THE WYKEHAM JOURNAL 2021 Active newsroom at the BBC, London.
vision of what’ s now become the Western Front Way has given his tragic death in the Great War a new salience for those planning to walk or cycle parts of the newly established trail across Belgium and France. His niece Peggy and her niece Lal helped me piece together his time at Win Coll, his service in the Great War, and a sense of how his ideas have shaped the legacy of distant events for pupils in the 21 st Century.
You might argue that in swapping Winchester College( by way of Magdalen College, Oxford and a few years in the Palace of Westminster) for the BBC, my own career has stayed comfortably inside well-weathered institutions. You’ d probably be right; the BBC celebrates its centenary year in 2022, and it’ s given all of us the chance to reflect on whether we are ready to rise to the challenges of the next hundred years. And there are certainly plenty of challenges. A public broadcaster funded by a universal licence fee enforceable by law is not a model anyone setting up the BBC in 2022 would have chosen. And yet it remains a system that delivers huge value to vast audiences. Despite what you may have read elsewhere, the BBC reaches over 80 % of the potential audience weekly. We remain the most-trusted news provider in the UK, and globally, where the World Service’ s audience has risen to almost 500 million people a week. But the digital transformation of the world is moving more quickly than most can respond— probably the most significant challenge to the BBC now is the fact that more audiences are streaming content from digital subscription services than are watching peak-time TV. Spotify has transformed audiences’ relationships with live music, and away from network radio. Netflix’ s Reed Hastings famously said that their greatest competitor was sleep— for the BBC, time spent with our services is the metric we worry about most. For people to love the BBC, and willingly pay for it, they need to spend enough time with us to value what we do— whether that’ s BBC local radio, Strictly, our news website, CBeebies, Radio 3, our 42 language services, and so on.
THE RESILIENCE OF THE SCHOOL IN ADAPTING TO THE REQUIREMENTS OF ONLINE LEARNING HAS BEEN INSPIRING.
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