The BBC Hard At Work

For a while now I started to notice something odd about the BBC's news site. Often they have a story with links to related stories at the bottom. These "from other news sites" are often different news outlets reports on the same story. They are often local news organisations close to where the story took place. Increasingly it's showing the same thing word for word on each link. Why?

I've been meaning to write this post for a long time now, but every time I find examples I either can't be bothered writing a blog post, or am too busy at the time to blog. While taking a break from a Drupal project I'll be launching soon, I thought I'd catch up on the news headlines from the BBC and other sites, and found an example. This story happens to be about a man convicted today of a knifepoint rape in 1988 after a cold case review.

Take a look at both links; the BBC link, and the Lancashire Evening Post's link.

The reason they're both identical word for word is that the story is an Press Association one. It was not written by a BBC journalist, nor by a Lancashire Evening Post journalist. Note the honesty in the one who states the Press Association part at the bottom of the story? Yep, it's not the BBC.

Why does this matter? The BBC keep bleating on about how world class their news coverage is, and that's why people should be sent to jail or given hefty fines for daring to try and avoid paying a subscription charge for their services. One of the weapons they use is quality news coverage. It's about having the best journalists in lots of places to get the best insights and the fastest scoops on stories. If their news coverage is so world class why do they resort to republishing content from other news sources without attribution, in full and word for word?

Yes, this is common practice among news organisations, to republish from other sources. It's also common practice to attribute it to the source too. Perhaps the BBC have a deal that lets them legally deceive the license payers, I don't know. The point is, that if that is what the BBC call journalism, then what the hell is the TV license funding? It's certainly not "high quality journalism", I can throw up a news collation site in a few days, copy and paste in full from other sources too. I don't need an extortion racket to fund it.

I totally understand that proper journalism needs money, and that small local news organisations simply can't afford to employ an army of journalists. They rely on news wire sources upstream like Press Association for their content. I have no issue with that, the BBC screw a LOT of money from every household with a TV license partly on the promise of well funded unbiased journalism. They have no excuses.

In this example it was only one "related news site story", often it's more than one. In some cases there are four or five; all with word for word identical Press Association stories, just like the BBC. What's the point of providing links to other pages where you can read the exact same story word for word?