ego.istic.org

I used to think very highly of BBC News. It was, and still is, a world-respected news agency in an elite group of big players. Like the World Service or the Arts Council, I feel much better that it is there, flying the flag. I suppose the political and business reporting maintains the high standards I've always expected from it.

But in other spheres I've seen them increasingly unable to distinguish real news from non-events. BBC News Online seems to have declared an all-year-round silly season as they struggle to maintain the turnover they think they need to keep people coming back to the site. The widely publicised telepathic parrot and cow accent incidents seem to be indicative of a wider trend of treating science reporting as trivia, but then I've never had much faith in the science reporting of any mainstream news agency.

The technology news, though, I've been quite forgiving of. As a professional in the software industry (cough), I wouldn't like to rely on it for my own use, but I am continually surprised when I talk to Mum about some topic of interest and she knows all about it because she watched it on ‘Click online’ (or whatever they call it these days). It's very simplified, often to the point of being wrong, but that's to be expected when journalists try to write about technical things for a general audience. They're unhealthily obsessed with anything to do with Facebook, but then so is everyone else, so I can even forgive them for that.

Even Bill Thompson isn't that bad when you get used to him. He's a bit too ranty and excitable for a journalist IMO, but he's done well for himself, and his heart is largely in the right place.

In fact, the only thing I can find fault with in the BBC Tech News is the lack of reporting. It would be extreme to expect them to herald every MS Security Bulletin or every new Debian package, but I would like a bit more than just press releases they've been sent and expos they've been to recently. I can't remember the last story I read on there that was based on someone going and finding things out. This isn't a criticism of the reporters themselves: I could well believe that they don't have the resources to do any actual news-gathering.

But recent events have turned my general disapproval into despair. Those of you who use Skype will know that they've been having problems recently. The service has been intermittent, to say the least. Now, Skype has previously claimed to have 100M users, which is more than the population of this fair isle. This claim is not widely believed, but at any time there are a few million clients connected to the network. Even allowing for the usual inflationary factors, it is clear that any general disruption to Skype affects a lot of people: more than flooding in Gloucestershire or kidnapped children. In comparison to those latter stories, being unable to chat with your friends might seem trivial, but remember that many people now use Skype for business. Imagine the impact of the telephone network in London failing. Think about all the businesses affected. Now think about how big a story that would be. Never minds BBC News online, there would be TV reports, interviews with BT engineers, interviews with people whose businesses and home lives might be affected, people rushing around everywhere to find out what went wrong and when it will be fixed.

So, I might have expected a world-wide story like this, which has been going on for more than 24 hours now, to get at least a mention. Maybe a rant from a smug-looking sysadmin about trusting your business communications to an outside system you have no control over nor SLA with. Maybe some cliché pictures of someone looking at the “offline” icon hopefully. Maybe even some quotes from affected businessmen or Skype people. I was disappointed to see no sign of it. Instead, the lead story was “Bluetooth helps Facebook friends,” yet another non-event of an academic project that will probably never get more than a handful of users.

Come on, BBC News. If you can manage to be a world leader, it can't be that hard to ring up Skype's press contact and get a statement. That is, provided you're not using Skype.