The World Service, to me, is what takes over when Radio 4 goes to bed. That doesn't really do justice to the grandmother of international news, which celebrates its 75th birthday today.
I thought we should note the occasion with some little-known statistics, which reveal a surge in demand for World Service news during political upheaval.
Page impressions on the Urdu-language site shot up from 29m in October to 44.9m in November because of the crisis in Pakistan. That's record traffic for the Urdu site and the highest for any site outside the English-language version, equivalent to about 1.1 million users.
In radio, the World Service has 183 million listeners each week. Audiences in the Middle East and Africa have grown by 9.4 million in the last year to 83 million, and audiences in Nigeria, Pakistan and Rwanda all increased by more than one million. And overall, the BBC's global news division has a weekly audience of 233 million, with 704m page impressions on the international news sites and 38.5 million users as of March.
The next roll outs will be a Persian-language TV service for Iran in late spring and an Arabic language TV service in the new year. Rather snazzy birthday history tool online now.
• Update: A few hours after I posted, the World Service rolled out its redesigned website. The head of the web team, Sally Thompson, explained the new design here.
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