BBC News: old dog to learn new tricks

March 26th, 2008 • Design, Journalism, Media
Tags: bbc

Something momentous will happen next week - the BBC will revamp its News site. Alright, so it’s hardly in the same league as the collapse of capitalism, but look at it this way - BBC News is my home page, the thing that greets me every time I launch my browser.

It’s so much a part of my life that I’ve been given to Victor Meldrew-ish outbursts when they make the slightest change (remember when they introduced those God-awful drop-downs for ‘Video and Audio News’? I grumbled to anyone dumb enough to listen to me for a week).

I know every pixel of the home page’s real estate - the ‘wacky’ Also In The News feature centre right, the sports headline just beneath it, the speed-scan block of blue headlines top right. I can see the damn thing with my eyes closed.

But why worry? The BBC can afford some of the best pixel-pushers on the planet, and can organise user testing sessions that would make lesser companies gulp. P’raps it’s because I cannot wrap my mind around the new BBC.co.uk home page, which has the sniff of tricksiness about it.

Or maybe I should just accept that I’m becoming offensively conservative, and shut the hell up.