From the editor's desktop

Pete Clifton, editor of the BBC News website, asks readers to direct a reporter with a laptop, seeks help with an e-mail crisis, defends the use of graphic images - and the site gets ready to make a splash.

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MISSED ME?

A familiar return to the newsroom this week after three days away from the office. Just the 512 e-mails to delete, numerous senior colleagues assuring me everything had been absolutely fine without me, and that page impressions had never been better. Clearly, a message here we should keep to ourselves in these times of budget cuts...

Every now and again I see something on the site that really makes me sit up. The Day in Asad Khyl was a remarkable way to give readers around the world an insight into life in Afghanistan.

As mentioned in this column last week, our reporter Soutik Biswas used his laptop and a portable satellite dish to receive your e-mails and put them to a selection of villagers.

I dropped a line to Soutik to says thanks for the fantastic work, and he reported back: "At the end of the day when we were winding up at the village, the elders told me they were so glad to participate - 'your project proves that the world has not forgotten us'."

Without getting too misty-eyed, what a great outcome. We spend a lot of time thinking about new ways to promote debate and discussion with readers around the world, and this seems to me a really engaging way to do it.

We're not the first to be doing this, of course. There are some amazing link-ups on Chat the Planet, for example, and feel free to drop me a line if you have any other favourites.

But we will definitely be developing this approach. We have a few others in mind on the back of other elections coming up round the world, but I wondered if you fancied helping?

If you have an idea for an unusual, engaging, under-reported part of the world where we could send a reporter, a laptop and a satellite dish, let us know. I'll take a look at the suggestions, and we'll turn at least one into reality.

E-MAIL MISERY

Seriously, though, this e-mail malarkey is getting out of hand isn't it? More than 500 e-mails in three days, and on closer inspection about 470 of them were rubbish. It's just that the closer inspection took most of a morning.

Those golden days of making phone calls around the building, or pulling out your quill to write a memo, are just a distant memory.

When I first became the UK editor on this website, I asked the world editor how he coped with all the e-mails. After a long explanation about moving e-mails into different folders for future reference, urgent attention, later reading etc, he added: "Or there is block, delete all". I have also heard word of someone in the BBC whose out of office message says: "I'm on holiday, your e-mail will be automatically deleted".

If you have a sound theory on how to avoid endless e-mail, drop me an e-mail (aaagh, here we go again). I'm after good ideas for the next time I sneak away from the office.

ANYBODY OUT THERE?

I was grateful to my senior chums here last week for the column they put together in my absence. And a very interesting read it was too. I always wondered what they did.

Amusingly, on the Saturday, one of them rang in to the news desk and asked why only five responses from readers had been published on the site. The answer was we had only received five.

I was privately delighted, of course, that people were not so interested in what they had to say. But it turns out that the form on the column was broken due to a technical gremlin in the works, and many of your comments did not reach us. So that's the real reason why not many replies appeared here.

But as the few comments that got through seemed to be along the lines of Matthew Leming from Dover - "This is an interesting experiment. It is good to hear from others and not just Mr Clifton" - I'm glad the gremlin worked so effectively.

But there is a serious point there about opening ourselves up more to discussion and questioning, and in the next little while we will definitely be launching a forum where more editors around BBC News explain what they are up to.

PICTURE COMPLAINTS

Numerous complaints this week about the pictures we used on the site of the British soldiers being attacked by a crowd in Basra. They were certainly unpleasant, with some showing soldiers on fire. There were also complaints about the images being used on television bulletins.

We should always think carefully before using graphic images, but it would also make for a very sad site if we chose to sanitise our coverage of traumatic events around the world to the point where readers could not appreciate the impact of what was happening.

On this occasion we knew the soldiers involved had not been seriously injured before we used the pictures, and that made the decision rather more straightforward. They have gone on to speak about the events in detail.

DEEP DIVE

The devoted follower of this column will know that last week I was away at a three-day retreat to discuss the creative future of the BBC's journalism.

Probably a bit too early for me to say what the conclusions will be, but some clear themes are emerging:

• BBC News available on any platform, how you want it, when you want it
  
• better use of content from the audience
  
• more engaging ways to promote debate around the news
  
• making the BBC more open and accountable
  
• finding new ways to get young people interested in what we do...
  

And the list goes on.

One thing that interests me is offering more training to readers who are interested in writing for us, taking pictures or shooting video. They may want to contribute material to us at some point, so why not give them an insight into some of our training methods?

An early move on this thinking came up at the regular meeting this week that discusses training for the BBC's journalists. Work is going on to create online training modules for journalists across the BBC to check and improve their knowledge of European issues.

It includes an interactive quiz, preparing for an interview with a businessman irritated about Europe, and how to set up a panel to discuss European issues. It's interesting stuff, and the meeting seemed up for my suggestion that the modules should also be made available to our readers. So watch this space.

MAKING A SPLASH

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we have been working on a new look to the front page for when major stories break. The idea being that if an event is so huge, we can drop our traditional format and devote far more of the front page to that one story.

Of course, in some ways it would be a relief to many if we don't use the "splash front page" for a long time to come. But the new format is now built into our content system, and it's ready to roll when the situation dictates...

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