"As others have said, you're really abusing the push notifications. None of them I've had so far could be considered breaking news, with the exception of a British person winning Wimbledon....stop spamming people!"
A user comment on a BBC News Online discussion board from 2013. The BBC's Push Notification system was developed in 2012, and made some people grumpy pretty quickly. Estimates suggest around 7 million people in the UK use the service.
Here's the current BBC guff:
Add BBC breaking news alerts to your BBC News app
Push notifications are available to users of smartphones and tablets who download the BBC News app, allowing you to receive breaking news alerts. When a push notification is received it will pop up on your screen similar to a text message, regardless of whether or not the app is open at the time. Depending on your settings the alert may also be accompanied by a sound. Tapping the notification will load the corresponding story in the app when it is available.
But not all 'push notifications' are 'breaking news alerts'. Our click-chasing BBC News curators think you should be alerted when they publish any 'compelling' content, not simply 'breaking news'. And then, when the push is all the punter reads, there are editorial issues. Days before the election was called, Laura Kuenssberg's In Depth piece was heavily 'pushed'; "How it went wrong for Project Sunak" - a summary judgement from a programme presenter, not Political Editor. Online wanted clicks for their new project; a smartphone reader who went no further might conclude the BBC thinks the Government has failed.
There is an internal review underway of such matters; a BBC spokesperson told the Guardian “With more and more audiences getting their news digitally, we know our push alerts can be hugely influential – especially during an election. The choice and wording of our alerts are important editorial decisions, which are referred to senior editors.”
So, let's imagine an election campaign in which the governing party, let's call them the Traditional Party, issues a series of steady-as-she-goes press releases & speeches with nothing new in them, because that's their political schtick: no gimmicks, we have to stay the course. And another lot, say the Radicals, come up with new ideas and mould-breaking policies. What does BBC News do? Reflect reality & give the Radicals more 'breaking' pushes, or strive for balance by pushing an equal number of heard-it-all-before Trad statements under the 'breaking' banner? It's old news, but they're repeating it NOW.
ReplyDeleteNo prizes, BBC takes the 'balance' line. Which is just one small indication that balance as a guiding principle has had its day. We're no longer living in a Butskellite consensus; we're dealing with outright liars & cheats like Trump & Johnson, with unbridled social media and more bad actors than you can shake a smartphone at.
As Owen Jones has pointed out many a time, independence is the sine qua non for any modern news service, not confected balance. The question for consumers of news journalism is not, "Are identifiable parties and bodies of opinion getting equal time?"; it is "Whose voice am I really hearing?"