WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

Robert Peston, the Business editor of the BBC writes in his blog:

“(British Airways executives) are beginning to question whether the Met Office’s computer model of the ash cloud is exaggerating its size. They claim that satellite pictures do not corroborate the Met’s computerised simulation of the cloud.

“It is possible that the Met Office is being too cautious”, an airline executive said to me.

There’s also a growing concern among airline executives that the government is not engaged enough on what they see as a catastrophe which – if airports don’t reopen soon – will spread from financially stretched airlines to any business dependent on aircraft for shipping goods.”

(In the picture, an aircraft maintenance worker covers a jet engine at Belfast City Airport, Northern Ireland, Friday, April, 16, 2010.
ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Good visual journalist be alert!

How do you believe in these maps when the information is not very good?

Look at the first ones and you will see how unreliable they are.

This will be a great challenge for my infographic friends.

But they will end doing a good job.

You will see.

The BBC has done this basic one:

Anoher version with the same data posted by the European edition of The Wall Street Journal website from the U.K. Met Office with an illustration of the volcanic ash dispersion from the surface to 20,000 feet, issued at 6 a.m. on Thursday.

According to The Times of London the red line on this map of the level of ash shows the exent of debris between surface and 20,000 feet

A late arrival from The New York Times.

And The Telegraph included this picture from a real-time radar image showing all aircraft movements in UK airspace at 9.30am today.

The image from www.radarvirtuel.com shows how ash from the Icelandic volcano stopped all flights in the northern parts of UK.

Here you can see who is flying in Europe… with IUK air space as no-fly-zone.

Lainformacion.com in Spain has a bigger map with more or less the same data.

Lainformacion.com’s logo gets some of the ashes too…

El Pais in Madrid shows the Meteosat 9 images and this the best way to understand the size and impact of the volcanic ashes.

From AFP

And in Twitter going to ashes you can see this incredibly beautiful picture

The BBC offers this fantastic pictures saying:

An image made available by NEODASS/University of Dundee which shows the volcanic ash plume from Iceland, top left, to the north of Britain as received by NASA’s Terra Satellite at 11.39 GMT Thursday April 15, 2010. Photo: NEODAAS/University of Dundee/AP

More, later.

Like The Economist maps and charts, the BBC uses simple and clear infographics that tell the story.

And the same does The New York Times team (Erin Aigner, Joe Burgess, Alicia Desantis, Xaquin G.V., Sergio Pecanha, Archie Tse and Charlie Williams) with these ones.

Seven people covering the Chile story with graphics, and one regional correspondent covering the tragedy… from Rio de Janeiro!

BBC doe a great job.

Today, I had a great time with Mark Byford, Deputy Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation and head of BBC Journalism, and his Senior Editors Team.

They wanted me to present the INNOVATION experiences and models on Newsroom Integrations.

They understand that this is a crucial issue for their future.

The BBC doesn’t buy the “us” against “them” idea and they have decided to reorganize the newsroom facilities around “content and audiences”, our mantra in this field.

So they were really interested in how to create new working flows, how to build an agnostic platform super-desk, etc.

After the presentation and many questions from this group, I have the feeling that the BBC can lead better than anybody else the new online journalism narratives of the 21st Century.

They have the talent, credibility, reputation, people and leadership to re-invent journalism in these new new platforms.

The old Regent Street Bush House or the BBC Broadcasting House will become, for sure, the biggest and most advanced state-of-the-art multimedia newsroom of the world.

The huge new rebuilding project will cost over 200 million pounds.

In less than 2-year time, more than 5.000 BBC people will move there and work together under one roof.

BH has been the BBC’S headquarters since 1932 and has survived every attempt of Hitler to destroy it.

The architects will have produced an estimated 10,000 drawings by the end of the project that will include 80.000-square meter of production areas, studios and staff facilities, plus a 4.000-square meter newsroom.

64,000 tonnes of debris will be removed from the site.

Around 17,000 lorry loads of rubbish will be taken from BH

During excavation, work will be taking place 4 meters from the Victoria tube line.

There will be six new studios for television news.

The new News studio will be one of the largest live newsrooms in the world

There will be 140 acoustic spaces for Radio & Music, News and World Service.

There will be 10,000 miles of cabling in the new building.

The focus of the complex is an atria-lit newsroom at the base of the main building.

The nine floors above the new double-height space are supported by a post-tensioned concrete transfer structure springing from four massive columns.

The resulting column-free space also facilitates the construction of television studios (including one double-height studio) in the three levels below the newsroom.

The famous London’s old Art Deco building will be the response to the huge challenges on how to make the BBC relevant in the new digital media landscape.

See here some old pictures of the BBC newsrooms.

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This must be world record.

I never saw so many negative comments about any breaking news in just the first 234 hours.

The BBC moderators are trying to cope with this incredible wave of negative comments.

So, of the almost 10.000 comments sent, the BBC has been able to filter around 4.500, and a long queue is waiting to say NO to the Obama’s Nobel.

Big news from the BBC.

Newsroom integration.

Period.

Peter Horrocks, head of the BBC Newsroom, explains:

“Today is a very big day for BBC News which has now been re-organised in a fully multimedia fashion.

As the head of the new multimedia newsroom that is responsible for our core output on web, TV and radio, I want to know about our audiences’ preferences in the world of multi-platform news.

I hope you agree, if you use our services on a number of platforms, that the BBC has a generally strong reputation in all media.

But up until today the editorial decisions have been taken separately in three different departments – Radio News, News Interactive and TV News.

Now those proud departments are no more.

Instead we have a new system that allows the great strengths of each of our editorial areas to create an even stronger editorial proposition.

We have re-organised into two main departments responsible for our audience-facing services:

• The multimedia newsroom comprises the BBC News website, the radio summaries and bulletins (except for Radio 1), BBC World Service news, BBC News 24, BBC World, BBC Breakfast and the bulletins on BBC One at 1, 6 and 10, among others.

• The multimedia programmes departments contains Five Live, the Today programme, World at One, Newsbeat, Newshour, Newsnight, Panorama, the Andrew Marr Show, Hardtalk and a wide range of other diverse programmes.

This new structure will help us to be more efficient and so save money to invest in improvements to BBC News.

We will be putting more into on-demand news – for instance developing content for new platforms such as mobile and IPTV; increasing personalisation and providing purpose-made audio/video for the web.

The new organisation also allows for our journalism to be used more dynamically across our three main existing platforms – web, radio and TV.

But I’d like to know how far we should go with this.

So for web users such as you I’d like to know if you mainly look to BBC News for an in-depth approach on the day’s most significant stories, or do you value more diversity in the range of subjects we cover?

If we drive our stories more across platforms you will see greater consistency within BBC News – with similar editorial judgments being made across different services.

We could concentrate resources on developing the most significant and original stories in greater depth.

However the downside could be a narrowing of the range of stories we cover, with less coverage that is distinctive and tailored for each medium.

Of course, I’m painting a somewhat polarised view of the strategic choices available to us.

In reality we will choose a balance between these two extremes.

But it would be helpful to know your broad preference– should we move in a more coherent or a more diversified direction in our core news?

For thousands of journalists in BBC News, today is the start of one of the biggest changes we have ever been through.

Many of the people who bring you the news are uncertain of their own futures, but I know that all of us are determined to improve further the service we bring to you.

BBC News wants to be the most successful multimedia news operation in the world – competing with and excelling against the best newspapers, broadcasters and news aggregators on the globe.