The BBC is infatuated with video news. On the front page of the BBC news website, almost as many videos are listed as written articles, and most major written news stories have videos to accompany them.
But an abundance of videos doesn’t necessarily lead to innovation.
BBC’s videos are a quick and easy meshing of television broadcast with the web. Stories are short, narrated, and exactly what one would expect from a report of a nightly news program.
Like this one, for example, about the South African police force trying to get in shape.
The only different format that I could find was one in which a simple video with no narration (and seemingly very little editing or thought to the piece) is thrown at the beginning of a news article. Like this one of Bush and Clinton visiting Haiti. No one is interviewed, no background is explained, and there is nothing particularly artistic or interesting about the piece that is unique to the BBC’s coverage of a widely publicized event.
A step in slightly different direction is this video that discusses the use of a local currency in Britain. It must be said, though, that this step is small and cautious. A few unique camera angles that wouldn’t normally pass on regular broadcast and some upbeat music are still overpowered by classic narration, conventional interviews, and—let’s be honest—a generally boring video that doesn’t quite do justice to a very interesting topic.
The BBC is, like much of Britain, steeped in tradition, so I imagine any allowance for creativity in web video will be slow in coming. There’s nothing wrong with tradition—it is the firm commitment to traditional journalistic standards that makes BBC World News website one of my favorite places to get informed—but would it hurt to throw us out-of-the-box thinkers a bone? Let’s see some innovation, BBC.
