Susanna Reid had to stand in for Andrew Marr after he was late arriving for the paper review part of his weekend show. I guess that’s vaguely interesting to those with an interest in politics or media, or anyone who’s a fan of Reid. How did she do?

The 39-year-old host was wearing a chic dress, just the kind of outfit that has helped her to acquire an army of fans during her time on the BBC

Great, but, er, why was Marr late?

On BBC Breakfast News on Sunday Susanna is usually behind a table – so, to see rather more of her was no doubt be a treat [sic] for her fans

No, but, surely as an experienced presenter there was a difference in the programme’s style? At the very least there’s a weak Marr/Reid coalition joke to be had, no?

Susanna’s internet fans think she is the sexiest presenter on the BBC and regularly post up videos of her wearing short skirts or unintentionally flashing her bra through her blouse on air.

So we learn that Reid has many fans, all of whom she’s won because she has tits and legs.

How does the BBC work? I don’t know if a 15-year-plus veteran such as Reid – who has a degree in politics, philosophy and law, which she followed with a postgrad diploma in broadcast journalism – gets any bonus for standing in, but I do hope she spends it on something pretty.

Doubtless the extra pixels will give their swingometer unrivalled accuracy, but it’s unlikely to do much elsewhere. Polling stations – invariably primary schools, Baptist churches and village halls – rarely prove cinematic in front of a hasty-put-together piece to camera, while vote-counting runs through dreary hours in a thousand strip-lit municipal centres. These places do not need HD.

Nor do our politicians, to whom it should be denied. We may suspect many of being self-interested, mildly corrupt, out of touch, high-handed, ignorant, duplicitous and even mendacious, but we know for a fact that there are no lookers among them.

I, for one, wouldn’t cyber-stalk the corridors of power.

As long as the meeting points between politicians and the public are run by PR people, we have a problem. Brown will likely lose – more because he can’t play the comfortable everyman than for anything else. Cameron talks a nice line in it, having apparently met everyone the other day. Clegg seemingly hopes that not being either of them will be enough.

And perhaps it will. “Vote for change” must have sounded like a great slogan a few months back, but I hope the Tories are regretting it come 7 May. We’re warned off a hung parliament, but what if it brings electoral reform – and with it an end to these meaningless politics of presentation, gesture and the party line?

So, no; we don’t need to see democracy in high definition. And in the days before we vote we don’t even need to see it.

We should just be listening, and thinking.

IMAGES by cole007, based on the transcript of the second leaders’ debate (on Sky).

Which is total cock.

The story explains how BA responded to the first of two cabin staff strikes by publishing videos on YouTube which, the magazine’s research suggests, are “winning over customers”.



Leaving aside any consideration that the one video I watched was a dry exercise in corporate spin, the article’s interpretation of the primary survey results is flawed.

The survey asked 1,000 consumers about BA’s campaign. Of those who’d seen it, “nearly 19% had an enhanced view of the airline”. Sixty-four per cent felt the same about the carrier, while “only 17%” said they had a diminished opinion of it.

The margin of error

There’s not much between 17% and 19%. If your sample size is 1,000 it’s 20 people.

But more importantly, look at the story’s exact wording (my emphasis):

The survey of 1,000 consumers, carried out with market research company Toluna, found that the majority of those who had seen BA’s campaign have either retained or improved their perception of the brand.

Which implies that not all of the sample had seen the campaign.

I’m going to go out on a limb here. The video I link to above has around 22,000 views at the time of writing and BA’s total YouTube views run shy of 130,000. Unless people are gathering in stadia to watch BA’s channel uploads on a single PC, that suggests hardly any of the general public have seen BA’s YouTube videos.

Charitably assuming that, perhaps, 10% of the Toluna sample were familiar with the campaign, that two percentage point difference amounts to two people.

Statistics are bent and twisted all over the backwaters of the news to make convenient arguments for vested interests. I’d always assumed that the liberties people took came from a need to further their own agenda. Perhaps that’s the case here, but I find myself wondering if it’s simply that marketers and PR workers can’t do the sums.

Or that they can, and they assume the rest of us are too stupid to undo them.

While the Mail has since tracked down the unhurt 31-year-old Clio driver, details were thin on the ground on Thursday last week as the surely-it-can’t-be-real video started to spread. Without much background we decided not to run it.

But I’ve been fascinated by the way that mainstream news sites covered the story, and by the way that they’ve all felt free to use the video (which, let’s face it, has to be seen to be believed).

The footage was originally posted by the YouTube user dogswick. His notes explained that it wasn’t his film, but that he’s a friend of the truck driver involved, who had been given a copy.

Video diary

Looking at different papers’ approaches, I wonder how some stand with regard to copyright law. The Sun didn’t bother sourcing the story or its stills, and felt entitled to repackage the video into its own flash player, complete with an advert prequel.

Perhaps that’s what you’d expect from the tabloids, but the Mail did much better, reproducing stills from the clip that were each credited to ‘dogswick / Youtube.com’, and embedding the original video at the foot of its article.

The Guardian also embedded the YouTube video and had managed to speak to haulage firm Arclid transport. The Telegraph had less information and reposted the video in its own player, albeit with a credit to dogswick and YouTube.

Finally, the BBC had the most in the way of background, but while it linked to the YouTube homepage it repackaged the video into its own player. While Steve Herrmann’s link policy post acknowledges that a link from BBC News can generate an overwhelming amount of traffic, this is YouTube we’re talking about.

Anyway, you get the idea. No two sites seem to have the same approach, but at least those embedding the original video are acting within YouTube’s terms. Of course, even then we may all be infringing someone’s copyright if it turns out dogswick didn’t have the right to post the video in the first place, but that’s his lookout.

And I’d love to know exactly what’s happened there, because after getting some half-million views he’s decided to take down the video.

I wonder why? The approach from ITN might explain it – as many subsequent comments on his channel imply – but I have an alternative theory.

Might his mate, the lorry driver – now suspended from his job and the subject of a police investigation – have administered the sort of shoeing that would have Malcolm Tucker taking notes?

I wonder if dogswick knows what hit him.

As Herrmann points out, the BBC has always provided relevant links – something I think is essential to good web journalism – but to date it hasn’t seemed comfortable bringing them into the body copy. That’s where the majority of the web seems agreed they should be – perhaps because the context tends to make them self-explanatory.

But the post is interesting not just because of what it asks, but because it shows the importance of clear linking policy to journalists. It shows how news organisations are only too aware of the value of links to the reader.

It’s also interesting for something it doesn’t mention – the value of links to the receiving site which, if they come from a goliath like BBC Online, is immense. This adds an extra dimension to considerations such as those raised by commenter Bob Almond – will you link to the websites of controversial or illegal newsmakers?

The BBC’s strategy review sets out that it should double click-throughs to third-party sites over the next three years. I wouldn’t be surprised if simply bringing the links into the body copy would achieve this.

Looking at the actual feed page it seems like there’s a problem – an 11 hour-time lag between a tweet and its appearance on the BBC page.

That and it looks fugly.

Sometimes the result is conveniently brief and fact-packed; at other times it’s just wonderfully bonkers:

Anyway, as editor Steve Herrmann explained in November, the BBC is finally embracing some basic SEO practices in a bid to “make it easier to find our stories if you are somewhere else”. God help the competition.

Steve’s post is entirely reasonable, of course, as is the corporation’s move. The examples he highlights are all cases where the longer headline is useful, or at least inoffensive, but I wondered when I read it how it would play out in practice.

To be honest, I’d forgotten all about it until last night, when I discovered a story where the new practice jarred: “Man charged over James Murray Belfast balcony death”. It’s not hateful, but it’s an example of what happens when keywords make their presence felt.

Interestingly, the BBC’s URL structure still doesn’t include keywords. Introducing them would also help the stories rank, and nobody would ever notice or care.