Online Journalism News

BBC trials embedded links in news articles

Posted: 15/08/08 By: Laura Oliver

Email this story | Comments

BBC News is trialling links within the body of its online news stories.

When clicked, the 'in-page links' direct users to background information from across the BBC News site related to the highlighted word or phrase.

Links to social media sites, including YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr, and external news and organisations' sites are also included in the trial, which can currently be switched on and off on the featured articles.

External links are identified by different symbols and open up a separate window previewing the linked-to page.

"We wanted to include these sources because they promote sharing of content, have a huge array of material of potential editorial relevance, are technically easy to work with and also we wanted to gauge your thoughts about us linking to these user-generated sources," said Steve Herrmann, BBC News website editor, in a post to the BBC Editors' blog

"We're not taking an exclusive approach to which sources we link to, the whole idea is to try out and develop a system that is flexible enough for pretty much anything."

The trial will last for four weeks and is currently only available on the UK site, Herrmann added.

At the time of writing news items on the UK's plans to sell out Olympic venues in 2012 and the discovery of a Roman statue in Turkey are using the trial.

The system has been developed in partnership with multimedia technology firm Apture, which has implemented a similar feature on the news pages of WashingtonPost.com.

In its review of bbc.co.uk in June, the BBC Trust said it was 'disappointed' with the click-through rate for the site's links to external sites and asked the corporation to improve this service to users.

Got a story? Email our news team: Laura Oliver; Judith Townend or telephone +44 (0)1273 384290. You can also follow us on Twitter: @journalismnews / @LauraOliver / @JTownend.