James Harding - the future of BBC World Service

Good morning – and thank you for having me here. Tamar, thank you for being quite so kind. And thanks too to the PRPD Committee for inviting me.

As you may know, I spent the better part of 20 years working in newspapers and only joined the BBC just over a year ago. For years, whether as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times in Asia or, more recently, editing The Times of London, I’d fetch up in far-flung places and World Service listeners would come up and thank me for the work of the BBC. Not one to shy away from a free compliment, I’d graciously accept - and try to leave the impression that, in some small way, the wonder that is the World Service had something to do with me.

I fear that, on an even grander scale, I’m set to do the same this morning. Hundreds of thoughtful and curious, provocative and often courageous journalists, programme-makers and editors at the BBC make the shows. Then I pitch up here for the curtain call.

But I was genuinely grateful to receive the invitation to come to the PRPD and have been greatly looking forward to coming to Portland, because it is the first chance I’ve had to talk, head-on, about the World Service and our ambitions for it. I particularly value the chance to do so with a group of people who share our love of radio and, more than that, our belief in it. And I greatly appreciate the chance simply to say thank you to APM and the many partners including NPR and PRI represented in this room who carry our programmes and reports, inform our thinking and make it possible for millions of Americans to listen to the BBC World Service every day.

It is impossible to get up on the morning of September 11 and not be seized still by sorrow and bewilderment at the memory of what happened 13 years ago. And, in the more than decade since, it often feels that, for all the uplifting stories of technological progress, human compassion and creative inspiration, we have, again and again, found ourselves looking on at the world in a state of disbelief.

Anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows that it’s a myth that nothing happens in August. Typically, something happens in August – a war in a place that we struggle to find on a map or a scandal that seems terribly important at the time, but is long forgotten by Thanksgiving.

But, this year, we have witnessed a war in Ukraine and a stand-off between Russia and the West; a war between Israel and Gaza; the third year of a war in Syria that has claimed 300,000 lives and displaced 10 million people; a war driven by the so-called Islamic State as it sweeps across Syria and into Iraq, murdering journalists, conducting mass killings of soldiers and threatening acts of genocide; a sporadic war in Libya of gathering violence and intensity; and a rumbling war driven by Boko Haram in parts of Nigeria.

It’s no wonder that, everywhere you go, you hear the same refrain: “What is going on in the world?” Or, in common parlance: “What the hell is going on in the world?”

And, put simply, I think that defines the job of the BBC World Service: that’s the question we’re here to answer. Our ambition for the World Service, now more than ever, is to enable understanding.

We are living through an age of realignment in world power; a struggle not simply between Sunni and Shia but also between church and state in the Islamic world; a period of uncertainty of US engagement in the world post-Iraq; a questioning not just of capitalism but liberal democracy too; and, alongside the advances in life sciences and the anxieties prompted by climate change, galloping change to the way we live, as individuals, families, societies.

There is so much that prompts the question: 'What is going on in the world?' And when the facts are moving so fast, the narratives so conflicting and the impacts so significant, it’s hard to think of a time when news is in greater demand, when there has been a greater need for global intelligence, for reporting and analysis that is accurate and impartial, free of political interference or a commercial agenda.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of a more important time for radio. As I said, I’m still a newcomer to broadcasting, only just getting inducted into the holy orders of radio journalism. But I have all the zeal of a new convert: to my mind, radio is the medium of understanding. For there may be no better way of conveying large amounts of information – and, in fact, ideas – than in print. There may be no more powerful platform than television. There may be nothing handier, more empowering than mobile. But in radio, in its capacity to combine intelligence and intimacy, we are lucky to work in a medium that really can provide understanding.

Part of my rebooting as a journalist, from newspapers to broadcasting, has involved trying to wrap my head around a dizzying new world of acronyms and shorthand. I’ve swapped nibs and wobs for oovs and sots. And when I was in news conference one morning and told that a correspondent had just landed in Donetsk but only had time to send us a squirt, I thought my colleagues in the newsroom are just making this stuff up to keep me on my toes. But by far my favourite piece of BBC shorthand is WDIAM?: as in, Bo Xilai’s been arrested in China, can you get me a WDIAM for Newshour? WDIAM – What Does It All Mean? It is the clarion call of what we the World Service is there to do.

But, of course, being the World Service, our effort to understand needs to be more subtle and sophisticated than news packages and explainers. (Even though, as you might tell, I have a healthy appetite for explainers, efforts to look behind the story and pieces of analysis.)

So, what are we trying to do to enable us to understand what it all means?

First, we are seeking to do more and more to use the whole of the World Service – i.e. all 27 language services from Hausa to Hindi, Chinese to Arabic, Russian to Persian, Burmese to Kyrgyz – to inform our reporting and our programmes on the World Service in English. You will hear more frequently our bilingual reporters, people who have grown up with the story, who live the story on the ground, on air on the BBC World Service. And, I should say, I’m really keen to see us get closer to the US story. We’ve just launched our first pop-up bureau in Boulder, Colorado. We’re looking to roll out more, but, I expect, our best bet in getting closer to stories across the US will involve greater editorial collaboration with our partner stations and their journalists.

Second, and in a similar vein, we are – like so many others in this room – getting more and more from our audiences in programmes such as Outside Source. The BBC World Service has an audience around the world of more than 41 million people, an extraordinary army of fact checkers, potential sources and opinion formers. They can be critical, contrary and challenging, but, if they make our lives a little more difficult, they make our coverage infinitely better.

And, third, I believe that a good diet requires the right mixture of spinach and cheesecake. The World Service is there to inform, but, also, to enliven, enlighten and entertain. The mix matters.

You may have heard Steve Titherington at the Arts, Culture and Lifestyle session yesterday talking about how we have been putting our shoulder into more arts programming. We love music – listening to it and talking about it and we are going to have more of it on the World Service.

We have stepped up our commitment to business – and you would have heard this week about the exciting work we are doing with Marketplace on the global economy. We are launching a new programme on the lives of women around the world. We’re rather proud of More Or Less, the programme that unpacks the lies and damned lies in statistics.

And we are, of course, fascinated by history: we are halfway through a series of debates being held around the world in Turkey, Russia, Germany and here in the US, on the legacy of World War One and we’ve broadcast Missing Histories that tries to bring two people together from different sides of history, for example Chinese and Japanese, to compare notes. There’s plenty of grumbling around about dumbing down in the media. Well, our ambition is dumbing up: accessible scholarship – global intelligence - that fascinates, that delights and that can make you laugh.

At the heart of that ambition is Newshour, a programme that has found a place on many of your midday schedules and in the hearts of many listeners. It’s a news show that every day tries to make sense of the world whatever is happening wherever it is happening. And in a way that captures the audience interest. Our commitment to supporting and developing Newshour remains as strong as it did when it started 25 years ago.

In order to ensure that the BBC World Service delivers on such promises, both as a radio network around the world as well as a provider of programming to the many public radio stations represented here today, we are resurrecting the job of the Controller of World Service Radio. In recent years, the BBC World Service has been managed together with our other English language output: i.e. alongside World News television and the BBC News website. But we want the BBC World Service to have an editor, a champion, an ambassador of its own.

This is, in part, because none of us know what the technological changes that are engulfing so much of the modern media and taking such a toll on the news business will ultimately do to radio. And, it’s with an eye to the future, that I’d like to make an appeal, offer an observation and then turn things over to you for a proper conversation.

We are, plainly, in the throes of a revolution. No-one in this room needs a primer on digital disruption. We all know the established news media no longer monopolise, perhaps even dominate, the production and distribution of the news; that the building blocks of our trade – the story, the bulletin, the programme, the idea of a network – are all up for grabs; that our audiences can seem increasingly fickle, moving seamlessly from one platform to another. People will expect everything, everywhere and right now. And they expect more of it for less. Business models have been thrown up in the air, with catastrophic consequences for journalists’ jobs. Many listeners want to be part of more than an audience, but active in the news, even activists in a movement. And the way people listen and think is changing: often, people want both/and: the radio on, a tablet in hand; scrolling on one screen, while sort of watching another.

So, here’s the appeal: last week, we launched a project at the BBC that is, rather grandly, called the Future of News. The aim is to try and understand what audiences might reasonably expect from the news over the coming decade. We are trying to consider what technology will do, what people will want and how stories will be told. Our approach is open. We want to canvass opinions, we want to host as many views as possible from people across the industry and our considerations and conclusions will be available to all: the Future of News will be public-facing, with findings that people can watch, hear, read, engage and debate openly. And most crucial to our understanding of how we need to change is understanding what you – in this room - want from us as a global news provider.

And I will be talking to Heather and others as to how we involve you in this more.

Our aims in this are simple. We want to make sure we are abreast of innovation; we want, as a newsroom, to have a sense of where we’re going; and, as the BBC looks ahead at renewing its Royal Charter for the coming ten years, we want to inform our ambitions for the future.

Of course, it is impossible to predict the future in news. We don’t know what will lead tonight’s bulletin, let alone make for the meat in tomorrow morning’s breakfast show. In fact, I read an editorial in the Spectator magazine a few weeks ago, which I found particularly heart-warming. It took us all back to the nostrums of 1989. To paraphrase the predictions and plans back then: Russia looked set to embrace liberal democracy, China was being written off after Tiananmen and the West, oblivious to the dangers of Islamic extremism, was set for a post-Cold War peace dividend.

The point is that when we generally agree on where the world is going, we’re generally wrong. And, on that note, here’s the observation: the current drift in media thinking seems to be that digital consumers will be hungry for video, but not for audio. In this, I think the conventional wisdom will, again, prove to be wrong.

This is in part because I’m not sure convergence will result in platforms all increasingly looking and sounding the same. Television forced both radio and newspapers to change. But they did not seek to emulate TV, rather to exploit their differences to complement it. So too, I suspect, with the unfolding digital revolution. My hunch is that radio, television, newspapers, magazines, websites, apps, texts and tweets will not all blur into the same indistinct kind of story-telling, but, instead, assert their distinctiveness in how they tell stories and, even, which ones they tell. This will surely be true of radio. For all the anxiety around changing consumer behavior, what is striking to me is the depth of affection, the addiction even, to radio. I know Jarl Mohn’s address to all of us was rooted in a renewed confidence in radio. It’s underlined by what they’re doing at NPR. And we at the BBC share it.

In fact, I think we are all poised to create larger digital appetites for the spoken word. I’ll give one example. The BBC has launched a programme called Trending: it’s a brilliantly pointy headed (but also fun!) response to a cool facet of modern life. It identifies videos, pictures and stories that have gone viral, then analyses and explains why – the truth behind the trend. On the radio, on mobile and online, it then serves them back to the world. Mobile technology should be a boon to the makers of radio programmes. Our job is to make it happen.

And, if I may, I’ll end there – on the idea of what we may do together. I started by saying I’m a newcomer to this particular gang, but I know that, unlike many other parts of the media, public radio treats partnerships not with suspicion but as a key to its success. My hope is that we at the BBC continue that tradition and, in meaningful partnership with stations across the US, do an ever better job of answering the question: WDIAM?

Thank you.