6 ms·

The breaking news banner is a source of much internal conflict, at least within the engineering teams. I think most people agree that it's too big, and most peo

The breaking news banner is a source of much internal conflict, at least within the engineering teams. I think most people agree that it's too big, and most people also agree that it's over-used. Unfortunately it's one of those things that editorial will not back down on — they must be able to push their breaking news to people, and it must be prominent (and therefore quite intrusive). There is a small improvement to the banner on the new front page (/news/0), which is that it's about 4 pixels shorter, and it's now grey instead of black which I think is much less abrasive.

nailer 9y ago
Who cares if editorial thinks it matters and you think it makes things worse? Act like engineers, work out what you want, test it and get some damn data on it.
- DanBC 9y ago
  You're downvoted because you display ignorance of what it's like to work within a huge rigid bureaucracy where "just test it" mostly can't happen.
  - nailer 9y ago
    Adopting data-driven decision making requires cultural change. I understand cultural change in large organisations is difficult, you don't need to explain this. Difficulty of changing culture is, however, no excuse. The BBC is competing with Buzzfeed who've been doing data-driven decision making since inception. I'm fine with being downmodded by people who disagree, but it's worrying "get data on it" is being flagged on HN.
    - bonaldi 9y ago
      "It's not "get data on it" that's being flagged, I suspect, it's "who cares what editorial thinks?". Because as a recipe for success, riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product is not a great one. What's more, BBC News editorial has reasons to be wary of pure data-driven decision making. It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purposes, not to drive eyeballs to ads. So arguments like "the data says nobody is reading our Welsh-language output, why don't we stop doing it?" or "The expensive pages covering Cornwall are getting terrible numbers, who care what editorial thinks, CLOSE 'EM DOWN" are not the slam-dunk you might be imagining. That's not to say there isn't useful data that can be put at the heart of the newsroom to try and capture things that matter to the BBC, as BBC News is well aware. They're building tools right now to support that [1]. But I think any editorial team will always want a way to say to its audience "we think this is important right now and you should know about it". So a constructive approach might be something more like "here is the most effective way you can highlight news to audiences" not "we don't care what you think, people don't like the breaking news ticker so it's gone, welcome to cultural change granddad". [1] https://www.newsrewired.com/2016/07/20/how-editorial-analytics-can-be-used-effectively-in-the-newsroom/ https://www.newsrewired.com/2016/07/20/how-editorial-analyti...
      - nailer 9y ago
        > Because as a recipe for success, riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product is not a great one. That's a gross mischaracterisation of data-driven decision making. The point is that non-data backed opinions belonging to anyone don't matter so much as the results of what you actually measure. > It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purposes, not to drive eyeballs to ads. Acknowledged, but effectiveness at that purpose is still measurable, and certainly should be measured as the BBC is publicly funded. > not "we don't care what you think, people don't like the breaking news ticker so it's gone, welcome to cultural change granddad" I'm unsure whether you're unfamiliar with media engineering, or simply creating a bizarre straw man of what was being suggested. Assuming good intention, and therefore the former, here's a more likely version: "We've measured the breaking news ticker and find out it that X% of users find it useful, Y% read it, Z% engage with it, engagement with other stories happens A% more/less when the breaking news ticker is displayed over the top of it. Given that our goals are B, this indicates we should.
        bonaldi 9y ago
        > That's a gross mischaracterisation of data-driven decision making. It is! And I'm v. pro D-DDM. But as I read your post -- given it has been flagged to death I don't think I'm alone -- you didn't appear to be calling for that. As I recall, you appeared to be saying "who cares what editorial think, work out what you want and get some damn data" (which is where the straw man comes from, fwiw).
        nailer 9y ago
        > which is where the straw man comes from, fwiw No. I wrote: >> Act like engineers, work out what you want, test it and get some damn data on it. Which is quite different from: > riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product I hope you don't need it explained, but just in case: we're ignoring all things not backed by data, which very different from ignoring a specific subset of people. The downvotes are for my saying 'damn' and writing angrily (ie, being pissed off with the poor engineering discipline of the public service). I'm intending to leave this thread, however, and enjoy the downvotes as "editorial doesn't like it" is frankly pathetic.
  - yitchelle 9y ago
    Wait..He got downvoted because he showed a lack of knowledge? HN is better than that. Is he trolling?
malza 9y ago
It reminds me of the early 2000s when websites would initiate a pop-up ad and the first thing I would do is automatically close it without looking. Thankfully browser makers stepped in and blocked them automatically. That's my hope. That news outlets will spam the feature so much that web browsers will make it easy to switch them off.
- inimino 9y ago
  Won't happen. Pop-ups were a specific browser API and could be easily turned off without affecting anything else, banners are just content and can't be singled out by the browsers (unless by an adblock-type arms race).
  - rocky1138 9y ago
    Machine learning will probably be used to learn the traits of pop-up content and block it with a given confidence value.
    - nacs 9y ago
      And as soon as that starts becoming common, programmers will implement workarounds that avoid AI detection.
  - samscully 9y ago
    Recently working on an embeddable shopping widget I noticed that if I animated it in certain ways chrome would block it as a popup. Doesn't contradict what you said I just thought it was interesting that chrome doesn't just look for the most basic types of pop-ups.
noir_lord 9y ago
I just block it with Ublock Origin. It's intensely irritating, since it's never breaking and these days with the way the world is it is also worrying. For me Breaking News should be things like terroist attacks, massive flooding not "Back Off Contestant Falls Over".
- SippinLean 9y ago
  I just realized that wasn't an ad; I've never read the text because the placement/intrusiveness triggered my ad blindness, I've blocked it with ublock as well.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Aye, I use Ublock Origin to block more than just ads. It's also handy for the comment sections on newspapers, sections of news sites you are never gonna click/read (in my case sport) and comments on youtube.
    - smichel17 9y ago
      I block the suggested videos sidebar on youtube, too.
afandian 9y ago
I thought as much. My tweet that contained the screenshot: https://twitter.com/joewass/status/788071468131295234 https://twitter.com/joewass/status/788071468131295234 Maybe you could resolve the conflict by including a "don't show any more breaking news" button and then taking the data back to Editorial. Or analyzing the clickstream to see who is being shown breaking news that they already saw, or they're actually reading at the time.
- untog 9y ago
  > Maybe you could resolve the conflict by including a "don't show any more breaking news" button and then taking the data back to Editorial. I suspect an optional button would not be very popular, so the data wouldn't achieve the aim you want.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    Maybe include it in either [settings] or [Customise your Homepage]
paulpepper 9y ago
Might users be given the option of disabling the breaking news feature? I don't expect that it's a straightforward yes/no.
- Theodores 9y ago
  ...or maybe you could decide what you wanted as 'breaking news', so if you did not want to know the football results because you are watching the game later, then you could un-tick 'sports'. This could be really useful for onboarding people, once onboard they could set up alerts for topics or tick 'follow this story' if for instance they read about someone being brought to trial and they wanted to know the sentencing or even what crimes get committed five years hence once the culprit is out of jail. Things in the news and the weather could then be pushed/pulled from an app. As well as topics for 'breaking news' there could also be a colour coded level so if you don't really care about some unknown unknowns getting droned out of existence in far-off-istan (in a 'yellow' terror threat incident) then you don't get an alert for it. Meanwhile, if you are British and some idiot kills people outside parliament then that one pops up as 'breaking news' with no hesitation. Tsunami alerts are probably handy as 'breaking news', it would be annoying to die in some massive flood due to having turned off the 'breaking news' wholesale just because you had no interest in the French election or 'Frexit'. I think that they need to just be a bit more imaginative with the feature so that it works for all stakeholders, the editorial department, the reads and everyone in between, up to and including No. 10.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Chris86 9y ago
Is there no way you can at least track that a user has already been exposed to the breaking news (banner or article etc) and stop re-showing it? I always see it after I've already hit the homepage, seen the 'breaking news' and then gone to somewhere else on the site and then 'breaking news' banner all over again.
_wmd 9y ago
Hey Joseph, You're doing God's work and a national service that is IMHO worthy of a knighthood, the BBC front page is one of those rare places where a few little engineering cogs can really make a huge difference. Keep up the good fight! Thanks from all of us -- the UK, still missing the old news.bbc 5ish years later :) And if I ever have the privilege of your CV gracing my inbox, I'd do everything to ensure we got to work together. Thanks again!

nailer 9y ago

Who cares if editorial thinks it matters and you think it makes things worse? Act like engineers, work out what you want, test it and get some damn data on it.

DanBC 9y ago
You're downvoted because you display ignorance of what it's like to work within a huge rigid bureaucracy where "just test it" mostly can't happen.
- nailer 9y ago
  Adopting data-driven decision making requires cultural change. I understand cultural change in large organisations is difficult, you don't need to explain this. Difficulty of changing culture is, however, no excuse. The BBC is competing with Buzzfeed who've been doing data-driven decision making since inception. I'm fine with being downmodded by people who disagree, but it's worrying "get data on it" is being flagged on HN.
  - bonaldi 9y ago
    "It's not "get data on it" that's being flagged, I suspect, it's "who cares what editorial thinks?". Because as a recipe for success, riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product is not a great one. What's more, BBC News editorial has reasons to be wary of pure data-driven decision making. It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purposes, not to drive eyeballs to ads. So arguments like "the data says nobody is reading our Welsh-language output, why don't we stop doing it?" or "The expensive pages covering Cornwall are getting terrible numbers, who care what editorial thinks, CLOSE 'EM DOWN" are not the slam-dunk you might be imagining. That's not to say there isn't useful data that can be put at the heart of the newsroom to try and capture things that matter to the BBC, as BBC News is well aware. They're building tools right now to support that [1]. But I think any editorial team will always want a way to say to its audience "we think this is important right now and you should know about it". So a constructive approach might be something more like "here is the most effective way you can highlight news to audiences" not "we don't care what you think, people don't like the breaking news ticker so it's gone, welcome to cultural change granddad". [1] https://www.newsrewired.com/2016/07/20/how-editorial-analytics-can-be-used-effectively-in-the-newsroom/ https://www.newsrewired.com/2016/07/20/how-editorial-analyti...
    - nailer 9y ago
      > Because as a recipe for success, riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product is not a great one. That's a gross mischaracterisation of data-driven decision making. The point is that non-data backed opinions belonging to anyone don't matter so much as the results of what you actually measure. > It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purposes, not to drive eyeballs to ads. Acknowledged, but effectiveness at that purpose is still measurable, and certainly should be measured as the BBC is publicly funded. > not "we don't care what you think, people don't like the breaking news ticker so it's gone, welcome to cultural change granddad" I'm unsure whether you're unfamiliar with media engineering, or simply creating a bizarre straw man of what was being suggested. Assuming good intention, and therefore the former, here's a more likely version: "We've measured the breaking news ticker and find out it that X% of users find it useful, Y% read it, Z% engage with it, engagement with other stories happens A% more/less when the breaking news ticker is displayed over the top of it. Given that our goals are B, this indicates we should.
      - bonaldi 9y ago
        > That's a gross mischaracterisation of data-driven decision making. It is! And I'm v. pro D-DDM. But as I read your post -- given it has been flagged to death I don't think I'm alone -- you didn't appear to be calling for that. As I recall, you appeared to be saying "who cares what editorial think, work out what you want and get some damn data" (which is where the straw man comes from, fwiw).
        nailer 9y ago
        > which is where the straw man comes from, fwiw No. I wrote: >> Act like engineers, work out what you want, test it and get some damn data on it. Which is quite different from: > riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product I hope you don't need it explained, but just in case: we're ignoring all things not backed by data, which very different from ignoring a specific subset of people. The downvotes are for my saying 'damn' and writing angrily (ie, being pissed off with the poor engineering discipline of the public service). I'm intending to leave this thread, however, and enjoy the downvotes as "editorial doesn't like it" is frankly pathetic.
- yitchelle 9y ago
  Wait..He got downvoted because he showed a lack of knowledge? HN is better than that. Is he trolling?

malza 9y ago

It reminds me of the early 2000s when websites would initiate a pop-up ad and the first thing I would do is automatically close it without looking. Thankfully browser makers stepped in and blocked them automatically. That's my hope. That news outlets will spam the feature so much that web browsers will make it easy to switch them off.

inimino 9y ago
Won't happen. Pop-ups were a specific browser API and could be easily turned off without affecting anything else, banners are just content and can't be singled out by the browsers (unless by an adblock-type arms race).
- rocky1138 9y ago
  Machine learning will probably be used to learn the traits of pop-up content and block it with a given confidence value.
  - nacs 9y ago
    And as soon as that starts becoming common, programmers will implement workarounds that avoid AI detection.
- samscully 9y ago
  Recently working on an embeddable shopping widget I noticed that if I animated it in certain ways chrome would block it as a popup. Doesn't contradict what you said I just thought it was interesting that chrome doesn't just look for the most basic types of pop-ups.

noir_lord 9y ago

I just block it with Ublock Origin. It's intensely irritating, since it's never breaking and these days with the way the world is it is also worrying. For me Breaking News should be things like terroist attacks, massive flooding not "Back Off Contestant Falls Over".

SippinLean 9y ago
I just realized that wasn't an ad; I've never read the text because the placement/intrusiveness triggered my ad blindness, I've blocked it with ublock as well.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Aye, I use Ublock Origin to block more than just ads. It's also handy for the comment sections on newspapers, sections of news sites you are never gonna click/read (in my case sport) and comments on youtube.
  - smichel17 9y ago
    I block the suggested videos sidebar on youtube, too.

afandian 9y ago

I thought as much. My tweet that contained the screenshot: https://twitter.com/joewass/status/788071468131295234 https://twitter.com/joewass/status/788071468131295234 Maybe you could resolve the conflict by including a "don't show any more breaking news" button and then taking the data back to Editorial. Or analyzing the clickstream to see who is being shown breaking news that they already saw, or they're actually reading at the time.

untog 9y ago
> Maybe you could resolve the conflict by including a "don't show any more breaking news" button and then taking the data back to Editorial. I suspect an optional button would not be very popular, so the data wouldn't achieve the aim you want.
- DanBC 9y ago
  Maybe include it in either [settings] or [Customise your Homepage]

paulpepper 9y ago

Might users be given the option of disabling the breaking news feature? I don't expect that it's a straightforward yes/no.

Theodores 9y ago
...or maybe you could decide what you wanted as 'breaking news', so if you did not want to know the football results because you are watching the game later, then you could un-tick 'sports'. This could be really useful for onboarding people, once onboard they could set up alerts for topics or tick 'follow this story' if for instance they read about someone being brought to trial and they wanted to know the sentencing or even what crimes get committed five years hence once the culprit is out of jail. Things in the news and the weather could then be pushed/pulled from an app. As well as topics for 'breaking news' there could also be a colour coded level so if you don't really care about some unknown unknowns getting droned out of existence in far-off-istan (in a 'yellow' terror threat incident) then you don't get an alert for it. Meanwhile, if you are British and some idiot kills people outside parliament then that one pops up as 'breaking news' with no hesitation. Tsunami alerts are probably handy as 'breaking news', it would be annoying to die in some massive flood due to having turned off the 'breaking news' wholesale just because you had no interest in the French election or 'Frexit'. I think that they need to just be a bit more imaginative with the feature so that it works for all stakeholders, the editorial department, the reads and everyone in between, up to and including No. 10.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Chris86 9y ago

Is there no way you can at least track that a user has already been exposed to the breaking news (banner or article etc) and stop re-showing it? I always see it after I've already hit the homepage, seen the 'breaking news' and then gone to somewhere else on the site and then 'breaking news' banner all over again.

_wmd 9y ago

Hey Joseph, You're doing God's work and a national service that is IMHO worthy of a knighthood, the BBC front page is one of those rare places where a few little engineering cogs can really make a huge difference. Keep up the good fight! Thanks from all of us -- the UK, still missing the old news.bbc 5ish years later :) And if I ever have the privilege of your CV gracing my inbox, I'd do everything to ensure we got to work together. Thanks again!