On Monday 24 May 2010, the day that the BBC World Service, Britain's global public broadcaster, announced record audiences for its international news services, it also faced possible heavy budget reductions as part of public spending cuts announced by the United Kingdom's coalition government.
World Service Director Peter Horrocks told the London Financial Times newspaper that the broadcaster must accept reducing costly shortwave transmissions, and step up its broadcasting online and on mobile phones to counter both potential budget cuts and a sharp decline in its traditional shortwave audience.
Record Audience for News
The BBC attracts a record weekly global audience of 241 million people to its international news services such as BBC World Service and the BBC World News television channel, according to independent surveys, said a BBC press release on 24 May 2010.
This was up three million on last year’s overall audience estimate.
However, the BBC World Service had lost 20 million shortwave radio listeners during the year. This reflected "the increasing global decline of the medium", the corporation said.
But during the year BBC World Service attracted around nine million new viewers to its television, online and mobile services, in addition to new listeners to BBC radio programmes through local FM and mediumwave radio partner stations in a number of countries.
BBC World Service drew an overall weekly multimedia audience of 180 million across television, radio, online and mobiles. This was eight million down on the previous year, mainly because of a sharp overall decline in shortwave radio listening during the year, the BBC said.
Radio audience losses were particularly high in Bangladesh, India and Nigeria, although there were significant gains in Tanzania and the US, mainly through BBC programmes being rebroadcast on local FM and mediumwave radio partner stations.
The multimedia BBC Arabic service attracted an audience of 22 million a week, including 12 million watching BBC Arabic television.
The BBC Persian multimedia news and information service was hampered by the jamming of its newly launched TV satellite service and the continued blocking of its online service by the Iranian authorities. However, in a hostile environment for research, the independent surveys indicated audiences of 3.4 million, including 3.1 million watching BBC Persian television in Iran, the BBC press release said.
BBC World News and bbc.com/news – the BBC commercial international television and online news services – attracted a combined global audience of 83 million. BBC World News had a weekly audience of 71 million.
The same BBC press release quoted Peter Horrocks, who is BBC Global News Director as well as heading the World Service, as saying: "…The figures … show the success of our multimedia strategy and investments for global audiences. But the continued dramatic decline in shortwave listening shows that those audiences are rapidly changing the way they access international news. Unless BBC World Service can accelerate its response to those changes, it will face a rapid deterioration of its impact as other technologies become more prominent in international media markets."
Spending Cuts
The Financial Times cited senior BBC managers as saying that spending cuts announced by the coalition government on 24 May 2010 translated into a 3 per cent cut in the budget of the Foreign Office, which currently funds the World Service by a direct grant to the tune of 272 million pounds, or almost 400 million dollars.
In his Financial Times interview, Peter Horrocks acknowledged that the BBC World Service, like other areas of the media, faced what he called "very significant challenges in terms of platforms… newspapers moving from print to online would be an analogy".
"We have taken a very big hit in our core audience, but we have stemmed that by investing in new platforms," he said.
Mr Horrocks told the Financial Times that shortwave broadcasts would continue "for the foreseeable future" to countries like Burma and Somalia, where there was no prospect of a substitute for shortwave. But other shortwave services were likely to be phased out over the next five years, he said.
Power of BBC Brand
Now thousands of BBC journalists as well as millions of listeners and viewers around the world will have to wait for June's government emergency budget to see where the axe will fall.
The BBC's Arabic and Persian services are likely to emerge unscathed because of their positive impact on Britain's reputation in regions where the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts have left a lot of ill will.
That leaves other foreign-language services at greatest risk, although cuts in the English-language radio output cannot be ruled out.
Earlier in May, the BBC dismissed as "speculation" a report in The Sunday Times that the World Service faced swingeing cuts of between 18 and 25 per cent.
As the BBC steps up its lobbying to minimise the extent of the budget cuts, its director-general, Mark Thompson, argued that the BBC brand was more important than the UK government for making people abroad think more positively about the UK.
In a talk on 11 May 2010 at Chatham House, a prestigious London think-tank which houses the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Thompson said: "The BBC continues to enjoy a level of trust from audiences across the world which is unique among international news-providers."
Peter Feuilherade - I took voluntary early retirement from the BBC in 2010, and I'm now a freelance writer. I had worked there as a reporter and news editor ...
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