The fact that you have managed to write and publish a post on the subject whilst their Twitter account is still asleep illustrates your point perfectly.

That’s a pretty big fail really, a lot of people both here and abroad rely on their breaking news, especially for bigger events.

I’m personally not a fan of the magazine section of their website at the moment but I still use it for breaking news. All it takes is to set up an auto-tweet of headlines from their CMS; They could get each author to tweet their own work (more difficult) or get the content manager to tweet each piece or even an intern!

Good spot,

Charlotte

Thanks for the comments. It is such an easy win. I’d prefer it not automated, but even if it was automated that is better than nothing. It possibly shows you need to share the social media roles around and not rely on one person.

It’s all very new for the BBC as it is for all the news networks. In this there is the new model for news which has to be a fusion of citizen journalism/ microblogging/ news organisations presentational skills and this, for the BBC is a bit like handing over the control of the steering wheel to “the forces of chaos”

Hesitation perhaps….

I would rather have BBC’s one page coverage than an active Twitter account. Their breaking news page that combines text based updates with their video feed is that best way I have found to monitor breaking news.

That said, if over a million people rely on you for breaking news via Twitter, you need to be doing both Internet and Twitter coverage right.

Why cant they link the two up? Seems the obvious option to me…!

Just after praising the BBC for the amount of Social Media articles they have released recently and the quality of them, they fail in a fundamental way!

As Charlotte Thumbs says, it’s new for the BBC and i’m sure they’ll get there – they’ve been improving the social aspect of their site on a weekly basis.

Constructive criticism like this will help speed up that process so they don’t repeat this mistake again, so good find!

I was going to suggest it may be worth joining in here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2011/03/comments_and_making_our_covera.html

But it seems it is closed, with most of the preceding threads on related topics, ironically.

Hi Gordon et al,

I’m the Social Media Editor at BBC News, and responsible for @BBCBreaking among other things.
Important to just clarify a few things here and set some context:

First, until about 5 months ago, we weren’t curating this account at all, it did just run off a feed for big breaking alerts, but in a somewhat unsatisfactory way (text was too long etc.) Since we started authoring manually, we have added about 500k followers. Pretty dramatic increase I would say.

However, as things stand, we’re not yet able to ensure proper staffing cover for it at all hours, and indeed are not in the luxurious position of being able to dedicate specific roles to just updating our main Twitter accounts.
So we are currently in the process of assessing how that can best be incorporated into newsroom roles that also involve other related ‘breaking news’ work.

Until then, we are in the situation where we are able to curate at most times during the week, and outside of those times, we either rely on feeds or update as and when we can (as we did a few times on Saturday evening and most of Sunday). Often in doing so pointing back to our website, where the live coverage is always absolutely up to the minute, as you have rightly pointed out.

You’ll also note our @BBCNews and @BBCWorld accounts do take more regular RSS updates from our website – however, we aim to reserve @BBCBreaking for bigger and more significant news developments on major stories.

Hope that reassures you we are proactively thinking about all this, and developing our BBC News presence on social media in a coherent and co-ordinated way.

Happy to answer any other questions anyone has!

Alex (@AlexGubbay on Twitter)

The Internet is a free and open medium.
Twitter is a privately owned company.
Surely the BBC is only giving a token nod towards Twitter because of its current popularity, but is holding back from full commitment right now as it probably feels that the work it performs in gathering news, which is paid for by the British License Fee should not just be handed over to another company for free to publish on its platform?
It does after all provide an RSS feed from its website that is updated regularly. It wouldn’t take a person that long to code a twitter feed that is automatically updated from the BBC RSS feed.

I think generally the BBC is doing pretty well keeping up with technology updates, they must be pretty stretched at the minute with everything that’s going on in the world.

Cheers
M

“we’re not yet able to ensure proper staffing cover for it at all hours”.

Oh boy, that’s so lame. You’d think that no one at the BBC has a mobile phone and between them they could organise to get one Twitter feed updated. Poor.

That account has 1.1 million followers, seriously, make an effort.

14 hours without an update is more than all hours.

@BBCNews has just over 114,000 @BBCworld has 641,000.

Both of those feeds are updated which suggests that the BBC has people to update some accounts, but there is poor integration and bad planning.

Could some one possibly update two accounts at once? How hard is that.

Besides if you can’t update the account, then put a link to an account on your news page that is updated. This is basic.

Not sure what @AlexGubbay says stacks up at all. That’s a fail.