Details have been published by the BBC staff magazine Ariel of the planned changes to the Chinese Service. Th service is to lose 11 out of 37 current London production jobs, and soft feature programmes will be scrapped in favour of hard news in peaktime [Exactly as predicted in this Weblog on Monday by Jonathan Marks]. A China editor will be appointed to help strengthen strengthen coverage of internal Chinese affairs, both for the service and across BBC news.
The BBC says the changes are being made in the context of a declining China-wide audience for BBC broadcasts in Mandarin and English, which reach less than a million listeners a week - about 0.1 percent of the population.
In an email to all World Service staff, World Service Director Nigel Chapman said that volunteers would be sought for redundancy in the first instance and staff would be supported to find alternative work inside and outside the BBC. None of the five Chinese service posts based in Hong Kong will be affected.
There has already been criticism from some commentators that, as the Chinese government seeks to tighten media control in the country, this is the wrong time for the BBC to be scaling down its own service. A spokesman for the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) said the cuts were coming at a time when there was a need for authoritative reporting and information about the world’s fastest growing economy.
Nigel Chapman said the scale of the service’s non-news music and lifestyle programmes was hard to justify, given the difficulty of reaching audiences on shortwave, and the inconsistent take up by FM partners. ‘We have decided to reduce our spend in this area, and cut back shortwave broadcasts which carry them. We have also found scope for genuine efficiencies in the way the service works by mirroring the more streamlined production methods employed by the other larger services in Bush House.’
After the scaling down of the London team, the Chinese Service would remain one of the largest in the World Service, with a budget of more than £2m a year.
(Source: Ariel/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)
The BBC says the changes are being made in the context of a declining China-wide audience for BBC broadcasts in Mandarin and English, which reach less than a million listeners a week - about 0.1 percent of the population.
In an email to all World Service staff, World Service Director Nigel Chapman said that volunteers would be sought for redundancy in the first instance and staff would be supported to find alternative work inside and outside the BBC. None of the five Chinese service posts based in Hong Kong will be affected.
There has already been criticism from some commentators that, as the Chinese government seeks to tighten media control in the country, this is the wrong time for the BBC to be scaling down its own service. A spokesman for the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) said the cuts were coming at a time when there was a need for authoritative reporting and information about the world’s fastest growing economy.
Nigel Chapman said the scale of the service’s non-news music and lifestyle programmes was hard to justify, given the difficulty of reaching audiences on shortwave, and the inconsistent take up by FM partners. ‘We have decided to reduce our spend in this area, and cut back shortwave broadcasts which carry them. We have also found scope for genuine efficiencies in the way the service works by mirroring the more streamlined production methods employed by the other larger services in Bush House.’
After the scaling down of the London team, the Chinese Service would remain one of the largest in the World Service, with a budget of more than £2m a year.
(Source: Ariel/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)
