I got a reminder of the voting systems I used to work on at the BBC when Neil Thackray of The Media Briefing tweeted a link to this blog post from October — “The Ubermotive Guide to Media Influence”

In it a “hacker” describes how they were able to influence the editorial content of news.com.au by posting a lot of fake votes into online polls that the site was running. To demonstrate how much they’d compromised the system, they even took to deliberately dead-locking polls on 50%-50%. Nobody at the company noticed anything was amiss until it was picked up by Reddit, and the manipulated polls were being referenced in stories, and forming the basis for commissioning.

Flashback to the mid-2000s, and my producer role at the BBC for “Online Voting”. Central “New Media”, where I worked, had a system called polling.pl. Written in Perl, an admin panel allowed site producers to set up “self-service” votes. The system worked well enough, but didn’t handle high load terribly well, and it wasn’t very hard for determined users to “vote stuff”.

Factual & Learning meanwhile had a system called log2results. This burnt the casting of a vote into the server logs, and a harvester script came along and counted them later. It also analysed votes for odd patterns. It was hard to influence the outcome of a vote, but this system couldn’t display dynamic counts back to the user.

News Online naturally had their own system as well. It handled load really well, but couldn’t, for architectural reasons, be served on pages aways from the news.bbc.co.uk sub-domain. It also had a fatal flaw — if two votes were submitted at exactly the same time, the counter would sometimes reset to zero. This used to annoy programme makers and journalists a lot.

For a good few months I was on the fool’s errand of trying to reconcile these three systems into a single requirements set and technical spec for one über-arching-pan-BBC solution that would scale, be dynamic, self-service to set up, and difficult to stuff with spoof votes. And which would keep three technical and editorial departments with three very different cultures happy that it was better than their system which it was replacing. And possibly shower users with glitter and unicorns into the bargain…

In the course of it, I learned an awful lot about the length that people will go to fixing relatively meaningless online votes.

Now I always tried to be clear at the BBC that online votes should be for fun and not serious matters, but that didn’t stop a myriad of producers around the BBC using them inappropriately. I’d be the person making the awkward phone call to some BBC local radio website saying “You really shouldn’t be running a competition with a prize worth £1,000 being awarded to an individual on the basis of an easily spoofed online vote that only has 52 votes.”

The vote that was targeted the most in my time there was the Today programme’s “Listener’s Lord” poll. A fringe candidate had unswerving online loyalty, and we uncovered what seemed like a whole university campus computer network repeatedly voting for them. The beauty of the log2results approach was that you could order the counting script to discount anything that matched a particular behaviour, and remove those votes from the final score. The people trying to manipulate the vote got no feedback that the results of their efforts weren’t being counted, so never felt the need to change their attack strategy.

But all that was the mid-2000s, and news organisations have had an awful lot of time to get their heads around the validity of online votes since then. The BBC had, and still has, a strict set of editorial guidelines. The current text states that:

“‘Straw polls’ - including phone, text and online votes - have no statistical or numerical value.

They can be an effective form of interaction with the audience, illustrating a debate, but they should only be used with an explicit reference making it clear to audiences that they are self-selecting and not representative or scientific. Such votes cannot normally be said even to represent the audience for the programme or website, they only represent those who chose to participate. This applies even when there is a large response.

They should not be referred to in our output as a ‘poll’. The term ‘straw poll’ itself is widely misunderstood and should normally be avoided in output.”

For me, that is what has gone wrong with the process at news.com.au, and it is a set of guidelines that any news organisation would do well to adopt.

Although people will look at the technical details, and blame the website security and the programmers, in the end it is the editorial decision to take the numbers at face value, and to commission content on the back of this kind of vote that has been their downfall.

The Nieman Journalism Lab called it a “movement”, which seems quite a grand term for two sites announcing similar but different things on the same day, but both Politico and TechCrunch are opting to move their commenting systems away from Facebook. At the very same time, waves were being created in the UK as the newly-relaunched Manchester Evening News shifted to a commenting system that required users to have a Facebook account. At the heart of all this is the old canard — would forcing users to comment with something closer to their real identity reduce instances of trolling?

It seems to me that what Politico and TechCrunch have in common is a stubborn belief that the quality of debate underneath their articles would improve if only they could find the right commenting platform.

At Politico, Dylan Byers is putting his faith in technology:

“Disqus gives you the ability to up-vote and down-vote comments and thread responses. By default, high quality comments will filter to the top, and poor quality ones will not show up on the page.”

A view immediately debunked in the first comment left on the piece, where Adrian Lowe pointed out:

“That’s if people actually vote for them. And if people are trolling in voting, then low quality comments will be seen at the top. So, ‘by default’ high quality comments will not necessarily rise to the top.”

You only have to look at the green and red arrows on the MailOnline site to see how sometimes it is the scum that rises, not the cream.

TechCrunch’s attitude to their below-the-line contributors was made clear by the image they chose to accompany their announcement: “I miss you asshole”

They seem to be ascribing the behaviour of their users to the platform they employ, not to the way they are goaded into commenting by the articles they write. As my ex-colleague Meg Pickard says:

“If you write a provocative article, you can expect people to be provoked.”

The Manchester Evening News move is in the opposite direction, hoping that a shift to using Facebook identity will improve the commenting experience on the site. There’s no doubt that restricting people to only using Facebook identities will exclude some users, but David Higgerson wrote an eloquent personal blog post about the shift: “Much ado about Facebook”.

“Most of the people who have complained…seem to come from a starting point that news websites should allow free-for-all comments on all stories, and that the ‘community’ can say what it likes under any name it likes. I don’t see it like that.”

My own experience with using the Facebook comments plug-in under news content was within the Guardian Facebook app. I had rather hoped that by opening two commenting threads underneath each article — one on Facebook, and one on the Guardian site — we’d be able to prove once and for all whether one or other led to better interaction. In the end, it appeared that actually the tone set early on in a comment thread looked like it influenced comments much more than anything intrinsic about the format or identity system used.

There’s no doubt that software design and features do influence community behaviours, but not as much as decent community management and personal engagement from journalists does. In 2011 my friend Mary Hamilton wrote a very thorough blog post looking at the responsibility of news organisations to not just provide a commenting space, but to also participate and join in that space:

“If you don’t set examples of good behaviour, or reward [commenters], or empower the regular visitors to police their community by telling them the rules, your community will make its own rules, and chances are you won’t like them.”

She described switching tech platforms in search of an answer to bad community problems as akin to “laying Astroturf over an unkempt, unmaintained garden because you don’t like the colour of the wildflowers.”

She also said:

“The news industry can’t simply automate away its duty to respond to users. Small publishers and bloggers for the most part understand this, and — more crucially — so do our users. These are human beings at the other end of the internet, talking in our spaces, and we need to start treating them that way.”

Still, the golden rule of newspaper website comment systems is “Don’t be a dick” — and no technology choice can enforce that.

Full disclosure: I used to work at the Guardian, and worked directly with Facebook whilst I was there. I currently provide some design and consultancy services to Trinity Mirror who publish the Manchester Evening News.

Debates like this often fall into political and ideological lines though, with the BBC accused of censorship and rewriting history. It is much more illuminating to look at the impact racist language has with Licence Fee payers and viewers.

It is only a couple of years ago that Ofcom commissioned and published research into the public’s reaction to offensive language on television and radio.

As much as people can argue that a Fawlty Towers edit is against the artistic integrity of the work, is political correctness gone mad, or simply just over-cautiousness by the BBC, public opinion on “potentially discriminatory” language was quite clear clear in the Ofcom study:

“Overall, most potentially offensive words were not seen to be unacceptable in principle, as context was a key factor in determining whether language was seen as generally acceptable or unacceptable. The exception to this was some potentially discriminatory language (particularly ‘Paki’, ‘nigger’ and ‘spastic’) which some participants considered unacceptable in any context.”

I suspect there will be acres of comment columns and green ink spilled on the issue in the next couple of days, but it seems that in this case, the BBC has opted not to broadcast pre-watershed one of the only three words that fall into this category with the viewing public. It was surely the right decision.

“As a valued subscriber, your opinions are very important to us.”

So said the marketing survey email I got at the weekend from the Times and the Sunday Times. I’ve been a digital subscriber since the website went behind the paywall.

The first question in the survey?

“Firstly before you subscribed; on average, which days of the week would you buy The Times and The Sunday Times newspapers from your local retailer? (Please take into account going on holiday)”

There are seven options: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

It is a compulsory question, with no “none” answer.

I never used to buy the paper in print, I’ve only ever subscribed digitally. I can’t answer the question. I can’t reach the rest of the survey.

That doesn’t make me feel like their marketing department value their digital only subscribers. It makes me feel that they can’t believe their digital product range would ever attract people who hadn’t previously purchased the paper.

UPDATED 23/1/2013: A spokesperson for the Times contacted me about this post, and said:

“The first question should have ‘never’ as an option but didn’t. Fortunately the majority of subscribers who completed the survey did buy a paper at some stage and we have had over 29k responses, of which about 39% were digital subscribers. We will discount the question in case it is skewed. Despite that, the survey has yielded us useful feedback from our users”

“Financial Graphics at Thomson Reuters” by Sam Arnold-Forster

Sam’s talk had a focus on the production of graphics, starting with the simple “flat graphics” similar to those that a newspaper might have in print, to those which involve more interactivity.

He said that a key thing was to focus on simplicity, and abstract out the under-lying story from the data with minimal styling. He said it was important for financial graphics to try and make at the most two points. I was impressed with the crisp simplicity of the designs Sam showed.

Often, Sam said, at the big companies people obsess about having the data and the tools and the technology, but a lot of what they do at the front-end is HTML5/CSS/JavaScript, and anybody can do that.

He explained that the focus on data visualisation was creating an interesting blur in some of the Thomson Reuters products. Datastream, for example, is a subscription product. However, within the interface is a tweet button, and my understanding was that if someone makes a chart and tweets a link from inside the product, clicking that link gives a glimpse to non-subscribers into the previously closed and paywalled world of the Datastream server.

Sam Arnold-Forster says that infographics and visualisations need to be planned as part of the news cycle. As well as encouraging graphics journalists to go to news planning meetings, at Thomson Reuters they are encouraged to form good peer-to-peer relationships with journalists out in the field and in the bureaus. That way if the reporter gets a data-driven story, they have a point of contact to get it translated into graphics.

One question from the floor directed at Sam suggested that all of the graphics had seemed pretty traditional, and wondered if there was a reluctance amongst subscribers for new formats. Sam explained that the customers are generally time-poor and under pressure, so they wanted to use graphics that could help easily tell a story in one picture, rather than have the journalists write the words.

Sam Arnold-Forster did say that he thought more interactive elements “changed the relationship between the producer and the customer” as it had become more direct. Sam did then go on to say that they didn’t really have a measure of success. They have anecdotal evidence that someone emails and says “I really liked that. That was useful. That helped me with my job.”

It struck me that this summed up a problem with the news industry at the moment. No offence to Sam, whose work looked excellent, but here was a news organisation that was all about measuring the success of other companies’ business plans and performance, yet it couldn’t seem to reliably measure the effectiveness of its own content.

Next…

Also on the Hacks/Hackers London bill was another Thomson Reuters speaker — Himanshu Ojha — who was telling the incredibly interesting story behind “The Unequal State of America”. I’ll have my notes from that next…

“All Bloomberg journalism is data journalism” - Marianne Bouchart

Marianne started with an overview of the company and the impressive array of data sources they use — some 11,200 of them — from brokers to banks to researchers to analytics companies.

She took the room through a walk-through of the Bloomberg data terminal that subscribers and Bloomberg journalists use. To anyone of an earlier vintage it is pleasingly reminiscent of MS-DOS and CEEFAX — all monospaced type on a black screen, which a host of functionality that all has to be launched from a command line.

Marianne’s demo of the Bloomberg terminal

From a UX perspective, it is entirely alien to anything you might design as a modern mainstream information service, but it really does the job. Once, when I was meant to be observing Andrew Sparrow live blogging at Parliament, I ended up mesmerised watching a journalist next to him hammering away at the Bloomberg terminal in the same office. Although the learning curve is steep, the keyboard shortcuts on the custom hardware, and dense information display help people get their jobs done.

The Bloomberg terminal custom keyboard

A Bloomberg journalist in the audience explained that the screen was optimised for long periods of use, pointing out that programmers often favour working on screens with a black display background for their code rather than the brightly-lit white screens often used on the web. As Marianne said, the roots of the system are three decades old, and she “wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Bloomberg’s Professional terminal service is around $2,000 per month, and they have over 300,000 subscribers. They’ve gradually thrown more and more data and news sources into it to keep the user hooked — during Marianne’s demo I noticed racing results and the latest soccer scores flashing through the news ticker.

Marianne was illustrating how the terminal could be used with rather more serious data, looking at the ability to map global market shares in goods like cars, or zoom in to a particular ship’s location to find out more about it.

Bloomberg journalists are able to create maps and charts and data views within the terminal, and then hyperlink to them from within stories. The data can also then power charts and tables on the Bloomberg website.

All Bloomberg journalism, Marianne said, is data journalism. She explained that everyone will tell you “now is the time for data visualisation”, and she said that Bloomberg are committed to taking their place in this world, with an increased use of data-visualisation and interactive graphics on their site.

Bloomberg terminal demo data up close

Next…

In a break from the usual format, Hacks/Hackers London had four talks, rather than the usual two. Next up I’ll have my notes on two talks given by speakers from Thomson Reuters — Sam Arnold-Forster and Himanshu Ojha.