Neil Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, might have been grimly amused to see Sir Howard Stringer recommending that BBC News online emulate Buzzfeed.
Now there may be some very general principles that the BBC can learn from about creating engaging, sharable content. But the news should be very different from cat photos and funny lists. For the BBC, not being Buzzfeed is a feature, not a bug.
The Unique Way That The BBC Is Funded (TM) should mean that BBC News isn’t beholden to generating clickbait. Not being reliant on advertising revenue should free it to do in-depth, objective reporting without worrying so much about pageviews and click-throughs.
Of course, there are lots of ways online news such as the BBC could be improved, such as making it easy to follow particular news stories over time, for example, by follow topics and figures.
For registered users, track what they read to predict topics they’ll be most interested in and sync notifications across apps and the web – like Google Now and it’s suggested content. But also build in deliberate surfacing of content that that particular users don’t usually read in order to break up those filter-bubbles, especially for events of particular importance.
Rather than treating the news as primarily ephemeral, the BBC should think about how over time it can build up a comprehensive, searchable record of events. The BBC could use smart metadata to tag each article with date, location, people, organisations and so on, to make it easy to search and map out topics contextually.
So for example, if a politician gives a speech on a particular topic, automatically show past news stories where he or she has addressed the same subject – have they changed their position? Or switch to an automatically generated timeline of events in a particular country based on past articles, to see how things have developed in Syria or wherever.
I don’t believe the shift to post-Gutenberg paradigms of communication and knowledge doesn’t have to mean dumbing down. But it does mean making information easily digestible and browsable for modern digital audiences.