INSIDE MONITORING

ESSENTIAL MEDIA INSIGHT

You’ve seen the What, this is the How. Inside Monitoring is a blog written by our staff journalists, linguists and analysts from around the world. With access to local sources and a nuanced understanding of language and context, they truly live the stories and are able to identify what other news organisations may miss. In this edition, we talk about our new, improved formats for our content. For a view from the other side, turn to Outside Monitoring on page 24.

Inside Monitoring: Improvements to our content set

BBC Monitoring (BBCM) has a reputation for providing distinctive insight and analysis, with deep regional and thematic expertise. Editorial Director Judy King writes about improvements to our coverage.

As media environments around the world grow ever more complex and the real-life impact of the spread of disinformation is plain for all to see, the need for the service that BBCM provides could not be clearer.

In recent user surveys, we learned that what customers value most is our knowledge of international media sources and the ability of our multi-lingual journalists to provide context and insight.

With this in mind we have reviewed our content set and taken steps to simplify it in order to make it easier for our readers to benefit from our expertise.

Here are the main changes we have made:

Briefings

We have introduced this new product to make sense of key developments in our areas of specialism. Briefings are concise, granular and link to the media sources contained within them. Each one covers a distinctive angle, along with relevant insight and background. They start with an ‘at-aglance’ section to enable readers to quickly decide if the content is relevant for them.

Deep regional and thematic expertise

News Alerts

News Alerts are not new and have been a popular product with BBCM customers for many years, providing timely updates from our key coverage areas. Given their popularity, we now want to do more of them and have advised our journalists to see them as tip-offs to our users, rather than viewing them as simple breaking news reports. In the past, News Alerts made up 3% of our output but now they make up 24%. Our readers will now have access to a steady flow of News Alerts on key themes and countries.

Reports

The Report category of content has also undergone a revamp and now focuses on the key narratives and messaging contained in the most influential sources. Reports summarise an article, opinion piece or TV item and explain its significance. Where possible, reports contain a link to the original source of the information.

Judy King is BBC Monitoring’s Editorial Director