OMC09: Reuters supplying video metadata to BBC, says multimedia newsroom head
Part of corporation's plans to develop an industry standard for metadata, says Peter Horrocks
– 1 min read
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The BBC is using metadata provided by Reuters to help its production staff deal with news videos.
Staff are no longer required to sort through packaged video footage from Reuters, but can use a feed of metadata about the clips to decide how it will be used.
Providing such information is no extra work for Reuters and makes the production process for BBC staff more efficient, Peter Horrocks, head of the corporation's multimedia newsroom, told Journalism.co.uk at the Oxford Media Convention yesterday.
The corporation wants to help develop an industry-wide standard for the use of metadata and is looking at ways this could benefit journalists and users, he added.
His comments echoed those from BBC colleague Pete Clifton, head of multimedia, who told the Society of Editors conference that more content sharing and metadata was part of the organisation's plans for the future .
Providing such information about news content would let visitors to the BBC website find information more quickly and allow items to be displayed in different ways, such as mapping, he added.
The data would be available for use by journalists and third-party developers, said Horrocks.
More use of metadata would enable the site to tap into the semantic web, he added, in particular by providing more contextual searches for users.
Any system requiring journalists to input metadata would have to be sufficiently intelligent so as not to add to their workloads, said Horrocks.
Last year Jim Kennedy, vice president and director of strategic planning for Associated Press, told the World Editors Forum that metadata should be a standard feature of digital news content in the US .
More Journalism.co.uk coverage of the Oxford Media Convention at this link .
Written by
Laura Oliver is a freelance journalist, a contributor to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, co-founder of The Society of Freelance Journalists and the former editor of Journalism.co.uk (prior to it becoming JournalismUK)
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