London, are you listening?

To employees at the Victoria Tube station, the answer was "No." They had offered repeated warnings over the PA system about proper use of the escalators, delivered in the sonorous male voice commonly deemed to command attention. Yet riders were ignoring them, to the tune of 15 injuries per month.

Maybe it was time to put things a bit differently. And what happened next offers food for thought about communication in a cacophonous age, be it a public service announcement or actual news.

As information pours out, often in a tone indicating the world as we know it is about to end, many of us stop listening. We may feel overloaded. We may be seeking to have our news biases confirmed, and deciding the source is wrong when they’re not. The source, meanwhile, may not be doing enough to convince us it’s trying to be fair.

Can you open up space for a better conversation? At Victoria Station, 9-year-old Megan, whose parents are station employees, recorded a simple request asking riders to listen up and hold the handrail. Same information, delivered differently. In the six months since she made the PSA, injuries have declined by almost two-thirds.

Now for our five stories of the day.