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The BBC’s annual report lists names including Clive Myrie, Reeta Chakrabarti, Victoria Derbyshire, Ben Brown and Joanna Gosling – who combined are paid more than £1m for work across the BBC – as presenters on the BBC News channel. The plans will see a significant cut in the number of presenters who currently work across the BBC News channel and BBC World News, with fewer higher-profile on-screen staff set to retain the title “chief presenter”, while correspondents are to be given the opportunity for more on-air presenting time.
Bbc news headlines for today full#
Full Reportįull eyetracking report on how users read on the web is available for download.UK viewers will no longer be provided with a domestic rolling news service, losing programmes such as Dateline London after 25 years, and the new channel will feature a mix of international content as well as “new flagship programmes built around high-profile journalists”. Visit the site daily for a week and try to apply some of the BBC editors' discipline to your own headlines. Whatever the reason, BBC News headlines are almost always written to the highest Web usability standards. Text on pre-HD televisions had horrible resolution and only allowed for a minute word count (somewhat like mobile). In a spoken medium, each word is gone as soon as it's uttered, so convoluted exposition confuses even more than it does in print.Ĭeefax (one of the longest-surviving videotext services) also helped instill conciseness in BBC's journalists until it was closed in 2012. So why is the BBC so good when most others are so bad? Maybe it's in the BBC's blood: The news organization originated as a radio station, where word count is at a premium and you must communicate clearly to immediately grab listeners. To research such facts, people would typically start by searching for articles about the missile strike, and then scan one or two to get the numbers. But in this particular headline, the word works as well as the numeral because users aren't likely to be scanning the front page for data about the specific number of militants killed. That information isn't something people need to know at the headline-scanning stage an exception would be if a famous person or controversial source had claimed responsibility for the missile strike, in which case the attribution might be a reason for users to click.Īlso, using "4" might be better than using "four" given the general guideline to prefer numerals for online writing. To save space, the headline's writer might have deferred the attribution to the unnamed "officials" to the article itself. Readers would certainly know what happened, and would even get the general picture after the first 4 words. One breaking story, for example, had the following headline: "Suspected US missile strike kills four militants in tribal region in north-west Pakistan, officials say." The site's top news headlines warrant a few additional keystrokes. You'll click through to exactly those news items you want to read. Even better, each gives you a very good idea of what you'll get if you do click and lets you judge - with a high degree of confidence - whether you'll be interested in the full article. I'm rarely that concise.Įach headline conveys the gist of the story on its own, without requiring you to click. The amount of meaning they squeezed into this brief space is incredible: every word works hard for its living. The average headline consumed a mere 5 words and 34 characters. Ten arrested in UK anti-terrorism raids.
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On a recent visit, the BBC list of headlines for "other top stories" read as follows: Most sites routinely violate headline guidelines, but BBC editors consistently do an awesome job.
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understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results).front-loaded with the most important keywords (because users often scan only the beginning of list items).rich in information scent, clearly summarizing the target article.short (because people don't read much online).It's even harder to write Web headlines, which must be: It's hard enough to write for the Web and meet the guidelines for concise, scannable, and objective content.
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