However, there was also criticism, with some stating that the use of white space was too widespread and led to the need for continuous and excessive scrolling.
![BBC News 2019](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/BBC_News_2019.svg)
On 4 March 2014, the BBC launched a
beta version
A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...
of the website that was built around the principles of
responsive web design, allowing the presentation of content to adjust automatically for a wide variety of screen sizes, from desktop computer to
smartphone
A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...
s and
tablet devices. The new design went live on 23 March 2015.
Features
UK/International editions
There are two different editions of the site: a UK edition, which gives prominence to UK stories, and an international edition, which prioritises international news. Internet users with
IP address
An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...
es originating from the UK are served the UK edition, all others receive the international edition. The international version contains advertising and an "Advertise With Us" link at the bottom. The international version of the website is operated by BBC Global News Ltd., the for-profit BBC subsidiary which operates the
BBC World News
BBC World News is an international English-language pay television network, operated under the ''BBC Global News Limited'' division of the BBC, which is a public corporation of the UK government's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and ...
television channel. All articles are archived indefinitely and can be retrieved via searching or by browsing the extensive ''Special Reports'' section, which contains collections of articles relating to major news stories. The previous seven days' top stories were formerly available through the Week at a Glance section of the website. As well as pure news articles, the site also contains material to support BBC news, current affairs and factual programmes.
Columnists
BBC News Online uses a blog-style system for correspondents to write articles within their specialism. Journalists including
Nick Robinson and
Kamal Ahmed use blogs to provide updates on current events and topics. Editors also provide entries within the "Editors' blog", giving explanations for editorial decisions as well as announcing new features or services. Members of the public are also given the opportunity to comment on entries from journalists and editors.
Prior to the adoption of the blog-style, BBC News Online also had a number of topic-specific
columns
A column or pillar in architecture and structural engineering is a structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below. In other words, a column is a compression membe ...
written by BBC journalists, such as former education correspondent
Mike Baker's ''Mike Baker Weekly'', and technology commentator
Bill Thompson's ''bill board'' (formerly ''bill blog''). BBC News Online Science Writer
Ivan Noble
Ivan Noble (June 1967 – 31 January 2005) was a British journalist who worked for BBC News Online, and became well known for his diary documenting his fight against cancer.
Born in Leeds, he lived in East Germany working as a translator betwee ...
, diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour in August 2002, shared his experiences of cancer in ''Tumour Diary'' until his death on 31 January 2005.
Magazine
The 'Magazine' is a section of BBC News Online that includes a number of articles that are not tied to a particular event or topic, unlike the other articles on the site. The editor is Jonathan Duffy, who took over from Giles Wilson in April 2006.
A major part of the magazine is the "Magazine Monitor" column, which takes an irreverent view on the day's news. It usually includes the "Paper Monitor", which provides a commentary on the daily press in the United Kingdom. During the day a series of
caption competitions and oddities are added. On weekday evenings at around 5p.m. GMT, letters from readers, both serious and light-hearted, are published. Topics can be varied: comments on news stories; how to measure sizes in terms of London
AEC Routemaster
The AEC Routemaster is a front-engined double-decker bus that was designed by London Transport and built by the Associated Equipment Company (AEC) and Park Royal Vehicles. The first prototype was completed in September 1954 and the last one ...
buses, or for larger geographical areas,
Wales
Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the Bristol Channel to the south. It had a population in ...
; spotting people mentioned in news stories whose name is particularly appropriate for their job, etc. Other favourite areas of discussion include the
Flexicon, the gender of Paper Monitor or coming up with sardonic comments about previous letters.
On Friday evenings, ready for Saturday morning, an article called "10 things we didn't know last week" collates odd and interesting facts from the week's news. Readers are encouraged to send their own images depicting ten objects to accompany the facts; past examples have included 10 swans flying in formation and ten toes.
Since a redesign of the BBC News Online in September 2006, the Magazine Monitor has followed a blog-style layout, rather than as a page updated over the week in a similar way to news articles. Comments are allowed, but not published, other than a selection in the daily letters.
''On This Day''
''On This Day'' is the name of the BBC's news archive website. It contains an online
digital library
A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital ...
of news stories reported by the BBC on the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
and world events from the 1950s to 2005. There are entries for every day of the year, many including
video
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syst ...
or
audio
Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to:
Sound
* Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound
*Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum
* Digital audio, representation of sou ...
reports which can be viewed online. The stories are arranged by years, by themes, by witness accounts and by the correspondents reporting the stories. The front page used to be refreshed daily with past events from the current date, but the site is no longer maintained. Unlike the rest of BBC News Online, it still has a working text only version.
Embedded video and audio
The launch of the
BBC iPlayer, with the new
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Fla ...
based BBC Embedded Media Player in July 2007
enabled BBC News and Sport Online to change the way it presented video content. Previously the site had delivered online video content using embedded
RealPlayer
RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multimedia realm, including MP3 ...
video in
pop-up windows branded as the ''BBC News Player''. From March 2008 the BBC began to gradually introduce embedded video using the EMP into individual news articles and onto the front page. The news player also provides constant live
streaming of the
BBC News channel
BBC News (also known as the BBC News Channel) is a British free-to-air public broadcast television news channel for BBC News. It was launched as BBC News 24 on 9 November 1997 at 5:30 pm as part of the BBC's foray into digital domestic telev ...
via the website. This had previously only been viewable in a separate window.
Mobile and text only versions
Previously, in addition to the standard website with embedded video and audio, there were
XHTML
Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is part of the family of XML markup languages. It mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated.
While HTML, prior ...
and
WAP
WAP or Wap may refer to:
Music
* "WAP" (song), a 2020 song by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion
Organizations
* Weatherization Assistance Program, for US energy costs
* Western Australia Party, a political party founded in 2016
* Western A ...
versions optimised for users on mobile devices. A text-only version of the main news website could be accessed via the BBC ''Betsie'' text to speech parser (now discontinued).
In March 2010 the BBC announced that the low graphics and
PDA versions of the site would be discontinued. As of May 2010 these versions of the site are no longer available and redirect to the main and mobile websites respectively.
As of 23 March 2015, separate mobile and text only versions have been removed, and replaced with a "responsive web design", allowing the presentation of content to adjust automatically for a wide variety of screen sizes, from desktop computer to smartphones and tablet devices.
However the low-graphics version of the On This Day pages does still work, as do the text versions of articles linked from it.
The BBC also have
mobile apps
A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on des ...
for news and sport, available on the
Android,
iOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...
and
Windows Phone
Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design l ...
systems. The news app launched in 2010, originally for the
iPhone and
iPad
The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operating ...
, followed by other providers. In January 2015, it was redesigned to include the option to play video and further links within articles to others.
Criticism
The site is primarily funded by the
television licence
A television licence or broadcast receiving licence is a payment required in many countries for the reception of television broadcasts, or the possession of a television set where some broadcasts are funded in full or in part by the licence ...
, and used to carry no advertising. The World edition has received some subsidy from the UK's
Foreign and Commonwealth Office through its grant-in-aid to the
BBC World Service. Proposals to include advertising on the international version of the website were discussed by the
BBC Trust
The BBC Trust was the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) between 2007 and 2017. It was operationally independent of BBC management and external bodies, and its stated aim was to make decisions in the best interests of ...
in February 2007, but were opposed by BBC journalists, who feared it would weaken public trust in the impartiality of the BBC. In October 2007, it was confirmed that the site would start to carry advertising. The advertising consists of large animated banners, which has led to complaints that these make the site's content harder to read.
The impartiality of the ''Have Your Say'' forums has been disputed by organisations such as News Sniffer: moderators are accused of sometimes appearing to promote their own agenda.
''Have Your Say'' received much criticism in 2009 for featuring the question "Should homosexuals face execution?". The BBC later removed it and apologised after the BBC Pride board lobbied against it and
Eric Joyce
Eric Stuart Joyce (born 13 October 1960) is a British politician, former military officer and convicted child sex offender. A former member of the Labour Party, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for Falkirk, formerly Falkirk West, from 2000 to ...
, the Labour MP for Falkirk, called it "more than offensive" and "completely unacceptable".
See also
*
References
External links
*
BBC News Online – About the site at
bbc.co.uk
About BBC News – News Interactive bbc.co.uk
{{BBC News
1997 establishments in the United Kingdom
BBC News
British news websites
Internet properties established in 1997
News Online