As part of its cost-saving plans, the BBC has today announced the closure of some of its online services, including Newsbeat, the BBC Food website and Travel.
£15 million worth of cuts to the BBC’s online output will be made over the next 12 months following a review that started last year.
The following services will either be closed or scaled down:
– Close the iWonder service, but redeploy its formats across BBC Online
– Close the BBC’s Food website, including 11,000 online recipes. BBC Worldwide’s Good Food site will remain
– Focus on “distinctive” long-form journalism online under a Current Affairs banner and close the online News Magazine
– Integrate Newsbeat output into BBC News Online, but close the separate Newsbeat site and app
– Continue to offer travel news online as part of BBC News but close the Travel site and halt development of the Travel app
– Stop running local news index web pages, offering instead an open stream on our rolling guide to BBC and local news provider stories, ‘Local Live’
– Remove ring-fenced funding for iPlayer-only commissions
– Reduce funding for Connected Studio, the digital innovation programme, with innovation increasingly funded within business-as-usual and the Studio maintained as an enabler of innovation
– Reduce digital radio and music social media activity and additional programme content that is not core to services
“The internet requires the BBC to redefine itself,” said James Harding, director of BBC News & Current Affairs, who led the review.
“The Review sets out what we want to be famous for online: trusted news; the place where children come to learn and play; high quality entertainment; live sports coverage and sports news; arts and culture, history and science; and historic moments, national events. And we are going to focus our energy on these six areas: BBC News; iPlay and BBC Bitesize; BBC iPlayer and BBC iPlayer Radio; BBC Sport; the Ideas Service; and BBC Live.
“We will stop doing some things where we’re duplicating our work, for example on food, and scale back services, such as travel, where there are bigger, better-resourced services in the market.”
There has been widespread public annoyance that the BBC’s Food website will close, with more than 60,000 signatures collected by a petition on Tuesday.
