Jakob Nielsen: World's Best Headlines: BBC News | Hacker News Reader

Jakob Nielsen: World's Best Headlines: BBC News

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46 pointsedw51926 comments

I love the BBC just because it's publicly funded — they don't even need to grab your attention to make a profit from you!

It's a tax I can honestly say I don't mind paying!

Same exact sentiment for NPR, even though it's not completely funded by public funds.

I'm conflicted about this. It's actually a very regressive tax, you pay the same whether you are rich or poor, whether you have 1 television or 20.

It's also enforced in an incredibly harsh manner and we (the taxpayers) are actually footing the bill to send people to jail who get caught without a license and then can't afford to pay it (though an outrcy in the House of Lords massively reduced the number being imprisioned down from 200 to 20 (roughly) a year.

On the other hand, if it came up for debate and reform, certain political factions would basically kill the BBC, which I love.

There's a fairly easy way out of the tax. Don't have a TV in the UK. You then don't have to pay it but you can still enjoy the BBC.

Specifically, you can use all their services including the iPlayer as long as you don't use the iPlayer to watch a program as it's being broadcast.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/01/iplayer_does_...

I don't have a TV and I live in the UK and the licensing people are aware of this. I do have broadband at home. At first I thought I would watch TV via the iPlayer, but it turns out that I've watched a grand total of one program in the last four months.

I have heard that you have to jump through some pretty annoying hoops to prove that you don't have a TV. Since the government just assumes that you actually have one and just don't want to pay.

You have to jump through hoops to convince them you don't have a TV, and they'll keep sending you letters asking for money. But, if you don't have a TV, just don't pay. They never force you to pay, and the onus is on them (I believe) to demonstrate you have a TV before they fine you.

Not really...

They send you a letter asking you to pay and you send it back saying you don't have a TV. That's all I had to do.

They'll probably ask me again in a few years, I suppose.

When I returned to the UK I simply wrote the TV licensing authority a letter telling them I didn't have a TV. They replied with a menacing letter claiming that I probably didn't realize that I did have a TV somewhere hidden in the house (in the form of some sort of TV receiver).

They then sent me that letter again. I guess the first letter was meant to scare me into paying under the assumption that I had lied.

Then they sent me a letter saying that they would pop round at any time of their choosing and check up on me. They have not yet done so, and if they do they are not coming in. It's a private property and they'll have to get a search warrant (which means going to a magistrate) if they think I'm watching TV.

Dear Householder,

Our records show that no one living at your address has purchased anything from Foo Department Stores during the past year. Since 99.9% of the UK population buys at least one item each year from us, you must have stolen something from us.

To pay for the item you have stolen ... .

Otherwise we will have to come and search your house to discover what you have stolen from us.

Yours,

Foo Department Stores.

Good points, it does seem a little outrageous people can go to jail for not paying their TV tax, however I guess it has to have some punishment for not paying it, else who would? :D

The place where I work was sent a payment notice (we don't have any TVs there). There was a strict instruction that failure to respond was a terribel thing and bad things would happen to us. There were lots of ways to respond if you wanted to pay or wanted to claim you already had a license.

There was no way to tell them you didn't need a license.

The next step is [they say in the letter] that they send an enforcement officer to your address.

If they just had a general phone number or a "we don't have a TV" phone number they'd have saved themselves at least the cost of sending someone out to try and hassle us ... and I'm sure a lot of other people.

It's not my job to chase up their failure to provide contact details on a demand for money.

OT: We got a parking fine when I took my wife in to have our baby last week. The number to call to pay the fine is the wrong number ... gah! I'm just not sure if this is malevolence.

Congratulations on the new born :-)

I loathe state media. The idea that the government runs media is very 1984. And they don't work for free, they just make money by forcing you to pay at gunpoint instead.

They are not neutral (which is impossible) so there are certain ideas that they promote in their reporting. And even people who are against those ideas are forced to pay for the promotion of those ideas.

I'm not sure if there's much truth to it, but I read that the BBC news headlines are so short as there is some central system that provides them to Ceefax too (which can only display 24 rows of 40 characters).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceefax

That was actually mentioned in the article...

    So why is the BBC so good when most others are so bad? Maybe it's in the BBC's blood: The news
    organization originated as a radio station, where word count is at a premium and you must communicate
    clearly to immediately grab listeners. In a spoken medium, each word is gone as soon as it's
    uttered, so convoluted exposition confuses even more than it does in print.

    Ceefax (one of the few surviving videotext services) also helps instill conciseness in BBC's journalists.
    Text on low-def televisions has horrible resolution and only allows for a minute word count (somewhat
    like mobile).

BBC articles in the "latest headlines" RSS feed that comes with Firefox tend to be poor - they often don't match the article itself and tend to be link bait type titles. The alternative is when they give too little information.

    * Italy buries first quake victims
    * Romania blamed over Moldova riots
    * Ten arrested in UK anti-terrorism raids
    * Villagers hurt in West Bank clash
    * Mass Thai protest over leadership
    * Iran accuses journalist of spying

2 of those are poor for one of the criteria given IMO.

* West Bank clash, villagers hurt * UK anti-terrorism raids, ten arrested

These front-load the headlines better so that if you know you don't like "West Bank" articles you can skip the other ~20 characters and jump to the next line. I don't think they are less readable either.

I have to confess I lengthened a headline from "Spiders reanimated" to "Spider Nightmare: Spiders resurrected from the dead" the other day ( http://digg.com/general_sciences/Spider_Nightmare_Spiders_re... ).. it felt so dirty and multiply redundant, and didn't get me any Diggs as National Geographic pipped me by 14 minutes with the story.

One of the guidelines nearly every publication practices for its headlines is that each one should have a verb (one thing that the BBC also does well in the above examples). The verb enables a reader to quickly grasp the "action" in the story and gives people a better understanding of the central point of the article.

Your rewrite does little more than remove the verbs, making the headlines less clear, in my opinion.

Actually, he removed the prepositions, not the verbs. I wouldn't mind the front-loading as much if he didn't remove the prepositions, but to me those two rearranged sentences sound awkward regardless.

I wonder if the journalists who write the articles choose the headlines, or if the BBC has a `Headline Phraser' job.

Good point -- it doesn't remove the verbs entirely. However, it removes them from their natural place in the sentence and puts them somewhere where they're likely to be missed entirely. By front-loading the headline with only the nouns, he puts what is arguably the most important part--what _happened_--at the end.

But you are right that the awkwardness is mostly due to a lack of prepositions.

His site has different priorities than a newspaper, but I've always been fond of Khoi Vinh's titles on http://subtraction.com, which have been consistently good even since before he started working at the NYT.

BBC News Low Graphics Page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565470

No, the world's best headlines are on Wikipedia. Each article is titled exactly what it is about.

In the phrase "every word works hard for its living", every word works hard for its living. What would you call that, a meta-sentence?

Self referential, perhaps.

I think we would need to consult Douglas Hofstadter about that one.

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