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Tag: Fran Unsworth

  • BBC takes ‘fake news’ battle global

    BBC takes ‘fake news’ battle global

    MUMBAI: The BBC today sets out its ambition to be a global leader in the fight against fake news, which is creating a huge decline in global audiences’ trust in media.

    The BBC’s World Service Group will spearhead this work, putting a major focus on Global Media Literacy, and culminating in a major live global broadcast bringing together young people from around the world to discuss how trust can be restored. Plans include:

    · Extending the BBC’s Reality Check service to more parts of the world.

    · Bringing together fact checking stories from different countries on a Global Fake News page, giving them wider circulation and bigger impact.

    · Rolling out materials educating about fake news to schools and audiences around the world.

    · Organising a major full-day fake news event where teenagers from around the world will be brought together in a live broadcast to talk about the challenges they face in their home countries in assessing news, sharing ideas about solutions for the future. It will feature on the World Service, World News as well as the Victoria Derbyshire Show and Newsround in the UK.

    BBC News and Current Affairs, Director, Fran Unsworth said: “The BBC has already been doing a lot to tackle the scourge of fake news through Reality Check fact-checking claims and coming to a judgment, or our journalists going into schools in the UK to educate youngsters.

    “But this is a global problem. It’s vital people have access to news they can trust – and know how to distinguish between fact and fiction. Broadcasters and the rest of the news industry have a responsibility to tackle fake news, and I want to use the BBC’s global reach to lead the way.”

    Fake news is a huge global issue. During the Italian election, there were social media claims that a government minister attended the funeral of a mafia boss when in fact it was a photo of her at the funeral of the victim of a racist attack. In Macedonia teenagers have made money from advertising by setting up sensationalist fake news sites. And a young girl believed to be trapped in the ruins after the Mexico earthquake last year never actually existed.

    Around the world too there is already work underway to hold power to account. BBC Persian has a journalist dedicated to checking claims made by Iranian authorities, as well as responding to audience queries; BBC Russian does rapid fact-checking of government speeches; BBC Monitoring does all of this as its daily bread and butter.

    Now the aim is to turbo charge this and make a much bigger impact globally.

    The single day live broadcast will be co-ordinated from London and include broadcasts from Beirut, Nairobi and Mumbai or Delhi. It will see teenagers talking about the challenges they face in their home countries in assessing news. They will share their thinking about solutions for the future.  It will have the flavour of a global School Report, with young people leading the debate and the journalism, supported by BBC journalists and in house experts in their region.

    It will include the findings of a global survey on media trust issues, and we will produce a clickable map of fake news stories allowing audiences to see a heatmap of disinformation around the world.

    Building on the work that has already been done by School Report, and BBC Hindi, through the year we will also be developing materials that can be rolled out globally to help young people combat fake and false news and information. They will guide our audiences through questions such as: “What is Fake News?” “Who do you Trust?” “How to assess content?” It will include online videos and workshop materials.

  • BBC’s combined global audience touches 308 million

    BBC’s combined global audience touches 308 million

    MUMBAI: BBC’s weekly global audience consists of 308 million people as per new figures unveiled today. This represents the combined measured reach of international BBC content – both news and entertainment – for the year 2014-15 and is the first time this figure has ever been measured in this way.

     

    In 2013, BBC director general Tony Hall set a target of 500 million for the BBC’s global reach for 2022.

     

    The figures by the BBC Global Audience Measure (GAM) reveal that the BBC’s weekly global news audience, which is measured each year, has increased by 18 million people, or seven per cent since last year, to a record-breaking 283 million. This means that one in every 16 adults around the world uses BBC News.

     

    For the first time, television (148 million) overtook radio (133 million) as the most popular platform for BBC international news, and it is also the first time since BBC’s GAM tracked audiences for all three platforms – radio, TV and online (55 million) – in English and 28 other languages – that they’ve all grown in the same year.

     

    The BBC World Service’s audience has increased by 10 per cent in its first year of licence fee funding and now stands at 210 million, with the biggest boost coming from new World Service TV news bulletins in languages other than English.

     

    The biggest growth for a single service comes for BBC World Service English, which has its highest ever weekly reach ever with an audience of 52 million, an increase of more than 25 per cent. The countries where the audience increases for World Service English have been highest are Nigeria, USA, Pakistan and Tanzania.

     

    BBC Global News Ltd’s audience has grown to 105 million with World News TV’s up by 12 per cent, and bbc.com/news growing by 16 per cent.

     

    BBC World Service Group director Fran Unsworth said, “These amazing figures demonstrate the importance and impact of the BBC around the world. In times of crisis and in countries lacking media freedom, people around the world turn to BBC for trusted and accurate information. Thanks to our digital innovation we now have more ways than ever before of reaching our audience – from the Whatsapp Service we set up during the West Africa Ebola outbreak to our pop-up Thai news stream on Facebook following the military coup.”

     

    BBC Worldwide director, global and CEO Tim Davie added, “Today’s audience numbers show the global reach of the BBC to be strong and growing.  The consumption of branded BBC services across TV, radio and digital platforms speaks to the international appetite for premium content across all the genres for which we are best known – primarily news, but increasingly for drama, factual and entertainment. Having a robust but prudent measurement system in place also helps increase our understanding of our audiences, enabling us to serve them to the very best of our ability in the future.”

     

    Additionally, the World Service Group is going from strength to strength in both developed and developing markets, with the single biggest audience for any country in the USA (30 million), and with more than a third of the total audience on the African continent (100 million), the biggest BBC audience ever seen on any continent.

     

    Digital innovations from the World Service Group over the past year have included a new Africa livepage on the BBC website; the Thai ‘pop up’ news stream on Facebook; the emergency Ebola service on Whatsapp in West Africa; chat app news services on Line, Mxit, WeChat and WhatsApp; and the move of all 27 language service websites plus News to fully responsive design, which means they can easily be read on mobile phones of all shapes and standards.

  • BBC.com users hit 100 million mark

    BBC.com users hit 100 million mark

    MUMBAI: BBC.com, the BBC’s international website, has started 2015 on an all-time high. More than 101 million unique browsers used the website and news app globally during the month of January, generating a record 1.35 billion page views, as per Adobe Analytics new figures.

     

    The figures come after a year, which saw BBC.com achieve sustained growth, with more unique browsers every quarter. Mobile and tablet usage of BBC.com has increased, with year-on-year unique browsers up 67 per cent and 45 per cent respectively, as greater choice and responsive technology encouraged users to turn to BBC.com for news on the go. A fully responsive tablet version of the site launched in late 2014 and a new feature-packed update to the BBC News app is due to launch in the coming months.

     

    The driving factors for January’s figures were coverage of major global news stories, such as the Paris attacks, along with human interest stories including the resurgence of a piece about why Finnish babies sleep in boxes. Features sections such as BBC Capital and BBC Earth achieved new peak figures for page views of 7.1 million and 5.1 million, respectively, with stories on the world’s best places to retire and the Earth’s biggest turning points proving particularly popular.

     

    In India, unique browsers for January were 3.9 million (monthly average is 3.7 million) and unique page views for January stood at 19.7 million (monthly average is 16 million).

     

    BBC World Service Group director Fran Unsworth said, “These fantastic figures demonstrate the global demand for comprehensive coverage of world events. Our ambition is to ensure audiences are able to access world-class, up-to-the-minute news and in-depth analysis across both text and video, regardless of which platform they’re on – as the stories break and beyond.”

     

    BBC Worldwide CEO Tim Dave added, “It is tremendous news that BBC.com has been enjoyed by over 100 million browsers in the past month. The fact that audiences are responding positively to the innovation that we have delivered across the site is particularly encouraging. Specifically, our investments across genres as well as our increasing availability across all devices, is driving strong growth.” 

     

    The BBC’s digital success also extends to social media where it was the most-shared news brand on Twitter every single month last year according to NewsWhip, with stories being shared up to four million times a month. 

  • Mihir Bose is the BBC’s first sports editor

    Mihir Bose is the BBC’s first sports editor

    MUMBAI: UK pubcaster The BBC has appointed Mihir Bose as its first Sports Editor. he used to be a sports columnist for the Daily Telegraph. Bose will provide analysis and context to the major sports news stories across the BBC’s news programming.

    Having concentrated on business journalism in his early years, he subsequently specialised in investigative sports reporting and moved to the Daily Telegraph in 1995, where he started the paper’s Inside Sports column.

    His journalism has won a number of awards, including Business Columnist of the Year, Sports Story of the Year and Sports News Reporter of the Year.

    He has also presented on radio and television, including BBC Radio 4’s Financial World Tonight, South Asia Report on BBC World Service and What the Papers Say for Channel 4.

    He said, “I was brought up on the magical World Service, and believe that the BBC is the greatest broadcaster there is. It’s a wonderful challenge and I can’t wait to start. However, I must add that I’ve had 12 very happy years with the Telegraph and will miss working with some of the finest print journalists there are.”

    The BBC’s head of newsgathering Fran Unsworth said, “This is a terrific appointment for us. Mihir brings an encyclopaedic knowledge of sport, together with an unbridled passion for the subject. Add to that his ability to explain the most complex of stories and a fantastic catalogue of contacts.”