Jakob Nielsen: World's Best Headlines: BBC News

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html

by edw519 • 17 years ago

46 26 17 years ago

edw519• 17 years ago

In the phrase "every word works hard for its living", every word works hard for its living. What would you call that, a meta-sentence?

Angostura• 17 years ago

Self referential, perhaps.

imp• 17 years ago

I think we would need to consult Douglas Hofstadter about that one.

ashleyw2• 17 years ago

I love the BBC just because it's publicly funded — they don't even need to grab your attention to make a profit from you!

It's a tax I can honestly say I don't mind paying!

yan• 17 years ago

Same exact sentiment for NPR, even though it's not completely funded by public funds.

ZeroGravitas• 17 years ago

I'm conflicted about this. It's actually a very regressive tax, you pay the same whether you are rich or poor, whether you have 1 television or 20.

It's also enforced in an incredibly harsh manner and we (the taxpayers) are actually footing the bill to send people to jail who get caught without a license and then can't afford to pay it (though an outrcy in the House of Lords massively reduced the number being imprisioned down from 200 to 20 (roughly) a year.

On the other hand, if it came up for debate and reform, certain political factions would basically kill the BBC, which I love.

jgrahamc2• 17 years ago

There's a fairly easy way out of the tax. Don't have a TV in the UK. You then don't have to pay it but you can still enjoy the BBC.

Specifically, you can use all their services including the iPlayer as long as you don't use the iPlayer to watch a program as it's being broadcast.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/01/iplayer_does_...

I don't have a TV and I live in the UK and the licensing people are aware of this. I do have broadband at home. At first I thought I would watch TV via the iPlayer, but it turns out that I've watched a grand total of one program in the last four months.

ashleyw2• 17 years ago

Good points, it does seem a little outrageous people can go to jail for not paying their TV tax, however I guess it has to have some punishment for not paying it, else who would? :D

pbhj2• 17 years ago

The place where I work was sent a payment notice (we don't have any TVs there). There was a strict instruction that failure to respond was a terribel thing and bad things would happen to us. There were lots of ways to respond if you wanted to pay or wanted to claim you already had a license.

There was no way to tell them you didn't need a license.

The next step is [they say in the letter] that they send an enforcement officer to your address.

If they just had a general phone number or a "we don't have a TV" phone number they'd have saved themselves at least the cost of sending someone out to try and hassle us ... and I'm sure a lot of other people.

It's not my job to chase up their failure to provide contact details on a demand for money.

OT: We got a parking fine when I took my wife in to have our baby last week. The number to call to pay the fine is the wrong number ... gah! I'm just not sure if this is malevolence.

laut• 17 years ago

I loathe state media. The idea that the government runs media is very 1984. And they don't work for free, they just make money by forcing you to pay at gunpoint instead.

They are not neutral (which is impossible) so there are certain ideas that they promote in their reporting. And even people who are against those ideas are forced to pay for the promotion of those ideas.

nevan• 17 years ago

His site has different priorities than a newspaper, but I've always been fond of Khoi Vinh's titles on http://subtraction.com, which have been consistently good even since before he started working at the NYT.

gb• 17 years ago

I'm not sure if there's much truth to it, but I read that the BBC news headlines are so short as there is some central system that provides them to Ceefax too (which can only display 24 rows of 40 characters).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceefax

DLWormwood• 17 years ago

That was actually mentioned in the article...

    So why is the BBC so good when most others are so bad? Maybe it's in the BBC's blood: The news
    organization originated as a radio station, where word count is at a premium and you must communicate
    clearly to immediately grab listeners. In a spoken medium, each word is gone as soon as it's
    uttered, so convoluted exposition confuses even more than it does in print.

    Ceefax (one of the few surviving videotext services) also helps instill conciseness in BBC's journalists.
    Text on low-def televisions has horrible resolution and only allows for a minute word count (somewhat
    like mobile).

nopassrecover• 17 years ago

BBC articles in the "latest headlines" RSS feed that comes with Firefox tend to be poor - they often don't match the article itself and tend to be link bait type titles. The alternative is when they give too little information.

pbhj2• 17 years ago

    * Italy buries first quake victims
    * Romania blamed over Moldova riots
    * Ten arrested in UK anti-terrorism raids
    * Villagers hurt in West Bank clash
    * Mass Thai protest over leadership
    * Iran accuses journalist of spying

2 of those are poor for one of the criteria given IMO.

* West Bank clash, villagers hurt * UK anti-terrorism raids, ten arrested

These front-load the headlines better so that if you know you don't like "West Bank" articles you can skip the other ~20 characters and jump to the next line. I don't think they are less readable either.

I have to confess I lengthened a headline from "Spiders reanimated" to "Spider Nightmare: Spiders resurrected from the dead" the other day ( http://digg.com/general_sciences/Spider_Nightmare_Spiders_re... ).. it felt so dirty and multiply redundant, and didn't get me any Diggs as National Geographic pipped me by 14 minutes with the story.

Elepsis2• 17 years ago

One of the guidelines nearly every publication practices for its headlines is that each one should have a verb (one thing that the BBC also does well in the above examples). The verb enables a reader to quickly grasp the "action" in the story and gives people a better understanding of the central point of the article.

Your rewrite does little more than remove the verbs, making the headlines less clear, in my opinion.

iain• 17 years ago

Actually, he removed the prepositions, not the verbs. I wouldn't mind the front-loading as much if he didn't remove the prepositions, but to me those two rearranged sentences sound awkward regardless.

I wonder if the journalists who write the articles choose the headlines, or if the BBC has a `Headline Phraser' job.

lacker• 17 years ago

No, the world's best headlines are on Wikipedia. Each article is titled exactly what it is about.

rams• 17 years ago

BBC News Low Graphics Page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565470

Jakob Nielsen: World's Best Headlines: BBC News

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