Metadata

There's a narrative getting embedded that lack of diversity in BBC newsroom processes led to the wrong identification of two famous basketball players. Some shots of LeBron James scoring for the Lakers were woven into the BBC1 story about the death of Kobe Bryant on Sunday night. At the end of the bulletin, the BBC apologised for the error. Sensible people, garlanded for their diversity work, like Stephen Frost here, shake their heads and say I told you so.

There's a feature of the news production process that is familiar to old heads; you take the time available to make a piece, which is never enough. If you don't make it on time, you miss the output.

The news of Kobe's death was broken by the BBC at 8.05pm. The BBC Washington team was on the case shortly afterwards, doing two ways for the News Channel, and tracking a piece for the weekend news at 10pm.

Imagine a piece being fed into London within a few minutes of transmission time, and a 'red flag' popping up, suggesting that the BBC in London didn't have broadcast rights to the 20 seconds or so of archive shots, selected in Washington, of Kobe playing the sport that made him famous. Swift correction may have seemed possible - search the digital archive for some replacement action that was 'green', and drop it in. Imagine a misplaced faith in metadata bringing forward a clip that might have been labelled "Kobe Bryant....". Imagine if the full label should have read "Kobe Bryant's scoring record broken by LeBron James".  Television news is complicated and pressured. Try to imagine that, before judging.