How the latest technology can render the news incomprehensible

This is what the BBC has to say about Outside Source: 'Distinctions between TV and online are blurred… as the latest technology allows the programme to combine reporting, collation and first-hand experiences.' It fails to add that much else about it is blurred as well, including clarity and comprehension. It goes on to say, 'It also gives the viewer and [sic] insight into the processes and decisions that are informing the way stories are told. We will tell what we know, but also we do not know [sic] and what we are trying to find out.'

So little has been said and written about Outside Source that I can only assume that few people watch it, or watch it regularly. In case you’ve missed it altogether, do please make a point of tuning in. In the meantime, here’s a rundown of what you’re in for.

For several months now, Outside Source has been a 9pm to 10pm weeknight regular on the BBC News Channel. It takes place in a special gallery in the BBC TV Newsroom. I do not know why it’s called Outside Source but as everything about it is achingly, touchingly, cringingly yearning to be seen as the hottest, coolest manifestation of the digital landscape, I imagine we’re supposed to make some connection with open source.

Its main visual element is a vast touchscreen across which is written Outside Source and underneath it says (of course) @BBCOS. (Not a serif in sight.)

There are some 30 other visual elements on this screen – multicoloured and usually on the move. At its base is a row of icons, each one acting as a button. These are the buttons that the main presenter, Ros Atkins (a man) must select, and physically tap, in order to call up the relevant pictures. Their functions include: breaking news, newswire, web, video playback, carousel, video feeds, maps, trending, hashtags, social media, quotes, and story.

The quick-wittedness and athleticism of Atkins are commendable. He darts backwards and forwards in front of the screen, nearly always tapping the right button. And nearly always, the right picture comes up. But as a piece of communication, Outside Source wilfully ignores just about every lesson that’s been learnt since Gutenberg.

The objective of BBC Television News, presumably, must go something like this: To select those items of news that are most likely to be of interest and value to our audience, irrespective of complexity; and to use any or all the available techniques of sound and vision to reveal the true nature of those items as evocatively and intelligibly as possible.

If Outside Source had set out to confuse and distract, it could hardly have done a better job. Ros Atkins is never still – and neither is his touchscreen. The skills of a good screen editor are wholly missing. Instead of being led, visually and verbally, through a coherent and comprehensible sequence of illumination – first see this, then hear this, then see this – we’re subjected to a splatter gun of visual irrelevance.

One of the tests of a good piece of communication is that we should be unaware at a conscious level of the expertise that went into it. Outside Source forces us to give time and attention to its irrelevant mechanics – and all at the expense of understanding. It’s like the 1986 Richard Rogers Lloyd’s of London building with all its lifts and pipes and services nakedly exposed on the outside of the building; not only for no good reason, but actually making it less fit for purpose.

The meeting at which the considerable investment in Outside Source was approved would have made an excellent episode of W1A. With charter renewal at the front of everyone’s mind, the fear of the BBC being thought irredeemably analogue must have warped all reason. Just as Richard Rogers must have looked his clients in the eye and made it clear that only cowards, Luddites and philistines would be spineless enough to question his revolutionary design, so the BBC executives must have been cowed into shameful accession.

Outside Source is a piece of blatant showing off. It is ugly, awkward and functionally a failure. There is nothing that Outside Source does that couldn’t be done with far greater grace and lucidity by an old-fashioned off-screen vision mixer.

The digital revolution has brought us many wonderful things but not all of them work and not many are beautiful. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be intimidated into an uncritical acceptance. The elegant, intuitive website is still a rarity.

Jeremy Bullmore is a member of the WPP Advisory Board [email protected].

This article, was taken from the January 2016 issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.