News
We report back from our latest experiments.
46 news articles
2023
12 October 2023
News for All: Delivering value in journalism
A collaborative endeavour discovering how we might tell different stories in different ways to give our audience more
19 May 2023
Salco 2023: Making news hyperlocal
An experiment in combining multiple data sources with our semi-autonomous content engine to create hyperlocal news stories
08 February 2023
GoURMET: A step towards bringing down language barriers across the BBC
The BBC's most ambitious experiment into machine translation hints to a media landscape with truly global conversations.
05 February 2023
News Labs 2022 highlights film
We've been working on some exciting projects in 2022, innovating around audience experiences and enabling journalists to do more in the newsroom. In our 2022 wrap-up film, we offer a glimpse at some of our endeavours.2021
23 August 2021
Can we fix the knowledge management problem in news?
An update on our latest experiments in making the news more understandable for all audiences
12 July 2021
Local, newsworthy and feel-good - the BBC’s new digital audio bulletins
Zoe Murphy explains how the BBC creates local audio bulletins available on BBC Sounds and smart speakers
06 July 2021
Chapters to discover and share - The Today programme pilots Slicer for greater online impact
The details of a trial run with the Today programme and BBC Sounds.
26 March 2021
How BBC World Service fights the coronavirus infodemic with chat bots
Jan Bruck explains how the BBC used Facebook Messenger to inform audiences in Vietnam and Bangladesh about coronavirus
16 February 2021
Applied innovation for BBC News
How will the BBC provide genuinely valued digital news experiences to extraordinarily diverse audiences?2020
09 December 2020
#newsHack report: Personalising news experiences with modular content
12 teams shared ideas in our first ever fully-remote hack.
07 October 2020
Graphical storytelling: Extracting and painting a fresh perspective
BBC News trials a new story format on social media.
27 August 2020
Coronavirus is changing journalism. Will its impact on newsrooms last?
News Labs speaks to a range of voices in the industry
28 July 2020
House of Lords hears latest trends from Labs
Committee inquiry on the future of journalism includes evidence on how innovation can help public service journalism.
20 May 2020
Audience questions: Could the Explainer Builder have the answers?
What we've learned so far in 2020 from a new prototype for journalists and audiences.
06 April 2020
How Skippy made it from a hack to your home
Senior Software Engineer Lei He takes us through the exciting journey of how Skippy was born.
24 February 2020
How the BBC is reinventing news for voice platforms
Zoe Murphy of BBC Voice + AI shares some of the lessons her and the team have learnt in developing BBC News for voice.
10 February 2020
Graphical Storytelling: Three things we tested
Labs software engineer Remi Oduyemi describes our recent experiments with new story formats.
29 January 2020
Journalism innovation in the 2020s
Some personal thoughts about the kind of innovation the news industry will need in the coming decade from News Labs executive product manager David Caswell.2019
28 November 2019
Trees, machines and local journalism
Out latest experiments with Semi-Automatic Local Content (Salco).
18 November 2019
#newsHack report: Storytelling with voice
A report on how nine teams got on at our biggest hack of the year.
07 November 2019
Mozfest 2019: Multidisciplinary teams focus on collaboration and audiences
Labbers Conor Molumby and Eimi Okuno report on a day of interactive sessions.
23 October 2019
BBC Voice + AI: An insider’s perspective
BBC Voice + AI producer Tallulah Berry describes the editorial work behind a new interactive news service for smart speakers.
07 August 2019
Salco part 2: Automating our local elections coverage
BBC News Labs' Tamsin Green explains how continued experiments with semi-automated journalism helped coverage of the local elections.
03 May 2019
Investigating investigations: a #newsHACK for the cutting edge of journalism
Thom Hetherington from Connected Studio reports on ideas to improve tools to help investigative journalists.
22 March 2019
Stories by numbers: Experimenting with semi-automated journalism
BBC News Labs' Roo Hutton explains how the BBC is experimenting with semi-automated journalism to bring you even more relevant local stories.
14 February 2019
Editorial innovation in news
It is easy to assume that the future of news will be inevitably technical. That assumption is dangerous.
05 February 2019
The challenges of debunking fake news in India
Plus, four possible solutions from our latest #newsHACK.2018
20 November 2018
Beyond 800 words: News formats for personalising and understanding
For every individual there are different needs from news at different times and places.
12 November 2018
Roundup: Hacking automated transcription technologies at Text AV
From fact-checking to scrollable video, here’s a look at seven projects from our latest language technology event.
22 October 2018
(re)building use cases for language technology in the newsroom
Five ideas from our latest #newsHACK with the Summa consortium.
17 September 2018
Experiments with AMP's new 'Stories' format for news
How we built a simple CMSfor Google's newest format — and what its future looks like at the BBC.
10 September 2018
Readers ask - but can AI answer?
The challenges of using artificial intelligence to answer questions about the news.
06 August 2018
Adventures in fuzzy matching with Match of the Day
How Google News Lab Fellow Dan Clark discovered that Gary Lineker sticks to his script.
06 July 2018
Roundup: Building the news for the next generation
12 ideas for engaging young audiences from BBC News Labs’ most recent industry hackathon.
07 June 2018
In Our Toolkit: BBC News BotBuilder
Scripting chatbots is hard. Here's how we're making it easier for BBC journalists
06 June 2018
Speeding up the BBC's speech-to-text pipeline
An apprentice tests new ways of cutting audio files to cut down on transcription time.
23 May 2018
Inside the BBC’s “innovation incubator”
What does a typical day in BBC News Labs look like?
29 March 2018
Rethinking newsroom innovation
Our Innovation Unconference invited innovation leaders to discuss the challenges facing teams within legacy media outlets.
27 February 2018
Face recognition: what use is it to newsrooms?
We built a prototype to highlight and identify the most important people in raw video footage. Here's what we learned during the process.
27 February 2018
A Brief Guide to BBC R&D’s Video Face Recognition
AI Research Engineer Fionntán O'Donnell explains how BBC Research and Development's facial recognition tool works.
29 January 2018