BeebCamp feedback on news and blogging

I was very grateful to receive an email last week from Chris Hamilton who is an assistant editor, production for the BBC website.

In our discussions at BeebCamp last week, news blogging at the BBC ended up being slightly misrepresented.

After reading Roo Reynold's post about the conference Chris emailed me to make an important point about the use of blogging in news and provide some useful links as well. (Chris wanted to come along to the conference but was unable to make it.)

So I've reproduced the email here with his permission and will add it as a comment on Roo's blogpost as well:

Hi Daniel.

I signed up to Beebcamp but unfortunately couldn't make it yesterday [now, last Tuesday]. Was just skimming through the notes at rooreynolds.com and alighted on the line from your bit about Sport's live text commentary and the fact news doesn’t do them. In fact we do run such pages, modelled on the Sport approach, with the most recent last Friday for "Downturn day", though the series done for the US presidential debates are probably better examples. They're also done weekly for prime minister's questions. The next big one is planned for US election night next week. Some links below. They're obviously not blogs in the true sense, and are quite labour intensive, but are popular and now a significant part of our coverage, when the event is right, although we're still feeling our way with them.

Regards,
Chris

McCain v Obama: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7658160.stm
PMQs 29 Oct: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7697280.stm
Downturn day: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7687142.stm

As I replied to Chris, I'm not sure if I said news doesn't do any form of liveblogging. If I did, I was thinking of the sort of liveblogging that you can do with software like CoverItLive. The informal nature of the conference meant that sometimes people brought different ideas of what blogging is to the table (though this in itself was interesting).

I didn't mean to under-acknowledge some of the stuff Chris has kindly pointed to above and thank him for taking the time to get in touch.