The development of effective quality measures relevant to the future practice of BBC news journalism online

Abstract

The BBC’s online news provision has been increasingly pressured by forces that are both internal and external to the corporation within recent years. In the light of this, the concern here is twofold. First, the aim is to produce a more comprehensive framework for the monitoring and evaluation of the quality of specific, key aspects of the corporation’s online hard news output than currently exists. It is intended to be usable not only by expert outsiders looking in at the BBC’s standards, but, with a little basic training, by the organisation’s editorial staff, should the corporation choose to consider its merits and agree its adoption. The second aim is to provide a means of helping maintain and increase the quality of the same key aspects of BBC news output at the stages of reporting and editorial decision-making within ongoing stories.