A year in a Wordle 

25 December 2010 tbs.pm/1235

Using the technical wizardry that is Wordle, here’s two looks at the past year’s news.

First, the TV news as seen by Wikipedia’s 2010 in British television article.

2010-in-tv-news.png

A Wordle works by emphasising the words that appear most often in a source of data. Standing out, therefore, is the on-going analogue switch off. So far, Grampian, Scottish, Border, Granada, both HTVs, Westcountry and Channel have all gone. Next up, in March of 2011, will be Anglia and Central.

Other interesting emphasised words: GMTV’s round of pre-Daybreak resignations and firings means that it gets more mentions that its flat replacement; Adrian Chiles, having left the BBC, fronted ITV’s World Cup coverage and moved on to stumble through Daybreak, gets more mentions than the wooden Christine Bleakley sat next to him.

Also getting a mention is Ray Gosling, who told the BBC’s Inside Out regional strand that he had ended the life of a dying former boyfriend. For some reason unknown to reasonable people, the police decided to investigate this, and when they found no evidence of murder, charged him with wasting police time. You’d be forgiven for thinking it should’ve been the other way around.

ITV, corporately, gets more mentions that the BBC and Channel 4; but BBC One gets more mentions than ITV1, perhaps reflecting BBC One’s stellar critical performance this year – although ITV1’s output seems to be improving, if still unoriginal. Channel 4 must be pleased to not be making headlines this year, after a run of bad publicity in the previous few.

Transdiffusion’s MediaBlog produces a similar Wordle, but with very different emphasised words, reflecting our writers’ take on the broadcasting world.

2010-in-MediaBlog-entries.png

We’ve talked about the BBC more than anything, perhaps reflecting how devoted to it our writers all seem to be. ITV gets barely a mention comparatively, but then I wonder how much ITV our writers watch – we may have been lost to the network some years ago during its Celebrity-Everything-Tat phase and are yet to return.

Particular attention has been paid to Mark Thompson, the Director-General, mainly because the man is a public relations nightmare: unable to stand up and defend the BBC when it needs it, but always happy to stand up and say something ill-thought-out when silence would be a better option.

The rest of the Wordle shows (to me as Editor-in-Chief of Transdiffusion anyway!) that we have a good mix of articles on this blog – it’s not all ITV bashing and BBC praise as one could fear from feedback.

In other Transdiffusion news, our redesign continued in 2010. This is taking a long time because there’s actually a whole new Content Management System underneath and there are a lot of pages to transfer. But, led by Andrew Bowden, the process is very far advanced. With the new system comes the ability to comment on each article and – most importantly for me – a useful button on each page allowing you to quickly report any errors you see. Transdiffusion is an early member of the Report an Error Alliance, founded by the notable journalistic-standards campaigners Scott Rosenberg of MediaBugs and Craig Silverman of Regret the Error. We’ve always strived for accuracy in our articles, both commentary and historical, and the Alliance is a good way of ensuring that any errors that creep past our fact checkers and sub editors are dealt with transparently and quickly. It’s no more than you should expect.

Once the Content Management System implementation is done, we’ll turn our attention to the Archiving Project – a user-editable treasure trove of the Transdiffusion archives. More on that in 2011.

Until then, season’s greetings to you and yours from all of us at Transdiffusion, and best wishes for a great 2011!

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