Re: [Swprograms] BBCWS Web Site

[Richard Cuff <rdcuff@xxxxxxxxx>]

Several reasons come to mind.

1) The continued decline of international broadcasting as a tool of public diplomacy, which began with the end of the cold war.  The ideological war was no longer relevant, and many stations found it hard to justify their existence...and those who remained found themselves scrambling for resources to fulfill their mission.

2) The decline of radio-centric media; many broadcasters of public and private stripes chose to sink their money into TV ventures, since that's where much of the audience moved.

3) The rise of the Middle East and its anti-Western factions; Apparently Middle Easterners listen to less radio than people of other cultures, so efforts were invested in new or fortified TV stations to serve these audiences, taking money away from radio initiatives.

4) The global shift to more conservative government, with even fewer resources allocated to public broadcasting ventures in nations that have long had public broadcasting heritages.  Along the way, governments began adopting Private Sector approaches to quantitatively measuring "performance" through the IT-fueled discipline of Analytics; and that which gets measured, gets managed...

5) The change in information-seeking habits of audiences towards Internet outlets and away from traditional broadcasting outlets; "brands" such as the BBC became less valuable.

6) The recognition that a large investment in Internet resources didn't necessarily yield a large increase in audience...though it did result in a shift in audience.

7) Much closer to "home", the downfall of the UK's Labour government resulted in steep across-the-board budget cuts; as part of that overall negotiation, the BBC World Service became a pawn in the competition for resources, with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office seeking to rid itself of the World Service expenses, and the domestic BBC wishing to retain its wildly unpopular mandatory TV Licence Fee as its principal funding source.  The BBC won the Licence Fee battle, but at the cost of having to pay for the World Service out of that Licence Fee.  As part of this whole process, the World Service was forced to cut $$ from its expenditures, and the BBC overall pushed to consolidate what had been duplicated efforts and organizations...both in the production side of the enterprise as well as in the public-facing parts of the enterprise.  In part this was behind the desire to shut down Bush House.

Used to be the World Service website looked a lot different from the domestic BBC websites, but these appear now to be under common management and organization.

It does seem that "survival mode" seems to be the M. O. for many within the World Service...some have departed through forced cuts, others see the future BBC and have decided they don't want to be part of that.

My two cents...

Richard Cuff / Allentown, PA  USA

On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 11:51 PM, Scott Royall <royall@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Agreed, but what brought up this?

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