Richard Cuff–noted SWL and festmeister for the Winter SWL Fest–sent a message to the BBC World Service listener feedback program Over To You deploring the BBC’s decision to incorporate limited advertising on the World Service as of April 2014.
Over To You contacted Richard and invited him to an interview where he discussed these changes with Mark Bunting, head of BBC WS Strategy.
The program aired earlier this week. Richard noted that the discussion was “chopped quite a bit” to fit a nine minute time slot.
Click here to listen to Richard’s interview on Over To You: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01sbmkt
I’m afraid that Over to You is always a poor cousin of its sister programme “Feedback” on BBC Radio 4. (I believe they are both made by the same independent production company). But the World Service programme tries to do a 30 minute programme in 9 minutes, with the result that it often sounds like a simple balancing act. Listeners say this. But BBC producers retort back with a reply. As so the topic is “solved”.
Every so often (5th weekends), the programme turns into a journalists forum, more akin to BBC Radio 4’s “The Media Show”, but then hosted by ex-BBC News Director Richard Sambrook.
In February he co-authored a piece arguing that BBC rolling news services like BBC World News had probably had their day. No mention of radio, but I guess that was implied too. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/feb/03/tv-24-hour-news-channels-bbc-rolling