“BBC Trending is a new social media series from the BBC. We have a video, which goes out on Twitter and BBC World television, and we also do our daily blog on the BBC website, and we have a World Service radio programme. So it goes across all platforms.”
What is the thinking behind it?
“The main idea behind BBC Trending is that social media has become such a huge part of our daily lives, and it’s become a pivotal element of news events. If you look at the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, or what happened in Egypt – many of these events were in some way catalysed by social media, so it’s playing a very important role, and also an important role in terms of how we engage with the audience.
“But what we haven’t seen as much of to date is an active engagement by journalists with what’s going on on social media – so what BBC Trending is doing is getting to the journalism behind the trends. That sounds like a catchphrase, but it actually is true. We try to find out the person behind a trend, or the reason behind a trend, and the real context behind what’s going on.”
Whose idea was it?
“Mukul Devichand is the presenter of the World Service radio programme; he came up with the concept of BBC Trending and is the series producer of it.”
What’s your role?
“I’m the main producer – the main journalist – for the video product, and I’m the main presenter for it, but I’ve also presented the World Service radio programme, so it’ll be something where we mix it up a little bit – but primarily I’m working on the video.”
I’ve seen you’ve been quite active at engaging with people on Twitter.
“Yes, I think that’s really important. Even if the comments that you receive on Twitter aren’t necessarily positive, I think it’s really important to be open to a wide variety of feedback, and that’s the nature of Twitter – it’s such an open and transparent platform in that way, so if you’re going to put yourself out there, you need to be willing to respond to all kinds of comments.”
People aren’t used to journalists replying to them, and it gives them a buzz when they do.
“These days, with the nature of Twitter, people who work in the public eye are also on a public platform like Twitter and it definitely bridges the gap between the audience and those who want to engage with them. It’s become a two-way street now, and I think that’s one of the great things about Twitter – it’s become such a big vehicle to reach out to people and make those contacts.”
We’ve seen quite a lot of problems with social media verification over the past couple of years. Are you going to be focusing much on that?
“It’s always something we need to bear in mind, with every story that we do. We have a few principles that we’re always bearing in mind – we’re applying the nuts and bolts of traditional journalism to social media; just because it’s on social media doesn’t mean that the same editorial standards don’t apply.
“The transparency is always there, in the manner in which we report it. For example, if you see a report going out on World News television, it might say something along the lines of ‘these pictures appear to show an attack in Homs, but they cannot be verified’ or something like that. It has to be transparent about what it is.”
But you could even make that a story in itself.
“That has come up within a number of the stories that we’ve covered on BBC Trending – for example, we were looking at the top countries tweeting about Movember. We saw that Indonesia was in the top 10, but interestingly, when we contacted the Movember organisation, they said to us that Indonesia isn’t officially part of the campaign.
“On closer inspection, we found that people are paid in Indonesia to tweet about all sorts of things, including Movember – up to $50 per tweet. So we’re trying to find out the motivations for tweets – they’re not always purely face value; it’s about finding out the real reasons why some of these trends are happening.”
Do you have any advice for aspiring digital journalists like us?
“It’s incredibly challenging to carve out a career for yourself – and, from what I gather, it’s getting harder and harder each year – but digital journalism has thrown up a lot of new opportunities. So what I would say is keep trying and persevere: if you have an idea, pitch it to an editor and if they don’t like it, go to another editor. That’s what I did – I was insistent.
“And also, try to talk to as many people and build up as many connections as you can – many jobs we discovered through talking to people. It sounds very, very basic – but, actually, it works.”
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