BBC News
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| Department of the BBC | |
| Industry | Media |
| Headquarters |
Broadcasting House, Central London, United Kingdom |
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Area served
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Specific services for United Kingdom and rest of world |
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Key people
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James Harding (Director of News & Current Affairs) Mary Hockaday (Head of Newsroom) Huw Edwards (Chief Presenter) |
| Services | Radio, Internet and television broadcasts |
| Owner | BBC |
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Number of employees
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3,500 (2,000 are journalists) |
| Website | www |
BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online news coverage. The service maintains 50 foreign news bureaux with more than 250 correspondents around the world.James Harding has been Director of News and Current Affairs since April 2013.
The department's annual budget is in excess of £350 million; it has 3,500 staff, 2,000 of whom are journalists. BBC News' domestic, global and online news divisions are housed within the largest live newsroom in Europe, in Broadcasting House in central London. Parliamentary coverage is produced and broadcast from studios in Millbank in London. Through the BBC English Regions, the BBC also has regional centres across England, as well as national news centres in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. All nations and English regions produce their own local news programmes and other current affairs and sport programmes.
The BBC is a quasi-autonomous corporation authorised by Royal Charter, making it operationally independent of the government, who have no power to appoint or dismiss its director-general, and required to report impartially. As with all major media outlets, though, it has been accused of political bias from across the political spectrum, both within the UK and abroad.
The British Broadcasting Company broadcast its first radio bulletin from radio station 2LO on 14 November 1922. Wishing to avoid competition, newspaper publishers persuaded the government to ban the BBC from broadcasting news before 7 PM, and to force it to use wire service copy instead of reporting on its own. On Easter weekend in 1930, this reliance on newspaper wire services left the radio news service with no information to report. Piano music was played instead. The BBC gradually gained the right to edit the copy and, in 1934, created its own news operation. However, it could not broadcast news before 6 PM until World War II. Gaumont British and Movietone cinema newsreels had been broadcast on the TV service since 1936, with the BBC producing its own equivalent Television Newsreel programme from January 1948. A weekly Children's Newsreel was inaugurated on 23 April 1950, to around 350,000 receivers. The network began simulcasting its radio news on television in 1946, with a still picture of Big Ben. Televised bulletins began on 5 July 1954, broadcast from leased studios within Alexandra Palace in London.
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Wikipedia