Pete Clifton - online's excellence

[Marine Girot]

Pete Clifton is Head of BBC News interactive since 2005. For him, online evolution is quite important. The traditional audiences are indeed in decline with 68% of adults watching BBC1 or BBC2 in 2006. They were 74% in 2001. When it comes to young adults between 16 and 34, they are even fewer with only 36% in 2006. They were 48% in 2001.

BBC News interactive is a really big organisation. It includes BBC News Online, BBC News website, CBBC Newsround, Ceefax teletext service, digital text service, On This Day, BBC’s interactive TV, Action Network, news service to mobile phones and other mobile devices. It involves 240 journalists and spends £12m a year.

The trend nowadays is to make online more accessible and modern by promoting audios and videos for instance. However, we can ask if this trend is not part of the general plan to make the BBC more eye-catching by closing some "old-fashioned" channels.

Overall, online becomes closer to the audience that is to say more commercial. The BBC offers now personalized and local news and information of the place where people live. It is also very keen to use “user generated content”, providing that the material has been verified, mostly for events like the Asian Tsunami in 2004 or the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 when reporters cannot be on site at once when the event is happening.

The last evolution is the mobile service which allows people to receive texts, videos and audios on their mobile phones. BBC News 24 is expected to provide such a service next year on 3G mobiles. With even fewer space and quality to watch and read the news, we are left wondering about that new change inspired more by commercial competition than by editorial improvement.