31 August 2022
200 years of collecting newspapers
2022 marks a special anniversary for the Newspaper Collection at the British Library. 200 years ago, in April 1822, the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books began systematically collecting newspapers. From that foundation the Library’s newspaper collections has continued to grow, and now comprises more than 36,000 titles from the UK and overseas, or 60 million individual newspaper issues.
The Old Newspaper Reading Room in the British Museum, Bloomsbury. Sell's Dictionary of the World's Press 1893
Like many of the British Library’s collections, newspapers were originally part of the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books. However, from the Museum’s founding in 1753, until the 1820s, news publications were not seen as a distinct collection in their own right, and weren’t part of any concerted collecting effort. The impetus for changing this came in 1818, when a large collection of early newspapers, compiled by Dr Charles Burney (1757-1817), was purchased by the Museum. The Burney Collection of newspapers 1603-1818, when added to the Thomason Tracts (a collection of newspapers and news-books from the English Civil War period, which had been purchased for the museum by George III in 1762), formed a significant collection of early newspapers; enough for the museum to start considering the form in its own right.
In April 1822, after negotiations by Henry Baber (1775-1869), Keeper of the Printed Books, the British Museum began to collect newspapers in a systematic fashion. This was achieved via an arrangement with the Stamp Office, who at the time collected all newspapers published in Britain for purposes of registration and taxation. They kept the newspapers for two years, in case they were needed for legal cases, but agreed to pass them on to the British Museum after this period had elapsed. The first newspapers to arrive at the library were London papers for the years 1818 and 1819, and the first consignment contained sixty complete sets for these years, and twenty-one imperfect sets. Provincial newspapers were added to those deposited by the Stamp Office in 1832, and Scottish and Irish newspapers were sent from 1848.
British Museum Trustees Standing Committee: Minutes of Ordinary Business, 13 April 1822.
There are very few surviving records of this early arrangement between the Stamp Office and the British Museum. The image above, showing a short notice of thanks to the Stamp Office after the first consignment of newspapers arrived, which was recorded in the minutes of the Trustees Standing Committee. This is the only know record held at the British Museum/British Library, and there is no list of which newspapers arrived in that first delivery. Records for this period from the Stamp Office do not survive. Therefore, we have no certainty about which newspapers were the first actively collected by the British Library, but we can make some educated guesses. Below is an image of the front page of The World, which began publication in January 1818. This newspaper has annotations, including the publishers name and address, which were made by clerks at the Stamp Office. This indicates that it was originally the Stamp Office copy, and it was published in one of the first years deposited at the British Museum, so it is likely that this is one of the titles handed over during the first year of the arrangement.
The World, Vol. 1, No. 1, 4th January 1818.
Newspapers arrived at the British Museum from the Stamp Office via this arrangement until 1869, when Legal Deposit laws were introduced. From that date onwards a copy of each newspapers produced in the country legally had to be deposited at the library by the publishers. The British Museum was now entirely responsible for its own newspaper collecting, and began building up a sizeable and (mostly) comprehensive collection of British newspapers.
The rate of newspapers publication from the late nineteenth century quickly led to storage problems for the British Museum, and from 1905 many newspapers were stored offsite at Colindale in north London. In the early 1930s this offsite newspaper storage depot was expanded, and a reading room was added, with the new Newspaper Library at Colindale opening to readers in August 1932.
In 1973 the British Library was established, and while newspapers, along with the other collections of the Department of Printed Books, were transferred to the new institution, they continued to be housed at Colindale until 2013. Newspapers then travelled up to Boston Spa, a site that had been used by the British Museum and then the British Library since 1962. A dedicated newspaper reading room was open at St Pancras in 2014, and the state of the art National Newspaper building designed especially for storing newspapers was opened in 2015.
Newspaper continue to be an important part of the British Library’s collections, with around 1,000 newspapers added to the collection each week. Alongside this, the Library now collects radio, broadcast, and internet news, creating the national news collection. Curators also continue to work to preserve and make accessible the newspapers from the Museum’s earliest days of collecting. Many of the first newspapers to arrive in 1822 have been recently digitised as part of the Heritage Made Digital project, and are now freely available to view via the British Newspaper Archive.
Sources:
Esdaile, Arundell. The British Museum Library. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1946.
Harris, P. R. A History of the British Museum Library, 1753-1973. London: The British Library, 1998.
The Library of the British Museum: Retrospective Essays on the Department of Printed Books. London: The British Library, 1993.
Gaskell, Beth and McKernan, Luke. ‘British Library News Collection’. In Breaking the News: 500 Years of News in Britain. London: British Library, 2022.
Beth Gaskell, Newspaper Curator
07 January 2019
Heritage Made Digital - the newspapers
The British Library is currently engaged on a major programme entitled Heritage Made Digital. The aim of the programme is to transform digital access to the British Library's heritage collections by streamlining digitisation workflows, undertaking strategically led digitisation and making existing digitised content available as openly as copyright and licensing agreements allow. Heritage Made Digital is embracing a wide range of materials, from manuscripts through to sounds, and one of its major elements is newspapers.
Unfit newspaper volumes awaiting conservation inspection
The first thing to ask is why the British Library needs to be digitising newspapers, when we already have a very productive relationship with family history company Findmypast, which selects and digitises newspapers for the British Newspaper Archive, providing us with digital preservation copies in the process. It has digitised over 20 million pages from our collection, and adds hundreds of thousands of extra pages each month.
The simple answer is that there is more that we would like to see digitised that isn't likely to get digitised soon otherwise. The greater part of newspapers processed by Findmypast come from our microfilmed copies, because it is so much easier and quicker to do so (about eighteen times quicker than digitising from print). But only a third of our collection of some 60 million newspaper issues has been microfilmed. Of the newspapers for which we have only print, some get digitised, but many do not. In part this is because of the condition of many of newspapers, often produced using low-quality newsprint and for many years not stored in optimum conditions. We define preservation status of our newspapers under three categories: good, poor and unfit. Unfit no one gets to see, even onsite, unless we have a microfilm or digital access version. And around 4.5% of our collection (or 20 million pages) is in an unfit state and with no microfilmed or digitised copy available. That's a lot of newspapers not to be making available at all.
So, for Heritage Made Digital, we have chosen to concentrate on newspapers in a poor or unfit condition. This is not as straightforward as it might sound, since few runs of a newspaper title (i.e. from its first date to its last date) exist under one condition status. One volume may be good, another poor, another unfit (e.g. with a broken spine, crumbling pages etc). Therefore, although we want to concentrate on poor or unfit newspapers, we also want to digitise full runs of newspaper titles, because this will make best sense for researchers. In practice, we find that 40% of the volumes we are digitising for Heritage Made Digital are in a poor or unfit state.
We have set other restrictions for ourselves, with the aim of offering the best result for the widest range of research users. We are only digitising newspapers that are out of copyright, so that we can make the results freely available online - both the digitised pages and the data created by digitisation. Calculating when a newspaper goes out of copyright is complicated, but we are sticking to a 140-year rule - so the run of the newspaper has to have ended by 1878.
Next, we are primarily digitising newspapers that we published in London but which were distributed outside London as well. So, not newspapers for the areas of London only (i.e. London regionals), but metropolitan newspapers with a wider circulation. Curiously enough, this is a neglected area for newspaper digitisation. The British Newspaper Archive focusses heavily on British regional newspapers, while the main UK national newspapers available digitally are almost entirely those where the title still exists (e.g. The Guardian, The Times). In other words, we have identified a gap, one which we think will make a significant difference to what is available online so far.
We are not in competition with Findmypast, however - in fact, we are working closely with them. Every newspaper that we digitise will be made freely available via the British Library's catalogue, but they will also be made available via the British Newspaper Archive (a subscription site). That means that almost all of our digitised newspapers will be searchable - by title, date and word - in the one place. As things stand, the newspapers will be appearing on the BNA first, and secondly (at a date still to be determined) through the British Library catalogue, using the Universal Viewer display tool (a development project still in progress).
Waiting to be digitised
So, what are we digitising?
It will be around 1.3 million pages, 1 million from print and another 300,000 from microfilm. We're still choosing the titles to digitise, even as we start digitising, as we find out more through a process of preservation need and research, but it will be somewhere around 180 newspaper titles, many of them short runs of a year or less. We can't provide a definitive list as yet, but these are some of the titles (with title changes) that have gone to our imaging studios already:
- Baldwin's London Weekly Journal (1803-1836)
- The Bee-Hive / The Penny Bee-Hive (1862-1876)
- The British Liberator (1833)
- Colored News (1855)
- Illustrated Sporting News and Theatrical and Music Review / Illustrated Sporting and Theatrical News (1862-1870)
- The Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial Times (1847-1863)
- Mirror of the Times (1800-1823)
- Morning Herald (1801-1869)
- The News / The News and Sunday Herald / The News and Sunday Globe (1805-1839)
- People's Weekly Police Gazette (1835-1836)
- Pictorial Times (1843-1848)
- The Saint James's Chronicle (1801-1866)
- The Sun / The Sun & Central Press (1801-1876)
There is a lot more that we have planned. We're exploring academic partnerships (we're already working closely with the recently-announced British Library/Alan Turing Institute data science project Living with Machines). We're aiming to do creative things with the data. We will be publishing blog posts, both about the content and about the decisions we're making on what gets digitised. We will be producing online guides and research tools, aimed at both the specialist and the general user.
We think that we have come up with a model for the digitisation of newspapers, in particular the way in which we are working in partnership with Findmypast, which will be particularly productive. We certainly hope to build on it beyond the life of the project. We can't show you any newspapers digitised through Heritage Made Digital, or offer any free datasets, as yet. But we will do soon.
It's worth remembering that the British Library has 60 million newspapers, from 1619 to the present day. After a decade or more of intensive work, we have digitised just 5%. There is a long, long way to go.
21 June 2017
Archiving the general election on TV
The general election that no one was supposed to want turned out to be completely compelling. Many of the apparent certainties on which the UK's snap election of June 2017 was based were overturned, at least in part - from its core themes (it was supposed to be about Brexit but never really was), to demographics (young people don't turn out to vote, except that they did), to the balance of political power (the predicted comprehensive victory by the Conservatives instead resulted in a hung parliament).
Tim Farron, then leader of the Liberal Democrats, from BBC News at Ten, 17 May 2017
One certainty that remained in place was the primary position of television as the platform for information and debate. Probably the defining image of modern electioneering is the politician speaking with a grouping of supporters with banners bunched behind them, the supposed audience seeing the back of the speaker while the true target is a remote one. Reality is subverted to televisual reality.
Although subsequent analysis of voting trends has shown that social media may have had a greater influence, in some sectors, than before, while newspapers' influence has not waned as greatly as some have pronounced (again, in particular sectors), television was where the general election was played out. One of the particular coups of the election campaign was when Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn changed his mind and decided to take part in a BBC party leaders' debate, wrong-footing the Conservative leader Theresa May. Likewise the performances by the various politicians in interviews (Theresa May telling The One Show about who in her household put out the bins), Jeremy Corbyn telling Jeremy Paxman on Channel 4 why he wasn't campaigning to abolish the monarchy) seem to have had a persuasive effect on public perceptions. Other media play their part, but television is the testing ground.
The British Library was recording all this, or at least a good part of it. Between the surprise announcement of the election on 18 April 2017 and election day on June 8 we recorded some 1,500 television news programmes from 15 channels (BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Four, BBC News, BBC Parliament, Channel 4, ITV1, Sky News, Al Jazeera English, CGTN, CNN, France 24, NHK World, RT, Channels 24). This included general news programmes from each of those channels, interviews, speeches, panel debates, party election broadcasts, satirical shows, and of course the through-the-night election results programmes and post-election reporting. Because of the surprise nature of the election, there weren't some of the in-depth documentaries and comedy series that we saw at the 2015 election and the 2016 EU referendum, but the air of improvisation as TV reacted to events only added to the compelling nature of those six weeks.
Because in the middle of the election were breaking news stories that halted the campaigning twice - the suicide bomber at the Manchester Arena on 22 May and the attacks on London Bridge and Borough Market on 3 June. Both events wove their way into the election narrative, and saw the broadcasters adapting to the abrupt shift in the news agenda. Extended recordings of the breaking news reportage on these events, across multiple channels, are also part of we archived.
George Osborne and Ed Balls, part of ITV's election night commentary team
All of our UK 2017 general election programmes are now on the Explore catalogue, and can be played directly from the I Want This links on the catalogue at either our London or Boston Spa sites. You can access the programme either directly from the catalogue, or you can go to our onsite Broadcast News service, and search in greater depth for programmes by date, channel or subject (to find Broadcast News, following the Sound & Moving Image services link from the front page of any British Library terminal).
We have produced a spreadsheet of all of the news and election programmes we recorded 18 April-11 June, in .xlsx format, which you can download here.
Our news collections go back to the 1620s, but they are as much about today as yesterday. It is not possible to archive the whole of the world of news as it impacts on the UK. The range of publications and platforms is too vast, and in an increasingly personalised news world, everyone is seeing different news. But we capture the best that we can - comprehensively for newspapers (thanks to Legal Deposit), reasonably comprehensively for web news sites (thanks to Non-Print Legal Deposit) and selectively for television and radio. It is instant history, turning what is live and uncertain into that which has become fixed and a subject for study and contemplation. And it is compelling.
04 January 2017
Trump on TV
The incoming US president, Donald Trump, is rewriting the book on the political process. However, despite the apparent creation of policy via social media, the real impact Trump has made since the presidential election process began has been through the more traditional media, particularly television. His statements made through Twitter have been picked up by newspapers, television and radio, and it is here that the seismic realignment of American political priorities is being digested and disseminated. Twitter has been used to ignite a media process. Social media remains for Donald Trump a means of being on TV, where his mass audience lies (Trump has 18.6m Twitter followers, but there are 114m television sets in the USA alone).
From the Sky News coverage of the US presidential election result, 09/11/2016
Trump's impact on television in Britain can be traced through the news and current affairs programmes recorded for the British Library's Broadcast News service. As well as recording regular television and radio news programmes each day from 22 UK and international channels, we have recorded numerous special programmes on Trump and the US election. On 8/9 November we recorded the election night programmes of BBC One, ITV1, Sky News, Al Jazeera English, CNN, RT (Russia Today), Channels 24 (Nigerian television) and CCTV (China). All of these can be found on our Explore catalogue with links to the playable programmes, which for copyright reasons can only be played on terminals at our London or Yorkshire sites. For ease of searching it is best, if you are onsite and using a British Library terminal, to go to the Broadcast News service itself (http://videoserver.bl.uk) and use the Advanced Search facility to select all recordings for 8/9 November 2016.
We also have many individual television programmes produced through 2016. of which the titles below are only a selection. They document not only the events of recent history, but the struggle that the often incredulous traditional media have had in trying to come to terms with the Trump phenomenon. The links are to our catalogue records, but again please note the programmes will only be playable on a British Library terminal. Descriptions in inverted commas are those provided for the programmes as part of the EPG (Electronic Programme Guide).
- The Mad World of Donald Trump (Channel 4, tx. 26/01/2016): "Matt Frei enters the colourful and mad world of presidential hopeful Donald Trump, whose meteoric political rise comes amid one of the most controversial political campaigns America's seen."
- Piers: The Trump Interview (ITV1, tx. 23/03/2016): "Piers Morgan's full, uncensored interview with controversial US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump."
- President Trump: Can He Really Win? (Channel 4, tx. 30/03/2016): "Donald Trump has emerged as the clear front runner for the Republican Presidential nomination. Matt Frei investigates whether 'the Donald' could make it to the White House."
- Republican Presidential Town Hall (CNN, tx. 30/03/2016): Anderson Cooper hosts a Republican Presidential Town Hall with Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Donald Trump.
- Listening Post (Al Jazeera English, tx. 23/04/2016): "Trump and Clinton win the New York Primaries but what part have the media played in their victories?"
- United States of Hate: Muslims Under Attack (BBC One, tx. 05/07/2016): "Examining America's recent upsurge in Islamophobia and the reasons it has come about."
- Panorama: Trump's Angry America (BBC One, tx. 18/07/2016): "Hilary Andersson visits the racially divided town of Bakersfield to meet Donald Trump supporters as well as those who fear Trump becoming president."
- Republican National Convention 2016 (BBC Parliament, tx. 22/07/2016): Recorded coverage of the 2016 Republican National Convention, from Thursday 21 July. Including speeches from Reince Priebus, Peter Thiel, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump.
- Republican National Convention 2016 (CNN, tx. 22/07/2016): Live coverage of Republican National Convention for 21 July 2016, including acceptance speech by Donald Trump.
- President Trump: Can He Really Win? (Channel 4, tx. 23/08/2016): "Matt Frei explores how the US presidential contest is shaping up to be one of the most brutal in living memory, and asks if Donald Trump can make it all the way to the White House."
- Trump vs Clinton Live (Channel 4, tx. 27/09/2016): "US Presidential Debate: Channel 4 presents live coverage of the first of three US presidential debates, as Donald Trump goes head to head with Hillary Clinton."
- Tonight: Trump's America - Will It Happen? (ITV1, tx. 06/10/2016): "Robert Moore explores why many Americans feel so angry ahead of one of the most bitterly-fought and divisive presidential campaigns in history."
- Clinton v Trump: The Second Debate (Sky News, tx. 10/10/2016): "We join Sky News for coverage of the second presidential debate of the 2016 US Election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump."
- Paxman on Trump v Clinton: Divided America (BBC One, tx. 17/10/2016): "Jeremy Paxman travels to Washington and beyond to understand how Americans came to face such unpopular choices in its candidates for the presidency."
- US Presidential Debate (BBC News, tx. 20/1/2016): "Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face each other in the final 2016 presidential debate at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas."
- This World: Conspiracy Files - The Trump Dossier (BBC Two, tx. 03/11/2016): "Investigative documentary looking into how Donald Trump has used conspiracy theories to further his bid for the presidency."
- Trump's Unlikely Superfans (BBC One, tx. 07/11/2016): "Angela Scanlon meets with the passionate and unlikely people stumping for Donald Trump to find out why they support his controversial campaign."
- Rich Hall's Presidential Grudge Match (BBC Four, tx. 07/11/2016): "An examination of the sordid machinations involved in becoming US president."
- Newsnight: Trump's America - A Newsnight Special (BBC Two, tx. 11/11/2016): "With reporting from across the United States, Newsnight explores the ramifications of the election of Donald Trump as president."
- The World According to President Trump (Channel 4, tx. 12/11/2016): "What will a President Trump really do? Will he really ban all Muslims? Build a wall? Pal up to Putin? Smash Isis? Matt Frei speaks to the people who know."
- Panorama: Trump's New America (BBC One, tx. 14/11/2-16): "Hilary Andersson meets angry Americans on both sides of the electoral race who feel disillusioned and disenfranchised by the electoral process."
- Listening Post (Al Jazeera English, tx. 19/11/2016): "How the US media begins the process of 'normalising' Donald Trump"
- Frankie Boyle's American Autopsy (BBC Two, tx. 20/11/2016): "Frankie attempts to make sense of the US election through stand-up and debate."
We will of course continue to record the television news throughout 2017 and beyond. For discussion of the impact of Donald Trump's tweets on the news agenda, see What really happens when Donald Trump goes on a Twitter rampage (Quartz, 11/12/2016), If Trump Tweets It, Is It News? A Quandary for the News Media (New York Times, 29 November 2016), How Trump Took Over the Media By Fighting It (Politico, 5/11/2016), or Why the establishment was blindsided by Donald Trump (Washington Post, 28 October 2016).
Or you can check every Trump tweet, the deleted and the active, with telling categorisation, at the admirable Trump Twitter Archive.
05 July 2016
Brexit - the broadcast archive
The most tumultuous British news story since the British Library began recording television and radio news programmes in 2010 has undoubtedly been the EU referendum. The result of the vote made on 23 June 2016 is still causing shockwaves, and has generated a compelling archive. It is hard to calculate just how many hours of broadcasting we have archived since the date of the referendum was announced on 20 February 2016 that relate to the subject, but it will be somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 hours of TV and radio. On June 24 alone, the day the result was announced, we recorded 135 hours.
The archive comprises regular and specialist news and current affairs programmes broadcast over February-June 2016, plus comedy programmes, broadcasts by the Vote Leave and Britain Stronger in Europe campaigns, interviews, live speeches, parliamentary debates, public debates and through-the-night coverage of the result of the vote. There are programmes from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News, but also CNN, Al Jazeera English, RT (Russia Today), France 24, NHK World (Japan), CCTV (China), BBC national radio channels, LBC and more. In general the referendum saw the traditional news media providing the chief platform for the national discussion. There was considerable activity on the web and via social media, but print (often thought to be waning in influence at general elections) and particularly television were where the mass audience came for its information, and to see the arguments played out.
Programmes on Broadcast News
The archive is available already at the British Library, and continues to be added to each day. Every programme recorded up to the end of June can be found via Explore, or on our Sound and Moving Image catalogue (SAMI), though the programmes themselves can only be played onsite, at either our St Pancras or Boston Spa locations. Researchers onsite may find it easier to explore the archive via the Broadcast News service, which offers word-searching for subtitled programmes and filtering by date, date range, channel or medium (TV and radio). If you are using Explore, you should search by a programme title or terms such as 'referendum', 'Brexit', 'EU' etc, and filter the results by Moving Image or Audio. Clicking on the Details tab of any record will give you the description plus the link to the playable programme (which will only play onsite).
Below is a list of some of the key special programmes broadcast (the list mostly does not include programmes such as Newsnight, Question Time, Peston on Sunday, The Andrew Marr Show, Murnaghan, Pienaar's Politics, Today and Daily Politics, which we record on a regular basis in any case). The descriptions mostly come from EPG (Electronic Programme Guide).
2016 EU Referendum - selected special programmes, February-June 2016
| Channel | Title | Date | Description |
| BBC News | BBC News | 20/02/2016 | Prime minister announces date of referendum |
| BBC 1 | BBC News at Ten | 20/02/2016 | Includes news that EU agreement has been made, triggering UK referendum |
| BBC Parliament | Live EU referendum statement | 22/02/2016 | Live coverage of the statement in the House of Commons by prime minister David Cameron on the deal reached with EU leaders on reforms to the terms of the UK's membership |
| BBC1 | Panorama Special: In or Out - The EU Referendum | 22/02/2016 | How much do you know about the EU? Nick Robinson debates immigration, jobs and sovereignty. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum - George Osborne | 23/03/2016 | The speech by George Osborne in Bristol on the importance of staying in the EU alongside fellow cabinet ministers Liz Truss, Amber Rudd and Stephen Crabb, from Monday 18 April. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum - Gordon Brown | 23/03/2016 | The speech on the reasons for Britain to remain in the EU made by former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown at a conference on the economic consequences of "Brexit", from 21 April. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum - Michael Gove | 23/03/2016 | Recorded coverage of the speech by justice secretary Michael Gove on the case for leaving the European Union, from Tuesday 19 April. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum - Nigel Farage | 23/03/2016 | The GO movement rally in favour of leaving the EU with speeches from UKIP leader Nigel Farage and Conservative cabinet minister Chris Grayling, from Monday 18 April. |
| ITV | Tonight: is Britain Really full? | 31/03/2016 | Ranvir Singh travels to London, Lincolnshire, Lancashire and Greater Manchester to find out whether public perception of immigration is borne out by the facts. |
| BBC Parliament | Live House of Commons coverage | 11/04/2016 | Government statement on EU referendum leaflet |
| BBC2 | Europe: Them or Us - part 1 | 12/04/2016 | 1/2. An Island Apart: Nick Robinson explores the troubled history of the UK's relationship with Europe. |
| BBC News | Victoria Derbyshire | 14/04/2016 | Includes Jeremy Corbyn speech on EU referendum |
| BBC Parliament | Alastair Darling EU Speech | 18/04/2016 | Recorded coverage of former Labour chancellor Alistair Darling making a speech setting out the economic argument for the UK to remain in the European Union, from Friday 15 April. |
| BBC Parliament | Boris Johnson EU Speech | 18/04/2016 | Recorded coverage of London mayor Boris Johnson making a speech at a Vote Leave event in Manchester calling on the UK to leave the European Union, from Friday 15 April. |
| BBC2 | Newsnight | 18/04/2016 | Referendum special on the economy |
| BBC Parliament | Vote Leave Event | 18/04/2016 | Recorded coverage of Labour MP and Vote Leave Chair, Gisela Stuart, making a speech entitled The Risks of Staying in the European Union, from Wednesday 13 April. |
| BBC2 | Europe: Them or Us - part 2 | 19/04/2016 | 2/2. Voice of the People: The troubled history of the UK's relationship with Europe. Episode two goes behind the closed doors of Whitehall and Brussels. |
| BBC News | HARDtalk | 19/04/2016 | The battle for Britain's future, in or out of the EU, will be settled in June. Stephen Sackur's guest is Tim Martin, founder of JD Wetherspoon. Could Brexit make economic sense? |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum - Boris Johnson | 10/05/2016 | Recorded coverage of the speech by Conservative MP and leave campaigner Boris Johnson on the 'liberal cosmopolitan' case for Britain leaving the European Union, from Monday 9 May |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum - David Cameron | 10/05/2016 | Recorded coverage of David Cameron's speech on the forthcoming EU referendum, warning that peace in Europe could be at risk if Britain votes to leave the EU. From Monday 9 May |
| BBC2 | Newsnight | 16/05/2016 | An EU referendum special with Evan Davis |
| Channel 4 | Channel 4 News | 17/05/2016 | Includes EU referendum debate with members of UK minority communities |
| BBC1 | Paxman in Brussels: Who Really Rules Us? | 19/05/2016 | As the EU referendum debate approaches its climax, Jeremy Paxman takes viewers on a journey to the heart of Europe, meeting the movers, shakers and anonymous faces who run the EU. |
| Channel 4 | Referendum Campaign Broadcast | 23/05/2016 | A referendum campaign broadcast by the Vote Leave campaign |
| Channel 4 | Referendum Campaign Broadcast | 24/05/2016 | A referendum campaign broadcast by the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign |
| Channel 4 | Boris v Dave: The Battle for Europe | 25/05/2016 | Michael Crick examines how the EU referendum campaign has become a personal battle between David Cameron and Boris Johnson; a battle that will define the future of the country |
| BBC1 | How Should I Vote? The EU Debate | 26/05/2016 | Live from Glasgow, Victoria Derbyshire hosts a debate on the issues that matter to younger voters ahead of the June referendum on whether or not Britain should remain in the EU. |
| BBC Parliament | Business Views on EU Referendum Committee | 27/05/2016 | Recorded coverage of the Business, Innovation and Skills committee on the views of businesses on the EU referendum, from Tuesday 24 May. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Polls Debate | 28/05/2016 | Recorded coverage of an event with pollsters and commentators asking whether the EU referendum polls can be relied on. From Wednesday 25 May. |
| BBC Parliament | Scotland and the EU Referendum Committee | 28/05/2016 | The Scottish Affairs Committee's session on the impact of the EU referendum on Scotland, from Wednesday 25 May. |
| BBC Parliament | Speaker's EU Debate | 28/05/2016 | Recorded coverage of the House of Commons speaker hosting a debate on the UK's membership of the European Union. From Monday 23 May. |
| BBC1 | Countryfile | 29/05/2016 | Snowdonia: John Craven races a hill runner to the summit of Snowdon and meets the volunteers protecting the area's ospreys. Includes David Cameron and Boris Johnson speaking on EU referendum and the countryside. |
| Channel 4 | An Immigrant's Guide to Britain | 30/05/2016 | Comedian Henning Wehn and his gang of first-generation immigrants provide an irreverent guide to life in Britain. This episode explores caravans, rugby, the weather and more. (Ep1/3) |
| BBC 2 | Britain & Europe: For Richer or Poorer? | 31/05/2016 | Laura Kuenssberg examines the economic costs and benefits of EU membership. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum - Chris Grayling | 31/05/2016 | Recorded coverage of Vote Leave campaigner Chris Grayling MP making a speech in London, from Tuesday 31 May. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum - Sajid Javid | 31/05/2016 | Recorded coverage of business secretary Sajid Javid taking part in a panel discussion for the Britain Stronger IN Europe campaign group, from Tuesday 31 May. |
| Channel 4 | Referendum Campaign Broadcast | 31/05/2016 | A referendum campaign broadcast by the Vote Leave campaign. |
| Channel 4 | Referendum Campaign Broadcast | 01/06/2016 | A referendum campaign broadcast by the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign. |
| Sky News | EU: In or Out? | 02/06/2016 | Adam Boulton presents build-up to the first big TV event of the EU referendum in which David Cameron will answer questions from Sky News's political editor and a live audience |
| Sky News | EU: In or Out? | 03/06/2016 | Adam Boulton presents build-up to the second big TV event of the EU Referendum in which 'Leave' campaigner Michael Gove will answer questions from Faisal Islam and a live studio audience. |
| BBC1 | Countryfile | 05/06/2016 | Montrose: Matt Baker and Anita Rani are at the Montrose Basin in Scotland, while Tom Heap looks at the EU referendum and Britain's fisheries. |
| BBC Radio 5 Live | Pienaar's Politics | 05/06/2016 | John Pienaar is joined by the former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, and energy minister Andrea Leadsom. He also speaks to a panel of young voters about the EU referendum. |
| Channel 4 | An Immigrant's Guide to Britain | 06/06/2016 | Comedian Henning Wehn leads the irreverent guide to life in Britain. This episode explores work, dating, the British sense of humour, and breakfast in a can. (Ep2/3) |
| Channel 4 | Channel 4 News | 06/06/2016 | Includes live youth debate on EU Referendum |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum Campaign: Jeremy Corbyn | 06/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of a referendum campaign event with Jeremy Corbyn MP in favour of the UK remaining in the European Union, from Thursday 2 June. |
| BBC1 | The Andrew Neil Interviews: Leave or Remain? | 06/06/2016 | In this first programme Andrew speaks to the shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn MP. Then BBC News. |
| BBC News | Victoria Derbyshire: The EU Debate | 06/06/2016 | Victoria Derbyshire hosts an EU referendum debate live from Manchester with an audience of 150 voters and senior politicians. |
| ITV | Cameron and Farage Live: The EU Referendum | 07/06/2016 | Julie Etchingham presents a live hour-long programme in which David Cameron and Nigel Farage will in turn answer questions from a studio audience in London. |
| BBC2 | Jack Dee's Referendum Help Desk | 07/06/2016 | 1/3. Jack Dee helps a live studio audience dispel their problems regarding the EU referendum. Jack's guests include Romesh Ranganathan and Katherine Ryan. |
| Channel 4 | Power Monkeys | 08/06/2016 | New comedy spin-off from Ballot Monkeys with Jack Dee, Claire Skinner, Kevin McNally, Andy Nyman, Archie Panjabi and Amelia Bullmore following both sides of the EU referendum. (Ep1/6) |
| Channel 4 | Referendum Campaign Broadcast | 08/06/2016 | A European referendum campaign broadcast from the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign. Featuring Stephen Hawking |
| BBC1 | The Andrew Neil Interviews: Leave or Remain? | 08/06/2016 | Andrew Neil speaks to the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne MP. Then BBC News. |
| Channel 4 | Referendum Campaign Broadcast | 09/06/2016 | A European referendum campaign broadcast by the Vote Leave campaign. |
| ITV | The ITV Referendum Debate | 09/06/2016 | Two-hour live debate ahead of the most significant UK referendum in recent history. Three senior political figures from each side answer questions from members of the audience. Nicola Sturgeon, Angela Eagle and Amber Rudd speak for Remain; Boris Johnson, Gisela Stuart and Andrea Leadsom speak for Leave. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum Campaign - Blair and Major | 10/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of the EU referendum campaign event in Northern Ireland, with former prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair backing the UK to remain in the European Union. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum Campaign - Gove and Raab | 10/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of the EU referendum campaign event with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab on why the UK should leave the European Union, from Wednesday 8 June. |
| BBC1 | The Andrew Neil Interviews: Leave or Remain? | 10/06/2016 | Andrew Neil talks to leading campaigners on both sides of the EU referendum debate. In this programme he speaks to Ukip leader, Nigel Farage MEP. Then BBC News. |
| Channel 4 | The Last Leg | 10/06/2016 | The award-winning satirical comedy show returns. Hosted by Adam Hills, Alex Brooker and Josh Widdicombe. The first guests are Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn and Russell Crowe. (S8 Ep1/6) |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum Campaign - Stronger in Europe Event | 11/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of a Stronger in Europe referendum campaign event with speeches from David Cameron, Harriet Harman, Tim Farron and Natalie Bennett, from Monday 6 June. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum Campaign - Vote Leave Event | 11/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of a Vote Leave referendum campaign in Stratford-Upon-Avon, with speeches from Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Gisela Stuart and John Longworth, from Monday 6 June. |
| Al-Jazeera English | Listening Post | 11/06/2016 | As Britain's EU future hangs in the balance, is the media helping or hindering voters? Plus, the challenges of covering Australia's refugee policy. |
| BBC1 | Better In or Out? A BBC Referendum Special | 12/06/2016 | Politicians and business leaders debate what London's future holds after the EU referendum. |
| Channel 4 | An Immigrant's Guide to Britain | 13/06/2016 | The irreverent guide to life in Britain continues. Henning's laugh exasperates an etiquette expert, Obosei tries a pie in a tin, and Veronika investigates personal space. (Ep3/3) |
| Channel 4 | Referendum Campaign Broadcast | 13/06/2016 | A European referendum campaign broadcast from the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign. |
| BBC2 | Britain & Europe: The Immigration Question | 14/06/2016 | Mishal Husain investigates migration within the EU, including the impact of immigration on the UK as well as the advantages for Brits living abroad. |
| BBC2 | Jack Dee's Referendum Help Desk | 14/06/2016 | 2/3. Jack Dee helps a live studio audience dispel their problems regarding the EU referendum. Jack's guests include Romesh Ranganathan and Katherine Ryan. |
| BBC2 | Referendum Campaign Broadcast | 14/06/2016 | Referendum campaign broadcast by the Vote Leave campaign. |
| Channel 4 | Power Monkeys | 15/06/2016 | Topical satire. In the Unity Unit the PM is coming to visit and Ruby's making cheesecake, Oleg reminisces about Angela Merkel, and the Trump team attempt to woo women. (Ep2/6) |
| BBC1 | Question Time EU Special: The Case for Leave | 15/06/2016 | Justice secretary Michael Gove MP answers questions on the case for leaving the EU. |
| BBC1 | Referendum Broadcast | 15/06/2016 | Referendum campaign broadcast by the Stronger IN Europe campaign. |
| Channel 4 | Eurotrash | 17/06/2016 | Antoine de Caunes and Jean Paul Gaultier present a new edition of the legendary show about the many, varied and occasionally alarming cultural delights enjoyed by our European cousins. |
| Channel 4 | The Last Leg | 17/06/2016 | Hosts Adam Hills, Alex Brooker and Josh Widdicombe are joined by US playwright and actor Jesse Eisenberg and Kunal Nayyar to take a fresh look at the week's events. (S8 Ep2/6) |
| BBC Radio 5 Live | Pienaar's Politics | 19/06/2016 | John Pienaar presents a special EU referendum edition of Pienaar's Politics. He speaks to politicians and pundits on boths sides, including David Miliband and Nigel Farage. |
| BBC1 | Question Time EU Special: The Case for Remain | 19/06/2016 | An audience in Milton Keynes quizzes David Cameron on the case for remaining in the EU. |
| Sky News | EU: In or Out? | 20/06/2016 | Jeremy Corbyn - live television debate of the Referendum campaign, exclusive to Sky News. |
| BBC1 | The Big EU Reality Check | 20/06/2016 | The Big EU Reality Check gets to the facts behind the claims in the EU referendum campaign.Then BBC News. |
| BBC1 | EU Referendum: The Great Debate | 21/06/2016 | David Dimbleby, Mishal Husain and Emily Maitlis present the biggest debate of the EU referendum campaign live from the SSE Arena in Wembley, London. |
| LBC 97.3 | Iain Dale | 21/06/2016 | Includes EU debate between Nigel Farage and Lord Heseltine |
| BBC2 | Jack Dee's Referendum Help Desk | 21/06/2016 | 3/3. Jack Dee helps a live studio audience dispel their problems regarding the EU referendum. Jack's guests include Katherine Ryan, Jeremy Hardy, Nina Wadia and Nish Kumar. |
| BBC R5L | Phil Williams | 21/06/2016 | Phil Williams presents reaction to the evening's debate on the EU referendum at Wembley Arena. |
| BBC News | The Great Debate Countdown | 21/06/2016 | A special programme building up to the start of the BBC's EU Referendum Great Debate - with behind the scenes access to the audience, the experts and the BBC's presenting team. |
| BBC Parliament | BBC Wales EU Referendum Debate | 22/06/2016 | On the eve of the EU referendum, leading figures from the two campaigns face questions from a studio audience in a debate presented by Bethan Rhys Roberts. |
| Sky News | EU: In or Out? Time to Decide | 22/06/2016 | Dermot Murnaghan hosts a special night of coverage in the hours before EU Referendum polls open, with reports and analysis from Sky News' Editors and leading contributors from the UK and abroad. |
| Channel 4 | Europe: The Final Debate with Jeremy Paxman | 22/06/2016 | Jeremy Paxman hosts the final debate before the EU Referendum, with politicians, celebrities and figures from business, science, sport, the military and security services. |
| Channel 4 | Power Monkeys | 22/06/2016 | There's one day left for the EU referendum camps to sway the waverers. In the Unity Unit, Sara is trying her best to manage conflict, while Jackie wants to be eaten by eagles. (Ep3/6) |
| BBC Radio 4 | The Moral Maze | 22/06/2016 | The EU Referendum: Combative, provocative and engaging debate chaired by Edward Stourton. With Mona Siddiqui, Matthew Taylor, Claire Fox and Giles Fraser. |
| LBC 97.3 | Britain Decides | 23/06/2016 | Britain Decides with Iain Dale & Shelagh Fogarty. |
| Sky News | Decision Time: In or Out? | 23/06/2016 | Adam Boulton hosts a momentous night on the referendum result from 50 live locations. Is the UK really about to leave the EU? |
| CCTV | Dialogue | 23/06/2016 | Discussion of UK referendum on EU membership |
| BBC1 | EU Referendum: The Result | 23/06/2016 | David Dimbleby is your guide as the votes are counted around the UK. Joining him in the BBC's Referendum Centre are Jeremy Vine, Emily Maitlis, Kamal Ahmed and Laura Kuenssberg. |
| France 24 | News & Magazines | 23/06/2016 | Coverage and analysis of the results of the referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union. |
| RT | News UK | 23/06/2016 | Live coverage of the UK's EU Referendum result. |
| BBC Radio 4 | Referendum 2016 | 23/06/2016 | Coverage and analysis of the results of the referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union. |
| ITV | Referendum Result Live: ITV News Special | 23/06/2016 | Tom Bradby presents live coverage of the biggest decision facing the British public in a generation. With Julie Etchingham, Robert Peston, Allegra Stratton and James Mates. |
| BBC R5L | Stephen Nolan | 23/06/2016 | Stephen Nolan and Chris Mason with initial reaction from campaigners and 5 live listeners following the close of the polls for the EU referendum. |
| CNN | UK Decides: In or Out? | 23/06/2016 | Live coverage of the UK's EU Referendum result. |
| BBC1 | BBC News Special EU Referendum | 24/06/2016 | Huw Edwards presents live coverage from Westminster on the EU referendum result, with reaction from BBC teams across the UK and around the world. |
| BBC News | BBC News Special: EU Referendum | 24/06/2016 | Huw Edwards presents live coverage from Westminster on the EU referendum result, with reaction from BBC teams across the UK and around the world. |
| BBC News | BBC News Special: EU Referendum | 24/06/2016 | BBC News presents live coverage from Westminster on the EU referendum result - with reaction from BBC teams across the UK and around the world. |
| CCTV | Dialogue | 24/06/2016 | Discussion of UK's decision to leave the EU |
| Sky News | EU Referendum Result | 24/06/2016 | Dermot Murnaghan with reaction and analysis of the referendum result. So what happens now? |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: Arlene Foster | 24/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of the speech by Northern Ireland's first minister Arlene Foster in response to the Leave result on the UK's membership of the EU, from Friday 24 June. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: Boris Johnson | 24/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of the news conference held by Vote Leave with speeches from Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Gisela Stuart, from Friday 24 June. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: Carwyn Jones | 24/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of the news conference held by Welsh first minister Carwyn Jones in response to the Leave result in the UK's referendum on EU membership, from Friday 24 June. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: David Cameron | 24/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of the Downing Street news conference held by prime minister David Cameron announcing he will step down in October, from Friday 24 June. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: Enda Kenny | 24/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of the news conference held by the Irish taoiseach, Enda Kenny, in response to the Leave result in the UK's referendum on EU membership, from Friday 24 June. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: European Reaction | 24/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of reactions to the Leave result from Angela Merkel, Donald Tusk, Jean-Claude Juncker and Martin Schulz, from Friday 24 June. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: Mark Carney | 24/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of the news conference held by the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, in response to the Leave result in the EU referendum, from Friday 24 June. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: Nicola Sturgeon | 24/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of the news conference held by Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon in response to the Leave result in the EU referendum, from Friday 24 June. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: Nigel Farage | 24/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of the speech by Ukip leader Nigel Farage in response to the Leave result in the UK's referendum on the European Union, from Friday 24 June. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: Ruth Davidson | 24/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of the speech by Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson in response to the Leave result in the UK's membership of the European Union, from Friday 24 June. |
| France 24 | News & Magazines | 24/06/2016 | Live coverage of results of UK EU Referendum |
| BBC World Sv. | Newsday | 24/06/2016 | Coverage of the EU referendum results. |
| BBC World Sv. | Newshour Extra Special | 24/06/2016 | A special edition covering the results of the EU referendum. |
| BBC 2 | Newsnight | 24/06/2016 | With Evan Davis. So... now what? |
| Channel 4 | Power Monkeys | 24/06/2016 | Topical satire. The results are in, the UK's fate has been decided. Tony is keen to begin the healing process, while the David Cameron fudge has morphed into a sad metaphor. |
| BBC R5L | Referendum 2016 | 24/06/2016 | James Naughtie and Carolyn Quinn present overnight coverage and reaction to the results of the EU Referendum. |
| BBC World Sv. | Referendum Extra | 24/06/2016 | Coverage of the EU referendum results. |
| ITV | Referendum Result Live: ITV News | 24/06/2016 | Alastair Stewart presents live coverage of all the latest news following last night's historic EU referendum result. |
| Sky News | Sunrise Special: EU Referendum Result | 24/06/2016 | Dermot Murnaghan with the crucial result of the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU. Did we stay or did we go? |
| BBC1 | The Big Decision with Nick Robinson | 24/06/2016 | Nick Robinson examines what the results of the EU referendum will mean for the UK. |
| Channel 4 | The Last Leg In, The Last Leg Out | 24/06/2016 | Adam Hills, Alex Brooker and Josh Widdicombe are joined by Stephen Mangan to examine the EU referendum result and the most entertaining news stories of the week. |
| Al-Jazeera English | Listening Post | 25/06/2016 | After an EU referendum campaign full of racism and fear, we examine the UK media's influence on the result. Plus, how ad blockers are costing the news business. |
| BBC2 | Newsnight Special: Life After Brexit | 25/06/2016 | In-depth investigation and analysis of the stories behind the day's headlines. |
| RT | Sophie & Co. | 25/06/2016 | Bright, straightforward, honest, respectful. Questions that stick. Answers that matter. |
| CNN | Connect the World with Becky Anderson | 26/06/2016 | CNN's Becky Anderson joins the dots of stories and events by exploring how an event or circumstance in one part of the world can have a significant impact elsewhere. |
| BBC1 | Question Time: A EU Special | 26/06/2016 | A special live edition discussing the implications of the UK's vote to leave the European Union. The Leave and Remain camps are evenly represented in the audience and on the panel. |
| Channel 4 | Channel 4 News | 27/06/2016 | Extended EU referendum news special. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: George Osborne | 27/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of a speech by the chancellor of the exchequer in response to the Leave result in the UK's referendum on the European Union, from Monday 27 June. |
| BBC Parliament | EU Referendum: Jeremy Corbyn | 27/06/2016 | EU Referendum statement by Jeremy Corbyn, Leader, Labour Party, from June 25 |
| BBC Parliament | Prime Minister's Statement | 27/06/2016 | David Cameron's statement to Parliament on the outcome of the EU referendum |
| BBC Parliament | Gibraltar Newswatch | 28/06/2016 | GBC Television Gibraltar present coverage of the EU Referendum vote, with local reaction, analysis and discussion on implications for Gibraltarians. Recorded Friday 24 June. |
| BBC News | HARDtalk | 28/06/2016 | Radek Sikorski, former Polish foreign minister: HARDtalk's Stephen Sackur talks to former Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski about Britain's Brexit vote |
| BBC Parliament | Live European Parliament | 28/06/2016 | Live coverage of proceedings in the European Parliament in Brussels on the outcome of the UK referendum on membership of the European Union. |
| BBC Parliament | Scottish Parliament - EU Referendum | 28/06/2016 | Coverage of the statement in the Scottish Parliament by first minister Nicola Sturgeon on the outcome of the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU, from Tuesday 28 June. |
| BBC4 | Power Monkeys | 29/06/2016 | The dust has settled in both EU referendum camps. Spencer is now scolding the Premier League and zigzag haircuts, while Tony endeavours to save his marriage... to the Tory party. (Ep5/6) |
| BBC Radio 4 | The Moral Maze | 29/06/2016 | Debate on the outcome of the EU Referendum. Combative, provocative and engaging debate chaired by Michael Buerk. With Mona Siddiqui, Giles Fraser, Melanie Phillips and Anne McElvoy. |
| BBC Parliament | Conservative Leadership - Boris Johnson | 30/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of Boris Johnson announcing that he will not stand in the election to become the next leader of the Conservative Party, from Thursday 30 June. |
| BBC Parliament | Conservative Leadership - Stephen Crabb | 30/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of work and pensions secretary Stephen Crabb launching his campaign to be the next leader of the Conservative Party, from Wednesday 29 June. |
| BBC Parliament | Conservative Leadership - Theresa May | 30/06/2016 | Recorded coverage of home secretary Theresa May launching her campaign to be the next leader of the Conservative Party, from Thursday 30 June. |
| BBC News | HARDtalk | 30/06/2016 | Stephen Sackur talks to Segolene Royal, French environment minister and former socialist candidate for the French presidency about the British Brexit. |
| BBC 1 | Question Time | 30/06/2016 | Topical debate in which guests from the worlds of politics and the media answer questions posed by members of the public |
| BBC R5L | Question Time Extra Time | 30/06/2016 | John Pienaar introduces coverage of Question Time, with the chance to continue the debate after the simulcast. |
| Sky News | The Pledge: Brexit | 30/06/2016 | This week on The Pledge it's a Brexit special. There will be straight talking debate on the UK's historic vote to leave the EU. |
As said, we continue to record programmes relating to the aftermath of the referendum, as well as our regular news programming - some 40 hours per day. We will aim to upload new programmes to SAMI and Explore at the end of each month, but those who want up-to-the-minute recordings can always go direct to the Broadcast News service, which makes most of the programmes it records available an hour or so after broadcast. To access Broadcast News onsite, go to any British Library terminal, and click on the front page link for Sound and Moving Image services.
The British Library has also been archiving websites on the EU Referendum, as outlined in this blog from our Web Archiving team: Capturing and Preserving the EU Referendum Debate (Brexit). And of course we have been taking in most British newspapers as part of our standard Legal Deposit intake.
Meanwhile, the recording goes on ....
Recording today's news
01 June 2016
St. Pancras Intelligencer no. 39
It's time for another edition in our occasional series on news about news, the St Pancras Intelligencer. Here are some of the recent stories on where news and where it might be going which have caught our eye.
Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages Project
Death to the Mass - Jeff Jarvis writes on the death of the traditional idea of the mass media as delivering the same content to everyone. What replaces it will be tailored to the individual, who is now the king over everything:
What has died is the mass-media business model — injuring, perhaps mortally, a host of institutions it symbiotically supported: publishing, broadcasting, mass marketing, mass production, political parties, possibly even our notion of a nation. We are coming at last to the end of the Gutenberg Age.
All well and good, says Roy Greenslade, but how in this brave new world are we to save public interest journalism?
When it comes to social media, news consumers tend to stick with 1 source - Media plurality is all very good, but humans still tend to stick with the familiar. The Pew Research Center and Knight Foundation find that 64 percent of social media news consumers get their news on just one favorite site.
43 percent of social media users don't know where the stories they read originally appeared - Some disheartening news for all news brands, as Digiday reports that 43% of social media users are unaware of them.Why China fakes 488 million social media posts a year - Mind-boggling report from Mashable on how China's government fills its social media with positive social media comments to distract its citizens from bad or politically sensitive news.
Digital archives of British national newspapers - Our own guide to current UK national newspapers available digitally at the British Library (and those which can't be found digitally anywhere).
A neighbor is better than a newspaper - A rather heartening report from Solutions Journalism Network, showing how the oldest form of news distribution - word-of-mouth - operates in rural Western mountain communities in the USA.
Facebook's Instant Articles
Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show - So many stories out there about how Facebook's algorithms are shaping the world's news. The Guardian reports on the humans behind the algorithms making selection decisions much like a traditional media organisation. Quartz has Facebook’s news feed algorithm is so mysterious, users are developing “folk theories” about how it works; Will Cathcart at The Verge has a long talk with Facebook about its role in journalism; Fusion reminds us that the real ‘news curators’ at Facebook are the engineers who write its algorithms; while The Independent reports Facebook denies claims it suppressed conservative and controversial news on its ‘Trending Topics’ sidebar.
Facebook is the new paperboy - And there's more. Matt Carroll at Medium traces the history of news distribution from paperboys to platforms, and how this is changing how newsrooms work.
Social networks could do much more to protect eyewitnesses in breaking news - Josh Stearns at FirstDraftNews calls on Facebook, Twitter and Google to do more to help eyewitnesses supplying on-the-spot news at disasters to protect and understand their rights.
Beware the ‘false consciousness’ theory: newspapers won’t decide this referendum - Charlie Beckett at LSE's Polis blog says that traditional newspapers no longer have the influence over something like the EU Referendum debate that campaigners imagine they have.
How the New York Times plans to conquer the world - Alex Spence at Politico reports on how the New York Times is eyeing Europe for new digital subscribers.
Suddenly, national newspapers are heading for that print cliff fall - The end has been nigh for a while now, but Roy Greenslade is now certain: newspapers "have no future".
A BBC for the future - And finally, among all the stories coming out the BBC White Paper - funding local journalists, cutting back on sections of its News website, no longer running local news index web pages, possibly merging the News and World channels - we were pleased to see this line lurking towards the back of the document: "There should be particular scope to do more to enable access to BBC historic news archive". Let's hope so.
19 May 2016
Digital archives of British national newspapers
Did you know that the historic back runs of most of the British national newspapers that are published today have been digitised by online publishers and that these are all available for free in British Library Reading Rooms? With the recent addition of the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Independent and Independent on Sunday to the digital archives you can search at the British Library, it’s a good opportunity to review what’s available for all current British nationals.
The Times was the first national newspaper to digitise its historic back run and The Times Digital Archive has been available in British Library Reading Rooms since 2003. This is a vast archive which allows users to search every page of the newspaper from its first issue in 1785 (when it was known as the Daily Universal Register) up to 2010.
The archive offers access to a 225 year back run of The Times and contains, in total, over 70,000 issues which include over 1.6 million pages or more than 11.8 million articles. The entire file is searchable by keyword and by date and the content can be viewed at page or article level. In addition there is an advanced search facility which enables a search to be focussed on particular parts of the newspaper such as ‘News’ or ‘Reviews’ or ‘Politics’.
In the years since 2003, when The Times Digital Archive first became available, back runs of most of the other currently published British national newspapers have been digitised and these are all available in British Library Reading Rooms. The titles are:
- Daily Express: 1900 to date, and Sunday Express: 2000 to date
- Daily Mail: 1896-2004
- Daily Mirror: 1903 to date
- Daily Star/ Star on Sunday: 2000 to date
- Daily Telegraph: 1855-2000 and Sunday Telegraph: 1961-2000
- Financial Times: 1888-2010
- Guardian: 1824 -2003
- Independent: 1986-2012, and Independent on Sunday: 1990-2012
- Observer: 1791-2003
- Scotsman: 1870-1950
- The Times: 1785-2010, and Sunday Times 1822-2006
Links to all of these can be via our Electronic Resources page (select Newspapers as a subject, then refine your search by Full Text). Please note that electronic access only works in British Library Reading Rooms and on our terminals.
Although the historic back runs of most of the British national newspapers that are published today have been digitised and made available online, not every current British national is available in this way. The following titles do not yet have digital archives:
- Daily Record
- i
- Morning Star
- People
- The Sun
Sample search on the Telegraph Historical Archive
The most recent additions to the list of digitised archives of British national newspapers are The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Independent and Independent on Sunday. These titles have only been available on our Reading Rooms since earlier this year.
The Telegraph Historical Archive contains over 1 million facsimile pages of The Daily Telegraph from the first issue published in 1855 to the year 2000 and the Sunday Telegraph from its inception in 1961 up to 2012.
The Independent Digital Archive contains approximately 750,000 facsimile pages and includes every issue of The Independent from 1986 to 2012 and every issue of The Independent on Sunday from its inception in 1990 up to 2012.
In some cases it is possible to carry out a combined search of more than one historic newspaper archive which can increase the efficiency of the search process and deliver a wider range of results from different types of newspaper. The historic archives of The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Independent and Independent on Sunday are all hosted by the same on-line publisher (Gale Cengage) and these archives can be searched individually or in a combination of two or more titles. Similarly, the historic archives of the Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Sunday Express and Star on Sunday are hosted by another on-line publisher (UKpressonline), and the archives of The Guardian and The Scotsman (along with the Irish Times) are hosted by ProQuest Historical Newspapers. It is possible to combine a search of two or more newspapers within these groups of titles as well.
Digital newspaper archives have transformed the use of historic newspapers in research. Whereas in the past it might have taken days, weeks or even months to search through large bound volumes of newspapers or to trawl through endless reels of microfilm to find all the information needed for a particular research topic, in a digital archive the information is much more easily accessible and can often be found in almost no time at all.
Stephen Lester, Newspaper Curator
14 February 2016
From print to digital
The news that The Independent and The Independent on Sunday are to close down, and the spin-off newspaper i to be sold off to Johnston Press, has led to much discussion about the future of newspapers. Is the decision to cease print and develop the independent.co.uk website a sign of the death of print newspapers? Was The Independent squeezed out of the market and hence a failure, or is the shift to web-only a timely strategic move, supported by growing use of what is apparently a profitable website, which other newspapers will inevitably follow in turn? Can a newspaper brand survive when it no longer has a newspaper?
The Independent in print, via Independent.co.uk
Here at the British Library we have seen many newspapers come and go. We take in 1,400 newspaper publications of one sort or another every week, but we have some 35,000 newspaper titles listed on our catalogue. A lot of newspapers have ceased publication over the past 400 years, and The Independent is merely the latest. But the gradual transference of a news industry from print to digital has major implications for what we collect in this area, and how. It is something that we are studying closely.
At present we acquire newspapers in print form. We would like to acquire more newspapers digitally, and newspapers today are produced in digital form (PDF usually) from which the print copy is then generated. But these digital copies are not published as such, consequently they do not qualify as 'publications' and cannot be collected under Legal Deposit. Of course some newspapers are available in digital facsimile form on their websites, which we could collect via our web archiving operation, but the PDFs that are available are of lower image quality (less suitable for preservation), and there is a shrinking number of these, as newspapers turn instead to aggregation services such as PageSuite to deliver their digital copies for them.
So why not just archive the websites? They have the same content as the newspapers, don't they? Well, no they don't. We recently conducted a study in regional newspapers and their web equivalents, to see how similar content was between the two forms. We found that the typical UK regional newspaper, in any one week, had roughly 40% of stories unique to print, 15% unique to online, and 45% that the forms shared (we looked only at news editorial, not advertising, arts coverage or sport). Some newspapers are closer to their web equivalents than others, but in general the two forms are not the same, and are diverging all the more.
|
Title |
Print issue date |
No. of news stories |
% unique to print |
% unique to online |
% shared by both |
|
30/7/2015 |
30 |
46 |
26 |
26 |
|
|
13/8/2015 |
90 |
49 |
34 |
16 |
|
|
23/7/2015 |
72 |
30 |
33 |
36 |
|
|
12/8/2015 |
42 |
55 |
0 |
43 |
|
|
3/8/2015 |
75 |
73 |
13 |
13 |
|
|
21/8/2015 |
51 |
19 |
13 |
66 |
|
|
7/8/2015 |
65 |
4 |
3 |
92 |
|
|
20/8/2015 |
31 |
32 |
3 |
64 |
Analysis of stories published by selected UK regional weekly newspapers
Nevertheless, we are archiving the websites. Since 2013, when non-print Legal Deposit legislation was introduced, enabling the British Library and the other Legal Deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland to start archiving the UK Web, we have been gathering in UK news sites. And whereas we archive most UK sites once a year, for news sites we are archiving them on an either daily or weekly basis. It's not just newspaper sites, however - we are capturing web-only news sites, community journalism sites (hyperlocals), news broadcasters' sites, news parody sites and more. We have 1,800 on our list so far, and we are still adding titles. It's not easy to keep track of all of the UK news sites, because there is no definitive list. The numbers keep shifting. Publications such as Benn's Media Directory keep a track of registered news publications on an annual basis, and the handy Local Web List database tries to identify all of the self-produced community journalism sites out there, but, frankly, trying to keep the Web in bibliographic order is like herding ants.
All newspapers and other serial publications in the UK are assigned a unique identifier, the ISSN (similar to the ISBN for books). The ISSN underpins the collecting of newspapers under Legal Deposit in this country, not least because it is key to issuing barcodes. So it is that we manage to keep track with nearly every UK newspaper as it is published.
The problem is that websites don't need barcodes. There is no operational ID system for pinpointing a news site, beyond knowing the URL, and that doesn't help when it comes to keeping track of all different variants, spin-offs (blogs, microsites etc) and other changes that a news site and its digital family may go through. And how do you define what a news website is in any case, if you start to include blogs, hyperlocals, forums and so on?
Then there is the problem of referring to 'news websites', as though capturing these through archiving would be the answer. Newspapers were once the sole form in which printed journalism appeared. Today, newspapers have become apps. News is produced by publishers across diverse platforms which draw their material from content management systems. A newspaper is one such output; a website another; a mobile application another. To build the news archive of the future, we might need to think less of capturing print or digital publications, and more about preserving the engines that have generated them (and the digital content fed into such engines). Then we could generate how the news looked to anyone at a particular place and point in time, according to the applications and devices that would have been available to them.
From print to digital, via Guardian
And that highlights another problem for the future archiving of news. A newspaper is predicated on the understanding that all who purchase it will share in the same news. They might have differing opinions about that news, yet they still share in it.
But news is not like that anymore. News is tailored to the individual, who has increasing editorial control over what news matters to them, as our news content strategy notes. Twitter feeds, Facebook news aggregation, multiple TV news channels, all put the selection of news in the hands of the consumer (even if the algorithms of Facebook and Google do much of that tailoring for us). No one sees the same news any more. This is why the archiving of Twitter is such a conundrum. There is no one Twitter out there - everyone's experience of it is different. How are we to recreate such an experience, to make our future news archives valid?
Theorising over the nature of news is all very interesting, but we have to make practical decisions to ensure that we archive newspapers, their digital derivatives and competitors in a multimedia news market, as thoroughly and efficiently as we can. We continue to take in most UK newspapers in print, and we are close to doing the same with news websites. We archive TV and radio news, albeit selectively. It would help a lot if we knew if and when newspapers are to disappear, but no one does.
Or maybe one person does. Speaking to the Leveson enquiry on 25 April 2012, Rupert Murdoch gave his thoughts on the future of print newspapers.
Every newspaper has had a very good run ... It's coming to an end as a result of these disruptive technologies ... I think we will have both [internet and print news] for quite a while, certainly ten years, some people say five. I'd be more inclined to say 20, but 20 means very small circulations.
And that could be it. Newspapers will last a generation. It may not be an even decline, because what applies to the nationals is not necessarily the same as the regionals. The UK's national newspapers, of which there are around 30, attract a particular kind of advertiser and have the potential to reach out internationally (which is what The Independent's owners are pinning their hopes upon). For regional newspapers, of which there are around 100 dailies and 1,200 weeklies, there seems to be a different model operating, one where local advertising combined with consumer loyalty may keep some titles in print for a good while yet, even as the same titles increase their digital foothold (the recent ranking of UK media publications for 2015 by SimilarWeb shows regional publisher like Kentonline, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo among those titles with the highest percentage of mobile traffic share).
The UK's top 10 publications ranked on mobile traffic share, via SimilarWeb
However long it takes, time is running out for print newspapers. It will be our job to ensure that we continue to serve the needs of UK research by increasingly gathering news in its digital forms. We need a smooth transition, with consistency of representation. The challenge is that the mechanisms to do so are not fully in place as yet. The technologies are; the means to ensure capture, identification and continuity are not. But we're working on it.
19 June 2015
The news from Waterloo
The bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo is upon us, and of the many books, programmes and articles currently published about the event, one of the most novel and fasincating is Brian Cathcart's history The News from Waterloo. This tells not the story of the battle but of the race to report the news in Britain, and in doing so it tells us a lot about the transmission and understanding of news in the past, and the world of news we enjoy today.
The 11:00 am 'Waterloo' edition of The Times, 22 June 1815.
The battle itself took place on Sunday 18 June 1815, ending somewhere between 9 and 10 that evening. The British public, however, did not start to receive certain news of the outcome of the battle (nor indeed confirmation that any such battle had taken place) until the very end of Wednesday 21 June, with the London newspapers reporting the story from the morning of the 22nd.
The reasons for this delay were several, and in describing them Cathcart gives an excellent and accessible account of how newspapers operated in the early nineteenth century. To begin with, there were no journalists at Waterloo. Newspapers in Britain at that time did not have journalists as we would understand them; there were parliamentary reporters (a recent innovation after government had finally conceded to the reporting of its affairs), there was an editor who would write the editorial, and there was much gathering of content from other sources, such as official sources - foreign news was generally channeled through the Post Office, as a means of exercising governmental control over reporting such dangerous information.
Government exercised control over newspapers through law (particularly libel laws) and through taxation, which had the effect of narrowing down the number of people who might read a newspaper because of the cost, and hopefully keeping the news out of the hands of the masses. This only worked so far, because newspapers were nevertheless distributed widely, borrowed, made available in reading rooms, inns and coffee houses, and read aloud in groups. But the high cost meant a restricted buying public, and together with the mechanical limitations of newspaper production of the time kept down the number of copies published - The Times sold around 7,000 copies a day in 1815.
News travelled slowly, though it was speeding up. The mechanical or optical telegraph, which worked by replaying signals from high vantage points, meant that messages could travel quickly over long distances, and it awakened in people a sense of news being able to be communicated to them far more quickly. However, the telegraph was expensive to maintain and it didn't work in the dark. Extraordinarily such problems led to the British closing down their telegraph operation shortly before Waterloo, so the only way to get the news to the British public was by road and water.
Cathcart's book entertainingly describes how news false and true made its way to London from Waterloo, causing much confusion among a public desperate to know if Napoleon had been defeated, as accounts of the battles that took place the day before Waterloo were muddled up with the battle on the 28th, communicated by private individuals who brought over scraps of information on what they thought had happened. (See his blog post for the British Newspaper Archive for a summary of these unofficial reports.) The official dispatch, which Wellington completed writing around noon on June 23, was mysteriously delayed while its bearer, Major Henry Percy, was travelling through the Netherlands. It then got held up crossing the Channel when the wind dropped, so that Percy ended up having to get into a rowing boat, before completing his journey by post-chaise. Finally the official dispatch was delivered in London around 11:15 pm on Wednesday 21 June, not a moment too soon for the newspapers laboriously to remake some type and to publish an account for the morning editions.
The Morning Post, 22 June 1815, via British Newspaper Archive (note that it is the second edition)
There were an estimated 56 newspapers published in London at this time, from dailies to weeklies. The leading titles were The Times, The Courier, The Morning Post and The Morning Chronicle. This was a time before there were press directories with lists of all newspaper titles published, but in the British Library collection we have just under 300 British newspaper titles from 1815, with some 40 of them published in London. So it is not every newspaper that was published. Cathcart has done a remarkable job piecing together the complex narrative of what was published when over 18-22 June 1815, noting where a newspaper issued more than one edition with more war information, but bemoaning the fact (on his website) that "Superb though it is, the British Library collection is nothing like complete for 1815." Well, there's a reason for that.
In 1815 there was no national newspaper collection. The Stamp Office took in a copy of every newspaper published (part of the taxation regime designed to keep the newspapers in line), retaining these for a period of two years before disposing of them. It was only in 1823 that copies published in London started to be transferred to the British Museum, with regional newspapers following after 1832, and not until 1869 were newspaper deposited directly with the Museum.
So for newspapers in 1815 we are dependent on private collections acquired subsequently, and inevitably there are gaps in the surviving record. Moreover, the British Museum and then the British Library have always collected just one edition of a newspaper per day, for practical reasons of space. We do not have, and cannot have, everything. Different editions of an historical newspaper on a single day are therefore quite a rarity (indeed most titles in 1815 only produced a single edition), existing usually on the few occasions where the same title was acquired from different collectors.
From page 3 of The Times, 22 June 1815, via The Times Digital Archive, summarising information on Waterloo learned from the official dispatch.
Fortunately 22 June 1815 is one date when there are some different timed editions available. The early edition of The Times for that day had the above notice, noting that the official dispatch had been received and summarising its contents. It is this version of the newspaper that can be found online via the Times Digital Archive (subscription access only, freely available in British Library reading rooms). The copy in the British Library is of the second edition, issued at 11:00 am that day. For this the second page of the 4-page newspaper had been entirely remade to accommodate the Duke of Wellington's complete dispatch. The full two pages are illustrated at the top of this post; the start of dispatch on page 2 is below, alongside the earlier page 2 from the version on the Times Digital Archive:
From page 2 of the The Times, 22 June 1815, early morning edition on left (via Times Digital Archive), 11:00 am edition on the right (from British Library collection), with the official dispatch from Waterloo reproduced on the right-hand column.
The dispatch had first been published in The London Gazette, which was a government publication issuing official information, and which is still in operation today (as The Gazette). The Waterloo 'extraordinary' edition of The London Gazette is freely available online, and this is the front page:
The London Gazette, 22 June 1815, via www.thegazette.co.uk. Wellington's official dispatch did not reveal the information that the battle had been won until halfway down the second column of the second page.
Once The London Gazette had been published, the other London newspapers plundered the official text for their own editions, and then gradually the information spread over the nation as mail coaches carried the news to every corner over the next few days (Edinburgh, for example, received the information on Saturday 24 June).
Today we may marvel at a time when the news of a major battle took three days to get from Waterloo to London, with part of the journey undertaken by rowing boat. We live in a world of constantly breaking news, where tweets or other electronic alerts informs us of news happening even before it is news (if we define news as something which has been composed after a period of time with an understanding of the context of the story, and with checks made to verify it). News has become instantaneous. Moreover news is cheap, for the most part free (in the UK) from governmental interference, and created by legions of journalists.
Yet in some ways the news archive we are creating for 2015 will be as problematic for future historians as 1815 is for us today. We are not keeping every edition of every newspaper published on any one day. More than that the news has now spread over so many different media and platforms that it lies beyond anyone's ability to capture it all. Still more problematically, we are failing to capture the experience of news today. Increasingly we are finding our news online, but web archives can only operate as snapshots, capturing how a web pages looked at a particular point in time.
Most of the websites that we archive are crawled just once a year, but for news websites we archive these on a daily or weekly basis. Yet not only will stories fall between the cracks (i.e. they may disappear from a site between one archive capture and the next), but the experience of the flow of news is lost. There is nothing in web archiving - as yet - that can capture the experience of seeing news being reported as it happens, as we experience through ever-changing Twitter feeds or through the increasingly-popular live blogs on news websites (and the British Library does not currently archive social media, except on a very selective basis). News is increasingly tailored to our individual interests - we may each of us see a different news. News is now an endless succession of ever-changing editions; but as archivists we still capture it as a single instance, as though it were still a thing on paper, to be published just once a day.
The endless flow of news - the live #Waterloo200 Twitter feed at 18:36, 18 June 2015
In 1815 we see the news almost overwhelming the mechanisms that were put in place to communicate it. The need to know outstripped the means to satisfy it. That led to new technologies. In 1814 The Times had introduced a steam-driven press, which would transform the rate at which newspapers could be printed. The arrival of the railways greatly spread how newspapers could be distributed, and the electric telegraph (the first working system of which was demonstrated in 1816) collapsed the distances between places worldwide. The invention of steam ships put an end to becalmed sailing ships holding up the news from overseas.
In 2015 we again see the overwhelming nature of the news. There is so much news available that services like Facebook must now filter it for us, telling us what they think we need to know. We cannot capture everything, yet we must strive always to capture something, and trust in the ingenuity of historians such as Brian Cathcart to fill in the gaps in the archive as they find it. History is not made by the evidence; it is a product of the reasoned imagination.
Where to find British newspapers from 1815:
- British Library - most surviving British newspapers for 1815 are held by the British Library and can be accessed by anyone with a Reader's pass at either of our sites (St Pancras, London and Boston Spa, Yorkshire)
- British Newspaper Archive - the subscription website based on digitised newspapers from the British Library's collection has 48 titles for 1815, four of them London titles (Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, The Examiner, Cobbett's Weekly Political Register)
- The Gazette - the full run of the London Gazette from 1665 (when it was the Oxford Gazette) to the present day can be found for free on its site
- Guardian and Observer Digital Archive - subscription site - only The Observer was published in 1815
- Newspaperarchive.com - American subscription site with some British titles covering the 1810s
- Times Digital Archive - subscription site for The Times, from 1785 to 2009
01 February 2015
St Pancras Intelligencer no. 36
Times are hard in the news industry, as all will know, and this applies to the news curator's blog as well. It just hasn't proved possible to keep up the weekly production of our St Pancras Intelligencer round-up of the week's news about news which ran for most of 2014. But we're unwilling to see a good title die, so the Intelligencer is making its tentative return as a monthly (or thereabouts). Here's hoping the strategy is a successful one - and let's kick things off again with the news about news in January.
The Future of News - There have been many reports on the future of news, and the latest comes from BBC head of news James Harding. He argues that
in the internet age, the BBC is more necessary and valuable than ever. The internet is not keeping everyone informed, nor will it: it is, in fact, magnifying problems of information inequality, misinformation, polarisation and disengagement. Our job is keeping everyone informed.
He says the BBC must increase both its local and global coverage and improve its digital services, and it's the increase in local coverage that has excited the most comment from the local newspaper world, which feels threatened by the BBC's reach at a time of shrinking newspaper titles and shrinking revenues.
Future of News: News v Noise - The key points from Harding's report have been published as an "immersive journey" on the BBC news website.
Emily Bell's 2015 Hugh Cudlipp lecture - Also on the future of news and journalism was this lecture by Emily Bell, the director of Columbia University’s Tow Centre for digital journalism, in which calls for social networks and journalists to work together.
We are seeing unimaginably large new entities, which get their size from publishing not just a selected number of stories but everything in the world. Social networks and search engines are the masters of this universe. As we see the disappearance of print as a significant medium, and the likely decline of broadcast television, the paths our stories and journalism must travel down to reach readers and viewers are being shaped by technologies beyond our control.
The answer, she argues, is for more journalists who a more technically proficient, and for social networks and search engines to hire more technologists who are understand the news.
Because at the moment we have a situation which is not working for either of us. Those of us engaged with what journalism is and will be, who have a direct and vested interest in the protection of free speech and standards for information have a lot to do, and we need to work together, because we are now part of one continuous global information loop.
Newspaper front pages around the world pay tribute to Charlie - The overpowering story of the month has been the murder by two Islamist gunmen of cartoonists and journalists working for French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The aftermath included the 'survivors' issue' with its front cover cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, which had a seven million print run (instead of the usual 60,000). Of the many debates triggered by the calamitious events, some of the most interesting have been on the role of cartoonists. George Brock at The Conversation wrote 'In Praise of the Cartoonist - solitary, studios and searing.' Peter Preston wrote sadly at The Guardian that 'Alas for cartoonists, pen and ink don’t wash on the web' while Ricardo Bilton at Digiday argued quite the opposite, reporting that 'Digital publishers turn to cartoons to cover the news'.
'Muslim-controlled' UK city claim mocked by #FoxNewsFacts hashtag - Much joy was brought by the Twitter hashtag #FoxNewsFacts following Fox News terrorism expert Steve Emerson's bold statement that there were no-go zones in Europe where "non-Muslims just simply don’t go", among them Birmingham. Tweets along the lines of "Mecca Bingo, probable proof of the Islamic domination of Birmingham" and "Spaghetti Junction was specifically designed to make sure all roads lead to Mecca" brought some gaiety to dark times. The Poke gathered a selection of the best of them.
Watch out for @Bellingcat - An interview on Columbia Journalism Review with British blogger Eliot Higgins (previously known as Brown Moses), whose citizen investigative journalism website Bellingcat feature closely-analysed evidence from social media, YouTube and data sources of stories such as the MH17 crash.
Timeline launches news app to give you the context behind the day’s headlines - Another day, another news aggregator app, but Timeline wants to bring you the historical context behind the headlines.
Vice News debuts 'virtual reality news broadcast' of US Millions March - Online news broadcaster Vice News demonstrated a possible advance in news broadcasting when it teamed up with digital artist Chris Milk and filmmaker Spike Jonze for a “virtual reality news broadcast” filmed at the Millions March protest rally at the death of Eric Garner in New York. The 360-degree view film followed Vice News correspondent Alice Speri through the march in December. It's available via the VRSE app for iPhone and Android devices.
Introducing Discover - Snapchat, the service that let's you send messages that get deleted after they've been read, has launched Discover, an app promises "a new way to explore Stories from different editorial teams". According to Nieman Lab, Snapchat’s new Discover feature could be a significant moment in the evolution of mobile news.
The British Library's newspaper collection as it was little more than a year ago (in Colindale) and as it is now (in Boston Spa)
Into the void - The British Library officially opened the National Newspaper Building, its new home for the UK's newspaper archives at Boston Spa in Yorkshire. Our blog post takes a look inside the building's storage void and traces the journey from Colindale to Boston Spa for the 60 million volumes held in the nation's newspaper archive.
9.5 million newspaper pages now fully searchable on @BNArchive - Talking of which, the British Newspaper Archive is close to the ten million milestone of digitising historic newspaper pages from the British Library. Just another 440 million to go...
After 44 years The Sun stops publishing topless model pics on page three - Well, so said Press Gazette and many others, including The Sun's sister paper The Times, which broke the news, and there was much debate as to whether changing taste, pressure from lobbyists, or financial arguments had forced the change. Three days later, Page 3 returned.
Google is now a more trusted source of news than the websites it aggregates - Quartz reports that online search engines have overtaken traditional media as the most trusted source for general news and information.
The Newsroom blog recent posts
- 200 years of collecting newspapers
- Heritage Made Digital - the newspapers
- Archiving the general election on TV
- Trump on TV
- Brexit - the broadcast archive
- St. Pancras Intelligencer no. 39
- Digital archives of British national newspapers
- From print to digital
- The news from Waterloo
- St Pancras Intelligencer no. 36
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