EDITORS' BLOG

Not a webcam but.... (4)

• Ian Westbrook - Sport Interactive assistant editor
• 27 May 06, 01:09 PM

Our correspondent The Gaffer, in reply to Alex's posting "Making headlines for the right reasons", said he would be interested to find out exactly how we actually produce the news for the many masters which we serve.

Well Gaffer, especially for you and anyone else who may be interested, here goes.

BBC Sport Online was born nearly six years ago after starting out as a small section of the BBC News website.

At that time it was purely the BBC's sport website and used a content production system (CPS) to produce all the pages.

In February 2004 there was a huge change as the Ceefax Sport department merged with the web team to form a new integrated department known as BBC Sport Interactive in a process known as Multi-Platform Authoring (MPA).

No longer were two teams sitting alongside each other writing different length match reports and news stories for two different services, now it was one team writing every story once for everything.

The Ceefax team's copy had previously automatically fed through to BBCi Digital Text, the pages you access by using your red button, so this had to be taken account of too together with other emerging platforms such as WAP phones.

Ceefax pages always have to contain all the relevant information in a story in just four paragraphs. You imagine cramming in six hours of a day's play in a Test match or all the goals in a nine-goal thriller in League Two and you realise what a fine art it can be.

The web has always had more space to include more detail and colour in a story but our task just over two years ago was to merge the two without compromising either service.

All of this meant a big alteration to working practices, writing styles and also to CPS which was required to work in a different way.

So from that point on, all stories had to be topped by a Ceefax-friendly four paragraphs and followed on with the detail.

One of our first MPA reports was Watford's 4-0 win over Wimbledon in the old Division One.

Have a look at it and you will see that the top four paragraphs do indeed contain a good summary of the match. There is detail on each of the four goals, Wimbledon's best chance and a bit of context in the intro.

Then for more detail on the match and the goals the report continues.

You can see the difference if you look at this old report of Manchester United's 4-2 win over Coventry in April 2001.

The information is more evenly spread throughout the report but both the old and new versions still provide good readable and informative match reports.

That's the editorial side of things but then there were the technical hurdles to overcome.

The CPS system had to be integrated with the Ceefax operating system Plasma.

This has been a very long operation but as we reach the eve of the World Cup, we have a well-established system which not only allows us to publish to the web, but also directly to Ceefax by controlling those pages through CPS.

We can publish and delete Ceefax pages, move them around, update index pages, add sub-pages and run the entire output in CPS although the main headlines page on 301 is controlled through Plasma and we have the facility to add manual lines to parts of indexes when we need to.

In the event of CPS breaking down, we could still update Ceefax the old way.

I hope this gives you some insight into how things work in here - but as for The Gaffer's other suggestion of a webcam.....you really wouldn't want to watch us working live.

Trust me on that!

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