David Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous, has been doing a series of interviews/podcasts, and the last is with Richard Sambrook, Director of Global News for the BBC. "Which means I run the World Service Language Radio Services: 33 languages and also in English on the radio. BBC World, International TV News, and the International News Websites," he says.
But you don't have to listen to the podcast: there's a transcript you can skim instead. I did, and one section in particular stood out.
Richard: I would say, certainly in the BBC, it has to go through quite a big cultural shift. I think, in our case, we have gone quite a long way through that shift, but not all the way yet. In the early stages of the Internet, we thought that the task was really to attract as many people as possible to our site and get them to stay there as long as possible. It is now becoming clear that is not really what is about.
It is about bringing people to the site and having content they want to come to, but then facilitating them in doing things with it: emailing stories to friends, being able to take a video clip and embed it on their own site or send it off to their mother or father. Being able to do something with the BBC's content is important to them as simply having our content available for them to come and to look at and post their own comments on.
The interview series was sponsored by Wired News and the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
