ITWales.com
The ITW Interview: Mandy Rose, Editor, Digi-Nation, BBCi
Last November the BBC revamped its new media operations and re-launched them under a new brand: BBCi. The little 'i' stands for a
big change in the way the BBC delivers its services. The 'i' stands for interactive.
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Nowhere is the 'i' more apparent than on the BBCi Wales website. 2002 has seen three key new projects launched in Wales that get the
public to create the content and interact with the BBC in a brand new way.
Here itwales talks to Mandy Rose, Digi-Nation Editor, who - having co-produced the TV documentary series Video Nation and joined BBCi
Wales as Editor of New Media - now heads BBC Wales' innovative new projects: the Where I Live websites, the community studios and the
Capture Wales digital storytelling programme.
"There's a lot of new work going on here at BBC Wales. We are, I believe, being regarded in the BBC as pioneering." - Mandy Rose,
Editor, Digi-Nation, BBCi
Where I Live
If the Internet has a capacity for one thing - more than most other mediums - it's detail. With the potential to be almost
infinitely comprehensive and inclusive, the web can cater for everyone.
Providing localised on-line content is a key part of the BBC's new interactive strategy. Five 'Where I Live' sub-sites are
scheduled to appear on the BBCi Wales site, each providing a wealth of local information - from news to histories, weather reports to web
guides, discussion forums to days out - on every region of Wales.
"They'll be sites of two halves in a way," explains Mandy Rose. "On the one hand we'll be offering this quality BBC content - news,
listings, sports, journalism, things that our staff and writers create. Then we'll have the user-generated part. In the case of the North
East site that we launched in May, already at least 60 per cent of the content is produced by the public."
Clean, clear and packed with local information: a Where I Live web page
The user-generated content on the North East site already reflects a wide variety of aims and interests. "Whether it's about getting an
opinion across, whether it's about flagging up an activity, the contributors are really interested in having their say on the BBC web
site," Mandy Rose tells us. The same level of interest can be detected in the visitors to the North East Wales site - it attracted more
than 33,000 page impressions in the week of its launch.
Community studios
But what's distinctly BBC about the Where I Live sites is that all members of the community are invited to contribute
to them - not just those up-and-running on the Internet. What makes this possible is a new project that will see community studios
established alongside each of the regional websites.
"The broad proposition is if you've got something to say, there's somewhere you can say it in BBC Wales," Mandy Rose tells us. "People
can walk in to see the website, and are invited to contribute. The studio co-ordinator talks them through the site, shows them what's
there and helps them add their content."
"Equally, if someone walks in and says there's something going on here and I don't know why the BBC's not covering it, the co-ordinator
will put them in touch with a journalist."
What the Where I Live and the community studios projects aim to achieve is public participation. Locals in-the-know provide a wealth of
information for the sites; fellow locals are rewarded with an information-rich service backed up by the BBC's own quality content.
"The fact is that the Internet is all about people doing it themselves," Mandy Rose stresses.
"The old publishing model is that a small number of TV broadcasters and newspapers push information out to the public. The Internet is
about the potential for anyone to contribute, anyone to publish, anyone to communicate with anyone else."
"I believe there's a role for the BBC on the Internet as the provider of excellent content. But I'm interested in exploring that other
business of how people can contribute. I'm interested in what happens when you say to members of the public: you can publish on the BBC
platform."
The five regions covered by the web sites; the South West and North East sites are already up and running
Capture Wales
Capture Wales is the project that capitalises most creatively on giving to the public the freedom to publish. Making the BBC's
technology and skills-base freely available to a wide range of people, it echoes an earlier project headed by Mandy Rose.
"I spent the last six years of my TV career running the Video Nation project," Mandy Rose explains. "That project was about
putting the technology the TV professionals used into the hands of members of the public."
Video Nation presented real glimpses into people's lives. Individuals could tell their own story in their own way by having creative
control over their own representation.
"I thought the results of that project were fascinating and that the recordings the public made really filled gaps in what TV was doing,"
says Mandy Rose. "There's something about the diversity you can bring to things - the diversity of opinion, the range of perspectives,
the kinds of people involved - that is different to what you're going to get if professionals produce something."
When Video Nation came to an end, Mandy Rose was asked to think about a next generation project - "a 21
st
Century version of Video Nation." New technologies beaconed.
"I'd been interested in the Internet. There was a group of 50 people who were connected to the Internet in 1994 in a BBC pilot project. I
was one of them."
The Capture Wales project was already being initiated before Mandy Rose came to BBC Wales; it was one of the projects that drew her
there. "Capture Wales came about through a collaboration with the School of Journalism at Cardiff University. Daniel Meadows had come
across the website of the Centre of Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California. At the same time I was thinking about what we might do
beyond Video Nation and I came across the website too."
Capture Wales now runs a digital storytelling workshop in a different place in Wales every month. In each workshop 10 people have the
chance to create their own digital story.
"Some may have no IT experience and some will have some experience," Mandy Rose explains. "The team takes them through a process where
they cut the story they'd like to tell based on their personal experiences. They work that into a script of around 250 words. They pull
in assets which might illustrate that story - they upload digital photos, for example. They then spend three days working with Photoshop
and Adobe Premiere editing it into a finished piece."
The results of the workshops, which are collected on the Capture Wales website, are captivating. They demonstrate that the digital
storytelling medium is a deeply personal and revealing one, and dynamic in its ability to fuse words, music, speech, images, animation
and video and present the results to anyone, anytime via the Internet.
"Some of the stories that are coming through are very strong and moving in particular," Mandy Rose remarks. "Everyone who
takes part tends to find it very inspiring. For a lot of people taking part, that business of doing creative work is not a part of their
lives, so to come in with an idea, to go through a creative process and to come out with a product with a whole story that you can show
your friends and that we'll potentially show on the website is quite an exciting thing."
The experience can also inspire a lasting interest. "Take 10 people who go to a given workshop," considers Mandy Rose. "It may be that 8
of those people never use these specific tools again. But hopefully they've had an experience that makes them think 'these tools can do
things for me'. Maybe the other two people might come back and try it again - either with us or through other mechanisms."
"We've already had one person coming to a workshop who's ended up working in our community studio in Wrexham."
BBCi
If Capture Wales, the community studios and the Where I Live sites demonstrate how the new, interactive BBC is adapting in a time of
new medias and exciting possibilities, they also represent a new method of providing a service to the British public.
"Underlying all this is the desire that people still feel they're getting value for their license fee," comments Mandy
Rose. "The BBC has a place in helping people use these tools and in sharing with people our editorial skills. We've got to continue to
offer people value and I think this is one way in which we can do that in the 21
st
Century."
So can the web be as important a development for the BBC as radio and TV were?
"This is a major paradigm change that we're going through with the Internet becoming as important as it is. I think what the BBC does
reflects that," responds Mandy Rose.
"There's a lot of new work going on here at BBC Wales. We are, I believe, being regarded in the BBC as pioneering. Nobody else is doing
the digital storytelling project, and the community studios are unique in the proposition that they're about contributing content. And
the level of contributions to the 'Where I Live' sites is beyond what's going on anywhere else. We're at the forefront of this kind of
level of engagement with the community through new media."
As well as the web-based projects, digital TV is also proving to be a hotbed of new interactive activities.
"We've begun to do work on interactive TV in Wales and it has got a terrific amount of potential," Mandy Rose reveals. "One of the first
things we've been doing - a simple proposition - is putting an i-bar onto some of the programmes, particularly those shown on the 2W
channel."
"One example is Scrum Five, where we've been putting quotes from the chatroom message board on to the i-bar, so for example, we'll be
experimenting in Wales this year with instant messaging to the i-bar. What you've got on a TV screen are messages coming in from viewers
instantly during the course of a programme. You have a kind of chatroom going on alongside a programme."
"There are a number of very exciting projects going on this year that really do start pulling the platforms together."
Another example of interactive TV's potential centres on Bay College, a new series being produced by the drama department. This
production that will pull together the web and TV platforms in titillating ways. "We're creating a website that will very much be a part
of the drama in that series, a place where you can go and find out things additional to what you can learn in the drama itself."
However, pulling together the platforms will require some work - especially within an organisation as departmentalised as the BBC.
"As with any integration, it's quite an interesting organisational challenge," Mandy Rose tells us. "There's a tendency to see on-line as
an add-on to TV, whereas our remit in New Media is to do with what works in a new media environment. It's not to serve the programme.
It's to make 360
content where that's appropriate."
What makes a good website
The key, then, is to create a site that is in a lead role rather than a supporting one. "People have to have a reason to visit a
website," Mandy Rose explains. "There has to be something really going on in the site; it has to be a genuinely dynamic environment."
Is this what makes a good website, and what makes the BBC sites world-renowned for their quality?
"A good website is one that people want to go to - and return to," Mandy Rose observes.
"News is fantastic content for a website. We produce a lot of websites with news on them and that's ideal. People who care about the news
go to those sites and return everyday because it's a constantly changing environment."
"The ideal is where there's constant change, news, things to catch up on; a site where you've got all sorts of different media assets
involved: streamed radio, archives, pictures."
"The really fascinating challenge for websites is about creating a community who actively seek out the site, return to it, and in that
sense the most successful site that we create per se is the Scrum Five rugby site - it's a thriving, vocal, engaged community. Users love
the subject, can discuss it in detail, and would happily do that all day and all night."
Sounds like another try for BBCi Wales.
For more information on BBCi Wales' new projects, check out the following sites.
BBCi Wales homepage:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/
Where I Live project:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/whereilive/
Capture Wales digital storytelling project:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales/
Community studios (Wrexham studio information):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northeast/yoursay/topics/community_studio.shtml
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