PRODUCTION PROCESSES - WEB REPORT

PRODUCTION PROCESSES
THEORY VS PRACTICE?

An Analysis of the BBC's Production Processes, through The Abolition of Slavery Project

BY VIVIEN VAN DER SANDT
STUDENT NO: 06003781
Email address: viviensandt@yahoo.co.uk

Exercise 1: Analysis of BBC website:

The BBC website contains a wealth of information - apart from TV and radio programme information, it also provides services such as weather and traffic, entertainment information, subject specialities such as history, event-based information (such as Black History month, a regular feature) and so on. The challenge is obviously to make this information accessible and easy to use. Visitors to the site hail from all over the world, therefore the information must be cross-culturally user-friendly. The key elements evident from the site are simplicity and standardisation, presenting similar navigational tools (thumbnails, for instance) for each page. These elements help visitors to easily access the information. There are a small number of templates - essentially an Index page (with thumbnail links and index), Main Page (onemain image with content) and Galleries (photo galleries, often as slide shows) - but the site is still visually intersting, as the wealth of information gives each page a very different appearance.

The Abolition of Slavery Project
Illustration:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/southeast/sites/history/pages/slavery.shtml

(Access this link to see an example of an Abolition of Slavery project page)


The BBC website is, above all, a service and information site, in line with its role as a public service broadcaster. As the sites are funded by public money in the form of a licence fee, they are bound, by the Charter, to ‘educate, inform and entertain’. All these elements are evident in their website. A large part of their brief, of course, is to promote their radio and television schedules. Another part is to serve the community.

The BBC undertakes a range of projects. There are some which are commissioned (by BBC Commissioners), some in which they pitch ideas, and others which are handed to them as part of their day-to day-duties. To narrow down this brief, this report will look at one current project, the Abolition of Slavery (the anniversary celebrations of the end of slavery in 1807).

Within the BBC, this is considered more a ‘theme’ than a project. While the BBC planners are often looking for themes to feature, this one was of course a given – it is already a well-publicised and long-anticipated anniversary and many organisations are making it their project for the year. The theme was considered ideal for the BBC as it embraced history (the website already has a popular and well-developed History section), it would appeal to a wide range of racial/ethnic group and a wealth of material was already available. The programme has already started in October 2006 - when the anniversary was highlighted in a regular series, Black History Month - and will run until November 2007. The main focus will be on March 25, the date the Abolition Act was signed in 1807.

Definition and planning

It was decided that since each region had their own particular stories to run (Hull would obviously highlight William Wilberforce, Wales has chosen to look at the buildings erected with income from slavery) the project would be handled by the regional websites (the Where I Live section). A Project Team was convened - it has a Project Director and Spokesperson and representatives from TV, Radio and Virtual (that is, new media). The Education and Legacy and External Liaison departments are also represented. This Project Team is tasked with co-ordinating the project and distributing all the information and schedule details to the relevant sections. The BBC has an intranet site called Gateway and a large amount of information has been posted on this site by the Project Team – therefore anyone in the corporation can access what they require.

Unusually (since Wales radio and TV usually operate fairly independently from the English operation) on this occasion it was decided that Wales would fall under the British regional programmes for practical reasons (as most of the Where I Live sites are in England). Naturally, all website work is dealt with via the New Media departments (several regions have one, and in Wales it is based in Cardiff). Falling under the New Media department in Wales are five regions – NE, NW, SE, SW and Mid Wales. Each has a producer and a researcher and all would be expected to find the local angle on the slavery theme, and post the material they can find.

The BBC is a bit different to most commercial organisations. A typical production cycle would consist of Planning (scoping), Project sign-off, Asset gathering (pre-production), the Build phase, Quality Assurance, Release sign-off and Launch.

A decision had to be taken on how to deal with the material over the long term. It was decided that it would run on the regional site for the course of the project, and thereafter it would be embedded in the History section (which already has a sub-category, Black History.

Information Architecture, Design and Construction

Where the Information Architecture, Design and Construction are concerned, the BBC is in the position where it is building on an existing website for every project. (There are occasions where it would do a site for payment, for an outside agency, but this is not the case with the Abolition of Slavery project). The BBC website is a well-established site so any new projects obviously build upon/slot into an already well-established information architecture. The design and construction are also usually established. As Robin Moore put it “We don’t think outside the box, we think in the box” (that is, they think how the new content can be produced in current templates – within the organisation this is referred to as ‘traditional builds’). The producers use a template system which makes the pages uniform and predictable for the visitor. In Wales, production staff use the WIPS (Wales Interactive Production System), a template-based system that allows a large number of inputters to produce pages that adhere to the overall style.

The Researcher at regional level would be tasked with sourcing material. The web pages would be built by the WIL producer in each region

Marketing

To a large extent, the BBC IS the marketing exercise, as the websites are marketing their radio and television programmes (and also community events). But they do sometimes get involved in marketing. They run focus groups. They also advertise – not much in print advertising, but mostly billboards. Some user testing is led by external testers. There are also smaller groups convened for in internal testing.

Tracking, evaluation and maintenance

Fifty percent of the BBC website’s traffic comes from search engines and the insertion, at construction stage, of the good, original keywords, is an important task.

The BBC website has a Your Say section which constantly invites comment and contributions regarding any item on their site. The feedback from this interactive facility is a valuable guide on how much interest a particular project has attracted.

The website is already featuring a few stories but the full impact of this theme could be assessed only later in the year.

The BBC website features many themes similar to the Abolition of Slavery issue, as well as other types of projects. All are commissioned, constructed and signed off in steps similar to those described above. The BBC, not aimed primarily at making a profit from its production activities (although there are some income-producing projects) operates in some ways differently from commercial operations. The BBC website is an established institution (started in 1996, it is now a sprawling network of main and mini sites) and therefore each new project builds in existing architecture and practices. The production processes reflect the nature of the work they do, and the nature of the Corporation.