You Tool

We've just had our very first online journalism lecture, and very interesting it was too. The lecture was delivered by Amanda Powell, who is the Editor of BBC Wales News Interactive, and she talked about the nature of online news, what it takes to be a successful online journalist, and the increasing popularity of user-generated content.

Amanda mentioned that the BBC is to launch a new audio-visual tool called iPlayer next year, and it strikes me that there currently exists a huge gap in the market for a one-stop audio-visual online resource. When I came into the broadcast newsroom in Cardiff this morning, a friend of mine was looking for footage of the (hilarious) Gary Neville/Paul Robinson own goal from England's miserable defeat against Croatia last night. After trawling the BBC Football website, the Sky Sports website and YouTube unsuccessfully, she eventually found a clip on The Sun's website. But she couldn't play it. It is now 13:19, and she still hasn't seen the goal - even though she desperately wants to - which, in this day and age, is ridiculous.

But the fact remains that, for all the advances in user-generated content and the popularity of websites like YouTube, television still leads the way when it comes to accessing football action quickly. Sky Sports Broadband is pretty good for the Premiership and the Champions League, and the BBC Football website occasionally carries highlights from international matches, but all too often rights issues prevent the online football fan from being able to access the footage he or she wants to find.

Obviously this has more to do with the allocation of coverage rights than it has to do with the efficacy of particular websites, but it is immensely frustrating that Sky Sports News 24 is the only reliable source of recent match footage, and yet last night they couldn't show the goals from either the Wales v Cyprus game or the Republic of Ireland v Czech Republic game.

If the BBC's iPlayer can wrangle some form of online rights package it will be incredibly popular, but if it's a question of financial power, it might be that the newly Google-owned YouTube will become the website of choice for the impatient football fan. Having said that, it will need to improve its usability considerably if this is to be the case. The Gary Neville/Paul Robinson clip is on YouTube after all (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5_ouWahJ9E&eurl), but I only know this because a friend sent me the link. The following search entries fail to yield anything:

"Neville own goal Croatia"
"Neville Robinson own goal"
"Robinson Neville own goal"
"Robinson Neville Croatia"
"Neville England own goal"
"Gary Neville own goal"
"Paul Robinson own goal"
"Croatia England own goal"

Even when you type in "Neville and Robinson own goal vs Croatia Euro Qualifier", which is the name of the clip, the search proves fruitless. Something needs to be done.