BBC Mundo
 |
|
| Type | Radio network and website |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Availability | Latin America |
| Owner | BBC |
|
Key people
|
Julia Zapata |
|
Launch date
|
1938 |
|
Official website
|
bbcmundo.com |
BBC Mundo (Spanish for BBC World) is part of the BBC World Service's foreign language output, one of 33 languages it provides.
BBC Mundo is the BBC’s service for the Spanish-speaking world. It is part of BBC World Service. The website, bbcmundo.com, offers news, information and analysis in text, audio and video.
BBC Mundo has its headquarters on the fifth floor of the BBC’s New Broadcasting House in London. The BBC’s Spanish service also has a newsroom in Miami, offices in Buenos Aires and México, and reporters in Washington DC, Los Angeles, Havana, Caracas and Bogotá, Santiago, Quito, Lima and Madrid. BBC Mundo benefits from the international newsgathering strength of the BBC which has journalists in more places than any other international news broadcaster.
The website bbcmundo.com was born in 1999 as a debate site - a single page dedicated to encouraging a weekly discussion of specific subjects on the global news agenda.
“There were only two of us working on the site at the time, the site was neither supposed to nor able to reflect the changing news. The Clinton/Lewinski scandal hit in the middle of a week where the page was encouraging debate on a totally different topic, highlighting beautifully how extremely difficult it is to not update a BBC-branded site continuously and retain credibility,” remembers Julia Zapata, first editor of the site and later Head of BBC Mundo until 2009.
The BBC then decided to allocate funding for 24x7 news websites in Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic. The first major wave of change involved recruitment, training and staffing and resulted in the creation of the site indexes needed to deliver full 24x7 region-specific, interactive and multimedia coverage.
“The next stage were years of consolidation, editorial growth and creative experimentation. This culminated with the combined World Service language websites winning a 2007 Webby Award, and BBC Mundo winning the prestigious Ortega y Gasset Online Journalism award in 2007,” says Zapata. However, less than a month after winning the award, a major budget cut across the World Service was announced. As a result, BBC Mundo radio broadcasts were reduced.
The first BBC broadcast in Spanish took place on 14 March 1938 when the BBC’s Latin American Service (el Servicio Latinoamericano de la BBC) was launched, initially airing 15-minute radio transmissions in Spanish and Portuguese. The service was launched in response to broadcasts by the governments of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy which had begun a strong propaganda campaign aimed at Latin America. Lord John Reith, Director-General of the BBC, made a speech on the day to welcome the Spanish-speaking listeners.
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Wikipedia