It's intensely irritating, since it's never breaking and these days with the way the world is it is also worrying.

For me Breaking News should be things like terroist attacks, massive flooding not "Back Off Contestant Falls Over".

It's also handy for the comment sections on newspapers, sections of news sites you are never gonna click/read (in my case sport) and comments on youtube.

Maybe you could resolve the conflict by including a "don't show any more breaking news" button and then taking the data back to Editorial.

Or analyzing the clickstream to see who is being shown breaking news that they already saw, or they're actually reading at the time.

I suspect an optional button would not be very popular, so the data wouldn't achieve the aim you want.

Doesn't contradict what you said I just thought it was interesting that chrome doesn't just look for the most basic types of pop-ups.

This could be really useful for onboarding people, once onboard they could set up alerts for topics or tick 'follow this story' if for instance they read about someone being brought to trial and they wanted to know the sentencing or even what crimes get committed five years hence once the culprit is out of jail.

Things in the news and the weather could then be pushed/pulled from an app.

As well as topics for 'breaking news' there could also be a colour coded level so if you don't really care about some unknown unknowns getting droned out of existence in far-off-istan (in a 'yellow' terror threat incident) then you don't get an alert for it. Meanwhile, if you are British and some idiot kills people outside parliament then that one pops up as 'breaking news' with no hesitation.

Tsunami alerts are probably handy as 'breaking news', it would be annoying to die in some massive flood due to having turned off the 'breaking news' wholesale just because you had no interest in the French election or 'Frexit'.

I think that they need to just be a bit more imaginative with the feature so that it works for all stakeholders, the editorial department, the reads and everyone in between, up to and including No. 10.

You're doing God's work and a national service that is IMHO worthy of a knighthood, the BBC front page is one of those rare places where a few little engineering cogs can really make a huge difference. Keep up the good fight! Thanks from all of us -- the UK, still missing the old news.bbc 5ish years later :)

And if I ever have the privilege of your CV gracing my inbox, I'd do everything to ensure we got to work together. Thanks again!

Difficulty of changing culture is, however, no excuse. The BBC is competing with Buzzfeed who've been doing data-driven decision making since inception.

I'm fine with being downmodded by people who disagree, but it's worrying "get data on it" is being flagged on HN.

What's more, BBC News editorial has reasons to be wary of pure data-driven decision making. It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purposes, not to drive eyeballs to ads. So arguments like "the data says nobody is reading our Welsh-language output, why don't we stop doing it?" or "The expensive pages covering Cornwall are getting terrible numbers, who care what editorial thinks, CLOSE 'EM DOWN" are not the slam-dunk you might be imagining.

That's not to say there isn't useful data that can be put at the heart of the newsroom to try and capture things that matter to the BBC, as BBC News is well aware. They're building tools right now to support that [1]. But I think any editorial team will always want a way to say to its audience "we think this is important right now and you should know about it". So a constructive approach might be something more like "here is the most effective way you can highlight news to audiences" not "we don't care what you think, people don't like the breaking news ticker so it's gone, welcome to cultural change granddad".

[1] https://www.newsrewired.com/2016/07/20/how-editorial-analyti...

That's a gross mischaracterisation of data-driven decision making. The point is that non-data backed opinions belonging to anyone don't matter so much as the results of what you actually measure.

> It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purposes, not to drive eyeballs to ads.

Acknowledged, but effectiveness at that purpose is still measurable, and certainly should be measured as the BBC is publicly funded.

> not "we don't care what you think, people don't like the breaking news ticker so it's gone, welcome to cultural change granddad"

I'm unsure whether you're unfamiliar with media engineering, or simply creating a bizarre straw man of what was being suggested. Assuming good intention, and therefore the former, here's a more likely version:

"We've measured the breaking news ticker and find out it that X% of users find it useful, Y% read it, Z% engage with it, engagement with other stories happens A% more/less when the breaking news ticker is displayed over the top of it. Given that our goals are B, this indicates we should.

It is! And I'm v. pro D-DDM. But as I read your post -- given it has been flagged to death I don't think I'm alone -- you didn't appear to be calling for that. As I recall, you appeared to be saying "who cares what editorial think, work out what you want and get some damn data" (which is where the straw man comes from, fwiw).

No. I wrote:

>> Act like engineers, work out what you want, test it and get some damn data on it.

Which is quite different from:

> riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product

I hope you don't need it explained, but just in case: we're ignoring all things not backed by data, which very different from ignoring a specific subset of people.

The downvotes are for my saying 'damn' and writing angrily (ie, being pissed off with the poor engineering discipline of the public service). I'm intending to leave this thread, however, and enjoy the downvotes as "editorial doesn't like it" is frankly pathetic.