The Editors

Even more feedback

• Steve Herrmann
• 4 Apr 08, 06:24 PM

Thanks again for all your comments about the new-look BBC News website. We’ve been going through them, collating them and feeding these thoughts into our work. I’ve addressed some of the points in my previous post, but I just wanted to let you know we have been paying attention.

We’ve tightened up the white spacing on stories and indexes – this was one thing a lot of you mentioned. The masthead and banner area of the page, specifically how the black BBC masthead works in conjunction with the current News banner, was another common theme, and we’ve asked the design team to look into this.

The masthead will soon incorporate a BBC-wide navigation area, so will be an important way of getting to other parts of the BBC website – radio, TV and much else – which is something people clearly want to be able to do easily (including those who miss the tabs that used to be on the international edition of the site).

To those who like it all, that is great to hear so thank you for letting us know. To others, we’re continuing to work on developing the site in the coming weeks and months, so please don’t see this as the end of the story.

Lastly, apologies to anyone who’s tried to post here and had difficulty – there have been ongoing problems with leaving comments on BBC blogs, including this one. Jem Stone on the BBC Internet Blog has explained our plans for improving this.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website

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Business matters

• Jeremy Hillman
• 4 Apr 08, 03:25 PM

Today we launched internally a fantastic new section on our College of Journalism website supporting all journalists who cover business and economics. It follows a report last year by Sir Alan Budd monitoring the quantity, quality and impartiality of our business coverage (which you can read here in pdf). He found there was no systematic bias but that sometimes we lacked balance and too often stressed the consumer perspective.

Of course, that was all before the credit crunch and Northern Rock. What a difference a year makes. It seems hardly a day goes by without Robert Peston or Evan Davis (now replaced by Stephanie Flanders) analysing and explaining the latest twist and turns of the global economy and using terms in their blogs that would give hedge fund managers a headache. I actually overheard a conversation at the tea bar the other day where the term 'de-leveraging’ was being bandied about.

Sir Alan commented in his report that there was a lack of commercial awareness in some parts of the BBC. I'd love to get him back in for another look, but he'd better be ready for a decent debate.

Jeremy Hillman is editor of the business and economics unit

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