The number of staff employed by the BBC

Here is a blog post to save people doing what I've just done to try to nail this one down: how many people work for the BBC?

The BBC press office pointed me to the BBC Trust report 2009/10. Table 2-11 on page 63 contains figures for the "total average PSB [public service broadcasting?] headcount (full-time equivalent)" at the BBC:


Year end 2006     18,860
Year end 2007     17,914
Year end 2008     17,677
Year end 2009     17,078
Year end 2010     17,238


Strangely, this Guardian article in May 2007 says that according to figures from the Corporation, "overall headcount in the public service departments of the BBC is now 21,360."

But that figure would tally with the working in this BBC response to a Freedom of Information request in February 2011 which tabulated the number of BBC staff "employed on permanent and fixed-term contracts":


31-Dec-00    19,914
31-Dec-01    21,741
31-Dec-02    22,592
31-Dec-03    22,968
31-Dec-04    23,199
31-Dec-05    22,111
31-Dec-10    20,753


The FOI response specifically excluded staff working for: BBC Studios & Post Production Ltd, UKTV, BBC World, BBC Worldwide Ltd, World Service Trust (around 500 employees) and BBC Children in Need.

I.e. those areas not funded by the licence-fee payer and thus exempt from the FOI Act.

Presumably if you add in staff numbers working in those departments to the figures in the FOI response you arrive somewhere near the 2006 figure the BBC reported  - 23,500 staff.

Wikipedia says there are around 23,000 BBC staff in total although the three links cited as footnotes contain no figures to back up this number. In February 2008, The Times also used the 23,000 figure.

But why there is such a discrepancy between the FOI request and the figures in the Trust Report escapes me at the moment. Counting or not counting the World Service (2400 staff with 650 due to go) might make a difference.

As the World Service is funded by an FCO grant it could be 'counted in' as tax-payer funded or 'counted out' as it is not funded through the licence-fee.

And what of freelancers in the figures?

If you can help clear any of this up, do get in touch.

In the meantime, it looks like I'll be going with the disappointingly vague: "employing more than 20,000 staff".

P.S. Usefully that FOI request also has a table for the number of staff working in the BBC News Division (with a not so useful gap between 2004 and 2010):


31-Dec-00 2,459
31-Dec-01 3,462
31-Dec-02 3,690
31-Dec-03 3,691
31-Dec-04 3,749
31-Dec-10 6,302


A note explains that "due to organisational restructuring in April 2009 the News division now includes English
Regions, accounting for the increased headcount figure for December 2010."

Recent interesting links: BBC, journalism, blogging, social media.

BBC and Blogging

The re-launch of BBC News 'blogs' has sparked some criticism. Going after the new commenting format in particular, Adam Tinworth describes them as a "road crash", while Adam Bowie starts at the scene of the same 'accident' before turning his attention to the associated RSS feeds.

Off the back of that, an unrelated yet interesting piece of research from Canada suggests that blog readers are perhaps not as interested in the ability to comment on blogs as one might think.

Social Media and Journalism

Sky News freelancer, Neal Mann (@fieldproducer), explains how he uses social media to monitor 2,000 sources - a practice he regards as essential to his job.

His post was one in a series for the BBC College of Journalism in the build up to their Social Media Summit on Thursday and Friday this week.

Hopefully, I'll see some of you there!

BBC journalists' 'blog' posts and reaction to new blogging format

End of BBC News 'Blogs' signals new era for blogging at the BBC

The BBC is in the process of launching 'Correspondent Pages' which will aggregate all the content of a BBC correspondent on one page.

They will replace BBC News 'blogs' and pages for Peter Hunt, Torin Douglas and others have been running in stealth mode since the end of March.

The change to the new format is explained in a blog post published today by News Blogs Editor Giles Wilson. He describes the move "as a pretty fundamental reinvention" of how the BBC's news "blogs operate".

The pages will collate all the content correspondents produce, including their articles for the BBC website, their radio and TV reports and their Twitter feeds.

The new Correspondent Pages were indicated as part of a broader set of changes outlined recently by the Editor of the BBC News Website, Steve Herrmann.

The BBC is not going to call these new pages 'blogs' and BBC blogger and Northern Ireland Political Editor, Mark Devenport, has already said farewell to his old blog format.

In a post flagging up his switch to the new format entitled 'Devenport Diaries RIP', he said he "fought long and hard" for the retention of his alliterative blog title but the "powers-that-be wouldn't budge". His Devenport Diaries blog is now archived here.

Devenport has been using his new Correspondent Page to report on the recent elections in Northern Ireland. 

The BBC's big blogging correspondents, such as Nick Robinson and Robert Peston, will be moving over to the new format soon so the 'BBC blog' label will be significantly diminished. 

The BBC has always had an uneasy relationship with the word 'blog' because of its association with partial comment and opinion.

Blog-like formats were often called 'logs', evident in Nick Robinson's 'Newslog' which first appeared on the BBC website in 2001 or 'diaries', like Jeremy Bowen's coverage of Gaza in 2009.

In 2005, former editor of the BBC News website, Pete Clifton, temporarily banned the word 'blog' from the website until the BBC had the "tools to produce them properly".

The BBC's live page updates or live text commentaries are also never officially described as 'live blogging'.

Nevertheless these new Correspondent Pages unmistakably draw on the blogging format. They offer a more comprehensive stream of news for a single correspondent. 

The incorporation of Twitter updates means correspondents can offer more regular and shorter updates.

And the pages continue a shift towards news content being organised around an individual personality as well as a news index.

In effect, the personal brand is becoming increasingly important in establishing the authority of the BBC's news online.

Giles Wilson notes that the BBC's decision to move news blogs from Movable Type software to the BBC's main production system enables the BBC's "top correspondents' analysis" to "feel much more like an integral part of the website."

Blogging will continue to underwrite the BBC's approach to online news output even if it looks as though a first era of 'blogging' in news at the BBC is coming to an end.

Using Storify to collect social media coverage of Osama Bin Laden's death

I've been experimenting with Storify...(perhaps best viewed there).

A Twitter Revolution in Breaking News

I'm hoping that you will have already seen my Frontline Club blog post on the way Twitter has been adopted as an essential tool to monitor breaking news by media organisations. If you haven't you can jump over now...

Or you can listen to me offering "some sharp observations" (in the words of Thomas Rid) on the topic in the War Studies Department podcast. (Warning: Other observations may have been less sharp...)



If either of those things catches your attention, do head over to the Frontline Club next Tuesday evening (5th April) for your first opportunity to get a copy of the full book chapter I have written on the topic.

As part of the launch event, a panel will be discussing future news tools for the modern media age. I'll be there if you want to talk to me about it (or anything else for that matter - I'm easy-going like that).

Further details and tickets are available here.

Five years since the first tweet: a Twitter revolution in breaking news

Today, Twitter is celebrating its birthday. Five years after the first tweet was published, its impact on the field of Internet communication and many others beyond has been much debated.

Recent events in Tunisia and Egypt re-ignited the debate over Twitter’s role in the political process and whether the world has seen its first Twitter revolution.

Nearly two years ago, the “Twitter revolution” headline for post-election protests in both Moldova and Iran spread widely. The idea that pro-Western digital revolutionaries could bring down Communist and theocratic governments using a trendy internet tool was an alluring news story readily seized upon by the media.

Twitter does facilitate the spread of news and information, enabling individuals to combat censorship and undermine the stranglehold of state-controlled media. In a previous post, I offered a few thoughts comparing the role of Twitter in the political events in Moldova and Iran in 2009 with Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. 

There is much more work to be done in this area, but here I want to focus instead on Twitter’s impact on journalism. I argue that journalists’ dubbing of these events as “Twitter revolutions” is also reflective of the experience of their own changing working practices.

It points to a Twitter revolution occurring in the newsrooms of media organisations, evident in the increasing importance of Twitter for journalists covering breaking news stories.

Twitter’s emergence for newsgathering

Twitter was founded in 2006, but it was not until the microblogging service won an award at the 2007 South by Southwest festival that it began its rise to prominence. Initially envisaged as nothing more than a way to keep a few friends updated with your current ‘status’, by 2008 it was emerging as a potentially powerful newsgathering tool.

The Chinese earthquake in May 2008 was one of the first global news stories where significant attention was paid to this phenomenon and the event convinced some of the sceptics that it might be more than worthwhile.

The Mumbai attacks: Learning from challenges

A number of journalists and editors were becoming aware that Twitter was a useful place to search for breaking news.

But harnessing its potential to cover a fast-moving breaking story such as theMumbai terror attacks in November 2008 was far from straightforward. The 60-hour crisis in the Indian city was discussed by hundreds of people using Twitter.

The Mumbai hashtag (#Mumbai), which collated tweets about the incident, quickly became inundated and CNN estimated that 80 tweets were being sent every second.

Sifting through the stream of tweets, identifying useful Twitter accounts, and verifying the claims of Twitter users challenged journalists to apply existing editorial practices in a new environment.

The task was hindered by the fact that many journalists were also having to familiarise themselves with Twitter while attempting to report a complex breaking news story. BBC journalists covering the Mumbai crisis on the news website’s live updates page, for example, had little personal experience of Twitter but were urged by editors to incorporate tweets in their coverage.

Fortunately, they could call on the expertise of journalists working on the BBC’s User Generated Content (UGC) Hub – the Corporation’s dedicated department for sourcing and verifying audience material.

Reporting the Iran election crisis: Changing mindsets and working practices

During the Iran election crisis in June 2009, there were also significant difficulties for journalists to overcome including: a large volume of noise and false information, inaccurate tweets, and a lack of balance available given thealmost exclusive use of Twitter by the Green Movement in Iran. Information overload was even more acute.

Former Director of BBC Global News, Richard Sambrook, estimated that at one stage up to 2,500 updates were being tweeted per minute.

By 2009, however, journalists had more experience of using Twitter which helped them to access eyewitnesses and contacts, identify leads, and track links to images and video.

In the context of a widespread media crackdown by the Iranian regime which included the jamming of satellites, the detention and expulsion of journalists and the blocking of internet websites, journalists turned to social networks for information.

Twitter was particularly useful because it allowed “multiple paths in and out for data”, meaning it was difficult for the Iranian regime to completely censor without cutting off Internet access altogether.  

Trushar Barot, who was working on the BBC’s UGC hub during the Iran election crisis, said the BBC used Twitter to monitor rumours and “chatter” on the web, contact sources, and glean information on the time and location of future demonstrations.

Barot noted that “after a week or so, there were certain bloggers and Twitter accounts that we could trust” because what they were saying was consistently confirmed by wire reports. After this vetting process, several key Twitter accounts were identified as being reliable sources of information.

The BBC’s experience of covering Iran helped change mindsets among BBC journalists who were previously sceptical of the value of Twitter as a newsgathering tool.  

Similarly, CNN’s Deborah Rayner, the Managing Editor for Europe, Africa and the Middle East, said at a conference that year that the broadcaster’s journalists covering Iran had “never experienced newsgathering like it”.

Journalists were “utterly overwhelmed” by the volume of information that was coming in from the streets of Tehran. Twitter and Facebook were used to source potential news stories and YouTube provided “an endless stream of video”. She claimed it “had been a revolution” in news
gathering; “the world had changed”.

Twitter: An everyday tool for journalists working in breaking news

   

By 2010, Twitter had become “a more effective system than any single news organisation at servicing breaking news”, according to Jay Rosen. For some journalists working in breaking news, such as BBC Defence and Security producer, Stuart Hughes, and Sky News field producer, Neal Mann, it has become an essential tool.

Stuart Hughes says previously he had a few main sources of information to track breaking news, but Twitter allows him to monitor those sources and several hundred others at the same time.

He is now rarely surprised by stories in newspapers because Twitter has already made him aware of the news and he is able to quickly monitor broadcast media competitors.

Sky News journalist Neal Mann has discovered that regular tweeting, a systematic approach to following Twitter users who are “really interested in news”, and the development of a significant number of Twitter followers (currently over 8,000) means that people often contact him through Twitter with news and information.

For some stories, such as the ongoing activities of the whistle-blowing organisation, Wikileaks, Mann claims Twitter is the only way to fully follow developments as a journalist.

A Twitter revolution in breaking news

A Twitter revolution in the practices of journalists covering breaking news has significant implications for journalism. It places pressure on the traditional news agency wires which are now regularly slower with the news than Twitter’s easily-updated network.

It thus increases the speed of the news cycle, enabling journalists to access sources very quickly in a breaking news crisis and it is part of a broader trend whereby journalists are operating in a “live” online news medium.

The Twitter revolution in breaking news is far from complete: many journalists still rely on more traditional methods and it is merely one tool in an evolving digital media landscape.

Journalists should be prepared, however, for a future where Twitter, or a similar web-based communication system that acts as a customisable and searchable global news wire, will become an indispensable tool for monitoring breaking news.

This is an edited extract of a chapter by Daniel Bennett for a new book Face the Future: Tools for a Modern Media Age, which is being launched at an event at the Frontline Club on 5 April.

Photo credits: Egypt: RamyRaoof; Iran:"SIR: Poseyal : KNIGHT of the DESPOSYNI; Twitter: DavidErickson via creative commons licences