I quickly scanned through a few of the front page articles on their site only to find the same format: a cover photo, a ton of text, and maybe a few more photos here and there. It seems like BBC News is more text-heavy than anything else. One article about slavery around the world did include a graphic map highlighting the number of slaves per region, but I feel like this map could've been enhanced by allowing readers to zoom into the region they were interested in to find a closer look at where the numbers actually lay. Telling me that there are 17,459,900 slaves in all of South Asia is powerful, yes, but it's not as informative as if you could tell me which countries within South Asia carry these slaves -- and how many for each.
Scanning through some of the other articles on the site, I found the comment section. I'm not sure why this isn't available for each article -- it seems kind of counter productive to me to cut off reader communication, since that's who you're writing for -- but I did find their technique interesting. There are two tabs under the comments section: "Editors' Picks" and "All Comments."
While it doesn't exactly say which editors or who is moderating the comments that appear under the "Editors' Picks" section, I still think that this is a smart move by BBC. It suggests that there are people at the news network reading the hundreds of comments their readers leave behind. It can give readers a sense that their voice is being heard. On the flip side, it also helps create a more compact section of comments for readers who just want to get the jist of comments left behind on a certain article -- instead of sifting through 500+ comments that may or may not all be relevant, they can now sort through 20-30 handpicked by the editors. I think that BBC could enhance their interactivity throughout the site by expanding this program to all articles, not just certain ones.
