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Comment by acheron | Hacker News Reader

Really interesting article, but terrible clickbaity title. I wouldn't have read it if there weren't so many positive comments on HN already.

It could work if there were a subtitle. "35 million people didn’t notice a thing: BBC Radio's NICAM Codec replacement project". I dunno. But it is (or should be) very important that the title actually informs you as to what the article is about. "35M people didn't notice a thing" doesn't tell you anything at all.

Edit: Upon further consideration I may have been a little harsh. This is really a blog entry more than an "article" per se, and I suppose that's fine for a blog post title. The problem comes when we link to it from somewhere else, e.g. HN; we need the additional context.

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Perhaps the title-writer has been infected by the BBC news editorial policy. They seem to be turning clickbait titles into a fine art, combined with renaming articles so you think it's a new piece on the same story, but turns out you've already read it. (If you read BBC News at all that is: my wife still does, I gave it up years ago and haven't looked back.)

I love many aspects of the BBC but sadly not their news output anymore.

(Sorry I realise this has very little to do with the R&D article.)

Agreed. The science section has a fine selection of rehashed press releases.

I used to think the BBC news was definitive 5-10 years ago. I'm not sure what has changed? Have the recent governments and their pressure on the license fee really made the difference or is it just my perception?

When I was young the BBC was always seen as pretty left wing (it certainly wasn't at it's inception though) it seems pretty conservative (and sensationalist) right now.

The Iraq war and David Kelly's suicide is what happened:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry

Add things like the Jimmy Savile abuse scandal, and the ongoing threat from the conservative government to turn the BBC into the equivalent of America's PBS (irrelevant on the political landscape, lacking financial heft, and in close to nonexistent viewership) and you have a recipe for a neutered public news broadcaster too afraid to do anything meaningful.

Both sides of the political spectrum regularly complains about the BBC being biased towards the other side. It's the best evidence that whatever bias there is either is minor or short-lived.

In my eyes, the biggest problem with the BBC isn't bias, but that they're terrified of seeming too biased, and as a result they're wishy-washy in ways that ironically makes them seem biased.

E.g. the left will accuse them of being right wing because they don't write in more critical terms about the governments willingness to deal with the Saudis, while the right will accuse them of a left wing bias for not writing in more critical terms about Chavez, and so on. Similarly they're often accused of bias for not reporting something, or very carefully reporting something, that either side believe to be fact, but where there's not (yet) actual firm evidence. Of course, if done "against" just one side, this too would be actual bias, but the BBC appears to be pretty consistent about it.

So we're left with reporting that is rarely very biased, but often exceedingly unsatisfying for everyone.

I'm not saying there's no bias - I don't believe that would be possible. But I do think that the allegations of bias against the BBC tend to be wildly exaggerated.

When you just look at the website it is easy to forget just how much current affairs content the BBC produces. Across TV and radio their are numerous news programs with different skews. News Night or PM can sound completely different to Breakfast or Five Live. I would rather individual programs are allowed to show bias as long as the output in general is balanced. It is ridiculous that every single program acts like it is the only thing the viewer will ever watch.

There was a comment here a few months ago which mentioned a term. I have forgotten the term since but it effectively described a situation where an expert in subject matter foo reads an article about foo in a well-regarded news source (like say the Economist) which is either pretty incorrect or pretty biased and then the subject matter expert goes "wow they know nothing about foo" and then turns the page and reads about another topic let's say bar (or maybe let's say Middle East politics) which our subject matter expert knows little or nothing about and then our subject matter expert says "wow, this news source is very insightful".

If we read about articles on key escrow or actually anything about cryptography and surveillance in general, we will find it hard to see BBC is accurate (neutral is not the same as accurate because to be neutral about anything -- and here comes Godwin's law -- involves saying that there was a legitimate excuse governments to act in a way that is not beneficial to millions of its citizens. Anti-terrorism rhetoric is way overboard and news outlets like BBC are fully on the bandwagon (although thankfully much less so compared to CNN, Fox News, and other low lives). Honestly, I think our fear of terrorists has caused more damage to the world economy than all the "acts of terror" combined. Ordinary people should not be afraid or even mindful of "acts of terror" in their daily life any more than they need to be afraid or mindful of a meteor shower hitting them in the head. Everyone goes over the top with "security precautions" because they don't want to be seen as doing nothing. The point here is BBC does not preserve this neutrality at all. I bet even CNN and Fox could do better if they were organizations that has their funding guaranteed, as opposed to being under the mercy of its advertisers. Sorry but what BBC does is nothing exemplary for someone in its shoes.

It's called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, a name coined by Michael Crichton: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/07/the-gell-mann-amne...

> Sorry but what BBC does is nothing exemplary for someone in its shoes.

I didn't suggest they were exemplary at all. On the contrary, I criticised them for not doing a proper job because they're worried about coming across as biased.

They've chosen to deal with criticism of bias by essentially trying their utmost to never say or do anything controversial, but the nature of the real world is that a lot of the most important journalism necessarily steps hard on someones toes.

Notably, they've taken flack for being wishy-washy on climate change, and eventually had to put out a directive to stop giving equal time to deniers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/0...

Where do you read news? I'm looking to find a source other than the BBC

Although it's foreign, I've found Christian Science Monitor to be fairly diligent and insightful. If nothing else, I've found it difficult to identify an institutional bias in their coverage and outlook.

Yeah, the HN title should be more like "Changing the NICAM radio transmission protocol without 35 million people noticing."

I came here (directly to the comments section) to see what the clickbait-title actually meant. Thanks for fulfilling! ;-)

Yep. For me, at least half of the value of an article comes from the (external) internet discussions about it, which summarize key points and weaknesses much better than the author is able to.

I don't think the protocol was actually changed. The article just describes an equipment swap.

I think you're right; when skimming, I read the following section, which made it sound like they were updating it to send additional metadata, based on their mentions of the "codecs" and how they "will" allow radios to do useful things with the metadata. Also, I'm used to codec meaning "software program", not "machine".

>>The NICAM distribution system also carries the RDS data. This will enable the radio in your car to automatically retune when you can get a better signal from a different transmitter. It will also display the station name (for example “Radio 1”) and the current song name (for example “Now Playing: Coming With You by Ne-Yo”). RDS will also indicate when a travel announcement is being made on BBC local radio so that a radio can switch to the travel announcement at the right time.

The BBC seem to have moved to this sort of title with the recent updates to their web properties. They do these things seemingly confusing themselves with a commercial enterprise rather than a publicly funded provider.

Being government funded does not mean you don't have to sell yourself. It just means the target audience for the sales job is different.

Because if they don't have clickbaity headlines the UK government will scrap the license fee?

It could reduce it, arguing there is a lot of waste at the bbc. As long as the public perceives the value in the bbc's offerings the odds of that happening are reduced.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2477726/BBC-face-cut...

That's a small example of what I mean, not the full totality of the threat space.

Building more readership makes them that much more difficult to cut funding to, in a variety of ways (more people to get outraged if the government tries, more evidence to show the government that they are worth the money, etc.). Clickbait headlines create more readership. We may prefer that to be false, but it's obviously not. From there the logic is simple, almost inexorable.

Being government funded does not mean you get to ignore funding issues, it just changes how you play the game. There is no source of unconditional funding in the world.

Also, one might argue, funding aside, that increasing readership (without sacrificing quality below some threshold) is the whole point of the enterprise. Click-bait headlines are annoying, but they aren't the actual body of the report themselves.

The BBC serves a charter which is managed by the BBC Trust. The Trust effectively interprets the charter. Their interpretation of the goals of the enterprise are (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/):

    "Make the most creative and distinctive output;
    Innovate online to create a more personal BBC;
    Serve all audiences; and
    Improve value for money through a simpler, more efficient, and more open BBC.    "

Increasing readership by reducing quality of headlines to match junk media clickbait doesn't appear to fit in there.

The actual Royal Charter, http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/h..., at Section 4 puts quite succinctly what the aims are:

    "The Public Purposes of the BBC are as follows—
    (a)  sustaining citizenship and civil society;
    (b)  promoting education and learning;
    (c)  stimulating creativity and cultural excellence;
    (d)  representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities;
    (e)  bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK;
    (f)   in promoting its other purposes, helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services and, in addition, taking a leading role in the switchover to digital television."

I'd argue that this sort of change goes against the stimulation of cultural excellence, the tail is wagging the dog.

But this is the Beeb, mate, no need to try and trick people into reading like a contemptible American news service.

Maybe people did notice but didn't care enough to complain? Or we're all used to various sound quality depending on what we're doing (cell, skype, voip, etc) that we've just internalized quality changes as not a big deal.

It reminds me how satellite radio was supposed to be "mp3 quality" whatever that meant. Everytime I rent a car with SiriusXM, my god, the sound quality is horrible. Its like they're using those early postage-stamp sized quicktime videos from the dial-ups days. Yet people still subscribe in vast numbers.

Apologies for that, I submitted this and did actually go looking for the HN title guidelines, which seemed to say use the original title. I'll try to be a little braver with title editing in future.

Even if you post a more informative title, the mods of HN will change it back to the original site title. It has happened countless times and is pretty much the site policy. The claim is that is prevents posters from making click-bait titles to gain karma, although in this case the original is the click bait.

So anyway, no, you did the only thing you could do. Anything else would have been degraded to the current information value by mods anyway.

The guidelines say to use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait. In this case it was linkbait, so a change was in order.

We've changed it to what the article says it is about in the second sentence.

It's interesting you classified it as click bait. Too many attempts to raise interest quickly, in a large number of people with low quality content, results in a small segment of those people "hitting" on the fact it's raising interest quickly and should be flagged. In your case, you "unflagged" it because we started talking about it, which implies some of us shouldn't (or won't) filter long term.

> but terrible clickbaity title.

I don't know about that. The clickbait title did its job well and we all clicked on the link and read the article.

The truth is that 7 billion people didn't notice.

Why didn't they use that title?

BTW, I agree with your edit. An R&D blog shouldn't be held to the same standard of journalistic excellence as a reputable news source, even if it's the BBC's blog.

The name of the url is even click-baity: http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2016-01-35-million-people-didnt...

Sorry this should be: http:// www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2016-01-35-million-people-didnt-notice-a-thing-dot-dot-dot

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