Helen Boaden, the BBC’s head of news, quoted in The Guardian, says that:
“Within minutes of the first blast we had received images from the public,” says Boaden. “We had 50 images within an hour. Now there are thousands. We had a gallery of still photographs from the public online, and they were incredibly powerful.”
Thousands? You wouldn’t know it from BBC News Online’s coverage. I can find maybe 25 in several different places at news.bbc.co.uk, most of which have been there for several days. What have they done with them all? Are they all sub-standard? Too graphic? Faked? Out of focus? I’d really like to know if there’s a flood of images from citizen reporters dammed up behind the BBC’s editorial code of practice.
Steve, the same was true for the BBC’s video coverage during the day. They kept returning to the same (remotely shot) footage when they had to have so much more than that. I too had the feeling that some editorial policy was limiting what would/could be shown. All that day I kept thinking they could do better if they just gave some junior cub-reporter a handheld video camera and said ‘go for it’.