BBC News Online

Abstract

BBC News Online was launched in 1997 as part of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s commitment to providing high-quality impartial news coverage to as wide an audience as possible. Within the larger organization, it is part of BBC News Interactive, which includes the Web and digital television output. The Web sites discussed in this chapter include BBC News Online, Sport Online, and CBBC News, a site specifically aimed at children.

It is nearly seven years since Pete Comber started working with the Internet. Having just started working in direct marketing, like most junior executives he quickly became frustrated with the fragile, incomplete, and temperamental customer databases upon which the ambitious DM strategies tended to exist. With the Internet boom in the late 1990s, he became convinced that there was massive potential for the Internet to provide large volumes of data not just about what people purchased, but about what they looked at and what they discarded, and to grant some insight into how people came to make their buying decisions. Having analyzed Internet data for four years for the UK’s biggest motoring web site, he joined the BBC at the end of 2001 in the hope that he would be able to provide some useful insights into how people use the BBC News Online service.